Games | Superior Realities

I woke up today feeling like it was Christmas morning. BlizzCon is always exciting, and after some of the hints we’ve seen, I was expecting some really huge news.

Instead, it’s turned out to be perhaps the most disappointing BlizzCon to date. Certainly the most disappointing since I’ve started following it closely.

Overwatch: The worst kept secret in gaming

They began with the announcement we all knew was coming: The hacker Sombra will be the next playable character in Overwatch.

I’ll give them some credit for announcing her in a pretty dramatic way. They began with a retrospective video of Overwatch’s launch, only for Sombra to hack the feed — I genuinely thought the stream was crashing for a bit — and for that to dovetail into a new animated short introducing Sombra as she aids her Talon allies in attacking Volskaya Industries.

Sombra looks a lot more interesting than Overwatch’s other antagonists to date. She has an agenda of her own and seems to be playing both sides — her loyalty to Talon seems far from absolute.

That said, Blizzard’s continued reticence to do anything with the Overwatch IP is making it increasingly hard for me to get excited about anything to do with the game.

I do appreciate that they are maintaining their commitment to diversity in Overwatch, if nothing else. Both characters added post-launch have been women of colour, and the game’s cast is now close to perfect gender parity, as well. Now at ten females, twelve males, one non-gendered.

They also announced a new “arcade” mode that mostly seems to involve death match arenas, some new maps, and an ambitious new eSports league, but again, not really interesting me.

StarCraft: SkyNet, Nova, and Stukov

StarCraft II is the only game coming out of this BlizzCon’s opening ceremony to offer me anything approaching genuine excitement, which is a sad commentary on the whole convention.

Firstly, the final installment of the Nova DLC was confirmed to be launching on November 22 (appropriately enough), which is welcome news. More Nova is always good, and now that all three parts are out, I can finally play through it.

Second, fan favourite and eternal badass Alexei Stukov has been confirmed as the next playable commander in co-op. He would count as a Zerg commander, I suppose, but he seems to be very unique, based mainly on infested versions of Terran buildings and units.

We’re short on details on exactly how Stukov is going to play at the moment, but it’s good to see more ambitious updates to co-op regardless. And those infested battlecruisers look pretty sweet.

Also, walking bunkers.

Yes.

They’ve also mentioned new co-op maps coming soon. Details on this are only now coming in as I’m writing, but it looks like we’re finally getting that co-op version of Outbreak we’ve all been wanting forever. Awesome!

On the downside, I’m also hearing Blizzard is going to add leaderboards to co-op — a competitive aspect that I don’t think anyone wanted, and which may lead to co-op ending up on the same endless nerf/buff rollercoaster as 1v1.

Finally, perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of BlizzCon so far is that Blizzard has partnered with the DeepMind team to use StarCraft II for advanced artificial intelligence research. It’s at best unclear what if any benefits this will ultimately have for us as players, but the very fact that the game we love is now going to be at the forefront of AI research is really exciting.

Heroes and Hearthstone: Steady as she goes

Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are pretty much just chugging along as you’d expect. Nothing to complain about, but nothing to get particularly excited for, either.

As many expected, Varian Wrynn will be joining Heroes as its next playable character. Although I was expecting a very standard warrior, he’s looking to be one of the most unique heroes to date. He’s actually a multi-role hero (I wonder how that will work with quests?) who can radically change his capabilities through several crucial talent choices.

The other new hero is Ragnaros the Firelord. I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about him at the moment.

They also spent a lot of time talking about next week’s brawl. I’m not sure why a weekly brawl is worth so much attention in the opening ceremonies. Were they just trying to fill time?

Meanwhile, Hearthstone is of course getting another expansion, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. I don’t have a lot of interest in Hearthstone, and I don’t see this expansion changing that, but I will say they seem to have some neat ideas. Tri-class cards are pretty creative, and the Kabal and Jade Lotus factions seem genuinely interesting — would love to explore them in WoW.

Diablo: Remake, necromancer, and disappointment

But by far the biggest disappointment came when they finally got around to Diablo announcements. After the necromancer leak, I was sure we were finally getting another expansion to wrap up Reaper of Souls’ cliff-hanger ending.

Nope.

We are getting the necromancer as a paid DLC, but no new story content. They did mention two new zones (as free updates), but they’re going to be adventure-mode exclusives like Greyhollow Island. Something to poke your head into for an hour and then forget about.

The other big news is that the first Diablo game is being recreated within Diablo III. We’ll be able to use our existing characters, so I guess the original classes aren’t coming back, but they will be bringing back at least some of the original mechanics (including intentionally making the graphics look worse, because apparently common sense and the Diablo franchise have severed all ties).

This is a confusing decision, and I’m not sure who the target audience is. I can understand trying to capitalize on some nostalgia, and broadly I like the idea of resurrecting old games, but it’s going to be too different from the original to satisfy the purists, and I’m not sure how much modern gamers are going to enjoy something that has been deliberately designed to be more clunky and visually unappealing than current content.

Diablo III badly needed a new expansion. There are so many story threads left unfinished, so many lands left to explore. The game can’t survive on adventure mode and seasons forever. I want to play more, but there’s just nothing left in the game for me to do. The base game and its expansion were wildly successful, and there can be no doubt a new expansion would do well. I just don’t get it.

The necromancer does look cool — I love necromancers in general, and Diablo’s take on the archetype especially — but is it worth forking over cash just to play through exactly the same content as a new character?

I hate how gamers are always pronouncing premature death on games, but at the risk of hypocrisy, I think we may now declare Diablo III dead in the water. Yes, it’s getting some more updates, but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of true forward momentum here. The story has been abandoned unfinished, and the game is just chasing its tail.

Between this, StarCraft’s apparent abandonment of mission packs, and Overwatch’s inexplicable aversion to exploring its own lore, I’m beginning to wonder if Blizzard is simply moving away from narrative in its games altogether.

That’s pretty much the only thing that could finally break my lifelong Blizzard fandom.

* * *

And that’s it. Nothing at all announced for World of Warcraft. No mention of a Warcraft movie sequel. Undoubtedly more news is to come as the convention unfolds, but it’s not likely to be anything huge.

What a massive disappointment.

When last I discussed this year’s Halloween event in The Secret World, I pointed out that we had yet to see the whole event and that my opinion of it might change once we had.

We now have explored the mystery of the Rider in its entirety, and I do find my view of the event has shifted. Largely for the better.

I’m not going to explain every stage of the event in its entirety, because I have other things to do today. If you want to understand the event and all it’s entailed, I direct you to the official forums.

The meat of it involves world bosses. Every half hour, the Rider will appear in a certain zone, spawning event-specific mobs throughout the zone. Slaying all these mobs before the Rider moves on to the next zone will summon a manifestation.

However, as we discovered halfway through the event, if a number of players use the /worship emote at specific points around the zone while one player utilizes various event drops at the Rider just as the last mobs are killed, you can enact a ritual to summon an empowered version of the manifestation, which drops improved loot.

The empowered bosses also dropped clues that led to the next few stages of the event, ultimately culminating in the Rider making an appearance in Agartha, where he will stay until the end of the event on 8th. If you /bow to him, you get his mask.

It’s not a perfect event, and there are legitimate criticisms to be made. What’s bothering me the most right now is how low the drop rates for the new cosmetics are. Given how much work empowered manifestations are to summon and kill, you’d think the drop rates would be a bit more generous. I’ve yet to see a single drop of any of the new fiery eyes items, and the prices for them at auction are usually extortionate.

Still, the event has grown on me. The summoning rituals are a lot of work, but the community is adapting to it incredibly well. In the space of a few days we’ve gone from running around like headless chickens to a (mostly) well-oiled machine that (almost) always successfully completes the summon.

It is does speak very well of the TSW community. I’m mostly pretty cynical about gaming communities in general, but the amount of cooperation TSW’s players have displayed is impressive. In most other games this would probably be much more of a horror show.

Initially I found the summoning process tedious, and to some extent it still is, but it does feel good to be part of something greater. It’s gratifying to see a boss spawn and know that you had a hand in bringing it forth.

Even one of the more annoying aspects of the event, the fact that the lore is not a guaranteed drop, has been greatly mitigated by the community. When a lore piece does drop, someone will usually do a call-out in event chat so everyone can come and collect it. Sometimes that person is even me.

Also, while my own contributions on the matter were virtually non-existent, it was fascinating to watch the mystery unfold, to see the community fall ever deeper down the rabbit hole.

I have to wonder if this event is actually a fulfillment of a long-held promise, that of the puzzle raid.

Puzzle raids are something Funcom has been promising since the game launched, but which have never materialized. We’ve never gotten a terribly clear picture what they’ll look like, but the general impression was that they would be similar to investigation missions, but on a much larger scale — something requiring mass cooperation by many players.

Sort of like the Rider event.

Food for thought, anyway.

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over datamining in relation to the event, but it seems like a manufactured controversy to me.

To be clear, it is true that a small number of players did datamine the event’s details in their entirety, but I’ve not seen any hard evidence they actually influenced how the event played out. Aside from one or two people on the forums spewing off conspiracy theories and calling everyone sheep, all indications are the community solved everything legitimately.

From my perspective, it’s been an intriguing mystery, and a great way to bring the community together, and while it’s a long way from perfect, I’m glad to see Funcom is still capable of ambitious, out of the box thinking.

Playing MMOs can sometimes be something of an awkward fit for someone as antisocial as me, but at times like this I’m really glad I do. Seeing hundreds of people working together in common cause to orchestrate the summoning rituals is unlike anything you will ever experience in single-player games.

There is something truly special about events like this, and I always feel privileged to be a part of them. In time, I know I’ll forget the annoyances of this event, but the fond memories of mystery and cooperation will remain for many years to come.

It might not be over, either. The lore makes mention of “deep December,” which has some people wondering if our Rider friend may be visiting again over the holidays…

Superior Realities

Category Archives: Games

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