Gaming Round-Up: Gamescom Reactions and What I’ve Been Playing

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

In this installment of Ye Olde Grabbe Bagg Poste, I’ll be talking about my thoughts on some Gamescom announcements, as well as my recent activities in World of Warcraft and other games.

Minutes to Midnight

Every MMO blogger is contractually obligated to use that pun at least once in the coming months.

I’ve been listing off my hopes and predictions for WoW’s upcoming Midnight expansion over at Massively OP, and following the reveal at Gamescom, it seems I got pretty close on most things.

As expected, I am mildly disappointed by the lack of a new class or other major gameplay features outside of housing (which doesn’t seem to be hitting the notes for what I want from player housing), but it’s what I expected, so I’m not too fussed.

The prey feature sounds like it could be fun, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that’s going to shake up the game in any big way. Just something to slightly spice up grinding world quests by the sounds of it. Conceptually the new demon hunter spec sounds awesome, but we’ll have to see what the actual game mechanics for it are like before I get too hyped.

The cinematic, though, was a thing of beauty. I’m a huge Liadrin fanboy, and I’m so glad they seem to be centering her in the story. Plus Gideon Emery is always spectacular in everything he does.

The new zones look great, too. For me the expansion will be worth the price of admission just to revisit Quel’thalas and Zul’aman. I’m also happy to see another underground zone, as War Within didn’t fully capitalize on that premise. The Voidstorm zone looks a little too similar to K’aresh at first blush, but I’ll try to keep an open mind about it.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with how Midnight is shaping up.

Age of Empires 4 debases itself further

My expectations for the AoE4 DLC announcement at Gamescom were pretty low, but even so they somehow managed to massively disappoint me.

I was expecting another Sultans Ascend: An over-priced DLC with a short campaign, a couple new civs, and a bunch of dumb variant “civilizations” no one asked for. Instead, we only got the dumb variants.

Yup, that’s right. No campaign, no new civilizations. Just more variants. I’ll give them some credit that at least the Golden Horde was an actual empire — you know, the thing the whole franchise is supposed to be about; does anyone but me remember that was supposed to be the premise? — but the rest I couldn’t care less about.

My flabbers are particularly gasted by the addition of a second Japanese civilization. Even having the Japanese in the first place when the civilization roster is so limited is mildly questionable given Japan wasn’t really a particularly large or influential nation during the Middle Ages, but two different Japanese civilizations is just ridiculous.

Again, it’s getting harder and harder not to feel like the developers are tacitly endorsing racist attitudes towards history that view anything outside of Europe and Asia as being beneath the term “civilization.” We only have one civilization from Africa and none from the Americas, but hey, at least we have two different flavours of Japanese to cater to the weebs.

A lot of people are saying that the developers must be starved for funding and doing the best they can with limited resources, but that doesn’t really add up. Sultans Ascend was supposedly the best selling DLC in the Age franchise’s history. They should have plenty of cash.

Even if that isn’t the case, no one was forcing them to start churning out noble houses and random armies and calling them “civilizations.” If your goal is asset re-use, there are smarter ways to do it. You could make a Scottish civilizations that shares most of its building and unit skins with the English. You don’t need to call it a variant, you can just use similar visual assets like the franchise has from the beginning. Similarly I don’t think anyone would mind if, say, a Vietnamese or Korean civilization shared architecture with the Chinese.

No, this bizarre tangent into variants is an entirely unforced error. We had every opportunity to expand the cultural and historic diversity of the game, and the developers simply chose not to.

The only thing about the Dynasties of the East DLC that vaguely appeals to me is the Crucible, a new single-player roguelike mode. I’ve wanted some more repeatable versus AI content in the game forever. But considering that the skirmish AI has been broken since launch, the fact the mode is barely even mentioned on the store page, and the failure of Age of Mythology’s conceptually similar Arena of the Gods mode, my hopes for it are basically zero. It’s pretty clear by now that AoE4 devs only care about catering to PvP sweatlords, so I expect this to be a very half-hearted feature.

The sands of K’aresh

Moving on to what I’ve been playing lately, I’m back in WoW just for a month to catch up on the story. The rest of this segment will have story spoilers for 11.2, so skip ahead if you want to avoid that.

I’ve been a bit underwhelmed with this patch. K’aresh is a cool zone — the art team hit it out of the park as always — but phase diving and ecological succession are pretty weak features, and the story’s conclusion was disappointing.

Xal’atath’s betrayal was the most obvious twist ever. I’m fine with the idea that our heroes had no choice but to work with her against Dimensius, but the fact they actually believed she would be trapped in the Dark Heart strains credibility a lot more, as does the fact Alleria apparently had no contingency plan for the inevitable double cross. This is one of those moments where instead of making the villain look smart, they just made the heroes look stupid.

K’aresh’s world soul surviving also makes it feel like there’s no real danger in the story. If a world soul can survive that, can anything ever actually threaten them?

This is one of the biggest flaws of Warcraft’s story-telling. No one stays dead, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there’s no consequences. It sucks the tension out of the story.

I also don’t really get how Ve’nari went from a morally grey rogue of uncertain purpose to a selfless eco-warrior. That character really lost her edge. While not as bad on that front as Dragonflight, War Within is still suffering from being a bit too saccharine. I’m not saying we need to go back to the ultra-edge of Shadowlands or WoD, but there’s a happy medium between that and the hugbox we have now.

Still, I remain mostly happy with The War Within and its story overall. It’s just a shame it stumbled a bit at the finish line.

I do think it’s interesting how much of Xal’atath’s story is about her fighting other agents of the Void. Infighting in that group is common, but she seems to have a special devotion to it. I’m starting to feel like her goal is not to conquer Azeroth in the name of the Void, but to use its power to make herself top dog of the Void. Like we’re just a stepping stone to her greater plans.

Outside of the new stuff, I’ve been half-heartedly leveling a few more alts. My Undead death knight from Pandaria Remix is almost level 80 now, and may be there by the time you’re reading this. My enthusiasm for the character has been waning since the recent Frost revamp, though, which added more pointless attention tax cooldowns to what had been possibly the only spec left without them. Playing Blood now, which is… fine, I guess, but man I just want one spec that’s purely resource-based.

I had planned to put a lot of time into my latest hunter, also from Remix, this time around. I’d collected some cool pets to fit her Dark Ranger ethos and everything. But try as I might, I’m still struggling to enjoy playing a hunter. I’ve tried so many times over the years, and it just never sticks. I wish so much we could get another class that uses bows.

Minidan returns

I’ve also been playing a little of Pandaria Classic. That expansion had my favourite incarnation of the warlock class, with Demonology in particular being possibly my favourite spec in WoW’s history, so I wanted to check it out.

MoP Demonology is every bit as good as I remember it (the gameplay anyway; the graphics less so…), but leveling up from scratch all over again has been rough. Theoretically I would like to get to level cap and check out those Celestial dungeons, but right now I’m kind of stalled out around level 30. Classic dungeons are so painful, man.

Spidey sense tingling

Before getting back to WoW, I played through Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (they really couldn’t have given that a better name?), one of my latest Steam sale purchases.

I wasn’t really motivated to do the whole open world grind shtick, so I ignored most of the side activities and just blitzed through the story. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was a fun romp full of Spidey nostalgia. I appreciated the wholesome, classically heroic vibe of it. Peter’s just a good person doing his best to make the world a better place. Feels good, man.

I found the boss fights pretty annoying (yet another recent game where my reflexes held me back), but otherwise the gameplay was fun enough. Tossing around goons was a good time, and the web-slinging was well done.

I’ll probably buy the sequels at some point, but I’ll definitely wait for sales.

ARPG ennui

I’ve run out of steam in Path of Exile and Diablo: Immortal. PoE did finally start to get a bit challenging, but mostly in the form of being one-shot by boss mechanics I couldn’t see because the visual clarity in that game is terrible.

I still kind of want to finish it, but it was really starting to feel like a slog. I may just watch the rest of the story on YouTube or something, IDK. The story isn’t even that interesting, really, but closure would be nice.

I realized after a while the story is actually incredibly basic but just seems deep at first because the dialogue uses such flowery language. And don’t get me wrong, I love how over the top dramatic the language is, and the voice acting is great, but there is something off-putting to the realization of how much of it is just smoke and mirrors to make things seem deeper than they are.

Everything in Path of Exile is like that, and I realized that’s my biggest issue with the game. It’s how hard it works to seem deeper and smarter than it is. It would be so much more fun if it just embraced its own dumbness. ARPGs aren’t meant to be a cerebral genre; they’re just dumb violence simulators, and that’s why we love them. Path of Exile feels so ashamed of what it is.

Meanwhile in Immortal, I really was loving their take on the druid, but — in stark contrast to what people will say the problem with mobile games is — it’s just far too generous.

I’ve never said that about a game before, but it’s true. If I play for twenty minutes, the first 15 of that will just be claiming freebie rewards and sorting my inventory. I’m only a few zones deep into the campaign, but I’m already level-capped with legendary gear in most slots. Nothing is challenging, and none of the rewards I get from actually playing compare to what the game gives away for free.

What a bizarre game.

Overwatch struggles

I’ve uninstalled Overwatch for the moment. Even with the accessibility aids of Stadium, I’m just hopelessly bad at it, to the point where it felt unfair to make other people play with me. You’d think eventually the MMR would put me low enough to reach a 50% win rate, but I don’t think there’s an MMR low enough for me.

I can play Reinhardt okay because he’s so brain dead easy, but I don’t want to be limited to playing just one character, and I’m pretty hopeless otherwise. It’s frustrating because I otherwise enjoy the game, but I just get curbstomped every time I try to play it.

I may give it another try at some point. I was looking forward to Brigitte joining the Stadium roster. But I worry I’m just never going to be good enough to hack it in this game.

Future plans

I’ve only got a few days left in my WoW sub. I’m kind of leaning towards doing more frequent but shorter stints in the game, at least for the near future. Once the current jaunt ends, I’ll be on to other things.

I’m planning to revisit The First Descendant soon. My always shakey interest in the game was feeling like it was running out, but Nell is my favourite character in the game (not for any good reason; I just like the cut of her jib), and making her playable is enough to entice me back, or at least poke my nose in.

I also picked up Songs of Silence on the last Steam sale, and I want to get to that soon. Like Clair Obscur, it’s another turn-based game that seemed interesting enough to give it a shot, despite my usual dislike of such things.

Farther down the line there’s the upcoming Legion Remix, which doesn’t excite me the way Pandaria did but will probably be worth playing a bit of, and in theory the release of Heavenly Spear for Age of Mythology: Retold shouldn’t be too far off.

After AoE4’s recent embarrassments, I find my criticisms of Heavenly Spear feel a bit less relevant. I still wish they’d prioritized something else over the Japanese, but it does look to be shaping up to be a cool civ based on the previews, and at least it will have an actual campaign, and skirmish AI that meets the bare minimum of functionality.

Gaming Round-Up: Massively Leftovers

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

One of my struggles with this blog since I started working at Massively Overpowered, and one of the reasons I don’t post nearly as much as I used to, is the decision of what to put here versus what to put on Massively. My recent Not So Massively column on Redfall, for instance, is something of a sequel to a blog post I made about it a few months ago, and I originally intended it to go on Superior Realities, but ultimately I get paid if I put it on MOP, so that’s what I did.

New World is another good example. It’s been my main game for the last two years, but I’ve barely mentioned it on my blog, because nearly everything I have to say about it goes into the Vitae Aeternum column.

That said, I now find myself with some thoughts to share on multiplayer games that are too short and rambly to form a MOP column, so it’s time for another gaming round-up blog.

New World

I’ve settled into a loose pattern of playing New World heavily for a few weeks, then putting it on the back burner for a few weeks (but rarely quitting entirely), rinse and repeat. It’s a good fit for both my own fickle attention span and the game’s seasonal content model.

During December I went through a phase where I took the unusual (for me) step of actually playing it the way you’re “supposed to” play MMOs: doing lots of endgame group content, chasing rare drops, trying to improve my gear.

This mainly took the form of elite chest runs, a form of open world zerg that will feel very familiar to anyone who’s ever done a hero point train in Guild Wars 2. In fact, the more I play of it the more I feel the endgame structure of New World is closer to that of GW2 than anything else. Despite its increasingly inaccurate reputation as a hardcore PvP game, New World truly has become a casual PvE paradise.

A particular goal was earning some more artifacts. I grabbed the Boltcaster bow for my Convenant alt (who is now more of a co-main, as usually happens with me) without much difficulty. What took more grinding was the Abyss, a great axe that deals void damage and can scale off intellect, but after a few dozen Corrupted portals, I finally got it on my main.

I like the idea of artifacts, but so far most of their designs have been a little unambitious, not really delivering on the “build-defining” role Amazon intends for them. However, the Abyss is an exception. Being able to use a great axe in a mage build is a fun novelty, and I completely retooled my fire staff skills to support the close combat. I wasn’t sure I’d actually use Abyss much, but I’m actually having a blast with this newfound battle-mage playstyle.

I also took a run through the new dungeon, the Glacial Tarn, to finish upgrading Boltcaster. This was only my third dungeon run in my New World career, and we didn’t have a proper tank, so things got a bit hairy at points, but the story mode introduced with the expansion is indeed pretty easy, so we were able to press through.

I wouldn’t say the mechanics of the dungeon were anything too exotic in the MMO space, but the environment art was great, the music was amazing, and overall it was a pretty good time, despite my dodgy group. It has me excited to see more of the game’s dungeons once the dungeon finder finally launches.

I also did quite a bit of grinding on the Winter Convergence event. Various circumstances led to me being unable to fully participate in it for the first two years, so I essentially did three years of grinding at once, but I managed to get pretty much all the cosmetics I want on both characters.

Finally, I did some redecorating on my Reekwater home, and I think it’s cozier than ever. All in all, a pretty productive couple of weeks.

Heroes of the Storm

When I wrote about my brief return to Heroes of the Storm on Massively OP a few months ago, I said I’d already uninstalled, and I did… but I reinstalled again not too long after. I’ve been playing off and on since.

As I always have, I maintain mixed feelings on the game. When you get a good match, it can be an incredibly exciting experience, but you won’t always have good matches, and it is kind of an empty and mindless experience even at the best of times. I can never quite escape the feeling that I’m wasting my life even more than one usually does when playing video games.

It also remains true that nearly every major change to the game since launch has made it worse, at least in my opinion. I hardly play my old favourite heroes, because almost all of them have been altered or nerfed too much. Jaina and Johanna are the only major exceptions.

The loss of Tassadar as a support character stings especially. I’ve been playing nearly every remaining healer trying to find a replacement, but none of them quite click so well. Whitemane is very fun, but also very difficult and thus too stressful to play all the time. Anduin is very easy, but a little bland. Tyrande’s not bad, but she still doesn’t feel as good as Tassadar did when he was a support.

I’m painting a very bleak picture of the game, but the core gameplay does remain very fun, and in terms of balance, the game is in a pretty good place. There’s a few overtuned heroes, but this feels like one of the most well-balanced periods of the game’s life.

And as always, the chief appeal is simply in nostalgia. Even with all we’ve learned in the last few years, I can’t help but get the warm fuzzies from all those classic Blizzard characters all together.

As is the case for all MOBAs, the sheer variety of heroes also does a lot to keep things fresh. Of the new heroes added since I lasted played, Fenix is probably the biggest hit for me. He’s very simple to play, but that can be a nice change of pace. I’m quite perplexed that I rarely see anyone else playing him; he feels incredibly strong to me, and I’ve had many dominant performances with him.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Imperius, too. Brusier was never my favourite role, but charging into the thick of it to impale people with your spear just never gets old.

Also, while I do tend to complain about the revamps over-complicating heroes, in the case of Raynor adding some depth to him was actually welcome. He’s still pretty simple, but no longer to the point of being boring. This pleases me a lot because he’s always been a favourite character of mine lore-wise, and I was disappointed he wasn’t more fun to play in Heroes.

Finally, I’ve been playing a lot of D.va lately, to the point where she feels like potential “new main” material. I barely played her before my long hiatus, so I can’t say if she changed or I did, but she feels far stronger and more fun than I remember. The fact you can almost completely avoid death with her given good play and a little luck is just so nice. Plus she combines my long-time affinity for short, mildly insane women and my natural masculine desire to pilot a big stompy robot.

I don’t know if I’m going to stick with Heroes much longer or not. I do want to at least try every hero, which is proving frustrating since Qhira and Hogger almost never get picked for the free rotation and Mei was never added to it at all for some incomprehensible reason. I’m grinding the gold to buy her just for completionism’s sake, which for now keeps me doing my dailies and trying to find a healer who feels just right.

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