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How To Disappoint an Entire Fanbase - Brought to you by Activision Blizzard

I’ve been sort of wandering the internet in a daze since yesterday afternoon hoping to stumble across anything that would hint that what I witnessed at Blizzcon 2018 wasn’t ALL that there was and found myself saddened to know that it indeed is it. The big reveal for Diablo, after they hyped it up by putting it on the first panel for the Mythic stage and closing the opening ceremonies with it, was a Diablo re-skin of an existing mobile game. A mobile game that is clearly popular in other countries (such as China) but roundly ignored here in the states. The crushing disappointment of this announcement probably could have been avoided to some degree if it was approached differently. Blizzard kind of went out of their way to note that “big things” were happening for Diablo at Blizzcon and that “multiple projects” (those are their words) were in the works. Most of us fans who paid attention knew that some sort of mobile app was in development from the hiring posts on the Blizzard website but we all I think assumed it was a secondary project to the main continuation of the story in the next installment of the game, maybe even tertiary to the release of another character pack for D3 (Druid has been on everyone’s wishlist as it would present a wholly different style of character for a game 6 years into it’s life). Never did we anticipate that the ONLY thing they would bring to the table for this year was the mobile game and because of that they have earned the boos and pushback from their audience. 

They clearly misjudged their fanbase on this one and I find it easy to trace where this is coming from. There have been high profile departures of original Blizzard team members for years now since Activision merged with Blizzard and we’ve seen the advent of big-game-company policies in recent games like Heroes and Overwatch (loot boxes, though tempered by the fact that you can earn your stuff without buying it by “getting gud”) and the alteration of Diablo 3 for the Chinese market to include microtransactions for cosmetics (something I am not against at all and would welcome, provided you could also earn those cosmetics by completing in game challenges). I understand this need for additional revenue streams well enough as it is expensive to maintain servers, code, and customer service for these “games as a service” titles. However I believe with the old Blizzard employees leaving we are now left with individuals who a) do not have the cache to push back on some of the more exploitative policies of Activision and b) care less about maintaining the traditions of the franchises. 

This is readily apparent with the decision to make Diablo Immortal the main thrust of their reveals for the franchise this year. Anyone who has played these mobile ARPG’s (not a new thing by any stretch of the imagination despite their hype machine touting it as some sort of leap in gameplay) knows that they are difficult to control for one glaring reason: tactile feedback. There is a reason the most popular games on mobile platforms are puzzle games; they require little to no twitch reflexes or tight controls, which are difficult to manage on a phone screen even excepting the extra screen space they require. Not everyone has a 7″ phone screen or does everyone want one; personally I like to use my phone to read, play music, text and occasionally puzzle game (and phone when forced). I do not want to use it as my action rpg gaming platform because that will require more battery drainage than I’m comfortable with. 

The hype accompanied by the video put on the Battle.net launcher was not tempered by the follow up blog post trying to put the brakes on the hype train at all; it merely adjusted our expectations down from “Diablo 4 announcement” to “D3 character pack and D1/D2 remaster”. The better, more honest way to approach this would have been to post the facts; that we were not going to get D4 or any of the things being postulated at Blizzcon. So why did they let this stand as is? Only one answer occurs to me and that’s to drive Blizzcon virtual ticket sales higher, a blatant money grab that we’ve come to expect from a company like Activision. If they had put Diablo Immortal on a secondary stage along with the Switch version, and specifically said we weren’t getting anything for current or next-gen Diablo games, then we would have all settled down and continued to wait for the next thing. Now I fear we all know the direction that Blizzard is heading and we don’t like it. 

The next time they try this shit they won’t get a reaction from Diablo fans at least. They won’t sell more virtual tickets, or more versions of Diablo 3, they’ll drop whatever they drop into the internet and we’ll shrug and say “show me something real or we’re out”. Diablo does not exist in a realm by itself now; games like Path of Exile, Torchlight, Grim Dawn and the upcoming Wolcen are pushing Diablo hard because they’re offering the updated game experience we enjoyed from Diablo 2 with new environments, music, and gameplay systems and keeping the quality of life changes that make these games worthy successors. I personally think PoE still keeps too many of the annoying game features of Diablo 2 (like carrying around multiple potions taking up bag space and forcing you to carry identify scrolls and the like) but Grim Dawn takes the quality of life upgrades from Diablo 3 and pulls them into a more Diablo 2 like experience. Wolcen is looking to blow them all away in the graphics and physics department but we’ll see how the gameplay ends up. If Actizzard wants to stay relevant in this genre they need to get their heads out their asses and realize you can make plenty of money by just providing a great game and not exploiting your players by draining their wallets for stupid shit. 

Of course they may just not care enough about the fanbase that exists for Diablo to try; they may care more about the emerging Chinese markets for these games and the wealth of microtransactions they provide (China does not have a deep history of PC or console gaming so they are far more used to smartphone style controls and paying microtransactions for stuff than in the US or Europe, whose gamer bases still remember the greatness of the last 30 years of console/pc gaming) so they may just say “fuck it” and not bother with us, the people who made them rich to begin with. People who still play Diablo 2 & 3 and get viewers on their streams regularly. People who would buy the next Diablo provided it still ticked the boxes of what Diablo is supposed to be about.  We as gamers will need to decide what we will tolerate in this regard. Do we reward a company that is continually pushing their franchises to a casual audience and ripping the features that hardcore players enjoy out? Only to resell them the experience from their past in better graphics when the newer games don’t hit the button? I’ve already written off companies like EA as a lost cause because they’ve clearly abandoned all pretense of caring about making great games and just want to put out cash cows so maybe it’s time to give credit to companies who still make great experiences devoid of cash grab schemes. FromSoftware, Wolcen Soft, Motion Twin, Grinding Gear Games, these are the new banner carriers of the hardcore ARPG gamers. We should throw our support at them and let Actiblizz go where they will, to exploit another fanbase.

I’m not 100% done with Blizzard at this point. I enjoy Overwatch (though I’ll never purchase a loot box) and they can still win me back with a D1/D2 remaster, D3 Druid, and/or D4 done right. But now I’m going to be skeptical of anything they announce or hype. And that unfortunately is the first step down the road of abandonment. Which is sad to me; Blizzard has been a great company that offered games I can play with my kid around, a super invaluable thing for me, but I won’t support them if they continue to do things like this.

To close I’ll note that the announcement trailer vid for Diablo Immortal went up on YouTube and immediately hit 100k dislikes, got taken down and reposted, only to have the same 100k dislikes show up. It’s clear to anyone paying attention that this was a major misstep for them and they are desperate to play it up as anything but. Good luck with that. They should have kept this on a lower hype level, maybe put it on outside Blizzcon, directed at the market it clearly is for (China) and not involve US or European audiences. We have options that the Chinese audience does not and that more than anything will spell doom for this franchise in the future.

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Source

Video of Tama

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

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Brilliant

(via (52) when you hear phil collins - YouTube)

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My approach to everything. (by Unclipped Adventure)

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A must-watch: MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reminds everyone of the known sexual assault accusations against Donald Trump, one by one, in detail.

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https://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497799354/a-list-of-donald-trumps-accusers-of-inappropriate-sexual-conduct

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reblog if you’d end a date if they said they voted for trump

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My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.   When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.   Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.   It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.   ‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.   ‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.   He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.   He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.   It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?   I asked him what happened on his adventure.   ‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.   ‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.   ‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?   ‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’   ‘And so I did.   ‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.   ‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.   ‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.   ‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.   ‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.   ‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.   ‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’   I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.   What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?   ‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’   My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.   ‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’   But I do. I really believe in it.   And it’s the best story I’ve heard all year.

Paul Magrs (via yourfluffiestnightmare)

Holy shit

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^

A hero in more ways than one

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Border collie, of course.

Dog thinks moon is a ball. [full video]

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Rogue-likes and the Arcade Experience

The recent (say 5 years or so back) emergence of the “rogue-like” genre in games and the inevitable genre mashups that have followed (see Dead Cells or Risk of Rain) is actually just a re-imagining of the experience many of us had first with games: the arcade.

As a kid growing up in the 80′s and 90′s I was blessed to see the resurgence of the home console market and the hours of enjoyment the new console generation provided, but I also was able to experience the joy and economy of the arcade experience as well. Arcade games were still the main pipeline for new hit console games due to the technological advantages that still existed making a single purpose cabinet dedicated to playing one game. Hit games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, House of the Dead and the myriad of side scrolling brawlers in full 16-bit glory were ported with some differences to consoles to massive sales, while also still swallowing quarters in pizzerias and mall arcades everywhere. The internet had not become the free-flowing, lag free playground many of us enjoy now so if you wanted to play with a large group of people without having a million peripherals for your NES the arcade was still the go-to birthday party and social hangout place.

The experience of an arcade game was singularly different than the console experience. With consoles you purchase the hardware (at a significant loss to the producer usually) and then you also purchase the software (at a much more significant and long lasting profit to the producer) to use as you will, sometimes with subscription services offered. But with the arcade experience your enjoyment was limited to the amount of quarters you had and your skill at the game you were playing. Once you ran out of coin and continues the game reset from the beginning, maybe allowing you to save a high score if you were so lucky as to crack their leaderboard of 15 or so. This put a higher premium on pattern recognition and twitch reflexes since you could spend a couple of bucks beating a game if you were great at it, or $100 over time if you sucked and just kept playing (Dragon’s Lair was a game built to sucker people with bad reflexes into monstrous, wallet cratering amounts of play time). It wasn’t uncommon for me to walk by a Street Fighter cabinet to see an pre-pubescent kid sitting at the player 1 side and a line of would-be challengers behind player 2; the kid would be so in tune and twitch happy that he would be literally impossbile to defeat, but people kept trying.

Rogue as a game has very little to do with modern “rogue-like” games; it was a role playing experience that merely reset every time the player died, much like an arcade game but with no safety net like “continues” or quarters. Modern rogue-likes retain the “start from scratch” penalty of Rogue but with a twist that any gear unlocked or levels gained on the previous playthrough would accumulate for the next run, thus creating a continuity and reward system for continued play. With arcade games occasionally one would be awesome enough an experience to keep playing no matter the cost, or you were good enough to play it at low cost because you were able to perfect your technique, but generally after dropping a couple of bucks tops in most games you’d abandon in frustration or boredom. With rogue-like accumulation systems it makes it worthwhile to keep playing and powering through as each subsequent playthrough gets a little easier thanks to the contributions of the last run. Games like Rogue Legacy (which cleverly makes a new generation of hero when the last dies, literally creating inherited wealth) and Dead Cells keep the ability and buffs purchased with the blood of the last player allowing each playthrough to get deeper and deeper into the game. 

So what makes the rogue-like an arcade experience? For 20 years or so since consoles became a dominant force in gaming the goal with most games was to play it skillfully enough to progress through a story or number of levels, reaching the end and then moving onto another game (on few occasions a game would be excellent enough to repeat a playthrough or two but for the most part once you beat all the levels or reached the end of the story there was not much reason to play it again). The idea of perfecting technique and reaching the heights of scoring ability sort of fell away, with the competitive natured gamer drifting towards the emerging online fps scene to get their fix for competition. The rogue-like genre recaptures the competitive, even with one’s self, nature of gaming, and with evolved pixel style graphics often tickle several nostalgia zones in the early to late 30′s aged gamer. Now it’s not just a progression through a story (though the best of them find a way to add this) or a head-on competition with another gamer (always an iffy relationship), it can be a competition against yourself and the game. How far can I push this playthrough? OH SHIT I JUST KILLED THAT BOSS FOR THE FIRST TIME! ARGH so close to my record! These are all feelings that get missed as being important for many gamers; those of use with responsibilities outside gaming often cannot find enjoyment in the competitive FPS scene due to our inability to dedicate time wholly to the game without fear of more important things crowding in, nor can we always progress fast enough and block time to group in MMO’s to reach the highest levels of that particular genre, so games that reward perseverence but allow saving and progression beyond the normal ideals of the story are perfect for this segment of the gaming world. We simultaneously crave the experience of the arcade we had as children while also pining for the old days of story based console games, at the same time we are limited by our adult responsibilities. 

Two games currently I’ve been batting back and forth between while home are Diablo III’s hardcore adventure mode and the new early access Steam game Dead Cells. D3′s hardcore mode combined with adventure mode creates an almost perfect melding of traditional ARPG gameplay with an arcade style experience and fast combat I think is unique to the genre. Aside from the added tension of potentially killing a fully geared and gemmed toon in the blink of an eye (along with all the gear they carry and gems) the ability to play for short bursts of time in various styles gives a new depth to a game I’ve been playing for 5 years now. To me the only true goal I have left with D3 other than achievements is playing on T13 comfortably in hardcore mode, something that is still unattained after 5 years for me, though I’ve seen plenty doing it. Dead Cells is a new mashup of “Metroidvania” style with rogue-like permadeath and Dead Souls-like skill caps is a new experience for me. The tight controls and timing based maneuvering combined with old-school pattern-recognition skill and the perserverence of fighting through failure has been an addicting presence on my PC. I’ve only just passed the first boss this week for the first time, and randomly generated elite monsters are just as tough and likely to kill you mid-level as the boss will. Other recommendations I could give are Rogue Legacy, though that one seems more frustrating to me for some reason, Don’t Starve, which combines the tension of a survival game with the replayability of the rogue-like and has compelling visual qualities. There were several similar titles I played at PAX but none long enough to get super excited about. 

I’m encouraged to see the arcade-style play resurfacing in this new manner; many a weekend was well spent at the local mini-golf/arcade/pizzeria that operated in my hometown, figuring out how much I could spend on each thing that would leave the most money to play games with and spending more than half a day just enjoying life. The games themselves indelible in my memory: Magician Lord, Aliens, Virtual On, Tekken, Time Crisis, House of the Dead and on and on. Experiences unique to the game cabinet not truly replicable on the home console. As soon as the console started equalizing in technology to the arcades the lines blurred and soon there was no reason to go to arcades anymore and press against the other sweaty virgins waiting to get their asses kicked by teenage Korean kids, but I missed finding those gems hidden around the arcade without crowds that offered weird and unique gaming experiences. Now the feel of that is being resurrected by the rogue-like features pulled from a 40 year old CRPG and to me that’s the enduring testament to the desire most gamers have to keep their beloved experiences alive. 

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This shit. This makes me furious. Now he’s saying USA “is with Mexico” ?? Oh but not when he said “Mexicans are rapists and thieves” not when he said he was going to force them to pay for the wall, not when he removed DACA that was the only hope for hundreds of Mexicans.

Now, only when a tragedy occurs, the first and ONLY thing he does is put a fucking Tweet saying “we are with you”. This Tweet does nothing, it is a mere reminder that the USA does not fucking care about Latinos. This is the fucking face of hypocrisy and uselessness. Trump is not “with Mexico”, he has never been with any Latino country and he will not be even if every country in Latin America exploded in flames.

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Hey remember early last year when the Large Hadron Collider overloaded and broke down and people were like “phew good thing nothing weird happened like a shift in reality.” Maybe it’s time to revisit that.

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If you can’t reblog this, unfollow me now.

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The New “Slavery”

Let me diffuse the click-bait-y title; there is nothing going on right now directly the same as slavery, as it existed in the past or as it exists now. The reason I use quotation marks is to hint at the fact that much like in the mid 1800s there has grown a divide of class and ideology so great in our political lives at the moment that I believe we have the makings of a new Civil War in America, and much like the original flavor the New and Improved Version is a fight against the ever ripening upper class and the vast population of people it is determined to shove down. 

The first US Civil War (officially; it may be noted at different times in our history  parts of the country were in open revolt in all but name) coalesced around one stark line: slavery. The optimists will want to believe it was one side of the country wishing to eliminate injustice and one side who wanted to continue it, the pessimist will tell you it was all about economy, but the pragmatist (Hello!) will say it was about politics, which is probably the most accurate.

The North as we know it was full of people crying for the plight of the slave while still benefiting from the economic advantage cheap production labor (sound familiar?). Full of factories building and assembling things for export, the economic boon came directly from the readily available materials at low prices. The manufacturies were stocked to the brim with immigrant labor (the North was actually just ahead of the times swapping out slave labor, which was actually quite expensive to house, maintain and guard, for cheaper immigrants who worked for pennies and still got to call themselves “free” as they struggled to feed and house their families) and this gave the industrialists and futurists a warm fuzzy feeling about how much “opportunity” they were providing for people. Very romantic. But the rub was as the industrial and political hub of the nation they also had to dead diplomatically with the rest of the developed world, most of whom had abolished slavery already and took it as a sign that the US wasn’t ready to be a “Great Nation” yet. This rankles the hoi polloi of the time, and if we’re being honest that’s really where the indignation came from with slavery in the US. Most of the rich white people in the North probably couldn’t have given two shits about the life of the average slave, but to be thought of as barbaric or lesser by the European powers that we fought so valiantly to rid ourselves of is too much to bear. 

The majority of the South was as it is now; rural farmland run by individual landowners no different from feudal lords. Beholden to federal power only in name they operated independently of state and federal authority most of the time and the separateness allowed their deeply held beliefs and culture to take root and thrive. This meant the idea that slaves were not humans as the lords were, that they were inferior in some way because they were allowing themselves to be chattel instead of fighting and dying to be free (fun fact: the electoral college system that so many populists defend as the best way to avoid despotic overlords in our government was created so that southern slave-owning landlords could count their slaves as population but not allow them to vote. Oh southern irony, there is nothing better) and the belief that the states should have power to rule as they felt without interference from an overarching governing body. Their fight to keep slavery alive was deeply rooted in these beliefs, ignoring the fact that economically speaking the practice of slave holding as a source of labor had been proven inferior to merely paying people a wage they couldn’t possibly live off of and letting them deal with their own protections and feeding. 

The two sides are not so different really; the North believed that they needed to join the rest of the civilized world as a nation and the thing keeping them out was the practice of slavery in many of it’s provinces, the South believing their sovereignity was more important than the liberty and rights of a huge segment of their populace and the desire for their northern brethren to be thought of well by foreign dignitaries. Both really didn’t care so much about the details of what it was to be black in America at that time, free or slave, and that’s the closest to the truth of the matter that anyone can claim.

Why do I bring this up? Because we are at this point again in our nation that there is a clear dividing line between our populace and it has become so polarized along that line that it’s almost unreconcilable. We’ve been building towards this for decades now, beginning in the 60′s, and only getting about a decade of stalling from 9/11 (an event that galvanized the nation in the short term but ultimately showed more of our weakness and hate). 

The linchpin of the next conflict I believe is rooted in the attitudes we are seeing towards health care. There is no clearer defining indication of social standing right now than the ability to afford health insurance. Those that have it are either wealthy enough to afford it privately or work in professions that offer it regularly, usually skilled positions that require some form of apprenticeship and specialized training or full college degrees. Those that don’t are the people either economically, socially, or educationally impoverished, sometimes all three, and unfortunately this segment of our populace includes many immigrants and people much darker than me, but increasingly over the decades many middle class white people who were comfortably living through 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s are now sliding down the economic ladder as cost of living goes higher and wages stay static, even for educationally demanding jobs. Add to this the skyrocketing cost of attending institutes of higher learning and the striking fall in quality at the K-12 levels has aggravated the divide, leaving many people despairing of ever improving their lives even one rung up on the ladder. The old dream of “work hard and you can be successful” in this country is no more; you now need to work hard AND have some sort of wealth and/or credit to bolster you into the ranks of the middle class, which means if you inherit no wealth from your parents in any way you might as well give up after high school or resign yourself to struggling to pay student loans for an education that doesn’t pay you enough to cover the interest. 

The Conservative power base has slowly built a new aristocracy around capitalist dogma and have labeld it “Meritocracy” indicating they deserve the wealth because they are smarter/faster/stronger or some such nonsense. They erected measures under the cover of ignorance to ensure their continued presence in the halls of power and leveraged that power to enact transparently self-serving policies designed to hoard wealth and power of even greater magnitude while leaving the world and society a smoking ruin. And worst of all the Liberal power base has been allowing it to happen for years because they continue to try and play by a civilized set of rules while the Conservatives have blatantly turned off all pretense of ever doing so. To use a pop culture analogy: the Liberals are the Northmen and Riverlords of Westeros, Starks and Tully’s, dedicated to civility, honor and cooperation, and caring for all peoples in their realms. The Conservatives are acting like the Lannisters; accumulating all power and wealth using barbaric, underhanded tactics designed to take advantage of the rule of law while flouting it blatantly for all to see. The end result will likely be similar; despots are always thrown down into the fire eventually, but the wreck and ruin they leave behind to clean up is a devastation that so many people will not survive. 

This is why we can’t be patient, those of us who see the writing on the wall, why we can’t “see how it goes”; we KNOW how it goes, and it’s going poorly. The longer Trump and his Conservative “allies” are allowed to stay in power the more of a mess it will be to clean up after. That mess can take many forms but I think the most likely is Civil War. We may be able to survive one Trump term, but I have a hard time believing a second will be met with anything but open warfare. The short-sightedness of the political pundits on Fox News and the Conservative “law” makers in Congress to not see what is barreling down on them is idiocy that should be punishable on its face by impeachment. 

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Looking like he'll be a LHB, throws righty