BlizzCon

BlizzCon, or BlizzConline as it was called this year, felt rather different. It wasn’t really the lack of a public for me—since that’s something I’ve always had in a sense since I never went on location, so that was a bonus if anything—but rather the way the panels were structured. To be fair, I haven’t watched all or even many of them yet, mostly just a couple of the ones that came after the main event, but still there was a distinct different style to them, much more personal something akin to a bunch of friends talking. Now it was at times rather obvious that they had a list of talking points that they needed to get through, but I still liked the vibe from what I’ve seen. To be fair, that probably partially came from it being the first time in a good while that they actually had the opportunity to catch up in real life as opposed to online, so perhaps that was to be expected even if it came as something of a positive surprise for me.

Another thing that really stood out for me this time around, probably owing to Blizzard not really having anything truly new to announce this year, was the heavy focus on nostalgia. That is naturally part of the whole thing when you’ve already released something like World of Warcaft Classic, and of course plays into the 30 anniversary, but still it felt somewhat interesting to see, especially when considering how much remastered stuff they actually ended up announcing.

This whole nostalgia thing did end up spurring some deeper thinking on my part, since it feels at times I can get rather stuck living in the past to a certain degree—looking at the current design of the blog—and while that isn’t in and of itself necessarily a bad thing it can definitely be a indicator of something left unresolved. I think one of the biggest points on this for me in recent times, was when I ended up changing my main’s name which felt like a much bigger thing than it probably is. Now sure, to a certain degree a name is actually a big thing, even if it is one in a game, but in retrospect I think there was quite a lot of unresolved emotions that I was clinging on to through the name, mostly unaware, and changing it helped me deal with those feelings better.

That doesn’t mean that I think that something being old or having me be nostalgic about something translate to it in someway being bad or negative in and of itself, but it has encouraged me to more critically look and analyze the feelings I think I have and actually have about certain things, especially when there is some outside influence nudging me in a certain direction.

With all of that said, much of the nostalgia Blizzard was selling us on wasn’t really something that applied to me, I didn’t actually play that much Diablo II or any of the things from the collection, so that does afford me the opportunity to go in with fresh eyes if I wanted to, but I don’t think I could handle the mechanics of old games at this point—even Diablo II, was never really a fan of the whole dropping items on death thing, just let me load the game.

The panels were really nice though.

So as noted a while back I was in the hospital and have been in recovery a good while which has lead to me not talking as much about some of the recent interesting events—namely, PTR and BlizzCon—as I would have otherwise liked.

Recovery however, has been going well and I’m slowly starting to feel like I’m in somewhat good condition again and maybe I can slowly start gaming more again.

BlizzCon

So BlizzCon this year kind of went like expected, we got a lot of new announcements and they all looked quite interesting though the apology at the start did end up feeling a bit hollow since there was no action taken alongside that apology.

Seeing more story content for Overwatch is nice, having recently actually taken the time to read some of the comics the story and the world does seem really interesting so in a way it’s something of a pity that there hasn’t been more story in-game that we could explore.

Diablo 4 seems nice, though while that is a franchise I enjoy it’s not one I’m overly invested in, getting more story to play like with Overwatch will be nice but I’m in no real hurry to get to play it.

StarCraft ended up being ignored a bit it felt like, with not much new content on the horizon though that is somewhat understandable but still a pity since StarCraft was one of my favourite games growing up though I never got into the competitive side of it.

As for the “main dish” for me at least, World of Warcraft, the announcements left me rather disappointed. There was really one primary thing that I had wanted from this expansion, and that was being able to play Night Elf again and that unfortunately got definitely denied in the Q&A they held at the end. This kind of extends to my fear with the new Covenant system, there are some really nice cosmetic effects tied into choosing a covenant however there is also player power gated behind that choice meaning I might again be “forced” to make a choice I don’t really want to make.

As for the rest of the mechanics, Blizzard seemed quite clear in pointing out that most of the systems were in very early stages with them even being unsure how loot would work and 8.3 with the corrupted gear being one of the deciding factors there which means it feels a bit early to comment on all of that, though so far aside from the concern voiced in the last paragraph regarding the covenants the systems do seem a lot better than the ones in Battle for Azeroth with the tower having the potential to be as interesting as Mythic+ was in Legion which would be nice though I am slightly skeptical of the rogue-lite nature of it since that type of game hasn’t really been my jam so far.

Public Test Realm Raid Testing

The PTR has also been out for a while and we’ve gotten to test every single boss I think, some of them even on mythic—and some of them on mythic when they weren’t supposed to be available on mythic; due to some bug on the PTR, for the first Wrathion and Ma’ut testing we were thrown into mythic instead of heroic which while a fun experience was more buggy than the PTR is usually leading to not very useful testing on our part.

As for the rest of our tests, they have gone decently well and given us a rather good feel for the bosses—except N’zoth, that fight was too buggy for us to do any real testing—which is always nice to have in preparation of the actual content. However the tuning has as usual been completely out of whack, so if we actually want to get any practice on the later phases we’ll need to focus on the tests that come shortly before release.

Still, so far the raid seems rather fun with some bosses even bringing in some rather fresh mechanics—looking at you, Prophet Skitra—which is nice to see and others bringing back very annoying mechanics, namely the Void Miasma at Drest’agath—healing people when line of sight is a major issue never really felt fun, and was one of the more annoying parts in the Queen Azshara encounter so I’m not overly thrilled to see it will probably play a major role again.

Overall though, I’m hopeful when it comes to the raid even with the Discipline nerfs coming out on the PTR and look forward to progessing it after a nice holiday break.