I know many of you don’t think things can be worse, but trust me, they can always be worse, lol.
The thing that strikes me about Microsoft is the fact that they tend to have a long term business approach rather than short term. Meaning, it might actually be in the cards for a game like D4 to get some genuine development regarding itemization, QoL, and improvement of systems.
With Blizz, it’s always the path of least resistance. They won’t fix itemization, so they just give us a few buffs and a handful of new items. After every single engineer working on D4 notified their boss(es) of the gargantuan mistake around loading every player’s stash in town, that fix gets pushed off as long as possible. You know, the path of least resistance.
Well, with Microsoft, there seems to always be a long term goal in mind. It wouldn’t seem as reasonable for Microsoft to make a bad game while ensuring pristine marketing and cinematics. In fact, it seems like the only real problem with their titles that were bad, was a lack of game development knowledge or vision.
So does it seem like Blizzard’s early history of great games lends enough knowledge that Microsoft’s patient, long term approach will yield massive improvements to Blizzard products?
Only time will tell, but the above paragraph would assume we get the best of both companies, rather than the worst. I have to admit, simply having Bobby Kotick out of the picture has me excited.
I believe it’s gonna make it better for WoW players at the very least, if WoW is in the game pass we’re gonna be cutting the subscription price by about half.
Without some sort of multi-verse looking glass, we may never know. But there will likely be things that are better and things that are worse. Rarely is something universally bad or good.
The pessimist in me thinks I’ll get more out of gamepass, but I’ll probably miss out on a lot of things that would otherwise have happened if they didn’t get bought out. This extra foothold means MS can deliver lower quality at a higher price to us. So overall worse
Yeah, I was aware of that. That’s only a couple months away, though.
Well, Blizzard functioned entirely differently and made great games before the Activision merger. Corporate changes have a potentially dramatic impact on how a company functions.
I doubt MS will mess with any of Blizzard’s existing products much at all. At some point a D4 expansion might become an Xbox/PC exclusive, I guess. That’s basically the reason MS bought Blizz after all, to stop the bleeding in the console wars. They may have agreed that CoD will still be released on PlayStation, but that doesn’t mean the version released on PS has to be good.
Now that I think of it though, I could see MS demanding that Blizzard shut down D2 and D3, since that would be historically consistent with how they treated other major studios they acquired.
I was keeping a close eye on the Starfield situation since they bought out Bethesda. Rumor was they were not going to let Bethesda put out a crappy product and were supporting Starfield development. Turns out the game isn’t horrible. I wouldn’t call it a good game either. But definitely better than D4. So I’m optimistic that they will support Blizzard as well and refuse to let them put out unfinished, uninspired dreck again.
Judging from Microsoft’s own bad decisions with their own franchises it doesn’t leave me with much hope for the future of any acquisitioned franchise honestly. Everyone thinks Microsoft is going to be the savior and I’m sitting in the corner being skeptical about it all. One things for certain, it won’t be an overnight change, it will take years, similar to when activision bought out blizzard.
Now we’ll see small things here and there, blizzard games being added to the game pass, probably some cross overs from various games. But the bigger stuff, the huge changes everyone thinks Microsoft is going to bring won’t be apparent until the next big project from Blizzard is announced, and it’ll be the same thing all over again.
I can see the complaints now, 5 years down the road, “What did Microsoft do to Blizzard? Where’s Diablo 5? StarCraft 3? They were supposed to make Blizzard great again not set it on fire”. And I’ll be there with my popcorn in whatever forums are around, enjoying it all.
I mean, the simplification of wow to the point of console accessibility has been kind of front and center since BFA.
I am going to be totally honest here. Classic seems to be better than retail. This seems to have a lot to do with accessibility. If MS recognizes this and blunts the endgame complexity in the next xpac, they’ll undoubtedly win the support of the masses. The desire for retail to encapsulate the experience that players are getting from classic is palpable. And it’s low hanging fruit for MS to say “yeah we’re not catering to the 1 % of hyper toxic Mythic dungeon/raid elitists anymore and btw you can play this game on Xbox now if you have a keyboard and mouse!”
That’s checkmake for MS. There is already all the monetization groundwork they need in the game. They just need the playerbase to expand. And if they go this route they seal the deal with PC players and console alike.
I don’t see how things can possibly get worse. Not when the barrier for making things better AND more accessible is so pitifully low.
I don’t think much will change for what is out there now, other than some games being added to GamePass. The hope for me is that maybe Blizzard will have more creative freedom to make different kinds of games. They did feature Starcraft in the announcement trailer a few times so maybe there’s some small hope we’ll get a new Starcraft game at some point.
Minecraft, despite being worth billions, has upset its players by having them vote between 3 mobs, despite having the resources to add all 3.
Age of Empires 2 and 4 are doing okay for RTS games, but they aren’t seeing nearly the amount of support that SC2 did before Blizzard stopped developing it.
What I think will happen with D4: development speed is going to stay the same. We’re not going to suddenly see faster bug fixes, clearer communication, QoL improvements, itemization improvements, etc.
Damage control until the first expansion is released with numerous changes and QoL additions that are typically part of any arpg… but we will have to pay for it.
Last Epoch is a wonderful new arpg and it’s ahead in every aspect and the game is still in early access. The divide between a company built on passion vs blizzard which is full throttle greed at this point. Reuse old code, bring in same exact issues as d3, save money everywhere, treat full priced d4 as free to play and squeeze customers even more. Sad state to see truly…
I doubt it will get any worse.
D4 might be included in their Game Pass and will benefit both Microsoft and Blizzard.
If anything, I hope it gets better after Bobby leaves, fingers crossed.