For those not into news links, Microsoft is doing more with Blizzard than laying people off and canceling games
King and other Activision staff are getting moved into Blizzard (staff updating their linkedin profiles) to form a small team for making AA games using existing blizzard franchises. Phil Spencer has name-dropped Starcraft before the acquisition, so there’s speculation that that may be one of the projects by the smaller team in years to come.
Probably doesn’t do anything for HotS, but maybe others see this is a “AA game” and therefore qualify for QoL milking.
I saw a post about this a couple of days ago on Reddit. Perhaps it’s a hopeful sign for Hots, but I couldn’t completely dismiss that prevailing sentiment in the comments, that existing IPs will mostly likely be developed into console or mobile games.
oh, they clearly won’t fix HotS, but they’ll use the Nexus (blizzard multiverse) for tapping into the lucrative mobile dating apps I predicted years ago.
I think the best HotS will ever get is Microsoft finishing the projects that were cut short such as the mastery rings going up to level 100+, facial movements for Maiev and Anduin, and whatever else that was in the process of completion before the plug was pulled. After that perhaps an uptick in patches. Maybe even some tweaks to the A.I, but beyond that I do not see Microsoft doing much more, and that is if they do anything further to begin with.
For the longest time, they didn’t wanted to touch him because they thought he needed a rework and not just some touch-ups to make him inline with the meta.
Turns out, a single balance patch years later made him at 50% WR and healthy pick rate.
