So, does this mean that there will be NO new content EVER again? Am I understanding this correctly? If so, why not make this announcement after the last major patch? I always thought they still had a few good years of content on the backburner, that they will release one drip at a time, like they have after the team has been downsized. I always got this feeling when I was checking the quick match hero selection screen, and was seeing like 5 more empty hero slots on there.
I was also hoping that the remaining team might work, even at the slow pace they got us used to, on new things, as much as their capabilities and resources were allowing them to.
But nothing? Thatâs it? Finito? Just balance patches at the most?
Yes. No new content. Balance patches will be rare. They didnât make the announcement because they wanted to avoid the mass exodus and continue to milk the game. We had already unofficially been in maintenance mode pretty much since the last major update with Hogger.
No heroes, no skins, no mounts, no maps, no nothing. After this upcoming patch on tuesday you wonât see anything new in the game outside minor balance patches. Meaning no more reworked heroes either. Just number tuning changes. This means that Blizzard is waiting for the playerbase to die in very low numbers before turning the servers off. Which could be more than likely if loot boxes get banned in the USA.
However if and when Microsoft obtains Activision Blizzard there is a 30% chance that they will put more money into it. However I wouldnât bet on it.
I wouldnât say it doesnât mean there wonât be something ânewâ ever. Itâs not a secret that the monetization for the game hasnât been working out since 2.0, so if the Nexus is going to have stuff happen again, itâll probably take a new release of some kind.
The amount of work itâd take to turn HotS around is tantamount to making a new game; since blizz already has D:I, D4, OW2, the Wow mobile thing and I think still a +1 that hasnât been officially announced (if it ever does) on top of whatever may be going on with Microsoft, itâs safe to say HotS is going to be sitting on the backburner for a bit.
14 years between Starcraft and Starcraft 2 (1996 - 2010)
12 years between D2 and D3; longer spans for Resurrected and D4.
And games take years to really develop content; while some may think stuff was in the background between the âlong term sustainabilityâ announcement and the one now, functionally, the blizz team is split on other teams to try to get other games out, though I donât know if theyâve been working standard shifts, or in crunch-time.
DotA spent more time without ânewâ content than HotS has been around. Since blizz has brought-back or updated some of their older titles before, it stands that something may yet happen again, so ever/never may not be on the books, but things may change once the acquisition goes down and microsoft has a say on future projects.
You missed the unnamed survival game they announced a few months ago.
I think there is still another unannounced project that has supposedly been leaked, though. But Iâm not sure, that might have been Warcraft Archlight Rumble (the âWoW mobile gameâ).
Yeah, a few months back there was a thread in the D4 reddit where someone said "I wish they would make a âDiablo 1 Resurrectedâ, and my reply was âI really doubt that would happen⌠But I never thought they would remaster RPM Racing of all things, and yet here we areâ
So, we canât really know what the future holds.
But as others have said, this latest announcement means functionally nothing. The situation was the same the day before the announcement, and most of the community already âknewâ that, I think (though I was one of those holding on to hope that there would still be more content, even if it was now âa new hero every X yearsâ. )
I did forget specifically about that one. That might be the +1 I mentioned, but I thought there was word about a non-rts starcraft-verse something in the works.
or how they cancelled the Starcraft 2 first person shooter for the second or third time in favor of trying to get overwatch 2 on track. Nobody cares about Overwatch 2, if anything just adding a perma pve mode onto overwatch 1 would of made anyone interested in overwatch 2 happy. However a lot of people were interested in the SC FPS >.<
Yeah that StarCraft FPS cancellation wasâŚa great example of bad IP management but I also think the tech just isnât there yet to do a SC FPS justiceâŚyet. UE5 is close and might even be enoughâŚbut that engine is still fresh and is frankly, the best engine out there. Everything else is dog crap compared to it.
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