Not even going to lie - I’d never leave the Free Trial if the only restriction was being locked to Vanilla and Burning Crusade.
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Heh, endgame Capitalism, amirite? Guy just pulled a Gallywix
Oh yeah, there’s this too
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No CEO rules forever my son.
Kotick: “I see only $$$ before me”
I briefly tried to give it another go back in November I wanted to try out all the new customizations and stuff, but I unsubbed again after a month.
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WoW wasn’t made for consoles. The MMO’s on consoles were planned to be that way and their controller layouts work because of it. I’m not saying you’re wrong but I think we should only expect this after an expac launches with MAJOR class overhauls across the board that fundamentally change some specs at least. Only then would I get worried.
Here’s hoping that’s a long time from now! crosses fingers
im…pretty sure there is one.
i know theres pooh, genie… i feel like ive seen banjo and kazooie
mightve been ratchet and clank though
It’s not a shock, or at least it shouldn’t be - MS won the game of America a long time ago. I mean if you know the rules you understand how the game is played and that winner takes all.
Like they says, this is a feature of capitalism, not a bug
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There is a banjo kazooie reference in Durotar! Bom’bay in Senjin Village will sometimes say “Eekum Bokum” when you poke him.
We’re getting ever closer to that cyberpunk trope where corporations own literally everything.
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That Arasaka shirt I bought will come in handy.
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Tfw this probably happens and we get player housing.
I wasn’t arguing that it could come to console 
, just to Steam. CoD’s there, a few other activision and maybe King specific games are there, it just makes sense that they would finally try to put wow and other blizzard games like diablo on there too.
If you come back, let’s kick it. If the next expac looks kinda cool, I want to chill with server vets kind of like:
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Oh hey, found a largely overlooked bonus: the ActiBlizz Board of Directors is being dissolved once MS completes the acquisition
Axing them as well as Kotick is a huge step in repairing the damage and seems to be a major cultural shift imo
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Also it’s like…You really expect things to ever get better? Not in our lifetimes, no matter how hard we try. The end goal is to get to the end of our natural lifespan and having lived a life of relative comfort and ease. That’s the goal for me, anyway.
Look at it this way…
This is the ‘average’ ending. There was no way that Activision was going to just roll over, collapse, and all the ones at fault for what happened getting their comeuppance and ending up broke with the victims getting full justice. That’s the ‘perfect’ ending.
The ‘bad’ ending is that nothing ended up happening and the Activision cycle just repeated forever and WoW and the gaming industry suffering for it. This was the best end result that could have possibly happened.
This is good news if you consider gigantic media conglomerate monopolies good.
It’s bad news otherwise.
It’s better news compared to the alternatives.
Perspective.
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it’s a cold day in hell because i am given a tiny amount of hope when a giant megacorporation got a little more giant.
that hope isn’t that things are improving on a global political scale or anything, just hope that wow may get better.
god i feel disgusting.
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at least the memes have been good
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Kotick gets his golden parachute. Nothing any of us can do. Good riddance to him.
Something like this was inevitable. I can only imagine how agitated the shareholders were in 2021 and every day seemed to bring more “wtf” news. MS approaches with an option, they would have been fools to not consider it. Business is business.
MS has always wanted to be bigger in the gaming industry. This gets them what they want. They don’t want to crash a $70B deal, so from that standpoint I believe this will bode well for the book of business they will now own, including WoW.
I would agree that monopolies are never good, but I also think there are still such options for smaller studios to coexist and show what they can do. Take Valheim last year and tell me small, creative things can’t still shake up everything. GOTY all over, 9/10 all over, millions of copies and the sales just kept climbing and it’s still just early access. It blew up and for quite some times last year, I played it way more than I did WoW.
I’ll choose to remain positive about the future of WoW itself, even if that makes me naïve.
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this is true, but the real hot take is that it’s not that indies are shrinking, not even that AAA games are shrinking, but more that AA games are shrinking.
for those who are unaware, a double A game is a game that fits in between the smaller indies and the bigger AAA monstrosities. a good example, imo, of a AA game would be Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a beautifully rendered, richly detailed, extremely fun game that is nonetheless very small in its scope. it looks beautiful, it plays brilliantly, and the story is excellent but unlike a lot of AAA games it’s very focused on its story and its gameplay to the point where it has nothing on the side. in my opinion, this is a good thing because it allows it to focus on being what it is.
as companies are devoured by larger entities, we typically see funding for AA games be reduced or killed off entirely. EA does this a lot, there’s a website that lists all the studios its ever bought and then just killed. the worry here is that if microsoft decides it’s bought something and it doesn’t have the ROI - and AA games typically make less money which means it’s less likely for them to have a good ROI - they could decide to just close the damn thing down
this is obviously not a problem with anyhthing done by blizzard. blizzard games are all AAA blockbusters. wow is not a game that will lack for funding, and in this specific circumstance, if you are a fan of blizzard games then this is something that will probbaly work out well for you.
but for other developers it may not. i dont like megacorporations, and i dont like that many of them are consolidating power. but in this specific scenario, i will allow myself hope. i find myself allowing that concession less and less nowadays.
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I think there is a point to be made that monopolies aren’t always a good thing, and there is a good point for them being bad for diversification and innovation, but what this at least does is provide Blizzard’s franchises with an owner that will certainly want to capitalize on them. You don’t sign a seventy-billion dollar takeover and then only focus on one franchise (CoD) or let the game studios wither away.
Just by virtue of earning their expenses back as quickly as possible, Microsoft will want all franchises to be strong. And no matter where it is right now, I think nobody can deny that Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo are big names in the gaming landscape.
And if we are being honest: I don’t think it can get any worse than it is right now. Even if it doesn’t get better, it certainly can’t get any worse.
Then again, I am simply partial because (some minor issues aside) there have been a few releases and announcements from MGS that make me hopeful. They revived one of my favorite fantasy franchises (Fable) and Halo: Infinite as a free-to-play multiplayer has been fun to play with friends. Additionally, I recently purchased Game Pass for a month and playing so many games for £10 a month is a nice deal.
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I don’t know if this is good or bad news for WoW. Time will tell I suppose. I just hope that at least maybe Blizz employees have a chance of getting a better working environment out of this - even though the effects won’t be immediate.
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