Naturally. There was a pretty easy narrative to exploit there about Abrahamic faiths coming together against this ruthless atheist empire. So that’s what they did.
I do find it impressive from an espionage perspective though. All the weapons given to the Mujahideen had to plausibly be something they could’ve looted from the Soviets themselves. Which meant getting the Israelis and Egyptians to play nice as they had tons of that stuff laying around which wasn’t exactly easy as most of their leaders were Six-Day War veterans.
That was one of like four times the CIA was competent. The rest of the time it was just a comedy of terrors. Seriously their assassination attempts on Castro come off like Willey Coyote and the Roadrunner ish. They were very clearly doing more than importing that snow.
We are expanding choice in two ways: through the creation of Game Pass, which gives players a subscription option; and by bringing more games to mobile platforms, including through our cloud game streaming technology. Subscription services like Game Pass make gaming more affordable and help players from all over the world find their next favorite game. Game Pass empowers developers to bring more games to more players, not fewer. We intend to make Activision Blizzard’s much-loved library of games – including Overwatch, Diablo and Call of Duty – available in Game Pass and to grow those gaming communities. By delivering even more value to players, we hope to continue growing Game Pass, extending its appeal to mobile phones and any connected device.
Bringing more games to mobile platforms, however, requires new capabilities. The expertise that the teams at Activision Blizzard bring in developing games for mobile platforms will help us understand how to create games that engage players around the world. In addition, we hope that players will be eager to play traditional console games from Activision Blizzard on other platforms via our cloud game streaming technology. This promises to open up mobile gaming, creating new distribution opportunities for game developers outside of mobile app stores while delivering compelling and immersive experiences for players by using the power of the cloud. And we can extend the joy of playing to devices that people already own, including Smart TVs and laptops.
No mention of WoW. It’s an old game, yes, but so is League of Legends. They could bring new life into it.
Mobile games are the way of the future, that doesn’t mean they will stop being for PC completely. I can play Xbox games on my PC thanks to microsoft, I don’t think it’s going to affect WoW as much as will make Overwatch a mobile game. Hearthstone is already a mobile game.
I do kinda wonder what WoW’s future will look like though. It kinda seems liks MMOs attract an older demographic and what killed SL for me more than anything else was the sheer amount of end game busywork.
I really don’t get why they insist on making you jump through so many hoops to get to a reasonably decent ivl. I’ve mentioned before how the end of BFA was the last time I had lots of fun as Horrific Visions could reward gear and be played solo.
Which was ideal for gearing up alts. Especially because Horrific Visions never lasted longer than an hour at most, so I could take a crack at it on this or that toon if I found myself with a free 90 minutes.
Torghast might not take that long if you really knuckle down. Idk as I always get up and do something else when I reach the break rooms. Not because this is simply that pulse pounding but because it’s that boring.
WoW is what I already use to procrastinate. Something has gone terribly awry if I’m procrastinating to avoid my procrastination. We’re getting fractal levels of Sloth here.
FOMO aka “Fear of missing out” zoomer word of the year. I had to ask GD for clarification since I am old. To my generation it means something entirely different.
I just found out what this means right now. I was not sure what it stood for, but I have seen people using it a lot, recently. Especially concerning the Mage Tower.
I am familiar with the term FOTM, as far as Forum Fad Complaint Acronyms. But I had no idea what FOMO was. It just seemed like some new complaint phrase that I could ignore.
It’s a marketing psychology term that’s made its way into consumer hands multiple times over the last two decades to criticize various commercial practices.
But broadly, my point is not ‘you should have known’, but rather ‘let’s not act like cranky olds because the kids are using a term we’re less familiar with to effectively describe phenomena’
You’re right that the removal of those in-game PUA books isn’t a big deal, my objection was to the reasoning behind them.
My experiences with Blizzard and media in general have given me a low threshold for virtue-signalling. While I don’t think this is how to go about it, you have a point that Blizzard is trying to do better (I wonder if the “Steamy Romance Novels” and Marcus the horny paladin will also be removed from the game. I could go either way, though I don’t think that addresses the core issues).
True that. Plus, Communist regimes have killed more people in the last 100 years than any religious group has in the last 500 (and several together - the Spanish Inquistion, the Taliban, the Sicarii and the Aghori combined killed much less people than Stalin’s Great Terror or Mao’s so-called “Great Leap Forward”), and in much less time too.
Ironically, one of the nations that funded the Mujahideen - China - went on to embrace the very ideas the Mujahideen was created to fight. I agree they were nasty and shouldn’t have gotten any funding, even if they’re less bad than the Taliban.
One place I think the leveling revamp has gone wrong is in Dungeon ques.
My Worgen is in BFA time as I’m trying to unlock the Kul Tirans with him. Everyone else is in Cata. And the wait times for Cata are much lower than BFA’s.
I don’t know. That may be attributable simply due to having better technology.
The Ustaše in Croatia were a fascist religious group that killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of people during World War II, but they never had as much territorial control as groups liked the N@zis and Soviets. Technology and control of territory matter.
Taelia and Flynn are my favorite BFA-new characters that didn’t go splat the same expansion (c.f. Ashvane, Zelling, Rastakhan, Rezan. Well, I guess Bwon’samdi and Katherine survived.) They’re not particularly unique, but they’re well-executed within BFA’s story, they’re very good “new to the game” characters. As zone story, BFA is a reasonably solid single-player game even if you took all the online parts out, so that’s impressive.
And that makes me all the more annoyed at how they chose to handle Taelia in Shadowlands. This girl is awed by the concept of the Deeprun Tram, and we’re just having her casually port in to talk with Bolvar? The story abuse of portaling into the afterlife is bad on every regard, but other story decisions add up to make her reunion with her dad oddly normal. It might be poignant … if her dad didn’t come off as “oddly normal” in every other respect too.
There are middle points between “caricature” and “total normie” and Bolvar has missed all of them.
It also makes me angry for Baine; their current writing staff can do party dynamics well, and Baine would have benefit well from it. The utter humiliations heaped on him in the Maw screamed that he was going to have a back-to-basics character redefinition… and as far as I heard, that was going to happen but they cut it for time.
All just a big pile of mediocre missed opportunity.
It remains bizarre to me that Thrall met the mother he never knew as an adult and had a touching reunion.
Because he already did that. Okay fair enough it was his alternate universe mom and not the precise Orc he popped out’ve but close enough.
And I’m still convinced something was supposed to happen involving Calia, Lilian & Benedictus Voss and Maldraxxus. Seeing as Sindane reacts to their presence like they’d already met. And why the hell even mention Benedticus if you’re not going to involve Lilian? I’d wager a fair amount of players had no idea who the hell he even was.
combined killed much less people than Stalin’s Great Terror or Mao’s so-called “Great Leap Forward”), and in much less time too.