• nearly 20 years ago, when WoW was just about to launch, my friends and I had been looking for an MMO to get into that would be interesting, fun, and have pvp. and I distinctly remember the vibe being cautiously optimistic with"well, Blizzard is great. I bet they’re going to do a great job."

    and they did. it was visually stunning, had lots to explore, very polished experience and it engaged us all for years.

    it’s hard to reconcile those days with today, where if somebody told me blizzard was making some new major game, my first impulse would be to shrug and wonder why anyone still cared.

      • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        I dont get it either, because I hated vanilla even though i played it for…too long…BUT it’s basically a completely different game from the modern WoW. If you want you can imagine it’s people wanting to go play Master of Orion 1, after not liking Master of Orion 3. emilie-shrug

      • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Its not necessarily nostalgia, but like rolling back to a pre-nerffed bosses version of Elden Ring. The old content still existed but it was fundamentally not the same experience and was significantly less challenging with the way the game had changed. I can definitely see the case for it, but I also think stuff like Season of Discovery and Vanilla+ were what people were really after, like with Old School Runescape. Which private servers like Turtle WoW do better, but still. I don’t think its weird except in a bizarre “people hate our changes so much they want to pay us to undo them” way.

      • Florn [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        My first experience with WoW was Wrath of the Lich King, and WoW Classic was the most fun I’ve ever had with the game. Granted I was also medicated for ADHD for the first time in my life but still

  • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    I remember being enthralled playing through a copy of StarCraft 2 I “appropriated” from a friend’s house (yes I was that friend, we exist and we DID steal your copy of that game you thought you lost). The story was pretty damn good by the standards of videogames, especially at the time, and I basically ate slept and breathed that campaign for the week or so I was playing it. StarCraft 2 had so much hype and totally failed to live up to the quality of that campaign.

    It’s not even a matter of rose tinted glasses, Wings of Liberty was decent and was pretty well-produced but all its best moments were just callbacks to sc1 and brood war.

    (And JESUS CHRIST, nobody who gave two fucks about that storyline was asking for all the boring trite Kerrigan redemption plotline across sc2’s campaigns, brood war was sick because it specifically tossed aside the idea that she wanted to be redeemed, she was a great character and villain until they just made her sci-fi Sylvanas Windrunner. My theory is that all the now-obvious sexism at Blizzard is why they cannot conceive of a woman having a role in a story that isn’t ultimately concerned with her being fixed for the sake of a dude who wants their cool monster gf to become a blonde wife)

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    How naive I was to think Overwatch 2 would actually get half the things they advertised for.

    Turned out to just be an enshittified version of the original.

  • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    Remember kids, Blizzard has been gone for years, and is now simply a collection of intellectual property owned by Activision.