1d ago

BlizzCon is returning in 2026 after a few years off

www.theverge.com BlizzCon is returning in 2026 after a few years off

BlizzCon is back, but not until next year.

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Oh is blizzard making good games again? Okay then, wake me up when they start again.
- Yeah, is there anything interesting in AAA games nowadays?
  
  Not a damn thing. Doesn't help that the endless mergers have lead us to just a couple AAA devs left. And MS grinds every dev they attitude into dust. Very few ever make anything actually good after being bought.
  
  Depends on what you're counting as nowadays. Only two years ago we had both Alan Wake 2 and BG3 come out in the same year.
  
  Does Monster Hunter Wilds count? It’s not the best optimized, but it’s an excellent game.
  
  I was thinking along the lines like groundbreaking games, like when HOMM or C&C came out for example.
  
  I mean, to me those examples feel a little unfair. It's easier to be groundbreaking in a nascent medium, and those came out thirty years ago - way before the term AAA was even used in the games industry. The bar for interesting and groundbreaking can't be "literally invent a new genre à la Wolfenstein 3D". That's a little bit like saying "I feel like the blockbuster movie climate is so stagnant these days. When was the last time someone did something groundbreaking like The Jazz Singer?"
  For my money what Remedy is doing with both their mixed media, their connected universe and their storytelling is pushing the boundaries of AAA gaming, but if that is not enough for you then how about Half-Life: Alyx (2020)?
  For the record, I do agree that the overall AAA landscape has become stagnant and risk-averse, much like blockbuster movies. But it's also unfair to say literally nothing interesting is happening.
  
  Well I don't play shooters, so I can't say. Don't get the feeling they invented much since the Duke Nukem time though.
  And I disagree hard, jazz was out a century+ ago, video games has still a lot to explore, why is there no "new better" C&C, WoW or even Minecraft? They just sit back and serve the new FIFA etc.
  
  Because C&C (along with the RTS genre in general) was killed and everyone interested in that genre either started playing DOTA or LOL, or the surviving hybrid genre games like Total War, WOW absorbed all the features of its competition except for what it couldn't (good music and writing), so it's living alongside its main competition, FFXIV, and Minecraft is just a multiplayer sandbox that is still incredibly popular and developers have been working on and releasing features for it for its entire lifetime. It is its own sequel a few times over. The big innovative games between now and Minecraft are probably Binding of Isaac for rogue lites, PUBG introducing the Battle Royale genre, Vampire Survivors for inventing Bullet Heaven.
  
  Well I can't say I didagree, you're basically saying not very much (new good stuff) have happened since quite a long time, right?
  BTW I only tried out BOI but it's just a frenetic shooter with a theme? Battle royale is just a shrinking map, right? I didn't know what bullet heaven was, a slo-mo bullet hell sort of thing, or a sort of moba-like with more control?
  
  BOI is there because it popularized Rogue Lites, or basically games with procedurally generated maps and permadeath, with some upgrades and unlocks that persist through your runs. It's been a huge genre in the past decade ish, especially among indie games.
  Battle Royale isn't just the shrinking map, it's also the massive player count and free for all nature where everyone starts with almost nothing and gets weapons as they find them. PUBG also got its lunch eaten by Fortnite, which popularized the battle pass, but that's a monetization innovation moreso than gameplay.
  Bullet Heaven is one that's new enough that there aren't that many games in the genre, but it's basically a Rogue Lite where your main verb is moving and picking skills when you level up. Basically you're picking skills to keep huge waves of enemies away from you for a set amount of time.
  Point being, most of the innovation is in smaller indie projects. I'd look there if you want interesting ideas. The big dogs you asked about are either still around and so successful at what they do that they take up all the air in the room or their entire genre crumbled around them and morphed into something else.
  And Minecraft is the only new thing you mentioned. Dune 2 was made by the same company as C&C and came out three years before, while WOW is something like the 5th big MMORPG, after ultima Online, Everquest, Final Fantasy 11, and EQ2. I'm also not confident that Minecraft is totally original, but it's probably the most original of that selection.
- I gave up on their other IPs (it seems so did they lol) but they crushed it with the two last WoW expansions after the disaster that was Shadowlands
  
  I dunno, everything storywise starting with when they put in pandas has read like bad internet fanfic. I recall a blizzcon I went to they were showing the trailer for Battle of Azeroth. There was one scene where Sylvanas yelled "For da horde!" that instantly made me cringe. And then the crowd around me just went fuken wild and I knew I had to get out of there right now.
  That was my last and final blizzcon.
  
  I've never been to blizzcon so I can't comment there. I didn't start playing until the very end of BFA so I didn't play it much but I heard it was also a shit expansion. Personally I couldn't care less about the story in an MMO (I'm playing for m+ and raids) but both expansions since have a much better story than Shadowlands did.
  It's still not a perfect game but there's been a LOT of QoL changes this expansion especially. Reputation is account-wide, campaign quests can be largely skipped on alts, and there's a shared bank. Almost everything is cross-faction and cross-server now, too. There's a lot more ways to gear up now, no rep grinds, and the only real time gating is at the beginning of each patch.
  Anyway, don't mean to sound like a shill here. I swore off WoW after a few months of Shadowlands but got talked into coming back and don't regret it. Blizzard addressed most of my problems with the game so I'm happy to say it's a good game now

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