4 thoughts on “Saturday Morning Gaming: Returning to the Spire

  1. I’m *not* playing Warcraft III – Reforged…

    Waiting for the Harvard Business Review case study on Blizzard.

    What makes me cringe isn’t that the Reforged version is inconsistent and meh (so I hear), its that along the way they decided to destroy the Original (which I also stopped playing, 1 or 2 decades ago – its hard to remember exactly how long its been since Blizzard knew how to make a game). So, not merely incompetent but seemingly maliciously so.

    Whats funny to me is that while porting to my new system I contemplated whether I should re-install Battlenet (or whatever they call it now) and realized I hadn’t played a blizzard game in ages. I quite Diablo3 after maybe the second or third “season” when I realized that all they were going to do was mildly fiddle with the set-bonuses. They couldn’t even be arsed to add a new set every, say, 3 seasons or what not. Of course, D3 costs $0 so they gained nothing, but then I lost nothing.

    Still… I said to myself, who am I kidding, I’ll buy the Reforged game just cause I like RT games and there aren’t a lot coming out… and hey, its Blizzard so it won’t be *merely* a reskin… they’ll update the genre (if maybe only incrementally). Buuuut… my faith in Blizzard was already dead, so I didn’t pre-order; I figured, sure, I bet I’ll buy it, but like D3 maybe it will take them a few years to take out the suck. Then again, will they care for a reskin? And lo how Blizzard has fallen.

    Ultimately reskinning old games is the ultimate Meh! of game design, but how Blizzard can fail at reskinning is definitely worth a Harvard Business Review case study.Report

    1. If I had to throw a guess out there (and I base this on stuff like the infamous Blizzcon from two years ago plus the Blitzchung Hong Kong support thing): “Millions of Chinese folks will pay for it anyway, so why put in effort for a few hundred thousand Americans?”Report

      1. Now I wonder if the D3 Phone re-skin of the re-skin of the other game done totally in-house and not by a Chinese re-skinner will break D3? I mean, D3 is free but we all have Phones, right?

        Maybe the Harvard Business review will be about how genius their 21st century strategy is playing out.Report

  2. (Psst…it’s “Wrath,” not “Rage”

    I really like this character. I’ve played The Watcher as a “Stance switcher/Flurry of Blows build” (FoB cost 0 to play and do minimal damage, but you get all of them back from your discard pile when you change stances). I’ve played the “Pressure Points” build (note: FUN but not sustainable). I’ve played a defensive build, a Wrath build (death is inevitable), and a Divinity build. Stance switcher is probably the best; Divinity builds will do TONS of damage but defense can be a problem. I haven’t yet figured out a use for Scrying, though.Report

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