Microsoft Tries to Buy Activision Blizzard

[Cassius_Smoke]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ft-acquisition
Reported everywhere but really this is 'insider' reporting reaching Mystic Meg levels now. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Call of Duty: Black Ops VI and Call of Duty: Warzone 2 will all be on PlayStation

You know, all the ones developed pre-merger

Thing is, the next one out this year is probably firing up production, so it'll be on PlayStation. Next year, MS own them and they don't need to make another.

[dataDave]

At this point MS need to do a FF14 with WoW and completely refresh it. Get it looking and feeling great and get it on consoles. It'll rake in a fortune in monthly subs.

Impossible without hugely compromising the game inputs and dumbing the game down massively. This isn't Diablo where you have a small string of interchangeable abilities. Even on a PC you'll run out of keys to assign skills to eventually.

But yeah, you're probably right anyway. Vanilla WoW was pretty hardcore. The exploration and leveling might have been for the masses to grasp, but the endgame was far from that. It was on the verge of being diabolically difficult and competitive. It utterly broke a lot of guilds and players. As each update rolled out things were always made more and more accessible as the vocal minority cried out about "unfair" difficulty. The current state is now utterly unrecognisable when compared with classic, so I wouldn't put it past them to consolise it with controller support and all that while pissing off their remaining stalwart PC fanbase.

[Neon Ignition]

It'll just be the old case of development on both being 2-3 years in and marketing deals already having been secured. Call of Duty 2024 will be the first one with any real risk of not coming to PlayStation and even then I'd be curious as to how early in development Activision seeks to secure its various deals with platform holders and marketing partners. Black Ops VI is the big one though next year in any case.... Game Pass.

[dataDave]

I did enjoy my brief time on WoW Classic, but it felt like a high school reunion where only the autistic kids turned up.

[Lebowski]

I did enjoy my brief time on WoW Classic, but it felt like a high school reunion where only the autistic kids turned up.

i don't know who would buy and play WoW Classic take 18 years worth of upgrades and quality of life improvements and just hit the reset button on them. Things have moved on a lot since 2004 so you'd hope that Wow in its current form would be the better game.

[Tobal]

i don't know who would buy and play WoW Classic take 18 years worth of upgrades and quality of life improvements and just hit the reset button on them. Things have moved on a lot since 2004 so you'd hope that Wow in its current form would be the better game.

from what i gather the classic requesters wanted to go back to a smaller world and no world server queues, recapture local communities and rivalries they remember having as teenagers.

[dataDave]

i don't know who would buy and play WoW Classic take 18 years worth of upgrades and quality of life improvements and just hit the reset button on them. Things have moved on a lot since 2004 so you'd hope that Wow in its current form would be the better game.

That's almost like saying "Why would anyone play Super Mario World when we have Super Mario 3D World?". The game has changed massively since 2004. For the better? Well, that's entirely subjective. It's been overhauled multiple times to suit wider and wider demographics at each turn. The game is barely recognisable now since Activision have been in charge, especially. Players wanted the Blizzard WoW back.

The only reason I'm not playing Classic TBC Arena (PvP 3v3) is because of the time investment it requires. Not so much in building a character, but in finding/building a like-minded team. That takes hundreds/thousands of hours.

[dataDave]

Generally, and without writing a lengthy post; incorporating 'Quality Of Life' equated to removing the World from World of Warcraft.

[Asura]

Generally, and without writing a lengthy post; incorporating 'Quality Of Life' equated to removing the World from World of Warcraft.

Admittedly, I was really surprised years ago when I logged in, and found that when questing, the game showed you the specific point on the map to go in order to do the thing.

At launch, WoW specifically didn't do this; you had to read the quest text and go looking for the thing.

Given, it's fine for some things. I used to really hate the whole videogame logic "find me 6 wolf teeth", where you had to kill 60 wolves because only 1-in-10 drop teeth - but the solution to that isn't "make the **** content easier", it's "don't have **** content".

[Lebowski]

That's almost like saying "Why would anyone play Super Mario World when we have Super Mario 3D World?". The game has changed massively since 2004. For the better? Well, that's entirely subjective. It's been overhauled multiple times to suit wider and wider demographics at each turn. The game is barely recognisable now since Activision have been in charge, especially. Players wanted the Blizzard WoW back.

The only reason I'm not playing Classic TBC Arena (PvP 3v3) is because of the time investment it requires. Not so much in building a character, but in finding/building a like-minded team. That takes hundreds/thousands of hours.

You cant compare a 2d platform game to 3d one their massively different games and play very diffrently, its why Nintendo still sells things like Mario maker and New super Mario bros. where as a 3D MMO in 2004 will still share a lot of the same DNA as a 3D MMO in 2021. From the sounds of what your saying is they dummed it down and made it more for the masses and less for the original player-base. I can see the merit in wanting to go back to a more vanilla experience and i can see why you wouldn't want to go back and invest that time in it all over again too.

which kind of brings me back to the whats the point of it, its a reset button for people chasing the past, "remember doing this stuff 18 years ago well do it again from scratch" and 18 years from now when wow classic catches up to wow 2022 you can reset it again and start over. Likewise those yearning for wow 2022 can now play the game they grew up with in 2040 with Wow Classic 2022.

[dataDave]

which kind of brings me back to the whats the point of it, its a reset button for people chasing the past, "remember doing this stuff 18 years ago well do it again from scratch" and 18 years from now when wow classic catches up to wow 2022 you can reset it again and start over. Likewise those yearning for wow 2022 can now play the game they grew up with in 2040 with Wow Classic 2022.

The point of it is mountains of cash. Prior to WoW Classic you had community-run private servers which always ended up being mismanaged and eventually closing down, taking everyone with them. When you have literally thousands of players screaming at Acti-Blizz to bring back classic realms so that they can throw money at them and re-subscribe what else are they going to do?

You could also ask what the point of retro gaming and backwards compatibility is. Isn't it just people that can't let go of the past? Why play all that old crap when the new stuff is much better? The answer is a lot more convoluted than that.

[dataDave]

I couldn't get WoW (the real 2004-2009 WoW) out of my mind last night thanks to this thread.



That's what happens when a player from 2022 goes back to 2006 in a time machine. This guy was to WoW like Dream is to Minecraft. Seemingly decades of private server PvP experience utilising a glass-cannon build in rubbish gear. People used to say his vids were planned/scripted and fake, but they weren't. He was just playing at the near-peak of the skill-cap and also happened to have lots of luck on his side when he was recording.

I don't know what the point of this post is, but the existing game is so far removed from what it used to be that it'd take me a whole day to write a post about all of the detrimental 'evolutions' of the game. I still crave for that old game, from time to time. I'll sometimes send myself to sleep or get through a shower re-imagining and re-playing old 3v3 matches in my head. If I had two other friends that I could depend upon for a team I'd absolutely drop everything else and get straight back in there.

[Cassius_Smoke]

This probably belongs in the 'all the worlds wrongs' thread, but it seemed apt in here.

Apparently, a scientific study has shown people who play COD frequently are desensitised to painful images.

https://www.psypost.org/2022/01/people-who-frequently-play-call-of-duty-show-neural-desensitization-to-painful-images-according-to-study-62264

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/activision-ceo-bobby-kotick-has-second-secret-company-that-donated-to-gop-campaigns.html

To the shock of no-one, Kotick is a Trumper

[fishbowlhead]

Of course.