The Dragon Quest XI shrine is up! Seriously, if you haven't played DQXI and you like JRPGs, you should get the hell out of here and play it right now. Right. NAO.
In other news, this trailer dropped recently and...I'm being cautiously optimistic. The trailer looks incredible - there are many wrong ways to depict "realistic" Pokémon, but the artist who designed the Pokémon in the trailer avoided them all. In fact, you might know him: RJ Palmer's art makes the rounds every so often and while his original depictions are significantly more "real" and less "cute," he managed to dial it more toward the cute side while retaining his interpretations on how Pokémon would look if they were real. For example: the Charizard in the trailer has scales, but still very much looks like cartoon Charizard - orange, winged, flaming tail. That said, movies based on video games have historically been terrible. They've ranged from "bad but enjoyable in the sense that you can make fun of it," like Mortal Kombat, to "what the goddamned hell is wrong with these people," like the Resident Evil series or that infamous Mario movie. I really, really don't want this sort of blemish on my favorite video game franchise in history. I just finished Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age and man that was fun. It's getting a shrine easily. I've also decided that I'm going to finish the Blizzard shrines by writing a Diablo III shrine, which hasn't happened since I've been on the fence about whether or not it really deserved one. I was also waiting to see if they were going to release any expansions to add to the official lore and plot.
Year after year passed with little-to-no news on the Diablo franchise. It's not entirely surprising from a business standpoint - WoW's release gave Blizzard a taste of what perpetual revenue from a game felt like. Before, they got revenue when a game sold...and then they'd need to make a new game to get more revenue. With WoW's subscription, they could get away with simply updating the same game and continue bringing in money. StarCraft has eSports and Diablo III was supposed to fit into this with the Auction House. They took out the Auction House, which garnered universal praise from...well, everyone. But while they'd made Diablo III significantly better by doing that, they'd also reverted Diablo III to the more traditional model of revenue - they made money when someone bought Diablo III or its expansion, and that was it. So Blizzard could either (1) put resources into building completely new Diablo content for more revenue or (2) simply update the games that were generating revenue already, which requires less resources. From a profit standpoint, Blizzard should absolutely have chosen option 2 - and they did. Then this past weekend came. At BlizzCon 2018, Blizzard teased a major Diablo announcement. Lots of people hoped for Diablo IV (I'm actually not one of those people - I was hoping for just some news as to how the current plotline would end). We got...a midquel mobile Diablo game. Now look, the game might end up being great for a mobile game, but there's no way people who're used to Blizzard-quality AAA titles are going to receive a simplified mobile game well. And they didn't. The backlash was savage and hilarious. Some guy actually went to the Q&A session in-person at BlizzCon and straight-up asked the developers whether the mobile announcement were some sort of out-of-season April Fool's joke. I feel sorry for the developers on stage for that - I mean I doubt Wyatt Cheng personally decided that they were going to make this game and then make its announcement the main reveal at BlizzCon - but I'm also pretty certain they all saw this sort of thing coming. There's no way they thought people were going to receive this news well. For me? I get that Diablo isn't really profitable for Blizzard the way they want their titles to be now, but I wish they'd just release some final content to wrap up the plot and declare the series over. Stop trying to milk the franchise. I mean, sure, it'll disappoint many loyal Diablo fans, but it's not like their current strategy is going over well either. By the way, their other big announcement was that they're remaking WarCraft III with better graphics. *eyeroll |
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