Thank God for Cold Fusion.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Yeah, Overwatch definitely wasn't a peak, but IMO HOTS is really onto something. I originally dumped thousands of hours into Dota 2, which is a much more robust game, but HOTS really does take an awesome, albeit different direction. Shame they pulled support right when they were starting to find a groove. My partner and I still play it nearly daily.
I was big into overwatch and reluctantly played a few rounds of HotS to get a D.Va skin or something. I didn't like it enough to keep playing but I liked it a LOT more than League if for no other reason than it basically skips the extremely boring beginning of every match
I was really confused why you were saying they pulled support from Heart of the Swarm. I totally forgot about Heroes of the Storm.
Heroes Of The Storm is the greatest MOBA ever created, and the only one I've ever found to be remotely playable. I will die on this hill.
Hard agree, they made a moba that was easy to balance, stripped out the tedicious shit mechanics, and had multiple cool maps. And if you were a Blizzard fan, all the amazing characters for the cherry on top.
same for me. And it still has a lot of active players. They should revive development. I think there is a lot of potential in it.
HOTS 3.0 is one of my most wanted things. Besides trans rights.
Not the greatest MOBA imo, but definitely one of the best Blizzard games and one of the greatest MOBAs.
It's definitely the most accessible. I still think DotA is the best in terms of balance and gamespace design, but if you want a game you can play casually HotS is much more approachable.
What about Awesomenauts?
Today's Blizzard would have released Star Craft: Ghost and the War Craft Adventure.
Because they would be good enough to make those games work or because they wouldn't care how good or bad a game is?
If you mean the latter, even current Blizzard has shown, they just cancel projects, they think will not work, like OW PVE or that Survival Game, that never saw the light of day.
I worked at ABK when the unnamed survival game was cut. That decision came from the C-suite directly. Everyone at Blizzard wanted to make it happen
The latter.
Still doubt it, because current Blizzard doesn't release any game, that isn't a live service title and makes $1B+.
They are already doing War Craft Adventure. Retail is very... kid gloves.
Overwatch was the end. Once they turned on the lootbox tap, there was no redemption remaining.
Also Diablo 3 was before Overwatch by, like, a decade.
I enjoyed D3 quite a bit. Sure, it wasn't as doom and gloom as the other diablos, but it was still a fun game.
It did, however, start the slide into think less and pick bigger number.
I never played D1 or D2, and only for into D3 after the expansion. Did quite a lot of seasons and for me the game had a zen like quality when playing.
Blast through the rifts and grifts watching numbers go up. I could just almost play it trance like.
I enjoyed the colors and the feel of the game. I never got really into D4, but that has more to do with me having more obligations as a parent.
Edit: and DH Engineer with stationary pets should be explores as third WoW-DH class as a DPS/support class.
Diablo III redeemed itself by the end
IV on the other hand....
Inexcusable The Lost Vikings 2 erasure here.
Also anything before SC1.
I have only heard good things about Heroes of the Storm tbh
Implying that Overwatch is peak Blizzard is incredibly insulting.
The OG one time purchase version of Overwatch 1 was top tier in my book. 40 USD got me a game that I got hundreds of hours out of. Maybe thousands.
Rereleasing Overwatch as Overwatch 2 was just bilizzard realizing they didn’t want to miss the live service boat. They microtransactioned and season passed the crap out of the game and re released it again while shutting down the original.
Sure but we're comparing an extremely derivative hero shooter that never had great balance to some of the greatest examples of their genres.
But at the time the concept of a hero shooter didn’t really exist. You had things like dota and league of legends. You also had things like cs go. All of which were not really hero shooters. Team fortress was closer but it was just cs go with humor and abilities added across 5? Characters. Not the modern select from X champs across 12 genres that the modern hero shooter has.
Overwatch really was the popular birth of the hero shooter.
The idea at the time was you could play your call of duty hero vs a western hero for the first time while a player playing a turret building hero prepped the area.
The tropes were tropes but it was a unique at the time arrangement.
It was balanced in my experience. Other teamhad a niche hard to kill set up? Your team reacts by changing what hero’s you use. There was always something that would work. No set of 6 would be perfect vs all other possible sets of 6.
OW is basically Team Fortress 3, the only mechanical addition was ultimates with cooldowns. It was an innovation, but saying that TF2 was just CS with abilities is crazy. It was a hero shooter by every metric that makes OW one, unless for some reason you think ultimate abilities are the defining trait. There were 9 characters with very unique toolkits, and most of the OW characters are directly inspired by one of them. The game modes were also lifted directly from TF2.
I liked OW1 quite a bit so I'm not trying to trash it, but it sounds like you never played TF2. If you did it's very obvious how much DNA the two games shared.
From my memory OW was constantly fiddling with the balance from day one -- there were always community complaints about one character or another, and I think the ults being so powerful made it extra hard to balance. Also look at how they had to introduce such hard role caps eventually.
When TF2 launched it was one of the most balanced games you could find with such diversity of gameplay. That got eroded over the years with all of the new weapons which is why the game eventually lost its identity IMO.
Man blizzard had an amazing run. Warcraft 3 was my game. Vanilla wow? buying burning crusade in lane, at midnight in the town mall? Hype. I remember still the moment I felt blizzard was done and wow was no longer my game, during wrath of the lich expansion.
I tried years later, BFA I think, the boss is called the janitor, he's a robot. And I had to spend time in hell or maw, farming for some stones...played 2 weeks and never again since.
Shadowlands, RIP you came back for arguably the worst expansion ever.
I don't think it's even arguable. I'll take pandas n shit over Shadowlands any day of the week.
The apex is Activision.
No more battle.net, now we get Facebook account integration!
No more private chats, now we get real money auction house!
Goodbye placeable stat points, now we get cookie cutter builds that must all be viable!
Goodbye soloable content, now all the bosses get enrage timers!
I thought it was very symbolic that after the demo of D3, (imo the last thing blizzard created, act 1 of D3, the only slightly decent part of the game) the first thing that happens is they kill deckard cain.
Blizzard is just a skin puppet, same as every other great developer that the Activision cancer has consumed.
I still have mixed feelings about the real money auction house. Sure, it sucks that it enables gold farmers, but it was awesome when an item dropped that was so powerful that it paid for my collectors edition copy of the game plus another $40 extra to cash out via PayPal.
Maybe a unpopular opinion but i do not think WoW is a great game.
It was revolutionary at the time it came out and it deserves to be a classic.
But these days it is just bad nostalgia and like most subscription games just holds you hostage. Have not played in a long time, since i noticed many antisocial mechanics that other MMOs just do better.
Then again i hate gear grind so i prefer gw2 for that reason alone.
WoW wasn't that revolutionary. The things it did well were the story, the raids, and fostering a community. I was playing Anarchy Online at the time and was kind of shocked that such a shallow game was taking over.
But you can't say "these days" when you haven't played in a long time. If you were still playing, you'd know that WoW has been out of its dark days for a couple expansions now. BFA was abusive to players and Shadowlands continued the trend while adding more shitty stuff.
Their numbers ranked and they realized maybe they should listen to players. Dragonflight and TWW were great. Midnight has been pretty good, albeit unreasonably buggy. Grinds are basically gone. Gearing is easy (too easy this season IMO)
I know other MMOs have a lot going for them but none have a better equivalent to Mythic+ dungeons which is the only reason I log in. Fellowship is all right (not an MMO) but it lacks the depth
WoW was a more polished MMO on release. We’d had plenty before it, but it was the first to have so many quests integrated and dungeons that had some scripts to make things more interesting.
Plus it had Blizzards reputation behind it which was at its peak back then along with the already developed Warcraft world. No surprise it took off with all that.
I liked HoTS, but do admit it wasn't a continuation of bkizzard's winning streak
SC2 was the start of the decline, what with them adding mtx to the co-op multiplayer.
where is blackthorne and lost vikings?
WotLK was pretty agreed upon to be the fall of Blizzard, and when i stopped paying attention
Lol overwatch is the peak of blizzard