OverWatch this.

So let´s finally talk about OverWatch. Blizzards first real step in to the first person market. If you have not done so yet take a few moments to check out the cinematic intro (and if you feel you have the time, the gameplay demo) linked here.

So now that we are all on the same page I am going to try to explain why I feel that the hype for this game might be justified. You see I used to be a FPS gamer once, back when I was younger and had way more time and a lot better eyesight. I started like many others on DOOM and Castle Wolfenstein back in the days when an entire game took up less space than your average image. It was fun because it was bloody and violent and so very much not Super Mario, it was also 3d… or well to call it 3d is being very kind. But it was something and it was awesome. Ten came Quake and later Unreal. My friends and I never got all that much in to the scene back then but we kicked some decent butt. We gravitated more towards Co-Op gaming like Rainbow Six and the early Battlefield games against the best of what bots could offer up back then. It was relaxing and we could banter and joke while we rained death and destruction down on digital people. Then the genre sort of got away from me. I tried to keep up with the BF games but failing eyesight and more realistic textures is not a good mix. It was not better on the more arcade side of things as the demands on players increased with weirder and faster gameplay. So I simply resigned from the FPS genre and went over to the slower paced MMO scene.

Now I do of course know that there are both first and third person shooters that are better suited for a scrub like myself. But here is where brand recognition comes in. Blizzard have time and time again produced solid and well supported games and especially with their new games such as Hearthstone and Heroes of the storm they work hard to make the barrier of entry as low as possible. Now I am banking on this with OverWatch too. Making it easy for an old goat such as myself to get back in to a genre of games I always liked but felt was beyond my scope.

Blizzard have said that the goal of OverWatch is to take the design philosophy from World of Warcraft where you bring the player, not the class. For Overwatch this will equal each play style having their place in the game. No matter if you are a tank or an assassin. For people like me you have the typical engineer that build turrets and generally have a slow paced game by the way of area denial and really burst-y but short-ranged damage. Characters like Bastion and Torbjörn(whom I already feel a certain kinship with seeing as he is a short and somewhat portly Gothenburger) fill a less jumpy-shooty niche and focus more on finding a good spot to defend.

So what is OverWatch in the game then? Well we do not really know all that much yet. It would seem that OverWatch was a G-I Joe/Avengers like peacekeeping force that for some reason fell from grace, either they ran out of favor or things to do. After all the world always cry out for heroes in times of dire need, but in times of peace and prosperity the same people with amazing power that once saved you as a unstoppable force will look more and more like a potential threat to the established peace. After all what if they decide to turn on society. It is a bit unclear why OverWatch members are once again going in to action in the game but I am sure that it will be explored further at a later date. The world of OverWatch is set in a version of our own, as I mentioned you can play a Swedish armsdesigner or why not an Egyptian soldier in a flying armor… Or a talking gorilla from the moon.. just for the heck of it.    

And this is a big part of what makes me interested in the new world, there is so much room to expand and explore. This world could hold so many new games, maybe a Dragon Age/Mass Effect type RPG based on the crisis that actually cause the formation of OverWatch to begin with… Of course we will see OverWatch heroes crossing over in to Heroes of the Storm… The opportunities are endless and if you like Blizzard for what they do rather than being a fan of a specific setting this is a very interesting time as we might see what Blizzard does with over 30 years of experience now that they have a blank canvas to work with.

So to sum this rambling mess up.

I look forward to OverWatch as a chance to get back in to the genre since the setting captures me in a way that most others have not, and if you read my blog you might see how a setting with in essence superheroes might be to my liking, but I also think the new world is a very interesting one to build on for a long time to come.

Jurassic world. It can not be worse than JP3.

Ok first off i am a bad bad person that fails at planning and time management. Sorry about that. Secondly I know I said this was going to be about Blizzards OverWatch… Then the new Jurassic Park trailer hit the web… .. .In case you missed it.

It… Is… Glorious…((also spoilers for the trailer and by extension the film.))

It is just about as facedesk stupid as you would expect a continuation of the Jurassic Park movie franchise to be. (The books are a different matter… So I will leave them out of this. )

You just went and made a new dinosaur... Probably not a good idea.

The story goes as follow. Jurassic World is John Hammond’s vision come true… But what is better than gene-modified dinos… Hybrids… Now way that could end badly… Then Chris Pratt is awesome and they have trained Velociraptors as hunting dogs… I would assume a CEO or other legal entity will get eaten… Also there are kids… Because Jurassic Park…I also like to point out that a pack of hunter/tracker raptors are an awesome idea.

So the trailer is only roughly two and a half minute long but it is packed with so much nostalgia and ambiance that... Well you get a little bit of that feeling you had when you saw the first movie. Now I have seen all the movies and I even think I saw the first one in the cinemas but I might be wrong. It was after all a few years ago. Now I loved the first movie, hard not to seeing as I was all of… 12 at the timer of release and that I had a fascination with Dinosaurs since a very young age. But I also picked up the book and enjoyed the heck out of that one. I think it is fair to say that Lost World did not really live up to the expectations, not only was I older but it lacked the punch that the second book had, at least as I remember it now thinking back. It was also a god awful movie in its own right. The less said about the third film… The better.

 

Walking with dinosaurs... Hammond style.

Actually let´s talk a bit about the third film any way. It did really take the bad things from the previous two movies and ramped it up even more. Big got bigger, Dumb got dumber and evil got more evil. And they had the audacity to put in the scene with the aviary. I like they tried to un-FUBAR the raptors (they seem to have given up that idea for this move and simply gone with “this is OUR raptors…” ) but all they manage to do is make them look.. Stupid… Not to mention young Clayton, lord of the jungle and first in line to inherit the Greytile estate…. Yes that little kid that somehow did what well trained and equipped adults failed to do. Fuck iNGen should hire him as the COO for their new park… In fact that would be an amazing turn of events. After all he should be 20-something by now…

crocosaursthingamabob... And yes.. that is a very big shark it is eating.

Any way Jurassic Park 3 was a horrid mess of Triceratops shit and it pretty much killed the franchise for me. So back when I first heard about the new movie (in any shape beyond “it might get done” and “raptors with lasers on their heads”) I was very much “Meh…” but you know what this trailer has me a bit pumped, and seeing how the film always was more fiction the sci-fi roots of the book all this stupid shit does not bother me. After all if you make genetically engineered “dinosaurs” why not make them a bit bigger and meaner looking, after all it is what the crowd is paying for. So what if the size of your regular lapdog or the T-Rex could not and would not outrun an average joe on a bike. You are putting on a show and by god a show they are going to get. Who give a fuck if the T-Rex is nearly blind due to shoddy DNA work or the beefed up…? Tylosaurinae…(or more likley a Mosasaurus? But who the heck knows...) only might liv a few weeks… It is showbiz.

 

I will most likely go in to Jurassic World hibernation now seeing as this is one of the franchises that I fear will go down hard on the path of spoiler-tastic.

 

Any way it is agood trailer and I am very much pumped for the idea and the concept. Also I kind of like Chris Pratt in these loveable douche roles

Of gods and… More gods.

 

Ra-merica...

So how do you kill a titan, I guess the answer will come down to who the titan in question is. But it is related to both my musings today.

 

Angry not pandas are cool

First off Blizzard have announced that they sold 3.3 million copies of Warlord of Draenor and that they have an active subscription base of about 10 million active subs. Now that is BEFORE they have the numbers from the Asian and Oceanic market. This marks not only the best reaction to any expansion of WoW but also the single largest increase of players in the history of the game. Now these are very impressive numbers but can almost hear some of you muttering in the bushes that a population spike is good but the real proof is in the retention of these new subs.

I agree and we all know that a good chunk of these people will drop from the game over the coming years but I think that enough will stay for long enough that Blizzard will have not only secured the next expansion but also have a little extra to put towards Overwatch. I am generally not a big Shooter fan but that game looks to be fun as heck.

But this does prove that not only are people inclined to return to the game they “started” in but also that peer pressure is a powerful tool. After all Mists of Pandaria was not bad expansion and for some of us war weary veterans it was a nice change of pace in the beginning. But there was a strong “trollolol kung fu panda” attitude among the more serious gamers… and I use the term serious very loosely here. This attitude have been pretty much absent with this new expansion and in fact there has been a opposite effect where a healthy dose of nostalgia and Orcs (who it would seem are a lot cooler then talking pandas.) have as we noted brought back the swing to WoW´s step.

So with WoW gaining more players with an expansion then most games doe in their lifetime I do not think we need to worry much about WoW going away any time soon and with Blizzard broadening their portfolio in the shape of the upcoming Heroes of the storm MOBA and earlier mentioned shooter Overwatch. I think it is safe to say that Blizzard as a company is not going anywhere any time soon. I will get back to Overwatch this weekend, but while Blizzard sits on godlike power and followers in other places god fight to the death to keep the creep going and juggle in the jungle.

Looking forward to Heroes of the storm I decided to dip my toes in to the MOBA scene. Now I never got in to DotA and I have played a grand total of two matches in LoL before it felt that I had better things to do then being verbally abused by people with the social grace of a drunk rhinoceros. But I got a free SMITE character code from Loot Crate so in order to research what I was putting in my loot giveaway pile I got reading up on SMITE.

Smite is a MOBA, in every way and shape but it breaks some new ground by being third person and forcing you to aim your basic attacks as well as your abilities. If you feel a bit fuzzy on what a MOBA is you can click here. The setting is also very funny. Imagine that all the gods of myth and legend decided to duke it out in an arena. So you have Tor teaming up with Osiris and Rama to kick the ass of Sun Wukong and Artemis backed up by Fenris. It is in my mind impossible to dislike the premise. But as I mentioned beyond that it is your standard MOBA with lanes, creeps and hiding in bushes. But the third person view give you a lot more control and lets you act and react to things in a much more dynamic way than the usual point and click top down view.

I have had some very nice fun with it. A lot more then I thought from the start and while I know that HotS is a standard top down MOBA, SMITE will give me a good sense for how a MOBA works without all the annoying click and clack. The gameplay of SMITE plays a lot like a mix between Diablo and a regular third person shooter, especially if you play a range characters. How you use your basic attacks to pummel your opposition and then spice it up with special attacks themed to the god you play, often very flashy and satisfying.

It is also fun to see how much respect they pay to the gods, most designs pull a lot from the mythos around the gods and you can often find small hidden gems if you know the lore of this or that god. It is also fun to see the use of Mayan gods, a mythos often overlooked in this part of the world. Each god is also fairly distinct and visually interesting. Now with that being said there is a lot of divine booty flashing and cleavage deep enough to hide Bacchus in. All hidden behind a flimsy excuse that they actually dressed a lot of the goddesses in more clothes tan they had in their original source material. Now I have nothing against a well-shaped human being and since we are dealing with gods such banalities as armor and other types of proper protection is easier to explain away… Would it hurt to even it out between the male and female characters?

Aphrodite... More dressed then Venus from the sea... But only just.

Neith... I guess she flash less then some ancient art. Still pretty much a pinup.

By comparison... Tor Odinson.

But the game itself is very fun and since it is pretty much free to play (if you do not mind the grind and random access to gods in the beginning.) I see no reason that you would not check it out if you like weird MOBAs or third person brawler games.

That is all today…. Come back Sunday for a trip on the hype train fo