Blizzapointment

Last year I managed to milk Blizzcon for three full posts , this year I’ll barely get one. Sure, the Demon Hunter class for Diablo III was announced, but everyone knew a ranger-type class was coming and she doesn’t really do anything that’ts exiting to talk about. She looks cool and she throws ‘nades but that’s about that. What else is there to talk about?

Diablo III

The rune system is back and it’s still cool and the other customization options (traits and the talisman) look quite good as well. I’m really looking forward to playing with that and seeing whether they managed to actually balance those ninety bajillion different builds per class that they advertise. Without further information – or rather the game itself – this is hardly something I can comment on.

I suppose the PvP arenas are the most influential of their D3 announcements, and I must say I’m a bit scared. World of Warcraft showed us what happens if you try to balance PvP and PvE in the same game and it wasn’t good. The Diablo games never have been about balance, really, but I’m afraid that with matchmaking and ranking systems coming up, Diablo PvE might be patched to hell and back over and over again. I don’t like the idea of collateral damage from PvP balance hitting my PvE and I’m sure PvP players don’t like to have the reverse happening. The videos from the Diablo 3 arenas look a lot like WoW arena gameplay. That can’t be good.  If they have to take something from WoW PvP, I’d much rather see them bringing Battlegrounds over, those seem to fit Diablo gameplay much better.

Starcraft II

The Diablo III Demon Hunter. The high heels might not be very practical, but I don't really care about that.

There were hardly any announcements regarding Starcraft II – not very surprising that the game has been released – but they announced a few official game mods. StarJeweled, Aiur Chef, and Left 2 Die look very gimmicky to me and more like a neat things to be made by mod developers rather than things to announce on your huge gaming convention. Blizzard DotA could be good of course, but I doubt that they put the effort in there that’s being put into the various DotA clones available these days or Valve’s DotA 2 for that matter. I’d have liked to hear something about the upcoming expansions to the game, but oh well. They have to have something to give us next year, right?

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

There were hardly any news about Cataclysm at Blizzcon. Lots of talking, sure, but pretty much all of it was already known from the Cataclysm beta anyway. If you followed TotalBiscuit, there was hardly anything that could surprise you in the Cataclysm panels at Blizzcon. If you didn’t, why the hell not?

Watching the Quest & Lore Q&A was quite enjoyable, but hardly informative and the dungeons panel was pretty much all about how they will be cutting down old dungeons into more digestible bites. That isn’t bad at all, but again not very exiting. I’m still convinced that Cataclysm will be a very good expansion if another WoW expansion is really what you want. Blizzcon didn’t add to that nor remove from that, so meh.  Part of me hoped for some huge announcement that would make me buy Cataclysm after all. So far, that hasn’t happened.

I’m sorry if this post has been a bit ranty, I’m really quite disappointed in the lack of news from Blizzcon. I still hear it was a great event for those who attended, so shout-out to Blizzard for keeping up with the tradition.