Everything must be realistic, atmospheric, and other vague adjectives taken from focus groups and written on white boards. It might remain as a callback, but if it does it will be an exception to the rule. Any of these sorts of things left in by mistake tend to be taken out immediately because players having fun in their own way isn’t part of the developers’ vision. Any way you find to exploit something, even in a single-player experience where no one else is impacted, is viewed as a mistake to be fi
Part of the tinkering feels like vanity too. In Horizon Forbidden West , Aloy was too chatty when she was alone , remarking that items will be sent back to storage (somehow?) and repeating the same few lines over and over. People said it was annoying, so it was taken out. But surely they knew it was annoying? Surely part of the point was to make Aloy endearing in this way? I’m sure people think Aloy shutting the hell up is an improvement, but mostly it just feels like fixing something for the sake of it. It doesn’t feel like developers have the license to be creative and eccentric if a few people joking around online is enough for the studio to mandate changing the game. Gaming is becoming more risk averse, not less, in the presence of a constant safety
Every game has bugs at launch, but in a competitive team shooter, ultimates being broken are a cause for concern. Cassidy’s High Noon looks bugged, as it completely missed its targets in some player’s games – not very deadeye cowboy of
On payload and other defend-and-attack maps, shield-based tanks are now the best bet, leaving other picks less viable. It’s much harder to defend your team with a hook and some healing juice, but that’s no fault of tanks like Roadhog – they’re not meant to be the defenders, they’re there to draw aggro and punish lone wolves. It can still work playing offense-based tanks with the right player, but it takes a lot of skill, and that means lower-ranked matches are a headache. You have to know how to push, stay alive, and defend the team all at once, and failing that brings everyone down. Throw in a damage-focused healer and you have a constant stream of marching into the line of fire and then sitting in spectate waiting to respawn. There’s a reason team kills have become frequent enough to warrant their own challen
Overwatch 2 has just had its biggest week since launch. Not only did Blizzard unveil a new Hero, but we also witnessed a cracker of a match for the Overwatch League Grand Final. However, it appears that it’s still finding its feet when it comes to Hero balancing, as well as the in-game store economy. Some aspects were so imbalanced that yet another Hero needed to be temporarily remo
Longtime Overwatch fans who had credits piled up from the first game were awarded Legacy Credits by Blizzard. However, it appeared that the developer was being its stingy self when Halloween skins from OW1 were marked as ‘new’ and weren’t redeemable via Legacy Cred
Patches are par for the course in gaming these days. While your live-service behemoths are always tinkering with the meta, keeping gameplay fresh, and fixing all the bugs those first two fixes cause, even the smallest single-player titles come with constant post-launch care these days. Day one patch is now the norm, and while games like Cyberpunk 2077 which launch in historically unacceptable states benefit greatly from devs now being able to fix things in the wild, it’s unlikely Cyberpunk would have launched at all if the studio knew it would be stuck with what it had. On the whole, patches offer a safety net that’s good to the industry, but it sometimes feels like they take away a game’s personal
Tank is its own role but it comes in two parts – offensive and defensive. You have Reinhardt, Zarya, Orissa, and the like playing defensive, but then you have tanks like Roadhog, Winston, and D.Va who contrast the protective role. Combining offense and defense meant you had someone to defend you from incoming attacks, making it possible to push as a group, while the second tank fought back and kept everyone alive by sponging damage and doling out plenty of their own. These tanks could even work well as flank
On the other side of things, playing against one tank is even more of a chore because both healers are now focused on the same tank, rather than dividing their heals between two. Take Orissa. She can buff herself and deflect damage, all while Mercy and Moira both keep her health full, meaning that it’s much harder to take her down. If you lose track of other players and focus too much on that singular tank, the enemy DPS can easily swoop in and pick you off. It’s all much harder to play for both sides, but the solution is sitting in the first game – adding a second tank. Overwatch 2 tips|https://overwatch2Tactics.com/ was designed for two of each role and it shows; pulling one away has completely disrupted the way it fl
In the run-up to the Resident Evil 4 remake, fans have been sharing their favourite Easter Eggs online. The game was full of strange little quirks, both accidental and deliberate. After the mine cart section, there’s a skull which, when interacted with, will give you piles and piles of money. Some claim these are the takings from the enemies slain in the aforementioned cart level, others that the money was there regardless. I’m not sure if it will be back in the remake, but I’m leaning towards ‘no’ – it just seems a bit too silly for games these days to keep
