PC Gaming Sucks – Unless It’s Elden Ring
FIRST
Overwatch 2 is now in a closed Beta. So it might be an actual Beta instead of just the kind of early access that is, ‘don’t blame us if the game breaks all the time it’s in “Beta.”’ Bethesda became legendary for that, and never fixing anything before they got bought up by Microsoft. The exact same thing is going to keep happening at Bethesda but now everyone will blame Microsoft for it.
Anyway Overwatch 2. I am pretty far from impressed. The joke is that it looks more like Overwatch 1.5. The graphics were brought up to date. There are some minor cosmetic changes to the characters. Sojourn got introduced. Yay, I guess. There were a bunch of buffs and nerfs that are going to get changed around after a few months plus a couple of major reworks to a couple of characters.
Basically, nothing that couldn’t have been done with just a patch to the current release of the Overwatch 1.
Oh, and the night maps are in daylight now. That happened.
Role queue is still there. It still sucks. The fun characters are the DPS shooters. Consequently, the role queue for DPS is hovering around 8 minutes. I was honestly expecting them to divide up the DPS characters and create a fourth queue for them. I’m sure they thought of that and tried and it didn’t work for some reason. Maybe. This is Blizzard after all. So, maybe nobody thought of it.
The biggest change to the game is taking the number of tanks down from 2 to 1. That is arguably an improvement. Except that all of the rest of the characters were designed from the ground up to be in a 6 v 6 game. Overwatch was born with a balance problem and it has never gotten over it. Not even close. Blizzard should have accepted reality and cut the number of characters down.
And some of the tanks, Ball for an outstanding example is going to be terrible as a single tank. Hammond is a flanker. Get behind the enemy and tear up the healers, that is his job. He is going to be useless for trying to push through a choke point.
Blizzard is clearly trying to force-feed a new dive-meta. Until they get tired of that a switch to something else or introduce a new character that breaks the game AGAIN.
I should state that the biggest change to the game will be a PvE (Player Vs the AI) mode. Blizzard is touting this new mode with new maps as the real attraction so we’ll have to wait and see.
But so far Blizzard is living up to the reputation it has earned in the last five years.
NEXT
Shadow Warrior 3
I knew that Flying Wild Hog had lost its way when I didn’t hear The Touch by Stan Bush anywhere in the trailers. It’s nowhere in the game either, come to that. Seriously, it’s Lo Wang’s jam. It doesn’t feel like Shadow Warrior without it. Although, it doesn’t really feel like Shadow Warrior anyway.
Remember this meme?
This was absolutely a thing. All of the first-person shooters were like that about ten years ago. Everyone credits DOOM with having finally ended that but that isn’t true. In 2013, three years before DOOM was released, a reboot of the 1997 raunch-fest Shadow Warrior was launched. It was a glorious throwback to the DOOM clones of the 1990s. You actually had to explore the maps. You could go on easter egg hunts. The powerup system genuinely added some variety to the gameplay.
It is one of the unsung classics of gaming.
DOOM 4 was canceled the year Shadow Warrior came out. When the DOOM reboot launched in 2016, it felt a hell of a lot like it was influenced by Shadow Warrior. I mean think about it. 2013 was when Bethesda stepped in and reorganized id. Do you really think Bethesda could have come up with something like DOOM on their own?
Shadow Warrior 2 came out the same year as DOOM and frankly, Flying Wild Hog just ruined it. They shoveled in too much extraneous stuff. The game heavily stressed multi-player, which no Shadow Warrior fan was calling for, and it had a bunch of fetch quests which has no place in the entire franchise.
It didn’t sell well and it looked like that was the end of the series.
But this year Shadow Warrior 3 was launched and it was… Not bad I guess. That is the level of excitement I have for it. It’s a lot like DOOM with a few extras like a grappling hook and a few parkour walls that let you do ninja tricks. Hoji is back in the game after having been dead for nine years. However, all of the maps are constricted by terrain. You can only move where the game wants you to. And after just about every action sequence there is, you guessed it, a cut scene.
The game is okay. It certainly looks good. The action is fine. It’s all fine. But Shadow Warrior has become what it had rebelled against.
