searched for Diablo once on X and grok decides it’s time for me to see every story spoiler on the timeline. Immediately.

Much of my experience with AI is similar to this fellow’s example: Adobe’s Claude AI integration is a DISASTER youtu.be/bncauA2b67E?si=mTRv…

when sargeras stabs azeroth, you'd think that the entire planet would go through at least a few earthquakes and tsunamis but nope, what we get is a palatial tower sword that didn't cause any harm as it landed, instead, all its doing is performing some great drama on the horizon.

I no longer want a Warcraft show.

The evolution of WoW Warbands; All toons on the same account can be logged in to the world at the same time and programmed just like delve companions. think of it as agentic Ai but you know…actually useful.

The only real world thing that you can trade for the time you spend in WoW is more WoW gametime. Crazy. Blizz has got their metaverse economy locked down hard on their own metaphorical blockchain. It’s kinda grim.

game launcher game updates average at about 0.5gb every single time. in my day, an entire game fit on a cd-rom that was just under 600mb. what slop are we downloading here?

what is this hero Domina? blizz thinks we're supposed to be impressed a smug looking OP tank lady? WHO IS COMING UP WITH THE USELESS HERO CONCEPTS?!

serious question: how do you make someone with absolutely zero gaming experience ceo of a very prominent & important gaming platform?

The state of Overwatch; “Which of my Barbie dolls should I pick to win this epic battle?” I just can’t anymore…what have you done Blizz? You turned ow into a frankenstein of fun that replaces lore and glory with glitz and comedy. Rename it CandyCrushCraft. Do it alrdy!

I still cannot get over the fact Doomfist managed to fight off Winston, Genji and track Tracer’s blink patterns all at once but when one Italian lady hides in the shadows THAT’S where he fumbles

Overwatch has seriously deteriorated artistically over the last decade. Every female character has an identical face slapped onto increasingly dumb-looking gimmicks, and every male character is just stupid looking overall.

Is Blizzard trying too hard to appeal to casuals? Is World of Warcraft getting replaced by World of Friendship?

so let me understand this...... you made a sequel and then spent a year gaslighting everyone into believing it was going to be a true sequel. You launch the game after cutting a bunch of pve content that would have justified the 2 label for overwatch. Now you finally admit it was all pointless and wasted everyone's time... We still have no animated show or movie. This has got to be the most incompetent usages of a ip ever.

Overwatch began with a cinematic of 2 brothers that couldn’t even best each other with their ults. Today, we got a cinematic where a lady uses a way too oversized sword to cut off doomfists wolverine metal arm and casually throws him out the window. No ult. Just sass. Meh.

we can scoff at WoW with the new State Of Azeroth video but, maybe this is what WoW needs to be for the gamer market today, appease everyone just enough to keep them paying. I can’t say if it’s a good or bad thing. we could call it profitable anti-polarity social media.

Game devs that make the latest flavor of an overwatch clone need to verify that all players in a match are actually human, What makes you so sure that every one of your teammates in chat isn’t a bot that’s been trained on years worth of player training data?

Oh and by the way: If MMORPGs want to evolve, we'll need to see the same thing happening there. You're not gonna win if you keep doing what World of Warcraft did 20 years ago. You win if you create the next logical step forward that's clearly better than anything that's come before, something that opens up entirely new ways for people to experience the genre. It's always the same old story. Sony back in the day didn't innovate with their Walkmans enough, so Apple ate their lunch by making the iPod. Because that clearly was the next logical design innovation and people clearly got it. Nobody wanted to schlepp cassettes or discs around anymore and Sony didn't get that MP3 would be a thing, but Apple did. You can't ever rest on your laurels.

We are trying to essentially build the next-gen ARPG. The kinda ARPG you couldn't have made 20 years ago cause it wouldn't have been possible just yet. I think the issue I have with PoE2 is that it's still built on the same old foundations of PoE1 in the same way that Diablo 4 is basically just built on the exact same foundations of Diablo 3. But sometimes risk-taking is required in order to push a genre forward. And if you don't do it, chances are your competitors will and then they'll eat your lunch. Super Mario 64 wouldn't ever have happened if Miyamoto just stuck to his guns and kept making 2d Mario games for the rest of his career just because those 8 and 16bit Mario games were successful. No, they had guts and bet their entire company on the idea that the next thing is going to be fundamentally different and that they're good enough designers to make it work even though they clearly had no idea if a 3d platformer would work - because those didn't really exist. There's a very strange conundrum with PoE2 where it seems clear that Jonathan wanted to have more meaningful combat in the game, but you literally can't get there by basing the new game on the same old point and click foundation of the old game. Instead, you need to look at what japanese devs did in the meantime, because we don't have the same limitations anymore that we had in the 90s and early 00s. MoHu and Souls already laid out the foundation, it was clear to us that these animation-commit combat systems just offer inherently more freedom and allow combat to not be basically a faked abstraction layer anymore. If you want combat to be meaningful, nowadays you can make an animation-commit combat system with a modern network engine and rollback netcode and actually make that work. You'd just have to be willing to take that leap forward. But I'm guessing that's a risk they didn't want to take, so they tried to ape Souls-like combat within their point and click engine, which is exactly why they're struggling now to make that work and will probably keep struggling until they decide to do the same thing we did once they work on PoE3. We feel like what we did with Wicked is the next logical step for ARPG combat. In the same way Brevik 30 years ago ultimately decided to turn Diablo 1 into a realtime game and did not make another turn-based game by aping Rogue, etc., we all need to accept that if we want better combat in ARPGs, it needs to be built on this foundation, because a point and click system comes with inherent design limitations that cannot be overcome. I already elaborated on this topic in great detail in this post: x.com/thomasmahler/status/20…