My Strange Strange Relationship with Blizzard Entertainment
I have spent an incredible amount of time playing Blizzard Games. I payed Brood War quite a bit in early high school which transitioned to me playing World of Warcraft and then back peddling to the Warcraft RTS games.
After spending an obscene amount of my life (all of High School and Half of College) on World of Warcraft, I moved over to Starcraft 2 with a brief stint into Diablo. Now I find myself playing Hearthstone for at least an hour a day. I still am awaiting my invite to Overwatch Beta.
So now today i am a little confused on how I feel about Blizzard. Its almost like I have a Schizophrenic relationship with them. On one hand, the Grand Tournament looks incredible, but I am incredibly disappointed in Legion, the new Warcraft Expansion.
I have been upset with Blizzard on the Wow lore for years. It started when the game devs refused to let me impale Maiev Shadowsong’s head on a spike in Burning Crusade and in the same moment, let her defeat Illidan in a very furious betrayal by them to me.
It continued in Wrath of the Lich King by focusing on the Lich King which I guess was inevitable. Still, the best raid of the game was Ulduar and with a change of order of raids, (TOC then Naxx, then ICC, then Ulduar last) Ruby Sanctum would have not been needed and it would have transitioned far better into Cataclysm. It began at this point that the lore became dumbed down. Not in the questiong experience, Wrath was great in regards to that, but in how Yogg Saron was handled.
An Old G-d, an Eldritch Abomonation. Mortals should not be able to defeat a creature such as this without great sacrifice. At minimum, Dalaran should have been destroyed, or Arthas gets impaled by a tentacle to remind the characters (and the players) who the real power players on Azeroth are.
This trend kept getting worse and worse (also Pandas) and then Deathwing got dummbed down. Vashjir got aborted, the Mogu became forgotten, and the Old G-ds continued to fail on delivery expansion after expansion.
The final nail was Gul’Dan in Warlords. He is one of, if not my absolute favorite Warcraft Character. The only contenders for most atrocities committed compared to the ultimate warlock and his Stormreaver clan would be Azshara, Kil Jaeden, Archimonde, Sargerus, and the Old G-ds (everything listed next to him are vastly more powerful) and then they ruined him in Warlords.
I personally would have had him kill all the Warlords, raise them as Death Knights as his slaves, and done this before the first raid. It would have been the perfect Red Herring, and just the sort of thing that Gul’Dan would do. Instead we got a half finished expansion. The next one does not excite me.
Now Hearthstone on the other hand, has done nothing but excite me these last few months (if not year) This expansion brings new fun cards. It brings new gimmicks. It brings new deck archetypes, and probably will still make face hunter the strongest deck.
Still, even if Face is the Place, Hearthstone I feel has far more resources dumped into it than Wow does. It should not be this way. Notice how I spent a lot of time on Wow and very little on Hearthstone?
I played Wow that much more than the card game. At this point, I am just THAT disappointed in the game. I hope that hearthstone delivers and that I am wrong about Wow, but I will not keep my hopes up.