You get up in the morning, your mom cooks you something to eat, your dad gives you money for Snickers and takes you to school. You go to a good, strict school without bullies. You study excellently – you have several tutors in subjects that you are not predisposed to. There is an honor roll in your school, on which you, along with your grades, should be, ideally, at the very top. Your future is cloudless – every day you are given gifts, candy, cool fashionable clothes. Everything seems fine, but you understand how boring such a life really is. There is no sense of struggle, every step is predetermined, scheduled for several years in advance.
That’s how I feel when I play any Blizzard game. I see a lot of people who can’t play old school games, can’t play something really original, not formulaic (Deadly Premonition or Papers Please) but everyone loves Blizzard games.
I started my acquaintance with their games on PC with Starcraft. After the wild and arcade Command & Conquer, the gameplay seemed very measured, calming to me. The limitation on the number of units, digging into micro-nano operations personally put me to sleep. Then there was a beautiful, but empty clicker game – Diablo 2. Good graphics, generated levels, and zero gameplay, an absolutely meditative and empty pastime. However, my friends were firmly entrenched in Starcraft and Diablo. In the early 2000s, the mind-blowing Warcraft 3 was released. I really liked the single-player company then. However, the multiplayer is very similar to Starcraft and therefore very dull. Then there was no less beautiful, empty Starcraft 2. I played f2p Hearthstone for a while – this game is like a slot machine, at first you win, you start believing in yourself, but then developers come to you with an offer to buy several decks for 500 ₽. Your skill doesn’t decide anything, only the amount of money spent on virtual decks decides.
I recently bought Overwatch, a shooter from Blizzard. I liked the heroine Mei, whose art and cosplay are all over social networks, and as a result, the general wave of advertising in geek communities threw me onto the shore of Overwatch players.
My fears were justified – excellent graphics, different heroes with their own voices, abilities. Not a single crash during the game, everything is at the level of Blizzard. And now, I want to say that the game is again so polished even in the gameplay that it is simply not interesting to play. It really lacks interesting – unexpected moments, risky ideas, the company, as always, took only the best from past years and, having polished it, sent it to conquer the market, not skimping on good promotion.
The only Blizzard game that I really liked is Rock’n’Roll Racing. It does have gameplay, but I suspect that the credit for this goes not to the developer, but to the publisher – Interplay, most likely Interplay helped Blizzard make something truly playable out of the game.
