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Overwatch – not free and why that’s bad for Blizzard’s eSports aspirations

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By now I’m sure you’re up to date with everything that’s been going on at Blizzcon yesterday, like the Warcraft movie trailer and what not. As expected, the trailer was one of the main highlights of the event, however, the Overwatch segment was definitely very interesting as well, and for the best of reasons. Not only did we get to see a whole bunch of new upcoming content, but we also finally learned a bit more about the game’s business model. Judging by its MOBA inspired concept, one would have assumed that Overwatch will be a free to play game, much like League of Legends, Dota 2 or Blizzard’s own Heroes of the Storm. One would have assumed wrong, however, because we just learned yesterday this is in fact not a free to play title.

The company announced at Blizzcon that Overwatch will come in multiple variants, with the standard one clocking in at $40. There will also be two additional versions priced a tad higher, but packing a number of goodies, as it is usually the case. Interestingly enough, Blizzard seems to have designed Overwatch from the ground up as an eSport, an yet, most of the successful eSports are free to play with microtransactions, including the aforementioned League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of the Storm. Right now the only successful eSport that you need to buy is CS:GO and the price of that is really low. A case could also be made for Starcraft II, but it’s no secret that the RTS has been on the decline for the past couple of years and I’d be very surprised if its eSports value were to grow even with the long-awaited launch of Legacy of the Void.

Everything points at the fact that people just don’t want to spend big bucks on a highly competitive game right off the bat, but they might actually spend much more on cosmetic items further down the line. Blizzard is taking a very strange approach here because it’s offering microtransactions while also asking for 40 bucks, which would be all fine and dandy if Overwatch wasn’t aspiring to be the next big thing in eSports. By asking $40, the company is essentially shooting itself in the leg and driving away customers who have a lot of other good and free options on the table to quench that competitive thirst. Moreover, the game does not feature a single player component so you won’t even be able to say “hey, I didn’t like the multiplayer, but at least the game had a nice campaign.”

What’s even stranger is that Blizzard is also asking $40 for Legacy of the Void and with that you get both an awesome campaign and (eventually) good multiplayer. Granted, LotV is an expansion so perhaps the comparison is not entirely fair, but still, $40 for a multiplayer only game that attempts to blend two genres and that may or may not live up to expectations is a bit much if you ask me. Until yesterday, I was fairly confident that Blizzard would be able to appeal to eSports fans with yet another release, but now I’m not so sure. We’ll just have to wait and see if this gamble pays off or if people take a look at Overwatch’s price tag and go back to LoL because it’s free.

Although George has many hobbies, he likes nothing more than to play around with cameras and other photography equipment.

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Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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