Category: Blizzard Entertainment

4th January

Hello and Happy New Year! Did you have a nice break? I hope so.

This is our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing, in this case, over the festive break. This time, we gorged on loot in Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2, we were pleasantly surprised nay delighted by Indiana Jones, and dug into the trifle-like layers of genius that make up Animal Well.

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, PS5

I’ve been ping-ponging between Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 during the Christmas break – I’ve been filling my ARPG cup, you could say. What surprised me, doing this, is how complimentary the games can be. Path of Exile 2 is frugal. It doesn’t give up anything easily. You inch through zones and then try multiple times to beat bosses, and when you do, they don’t give you much, the stingy bastards. Path of Exile 2 certainly doesn’t shower you in rewards like Diablo 4 does.

Treasure Goblins everywhere!Watch on YouTube

Never was this more apparent than during Diablo 4’s festive Slay Ride to Hell celebration, which spawned Treasure Goblins around the map seemingly everywhere – those scurrying Santa-like carriers of bottomless bags of loot. The spawns were particularly potent in the new Vessel of Hatred expansion zone, Nahantu, which it turns out I hadn’t been to yet because I hadn’t played the expansion yet. Cue, then, the perfect storm for me: catching up on a year of loot changes and expansion content, while also being drenched in fountains of loot along the way.

It did get old eventually, but not before I’d romped through the standard character levels with the new Spirit Warrior class and redeemed literal bags full of some of the best loot in the game. I even had time to re-equip a few other characters. It’s an embarrassment of riches that couldn’t be further away from the Scrooge-like approach of Path of Exile 2, and I loved Diablo for it – I gorged on it.

Now, though, I’m back to Path of Exile 2, as if to purge the excess of Diablo. It’s fitting for January, I feel.

-Bertie

Animal Well, PC (Steam Deck)

This video features the maker of Animal Well: Billy Basso.Watch on YouTube

I swallowed the Animal Well pill along with my Christmas dinner this holiday season and cor, what an absolute gem of a game. I know it’s been said a million times already, but Developer Billy Basso has cooked up something really very special with this debut, and Metroidvania likers owe it to themselves to get this played if they haven’t already. This is an ingenious interpretation of the genre, not just in the way it changes the rules around traversal and discovery (swapping double jumps for frisbees and bubble wands, for example, and dashes for yo-yos and spinning tops), but also because it’s just so gosh-darned clever. It does that thing that a lot of my favourite games do, in that it plops you into a world and then simply gestures towards the open door, leaving you to discover it for yourself with next to no guidance whatsoever. It’s so, so thrilling, and the kind of game that occupies every waking thought while you’re playing it.

Case in point: I loved discovering all the different ‘layers’ of Animal Well the more I played it. The first one is the six-odd hour jaunt you’ll experience to simply get to the bottom of the well, completing the main thrust of its story quest and conquering its ‘final’ boss. The second layer, however, is where Animal Well really comes alive, which is a 64-strong egg hunt that actually lets you leave the well altogether, leading to what I’d consider its proper ending. This is what I was able to finish over the holidays, expanding my playtime closer to 20 hours. But there’s also a third layer that riffs on all manner of Tunic/Fez/ARG-style ‘deep’ secrets involving hidden bunnies, bar codes, community puzzles that – hands up – are probably beyond me (or rather, beyond the amount of available head space I have for that kind of stuff alongside also having a job).

But man alive, that egg hunt layer was properly great, if only because the tools and gadgets you need to obtain to find them all go way beyond what’s required to beat the first layer of Animal Well. It really fires up your mind about what’s possible in this strange environment, and what other secrets might have been hiding in plain sight all along. And some of those eggs are so well hidden! An absolutely insane achievement for a solo developer, and very deserving of its spot in our Top 50 Games of 2024.

–Katharine

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xbox Series X

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Watch on YouTube

What a joy it’s been discovering Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Eurogamer’s 2024 Game of the Year. I’ll happily admit to some initial scepticism about it. Indiana Jones is a franchise that has not always been well looked after, and while MachineGames is undoubtedly a talented developer, it is not known for handling licensed action adventure games. How wrong I was! I’m having more fun than I’ve had with pretty much any other game launched last year.

But it goes beyond Indy simply being a fun game to play. MachineGames consistently demonstrates an understanding of the essence of Indy – his half-mumbled deductions, mildly snarky humour, and the subtle movements and facial animation that make me feel like I’m watching a fresh performance mo-capped by Harrison Ford himself.

Then there’s the attention to detail. Surely I wasn’t the only one who teased out the arrival of the game’s first villain even longer by reading up on all the fossil exhibits in the college library? And hopefully I’m not the only one to notice MachineGames finally solving something that irks me in so many games I play: that you explore a cave/dungeon/some catacombs supposedly left undisturbed for hundreds of years, except for the fact that all the candles are still burning.

Indiana Jones, I should have known some day you’d come walking back through my door with a brilliant new chapter. I just didn’t expect it to be this.

-Tom

How is it that the most exciting thing about Warcraft in 2024 is old Warcraft games from the mid 90s? I can’t have been the only one watching the Warcraft Direct broadcast this week hoping for a glimpse of the future, and of something new – to hear what director Chris Metzen has been doing since he returned to think about the future of Warcraft a year ago. Instead, all we got was remastered versions of Warcraft 1 and 2, and Classic servers for World of Warcraft Classic – Classic Classic – and a tease for player housing in WoW. That was as good as it got: player housing, which, admittedly, is exciting, but it’s still a niche development for a 20-year-old game. How many people, besides WoW players, are excited to hear about WoW expansions in 2024? They have become as predictable as winter.

Ironically, all the Warcraft Direct did was remind me how exciting Warcraft used to be, which I know is partly the point of a 30th anniversary broadcast, but isn’t it also about setting up what’s next? We used to hang on Blizzard’s every word, eager to see what it had been making for us. Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3 – the latter rewrote the rules of the RTS. Then of course there was World of Warcraft, which really did seem to captivate the world. But how long has it been since it can claim to have done that? It’s telling that the most exciting thing to happen to WoW in recent years was the launch of Classic, five years ago. The future seems to have become about reliving the glory of the past.

The Warcraft 30th Anniversary broadcast.Watch on YouTube

It’s not just Warcraft that’s tiring. Look across Blizzard more broadly and ask, “When was the last time it gave us something new?”, as in actually new, not Warcraft Rumble new. Diablo 4, as much as I enjoyed it, wasn’t much of a surprise. Do we really have to go back to Overwatch in 2015 to find the answer?

What a renaissance moment for Blizzard productivity that was. Finally, as if freed from a kind of perfectionist paralysis, not one but two experimental and unfinished games were released: HearthStone and Overwatch. Both were enormous, company-changing successes, and they seemed to usher in a new age, one of creative transparency, as well as a willingness to try things and, perhaps, fail. Where did that go? HearthStone, as we were repeatedly reminded during the Warcraft Direct, is now 10 years old, and Overwatch is unironically having a Classic moment of its own, reinstating 6v6 play in a call-back to the game’s original launch. Where is the new?

Look, I know none of this exists in a vacuum and that Blizzard has had more on its plate than creative concerns in recent years. It was embroiled in allegations of workplace misconduct for years, and trapped in web of will-they, won’t-they Microsoft acquisition complications for just as long. Then, it was rocked by layoffs. Clearly, life at the studio hasn’t been easy, and I have every admiration for the people who’ve stuck it out and are the new face of Blizzard, and who’ve turned out games like Diablo 4 and the World of Warcraft expansions we see now. Evidently a lot of really important structural work at the company has been done. The Blizzard we’re presented with in showcases now seems more diverse, and the dialogue between game teams and their audiences feels more natural and open than ever before. Detailed road-maps lay out the path ahead, blogs detail upcoming features in depth, and videos document changes and design philosophies in ways Blizzard never used to do. There’s also experimentation and risk being taken on existing projects. Vital progress has been made.

The very first Overwatch developer stream, where Jeff “from the Overwatch team” Kaplan talks about doing more broadcasts like this if fans like it. They did; we did. It changed Blizzard’s entire way of working.Watch on YouTube

But when is Blizzard going to excite us with something new again? It’s as though, in being tossed around a bit, the company lost some of its nerve. In clinging to former glories in the way it does, it comes across as shackled by them, because no matter how exciting a World of Warcraft expansion gets – or a trilogy of them, as we’re getting now – it’s never going to make the game as exciting as it once was, in that moment when it first arrived, when it was new. Reliving it over and over again in Classic isn’t the same thing. It’s true of Hearthstone and of Overwatch too – there’s no escaping the diminishing returns; there’s only so much excitement one game idea can naturally give.

Perhaps this is the curse of extraordinary live game success, an eternal clinging to a previous high and reluctance to do anything that might upset the audience and recurring paycheck. But for how long is that sustainable? When you’re pulled in several directions by several games, where do you find the time and creative space to do something new? Moreover, where do you find the desire and the appetite to take the risk?

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What’s doubly worrying is that Blizzard does seem to have been trying. That “brand new survival game” set in a “whole new universe”, codenamed Odyssey, sounds like it was exactly the kind of ‘new’ I’m talking about. But it was canned – canned after six years of development amidst Microsoft-mandated layoffs earlier this year. It’s as though the suits came in, saw the risks involved, and only the risks, and thought better of it. Better to have a nice stable income from tried and tested brands instead. A rumoured StarCraft shooter led by former FarCry boss Dan Hay doesn’t sound anywhere near as interesting by comparison; it’s an idea Blizzard has been toying with for decades – remember StarCraft Ghost?

It’s a shame. Blizzard has produced some of the games I remember most fondly of any that I’ve played, and I’ve no doubt there’s the talent there to make more of them – to give us experiences we haven’t even conceived of yet. But does it want to? That’s the question. In looking to the past, it’s in danger of living in it and being hemmed in by its own success. I don’t want Blizzard to become a Greatest Hits band; I want to hear something new.