This just kind of hit me, as I was thinking about my old days in Diablo 2. If Blizzard wanted to, they could do a quick spit-n-polish of the D2 code, and chuck out a re-release of the game for $15, and probably make a nice little bit of cheddar on the effort. No, it's not going to reawaken the sleeping fanbase of Diablo players, but it would give a generation who maybe have grown up without the freedoms of D2, to give it a shot on a cheap price. Not much effort, but a nice way to make a little cash on a well known and respected game.

Then I thought about them doing that for something like WoW or SC 2 or even Overwatch in another fifteen years....and I realized those fans won't come back, and new fans won't have the tales of those legacies to inspire them. MMO's have largely(with a few notable exceptions) failed as a genre. But they did teach us something: once the servers go dead, so do all the memories of the game. Someone who owns a physical copy of D2, can still fire it up into someone else's computer on a party night, and show them how the game was at it's best.

But you can't do that with all these dedicated server games. Once the servers die, the game industry has demonstrated a draconian intolerance for fans emulating the servers or modding the disc/game code to run outside of their control. So the fans do what comes naturally; they don't bother thinking about the game....at all. It dies in their mind. and along with it, any kind of nostalgia or desire for a re-release. To be clear, this isn't ALL games, just those that require developer-owned servers to play on.

We're about to come up on I think the 12 year anniversary of WoW, a game that basically cemented the prospect of dedicated developer server control in the gaming industry. It reduces piracy, it helps to curb cheaters, and it lets the developer control how, when, and where gamers can play what they paid for. But....there's little talk of the halcyon days of those times in gamer's minds.

As modern games continue to skyrocket in budgeting and production time, the gaming industry is being left with a lot of good properties, that people might have had an interest in that are going to rot. No....not rot, but rather encased in unbreakable amber, that even THEY can't trot out for a quick buck. They can't just flip the servers back on and tell everyone "...to come relive the past." First off, they'd have to update all those games with solid netcode, to weed out the very problems dedicated servers were supposed to solve; pirates and cheaters. Then, the developers need to convince gamers, that the servers will stay on long enough, for US to feel satisifed. Lastly, the dedicated servers aren't free. Someone's got to put time and MONEY onto some kind of server farm to build and host them.

As more and more games get an online component that becomes increasingly required to play the game, I almost see a dark age on the horizon for gaming. Where there's so many old titles, and no real new ideas that don't come FROM those old titles, that gaming starts reducing quality and innovation just to get a product out....that people still won't buy. Developers won't put out the money to get the old titles running, and people aren't going to want their spiffied up version that costs two or three times as much as the original, that has the same features. I won't call it a gaming crash, as it will be more of a drought of new ideas, and a desire to really embrace the OLD ideas.

Okay, I'll go by your post(Sorry, but I don't like quoting someone's ENTIRE post here, and then mine. These things get big enough as is. :-) ) And for those who are insinuating THAT argument, please remember, we're not here for THAT argument. Gamespot and IGN have done more than enough to fuel that rather silly divide, and we don't need to re-enact it here. :-) So let's focus on Overwatch.

Everything that you referenced in your post, pertains to a single aspect: in the game, hot-seated and playing, making decisions right there in the moment. You base your opinion off gameplay in that moment to moment feeling. That's fine. That's something a long list of FPS and TTPS games have done admirably. Pick a character, send them into the field. Don't like them or got killed fast? Pick another character and go back in.

But is that really all you want from this game? Even better, SHOULD that be all that you want from this game? I understand that OW is being billed as the new e-sport. So it's not a crowd I really understand. Before the game even hits shelves, we're getting competitive gameplay right out of the beta. Usually, that takes a little while; you know, people play the game, pick apart the mechanics, and then really start to develop a competitive scene. OW, TO ME(Sorry, but I had to make sure no one thinks I'm speaking for some majority :-), feels like it's not going to develop any further in the core gameplay, than it has. Modes will certainly be added, as well as new maps, but the core aspects of the gameplay, feel rooted and fixed where Blizzard wants them to be.

To me, Overwatch feels like Blackjack in a casino. Now, a savvy Blackjack player, will tell you all about the math and the strategy of playing multiple hands, knowing when to split, double down, hit or stand. But in the end, there are three outcomes: you beat the house with that hand, you tie the house with that hand, or you lose to the house with that hand.

When I first saw Overwatch, I thought it was going to be Poker. Not JUST about winning the hand, but winning the hand when you have a LOSING hand, and bluffing your way over. When the money and the cards mean far less, than the person behind them. I'll use Planetside 2 as an example; many's the time that I have used a squad, to headfake the entire OPFOR. Instead of focusing all our efforts at capping one specific base, my squad and I would capture all the little outposts around several other bases, sending off warnings to the enemy, that their various facilities are all under attack. Their response would be to divert aircraft and ground vehicles to inspect those bases, which we would mine the roads to, making it appear that we're preparing a large ground assault. So, we pull enemy assets away from the main fight, to meaningless fights elsewhere, while our real objective is being hit with our faction's full strength. It's an underhanded tactic, but, it works. :-)

That's what I'm trying to see with this Beta. Where is that person to person gamesmanship? Far as I can tell, both sides effectively run into a meat grinder until one comes out with greater numbers of survivors than the other.

Yes, but CSS, was over fifteen years ago. If this game came out ten years ago, before MW1, even with a graphical downgrade, I wouldn't have a single complaint. But for all the visual richness, for all the smooth controls and detail in the characters, the core mechanics, are JUST shooting. I can't upgrade a character; I can't even SIDEGRADE to maybe do things a little differently. Maybe lose something, to gain something else. Every Tracer player, plays the same way. Every Winston or Mercy, is going to tank and heal the same way. The characters might be varied from each other, but nothing about them can really be varied by the player.

To maybe put this in perspective MBJ, consider that while CS had no classes, the weapons and armor you took into the fight, were generally hard to spot until the bullets started flying. That gave CS a lot of gamesmanship; skilled players could flash and pistol early rushers, and keep the rest of the opposing team unsure about what main weapons they're now going to run into on a shorthanded fight. But Overwatch has no variance, aside from switching classes. There's nothing you can really hide from the enemy team about what's coming. So it's just a scrum around the objective.

Okay, full disclosure first: I play Battleborn. I LIKE Battleborn. I'm not here to do THAT discussion.

What I'm here to ask is this: What am I missing with Overwatch? The gameplay is buttery smooth, I grant you. The controls feel a little wonky, but I think that's just me because I'm playing Battleborn at the same time. And the map layouts look great.

But....it's just shooting people. I grew up in the days of CSS, when the best game on earth, was a free mod for Half Life :-) I've been a part of gaming for over 30 years. I don't understand why people are raving about a game that does one thing; admittedly it does that one thing quite well. But there's no depth to the game. It's run around the map, or fly over it, or grappling hook up(assuming the hook lands you on a surface you can run over) it, shoot people, stand by a moving target to progress to the next checkpoint. The characters are well designed, but this is Blizzard. They made PANDAS look dangerous :-) There's no story in the game; its just shooting people. There's no map-specific fights or real mechanical variation on the characters.

I have to think that I'm missing something here. I mean if people wanted this, why is everyone not going utter ape-shit over the remastering of MW 1, which I think still benchmarks most FPS games on the market?

I'm going to counterpoint Evil here. I had experience with both GTA Online and The Division. If your group of friends, also play GTA Online, get that game. Without question, GTA Online with your friends playing it, will be a MUCH better experience. The Division has a few nice tricks, don't get me wrong. But it seems Ubisoft is dedicated to doing as little as possible to actually EXPAND on that.

The first free update, "Incursion" added a raid style fight: a Light Attack Vehicle, trapped under ground that you have to shoot at with guns and explosives. If your team dies, you start it all over again. The basic mechanics of the game didn't change, the enemy playstyle didn't change. All they did, was add more of them, with better armor and weapon values. I didn't even feel like I was fighting in a raid. I just felt like I was in a more difficult version of a Challenging Mode fight.

That kind of sums up the entire Division experience. I can't say my money was wasted; I DID have fun playing it and learning the story. But once I hit 30th, and was comfortably doing Challenging Mode runs, boredom QUICKLY set in. Ubisoft responded to this as only Ubisoft could, by making it harder to get loot via crafting, and bumping up the Phoenix Credit and Dark Zone Credit rewards for doing PvE and PvP, while ALSO 6x-8xing the COST of the gear purchased with those currencies.

In conclusion, as I said, if your friends have GTA Online, and want to play it, get that game. Otherwise, I'd maybe try Battleborn or possibly wait for No Man's Sky or something deeper around the christmas buildup.

I never said Overwatch was Project Titan. It was built on some of the BONES of Titan, as admitted to by the devs.

Let's roll back time just under four years ago, to September of 2012. It's the start of the Christmas build up: Borderlands 2 has just released for Windows, PS3 and 360, Halo 4, BLOPS 2, and AC 3 are laying in wait for our wallets.

And two mystery projects, are duking it out to be the big secret of the year: EA's just taken the wraps off an upcoming game, once known as Overstrike, that's now renamed Fuse. And Blizzard is hard at work, testing out a playable version of Project Titan, which will ultimately become Overwatch. Now, before I go on here, I want to show everyone something.

This first trailer, is a youtube link to the first Overwatch cinematic trailer.

Second, is the ORIGINAL trailer for Overstrike, BEFORE it was....well, let's just use the word "altered". :-)

Last, is a trailer for Fuse, what Overstirke was altered into....

Anyone notice how Overstrike looked suspiciously like Overwatch there? Down to the quasi comical aspects and goofy characters? Remember, at this point, Titan is still shooting to be an MMO styled game( I think it was at least), and EA has just had it's rear collectively handed to it by Blizzard, when SWTOR tried going up against WoW over the past year.

Now, this is just a Conspiracy Theory, but I think someone at EA, got a look at Titan while it was in development. I think they saw another Blizzard juggernaut barreling down on Insomniac and EA's Overstrike, and said "Oh hell no!!! We ain't doin this again!!!!! Change this game up!!! I'd rather us compete against Gears and CoD, than try and fight Blizzard in the ring again!!!"

What do you think?

I don't think it's a problem of the genre. It's a problem of the people making video games. FPS's and MMO's have gone through the same thing in the last generation. Tons of people making shooters and MMO's, just because WoW, Call of Duty and Battlefield were successful. Now, it's Open World games, and MOBA's that are the darlings of the hype train.

To be clear Klunt, I'm not arguing that I wasn't more than a bit salty in my posts. In that particular exchange, I was dealing with someone who I would unabashedly call a prime specimen of an internet troll. In what appears to be another deleted post, I noted that the user sammoth had actually created a SECOND gamespot account, just to send even more bile at me for reasons I cannot fathom.

My concern, is that since I've been posting on the Gamespot boards, I've never had a mod even warn me about my posts. Normally, I'm more than willing to argue the points of fact and public knowledge, over going after a user directly. It took four posts and four noxious responses, to get me to that point. But without notice or further advice, my posts in this case were simply deleted wholesale, without any kind of communication. Even worse, they were deleted over a month LATER, long after the argument itself had died out. The only reason I can dredge up any details from back then, is because I almost never delete my GS notifications save once or twice a year, and I still have some of sammoth's bile there.

I feel like something is going on after the fact, that isn't being communicated with me. Why did it take a month and then some, for someone to step in and say or do anything? And then, to change my posts to something I personally wouldn't have done, and THEN delete them. I'd have been far less upset, had a mod just replied during that conversation, telling us both to reign it in.

@klunt_bumskrint: Umm, that splat of text, is devoid of the punctuation and spacing I normally use in my posts. THAT text, is copied directly from the email I got about the deletion, since I couldn't find my original post anymore. So, it's going to look like splat text, because someone else first removed all the things that turned it from a I believe four paragraph response to a person on the boards who was attacking me first, to a massive wall.