Diablo 4's upcoming season was shaping up to be a big disappointment after the excitement around its latest expansion. Blizzard threatened to completely flatten the identity of the most powerful loot with a change that—while healthy in the long run—spoiled the fun of having ultra-rare items to chase in an action RPG.

But after holding a week-long playtest, Blizzard has taken the overwhelmingly negative feedback and found a promising compromise.

Season 14, the Season of Death Awakening, will bring a permanent change to Diablo 4 that redefines how its rarest items work. Blizzard's goal is to take Uniques, an item tier that was previously pretty niche, and expand their usefulness for a variety of character builds. To do that, it will make Uniques less powerful and their bonuses more random—two things no Diablo player who is looking to perfect their build wants to hear.

Previously, the plan was to ditch the guaranteed bonuses Uniques currently have for completely random stats. Nobody, including me, liked the sound of erasing the identity of the cool Uniques in the game to basically make them Legendaries with a different color. This would've made the game unnecessarily grindy and broken the whole point of Uniques having curated stats that synergize with their unique powers. Why would you want a sword that empowers your critical strikes to not even have any critical strike chance on it?

Thankfully, that's not how it's going to work anymore. Blizzard has given Uniques back two guaranteed stats to fit their themes. The other stats will still be random, but you'll be able to swap one of them out to fit your build.

The solution, as is laid out in the updated patch notes for season 14, is to preserve each Unique's identity while allowing some flexibility with the random stats they can have. This solves the problem Blizzard was originally targeting by moving away from Uniques only working for hyper-specific build archetypes. It was always a bummer to find an item that, for example, boosted your damage only if you invested in fire skills on a sorceress. Now, that item will retain its general damage bonus but could roll stats on it that synergize with cold skills instead.

On top of all of that, Uniques will be able to appear as Mythic Uniques. Diablo 4 already classified a pool of its rarest and most powerful items as Mythic Uniques, but now that title will refer to any Unique that drops with a purple tooltip, like how orange items (Legendaries) are better than yellow items (Rares). These new Mythic Uniques will have maxed out stats when they drop, or when you craft them, giving you a new item type to chase after.

By opening up the possibilities for Uniques, Diablo 4's loot should be more broadly useful and exciting. I was always confident it would be a healthy change for the game, but disliked the way Blizzard had initially decided to handle it. This revised approach is a compromise I'm willing to try when the season starts on June 30.

Inside me, there are two people. The first, a rational adult, understands the legalities of private servers, and how typically incompatible they are with… well, existence. I can't say that certain servers, like TurtleWoW, played it safe either—while you do need to pay developers, opening up a cash shop for a game you're running off a stolen IP isn't smart.

The second has a grim understanding of the state of the genre by virtue of writing this very column. Not only have I personally observed that MMOs are an aging genre with very little in the way of newcomers, but I'm also not the only person who has identified a problem—I spoke to Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) earlier this month about the miserly state of things. Jack Emmert of City of Heroes fame also thinks there are huge problems. It's not just me getting nostalgic and misty-eyed.

Regardless of the cause, one thing is true: New MMOs aren't surviving, or they're being shut down. There are a couple indie outliers like Project Gorgon that're doing just fine for themselves, but we aren't getting the big hitters anymore.

And while I might not mourn servers like TurtleWoW or Project Ascension quite like I might, say, wince in sympathy for poor Matt Frior—who made Project Blackbird for years only for it to be slain in the cradle by Microsoft—I still feel a little sad to see Blizzard folding in on them, even if they're well within their rights to do so.

Because it's not like Blizzard isn't taking pointers, right? Of course, Ion Hazzikostas isn't gonna walk out one day and say "yeah, we were inspired by the private server we shut down". But there's absolutely a pattern. Blizzard will muscle in on a private server, and then a year or two later, come out with their own version of what that server was doing.

The original example is, of course, Nostralius, which Blizzard came for in 2016. The server reached a major height of popularity as a version of oldschool World of Warcraft maintained by passionate fans, something Blizzard had previously rebuffed with the now-infamous quote: "You think you do, but you don't."

Two years after Nostralius shuts down, Blizzard opens up World of Warcraft Classic, an experiment so successful it's still working through expansions today, both in the OG Classic and in Anniversary servers that are doing the whole time loop again.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of these servers were offering Classic-adjacent experiences with clever twists around the time Blizzard put out its Season of Discovery servers or Remix events, either. Or, indeed, that Blizzard has a mysterious "Project Camelot" on the horizon in the wake of these C&Ds.

I'm not accusing Blizzard of copying homework, mind. These versions of WoW are very much distinct from the dying servers—whether that be Project Ascension's ability draft or TurtleWoW cooking up entirely new classes. But they were made in an environment where there was concrete proof that an appetite for interesting, experimental takes on the good old days are incredibly popular.

To be clear: I'm certainly not in the business of defending Microsoft, and I don't think Blizzard needs defending when it comes to what it's done. Stating that Blizzard has a right to shut these servers down is an outlining of the facts, rather than what I purposefully believe should be the case in a utopian society. The law and what I want are two different things.

But the facts are: We do live in a capitalist society with copyright laws. Blizzard is legally obliged to snub these things to protect its IP. There are alternatives, such as NCSoft's treatment of the City of Heroes server Homecoming—but that was achieved under years of meticulous and very, very careful manoeuvring by the private server's devs, who never once accepted donations beyond what they required to run the server.

They certainly didn't open a cash shop. Again, TurtleWoW did itself absolutely no favours, even if I think what it was doing was rad in a vacuum.

So why am I still sad? Well, two reasons.

Well, in isolation, I think these private servers are often just doing cool stuff. I think it's neat that Project Ascension had an ability draft version of WoW. I think it's neat that TurtleWoW was cooking up entirely different classes and zones—just as I thought it was neat that Homecoming made new archetypes and story arcs.

While the scale of passion projects to actual illegal business varies from server to server, the MMO genre is a space that's in dire need of innovation. And if Blizzard has been taking notes, it's these servers we have to thank for a lot of the precious scraps of invention the company has been allowed to make.

Not necessarily because the devs have been nicking ideas. As a matter of fact, I think they're plenty creative—but they're bound to the laws of capital in a way these private server mavericks just aren't, and they can't just disagree with management because… well, it's their career. A private server getting popular, however, means developers can point at their playercounts when pitching to the people with money.

I am willing to bet that we probably wouldn't have WoW Remix or SoD without some of the servers that're getting shut down. We certainly wouldn't have had Classic without Nostralius.

But I'm also sad because, in a healthier videogame industry, with fewer layoffs and studio closures, might some of these private server devs have found positions within actual studios? In a world where companies aren't obligated by copyright law to send cease and desist to fan projects, could these private servers tick along just fine?

And more to the point—in a world where the MMO genre wasn't suffering from companies hounding after the next quarter (and, to be fair, ballooning development costs)—would these servers even exist in the first place?

It's a pipe dream, I know. But I think private servers are a symptom of a wider illness, not a disease—and I have watched genuine creativity and effort be poured into them by people I can't rightly blame for being unable to find legitimate work in this utter hellscape of an industry. It's a sorry state of affairs, one I doubt will change in my lifetime—but I'll quietly wish it would.

Patch 12.1 is on the horizon, and it looks like we were right—that ominous monologue Zul'jan had during World of Warcraft: Midnight's main story quests was absolutely a setup for the next major patch. Curse of Ula'tek is going to take us to The Coiled Isle, where we'll be digging further into the troubled history of the Amani trolls.

One surprise from the patch is the inclusion of Mythic+ world bosses via lairs, as explained in the overview video below.

Essentially, a lair is a one-boss delve-like instance that plucks out the usual world bosses that'd be prowling a patch zone like this and places them in an instanced, delve-like arena with some variable difficulty settings, all the way up to "flexible Mythic" 15-25 man groups, which'll presumably have the same bite as the other Mythic content in the game.

I'm of two minds about this, honestly. On the one hand, I think it's really neat that WoW's continuing to add varying difficulty to all of its activities—using the whole buffalo is the smartest way for MMOs to design their encounters, and I was a huge fan of the Prey system on launch for making my open world activities spicier.

And yet I'm not too excited about them being instanced. Part of the appeal of a world boss is… well, that it's a boss in the world, and the MMO feeling of piling onto some schmuck with a gaggle of strangers in a chaotic melee of spells is more appealing than this alternative from a community perspective.

The patch also includes, naturally, more story quests, an in-zone talent tree, a new dungeon, delves, a raid—all that good major patch stuff. As well as some much-needed brush-ups to the cooldown manager, the ability to add pets to housing (score!) You can read the full details on the official website,

Life is about to get much easier for World of Warcraft players tired of having to track down guildmates to get a group together for a raid. Blizzard is officially acknowledging that Discord is the most convenient solution to this problem and will be integrating its chat directly into the MMO in the next update.

Blizzard announced that patch 12.1, Curse of Ula'tek, will bring cross-platform chat between Discord and WoW guild chat. Messages will show up in the MMO and in Discord, and can be set up so it's all-in-one combined chat or separated into individual channels.

The only requirement is to link your Battle.net and Discord account and have a guild leader or officer adjust how they want the chats to work. Once that's done, you'll be able to see people chatting directly from Discord with the logo next to their messages in-game.

This is big news for guilds with hundreds of players across different time zones. WoW's in-game chat just isn't equipped for that, especially without an easy way to scroll through an archive of messages across multiple days. I have two monitors so it's not particularly hard to swap between Discord and a game, but I'm sure solo monitor and laptop players will be relieved to hear they don't need to stop doing their dailies to answer a ping.

This does make me wonder if we're about to see Discord chat show up in more games as a replacement for developers having to build a guild or clan chat system. It's not just MMO players who need to wrangle people together; I could see this being useful in other multiplayer games, like Arc Raiders or Overwatch.

All of this might be moot by the time Discord gets around to rolling out its extremely unpopular global age verification, which is supposedly happening sometime before the end of the year. If that goes awry, WoW players might be back to juggling chat apps trying to see if enough people are online to run some Mythic+ dungeons.

A new version of World of Warcraft was just discovered and it's called "World of Warcraft Camelot". Instead of some kind of Arthurian spin-off, however, the dataminer who found it theorizes that it's just a codename for an enhanced version of World of Warcraft Classic.

Dubbed "WoW Classic Plus" by hopeful players over the years, this hypothetical version of the MMO would branch off from the original and become something new based on something old—just like Old School Runescape.

Wowhead dataminer Stiven found licenses for two versions of "World of Warcraft Camelot" on Blizzard's servers, suggesting that it will have multiple editions available to purchase. They also said that this branch of WoW is on the July 2006 patch that introduced a raid you might remember from the viral Leroy Jenkins video.

That happens to be the same patch a version of WoW was mysteriously running on last year. With BlizzCon coming up in September, it would make sense for Blizzard to start testing WoW Classic Plus so that it's ready to be playable on the show floor. Not to mention that it recently invited a bunch of WoW Classic streamers to its offices in Irvine to see something new under an NDA.

Blizzard has a track record of letting things slip by way of their internal server updates. Most WoW players know to start preparing for a new patch when a PTR server shows up on there. And sometimes big announcements, like Diablo 4's new paladin class, are accidentally leaked by poorly named internal builds.

At this point, WoW Classic Plus has been talked about so much that it would be hard to imagine Blizzard won't give it a shot. It already dabbled with the idea of mixing things up with the original MMO via Season of Discovery, and it's hinted that something similar could happen again.

With WoW Classic's popularity waning these days as the MMO gets closer and closer to catching up with the regular version, a WoW Classic Plus could be Blizzard's solution to the problem. I'd like to see it try because playing a version of the game without the conveniences of modern WoW always puts me off of it. I'd be way more inclined to try something that isn't so beholden to the kind of suffering players went through a decade ago.

It's finally over, we're free. Overwatch players no longer have to live in fear, cowering from the skies in anticipation of what is essentially an AH-64 Apache appearing overhead and gunning us all down, because Jetpack Cat has been nerfed yet again.

This comes as part of Overwatch season 3's patch notes, where Jetpack Cat has undergone some decent changes, including a reduction in the shield minor perk, a speed decrease, and crucially, a fuel regeneration penalty while carrying a target, which has been increased from 2x to 3x slower.

The latter is big news for anyone who's fallen victim to Jetpack Cat's ability to carry allies into enemy backlines. What started as a goofy joke graduated to a viable strat as Jetpack Cat and Bastion quickly became meta. Jetpack Cat is one of the most mobile characters in Overwatch, so she's pretty hard to hit as is, but add a flying Bastion in the mix, which can switch to turret mode and mow down any poor soul that can't duck for cover, and then you have a server admin-level threat.

"While Jetpack Cat's win rate and play rates remain low, Lifeline is highly effective at higher ranks when continuously carrying certain heroes," the patch notes explain. "Increasing the fuel regeneration penalty while carrying a target and reducing the strength of Transport Shielding weakens this strategy, while weapon improvements increase effectiveness outside of Lifeline."

If you're still not convinced of the sheer power of Lifeline then just look at the recent Overwatch World Cup, where teams were forced to either ban Jetpack Cat or play into the Cat and Bastion meta—it was pure chaos.

This isn't to say Jetpack Cat has just been left in the dirt, though, as she has got a couple of buffs. Damage and healing from Biotic Pawjectiles has been increased from 4 to 4.5 per pellet and the Headbutt major perk has had its damage increased from 30 to 50.

I'm not opposed to making Jetpack Cat stronger in these areas; so far my biggest issue with her has been her ridiculous mobility and the Lifeline ability, both of which have been addressed to some extent. Although, I'll still probably ban her in competitive matches—I don't want any of that smoke.

Overwatch's next hero might carry twin pistols and has a quick dash, but she's no Tracer. Tomorrow, when Shion makes her debut, Overwatch will have a hero who fights like a Devil May Cry character.

In fact, the character action game series was so much of an inspiration that Blizzard originally gave Shion a Devil May Cry-esque style rank meter to measure your moves.

"We did have a style meter," lead hero producer Kenny Hudson said in a recent group interview with PC Gamer. "We had this little style meter UI in the beginning and it would start at D or E and then move its way up to S, depending on how [many abilities] you could link together."

Hudson said it "would've been cool," but it was too stressful to manage in combat. The team also had troubles figuring out how to reward you for earning an S rank. "At one point we had it so she has super speed or she has double the run speed of other heroes in the game," Hudson explained. "That was kind of wild, and we felt that the bike [was] going to be enough of a challenge."

Even without the style ranks, Shion still has some Devil May Cry DNA in her kit. The motorcycle he mentioned isn't just for racing around the map. Shion can take off with it into the air, hang for a beat, and then kick it towards enemies. Some characters have rocket launchers or grenades; Shion has an explosive bike—a core part of her design that everything else was built around.

The rest of Shion's abilities are made to be used interchangeably so you can combo them together based on what you need in the moment: Each pistol shoots a three-round burst before she swaps to the other, they can both be unloaded in an X pattern for a huge chunk of damage, and she can use her dash to move in or out of the fray.

I can already see several ways you can optimize Shion's abilities for the different heroes you'll face in a match, like forgoing the accuracy you gain from charging up her pistol volley when fighting a bulky tank hero. This flexibility extends to her ultimate ability, which gives her three charges of an AoE barrage that she can use in place or after a short dash. In the brief demo Hudson gave us, it looks like Shion will be particularly good at pouncing on weak targets before they can react, but will struggle to survive anyone prepared for her arrival.

That also might mean Shion's about to become the most banned hero in ranked. Erratic movement abilities can be as much of a pain as a hero with auto-aim. Hudson said a problem in early playtests was that it was nearly impossible to take her out while she was riding the bike because her hitbox became smaller than intended. That's fixed now, but I still expect it's going to take some practice to stop her before you've been turned into roadkill.

Shion will Akira slide into the hero roster tomorrow when Overwatch season 3 begins.

Earlier this year, the private World of Warcraft server Turtle WoW announced it would shut down after Blizzard served it a cease and desist and filed a copyright infringement suit. Second verse, same as the first: Project Ascension, a different private server project with several realms, is the subject of a new suit filed last Friday (thanks, Aftermath).

"The defendants … have built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard's intellectual property," the complaint reads, noting that Ascension is "among the largest private WoW servers available today … with 'over a million players.'"

If you're unfamiliar with the fan server, it's a modded, classless, free-to-play version of the game where you stitch together existing and custom spells to fashion unique playstyles. "Build the character of your dreams," the website beckons. It also looks like there's a different project in development which adds new ideas to World of Warcraft's classic incarnation, not unlike Turtle WoW or that secret thing Blizzard seems to be working on.

Also similar to Turtle WoW, the server allowed players to buy in-game items with Donation Points—the complaint alleges this has made the Project Ascension team "millions of dollars." The complaint also says the game's pirate servers are "hosted on 'bulletproof' servers associated with the Russia-based Aeza Group," which the U.S. Department of the Treasury has targeted for "enabling cybercriminals and technology theft"—an association which allegedly "signals willful intent to engage in unlawful activity."

While the team behind Turtle WoW initially urged Blizzard to consider an official licensing framework for fan servers, no public word has come from Project Ascension just yet. Fans of the server are not hopeful: "Welp, we're fucked," reads one thread from Reddit user AnaTheSturdy.

User micro_Ampere replied, "Thanks for the memories. I had a better time here than I had on any other [private server] currently out there. Shame to see all that creativity gone to nothing. Good luck devs, but surely you knew this was coming."

In a downright intriguing turn of events, it looks like real money trading (RMT) gold sellers—whose peddling of gold for actual cash is against World of Warcraft's terms of service—have taken to the streets of WoW Classic Anniversary to advertise casino games as a way of raking in cash (thanks, WoWHead).

They are spending money to boost level 58 casino bots now 🤣🤣🤣 from r/classicwow

These bots, boosted to level 58 (presumably because doing so via the store gives you 25 gold to play around with—and to protect themselves from ganks, more on that later) have been standing on street corners in major cities and trying to lure players in with the promise of gambling. Which—and I write this with pride—has led to players devising new and inventive ways to kill them.

Take this example posted by Reddit user Purple_Resident2930, which suggests players travel to the Netherstorm, pick up a debuff that spawns a monster on expiration, Hearthstone back to the city and run at the casino bot in question. This is a little like voluntarily letting an Alien-style chest burster sit in your ribcage so you can sic it on a spam caller

This doesn't work as well if they buy the aforementioned boosts, mind, but there are other ways of gambling-based murder—for example, kiting a level 60 elite over from Ashenvale to squish them.

Anyway—anti-casino arms races notwithstanding, Blizzard has marked, recognised, and promised to do something about these yapping slot machines. Tom Ellis, a senior game producer on World of Warcraft, writes via his personal X account:

"The casino thing that's vogue right now. Just to confirm we're aware, it's still against policy to advertise a casino, so keep reporting them (or dropping infernals on them). Digging in, it looks like the RMT crowd (that's gold sellers) have realized this is an easy way to make gold quickly and cheaply, which has driven an uptick in the behavior.

"You caught Watcher's attention so we have a few folks looking into ideas on how we can make getting these people out of the game much faster so the activity is less lucrative and in turn, they will hopefully piss off."

It's a fascinating little development, all told—though it makes a certain kind of sense. Casinos in real life operate by tipping the odds in their favour, and drawing people in with the allure of being one of the rare lucky winners that makes it big (this is where the saying "the house always wins" comes from).

In other words, it's absolutely a smart, albeit ToS-violating, strategy to encourage people to gamble with a game of chance because, writ large, it will make you more money than it loses you. Unless, of course, you get repeatedly murdered any time you try.

"Don't expect any sort of big fanfare 'Mission Accomplished!' banner for this one," Ellis adds, "This is one of the ones that you hopefully don't even notice stopped happening if we get it right."

Overwatch's soft reboot earlier this year has kicked off more story development than I can keep up with. There are several new short stories, comics, and even webcomics that are building up to something big. And it looks like they're going to be necessary for figuring out what is going on with its newest hero, too.

The trailer for Overwatch 52nd hero, Shion, doesn't actually tell us much about her that we didn't already vaguely know from some of the hints in the past few months. She's one of the leaders of the Hashimoto clan—Overwatch's near-future version of the yakuza—and dual wields pistols.

People have already been debating if she's a robot (an Omnic in Overwatch parlance) or a human based on the early info, and the trailer refuses to give a clear answer. At first, it looks like Shion wears a demon mask like many of the other Hashimoto members, but when she starts talking through speakers in her neck it almost seems like it's not a mask at all and that she is indeed a robot.

This isn't helped by the fact that she tells Sojourn that she "fights well for a human," which is the kind of thing an Omnic would say. But Sojourn says she was thinking the same thing and now I don't know what to believe.

Right now, all we know is that she's the clan's "most terrifying elder" and that she's going to be a villain in the next season. Her dialogue with other heroes or a new comic will likely explain her whole deal.

For now, we'll have to wait until she is playable in season 3 starting on June 16 to find out more. It's not super clear what kind of hero she'll be. She has those pistols and an electrified knife of some sort that she stabs Sojourn with. Maybe Blizzard is about to drop a damage hero who can stun you in close-range and then turn you into swiss cheese.

Overwatch's anniversary event has come under quite a bit of fire over the last few weeks. While the nostalgic modes were a hit, fans have complained that the rewards are simultaneously not good enough and too much of a grind, and they're not wrong.

While the anniversary loot boxes weren't too bad—allowing players a chance to get everything on offer with no duplicates over the three weeks—the player titles were a slog. The rare title required you to complete 24 anniversary challenges, the epic needed 36, and the legendary needed a whopping 48.

Bear in mind that there were only 24 base challenges in the game, which were a mix of playing one to 20 games each week alongside playing five games on tank, DPS, and support in that week's anniversary mode.

So, to reach 48 challenges meant you needed to complete an extra 24 challenges. The catch is that these extras were the 'Decennium Contributor - Repeating' challenges, which meant players had to complete 10 games (wins and Stadium granted double progress).

That means if you won every game or just played Stadium you'd need to play 120 games, but at the high end players had to complete 240 games over three weeks, which boils down to 5.7 or 11.5 games a day. That's a lot of Overwatch. I play too much Overwatch and I nearly didn't get it—I only finished the Meta Challenge: Decennial Hero and got the legendary title yesterday, hours before the timer was set to run out.

You shouldn't have to grind to get the anniversary rewards. They should be accessible to everyone who's played Overwatch over the last 10 years, regardless of how much they play. And Team 4 has finally cottoned onto this, albeit too late.

Yesterday Overwatch's game director, Aaron Keller, announced that Team 4 would be "making changes to the anniversary event because the requirements to earn the Table Flip (legendary title) weren't entirely clear."

"We do want some rewards to feel rare and meaningful, but many folks didn't realize the effort required to earn this particular title," Keller continues. "As a result, many people who could have earned it may have missed the opportunity. These changes are meant to address that."

So, the requirements to earn the legendary title have been lowered from 48 challenges to 38, and players will get until the end of the season in two weeks to complete them. Good stuff, right? Well, although it's now easier to get this legendary title, the issue of having an unachievable reward for some still stands, as Team 4 is now handing out an even rarer player title to those who already grinded the challenges.

"Players who earned the original Table Flip title before that will receive a special Double Table Flip title in a future patch," Keller explains.

Honestly, I don't think there was any way out of this. As someone who grinded the event I'm really not bothered if people get extra time to get the same reward, but I understand why some people would be frustrated at the notion. Really, this should have never happened in the first place.

There's always plenty of opportunities to grind for exclusive rewards in Overwatch. But this event should have been about celebrating Overwatch and every single player that made it so special over the last 10 years, regardless of how much they play. Because time played doesn't necessarily equal dedication or love for the game. The time you have to put into a live service game is largely circumstantial—lord knows I won't be able to play as much as I do now in 10 years.

The saga of TurtleWoW was perhaps inevitable—operating pretty brazenly under the nose of Blizzard, the World of Warcraft private server featured bespoke content for its own vision of the game, and advertised itself as an actual game might.

It also featured in-game microtransactions, and while some private servers for other MMOs (like City of Heroes) have received official permission from the developers to keep operating, they've usually done so via years of muddling by on strictly-documented donations that only cover server costs.

In other words—regardless how neat the work of TurtleWoW's developers was? Legally-speaking, that's cruisin' for a bruisin'. In October of 2025, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against TurtleWoW, and while the team behind it put on a brave face, it didn't matter. Come April 2026, TurtleWoW was given a cease & desist and announced its closure several days later.

Well, as per the TurtleWoW (now Moonwhisper Games) Discord, its developers have said they'll make their own MMO: "This isn't the end of our journey together, but rather the beginning of a new one! We'll be transitioning the team into a game development studio Moonwhisper Games.

"... We've decided to begin work on our own MMO! We know this is an enormous undertaking. MMOs are among the most ambitious and demanding projects in game development, and we're under no illusion that this is something that can be built quickly or easily."

However, as the team points out, it's also sort of been getting in a lot of practice with TurtleWoW itself—regardless of whether the server was playing stupid games and getting stupid prizes, the amount of work put into its extra content was commendable. We're talking new zones, classes, dungeons, the works.

"At the same time, we're not starting from scratch completely. We have spent years building MMO experiences, managing communities, creating content, and learning both the strengths and shortcomings of the genre. We know how challenging this road will be, but we also know it's a challenge worth taking on."

Honestly? Bully for them! While I wish we'd all live in a world where IP laws allowed people to make cool stuff, I do absolutely understand why Blizzard had to put the screws on, here. TurtleWoW was playing with fire—but that doesn't mean its devs shouldn't get to keep making cool stuff. I'm excited to see what Moonwhisper Games'll put together in the coming years. God knows the scene could use an injection of new talent.

Six years ago, in October 2020, Blizzard announced the end of new content updates for StarCraft 2, its storied real-time strategy game, although it promised to continue supporting the game with tweaks and balance patches "as needed." It's followed through on that commitment over the years since, and today (technically yesterday, but I didn't notice it then) brings as a new one, and it's kind of a banger.

The focus of this update is on "extending the early and mid-game experience, allowing players to remain competitive on one to three bases for longer periods," Blizzard said. "We’ve introduced changes to make non-warped Gateway play a more viable path, while also increasing overall strategic diversity across all three races."

The top-line change is a reduction in starting workers from 12 to eight, which fans in the StarCraft 2 subreddit seem generally supportive of, because it provides for more varied builds and, as redditor GoGoGoRL put it, because "shaking stuff up in this stage of the game in general is a breath of fresh air."

"The idea is to force harsher compromises in builds, in that you can't get counters for everything online as quickly," redditor Appletank added, explaining how the change fits with Blizzard's strategy of extending StarCraft 2's mid-game. "This increases [the] need to scout, increase time spent in the 80-150 supply range before everyone maxes out, makes supply slightly less free with expanding, makes it slightly less punishing to be a bit later on expanding as your main base minerals aren't half gone by eight minutes."

Redditor RedErin was a bit more succinct: "With 12 worker starts you have to get a third base ASAP or you're dead."

There are a handful of other economic tweaks, gameplay changes to zerg, protoss, and human forces, and a surprisingly beefy list of bug fixes and quality of life updates—all told, a more impactful update than you might expect given that StarCraft 2 is now 16 years old and, at least in terms of new content development, effectively abandoned. StarCraft 2 players are already kicking around ideas on how the patch will change strategies.

Comment from r/starcraft2

starcraft 2 changed warpgate after like 10 years whattt

— @hatmasteryt.bsky.social (@hatmasteryt.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-29T18:41:09.643Z

The StarCraft 2 5.0.16 patch is live now on the public test realm—depending on how that goes, it's possible some of these changes will be reworked. The full patch notes as they currently stand are below.

Economy

• Starting workers reduced from 12 to 8.
• Default Large Mineral patch resource count reduced from 1,800 to 1,600.
• Default Small Mineral patch resource count increased from 900 to 1,200.
• Total Default Minerals per base increased from 10,800 to 11,200.
• Default Vespene Geysers' resource count increased from 2,250 to 2,500.
• Total Default Gas per base increased from 4,500 to 5,000.
• Rich Vespene Gas Geyser harvest return value decreased from 8 to 6.

Zerg

• Hatchery, Lair and Hive
  • Supplies provided reduced from 6 to 4.
• Creep
  • Spread/Recede rate slowed from 0.45 to 0.55.
• Spore Crawler
  • Damage against Biological increased from 20 (+10 Biological) to 20 (+15 Biological).
• Carapace Upgrades
  • Level 1 cost decreased from 150/150 to 100/100.
  • Level 2 cost decreased from 200/200 to 150/150.
  • Level 3 cost decreased from 250/250 to 200/200.
• Infestor
  • Microbial Shroud range increased from 9 to 12.
  • Microbial Shroud can now be cast without requiring an upgrade from the Infestation Pit.
  • Neural Parasite on builder SCVs will only expire at structure completion.
  • Now has an auto-attack weapon.
• Viper
  • Abduct now considers Sieged Tanks a valid target.
• Overlord
  • Speed without Pneumatized Carapace decreased from 0.9 to 0.7.
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.
• Overseer
  • Changelings automatically inherit the current order queue of the casting Overseer.
  • Changelings’ deaths are contagious to other nearby Changelings.
• Mutalisk
  • Mutalisk Glaives now prioritize targets.
  • Arc slop increased to 180.

Terran

• Command Center
  • Supplies provided reduced from 15 to 13.
• Ghost
  • Supply increased from 2 to 3.
  • Health reduced from 125 to 100.
  • Attack damage changed from 10 + 10 vs Light to 20.
  • Attack range increased from 6 to 7.
  • Steady Targeting:
    • Damage increased from 130 + 40 vs Psionic to 170.
    • Energy cost increased from 50 to 75.
    • No longer cancels upon taking damage.
• Medivac
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.
  • Subgroup Priority:
    • Priority order updated from (Raven, Ghost, Battlecruiser, Marine, Marauder, SiegeTank) to (Ghost, Marine+Marauder, Raven, Battlecruiser, Siegetank).

Protoss

• Nexus
  • Supplies provided reduced from 15 to 13.
• Warpgate
  • Warpgate Research moved to the Gateway from the Cybernetics Core.
  • Warpgate Research speeds up Gateway unit production time by 35%.
  • 'Transform to Warpgate' cost increased from 0/(0) to 50/(50).
  • Warp-in Time is no longer determined by 'slow power fields'.
  • Warp-in Time decreased to 3s (from 3.6s and 11.4s).
  • Warpgate Cooldown Values:
    • Zealot: from 20 to 22.
    • Adept: from 20 to 22.
    • Stalker: from 23 to 22.
    • Sentry: from 23 to 22.
    • High Templar: from 32 to 35.
    • Dark Templar: from 32 to 35.
• Gateway
  • Pre-Warpgate Production Time Values:
    • Zealot: from 27 to 28.
    • Adept: from 30 to 28.
    • Stalker: from 27 to 28.
    • Sentry: from 23 to 24.
    • High Templar: from 32 to 40.
    • Dark Templar: from 32 to 40.
  • Post-Warpgate Production Time Values:
    • Zealot: 18.
    • Adept: 18.
    • Stalker: 18.
    • Sentry: 16.
    • High Templar: 26.
    • Dark Templar: 26.
• Sentry
  • Hallucinations automatically inherit the current order queue of the casting Sentry.
• High Templar
  • Psi Storm total damage reduced from 110 to 100.
• Disruptor
  • Now has a 'phantom attack' weapon.
• Warp Prism
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.

Bug Fixes & Quality of Life Updates

• Fixed an issue where Carrier Interceptors owned due to a player casting Neural Parasite would not inherit the opponent's upgrades.
• Fixed an issue where EMP visuals did not provide clear visual indication of effect radius/affected units.
• Fixed an issue where Motherships would warp in adjacent to the Nexus rather than overtop.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Shield visuals would persist even after loaded into a transport.
• Fixed an issue where melee units targeting builder SCVs would lose their attack order when the SCV moved through the structure.
• Fixed an issue where SCVs could not have build orders queued sequentially onto structures already being constructed by another SCV.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Shield visuals would not update player color post-initialization.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge could knock back immobile targets during Recall.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge lacked a placement model and AOE effect radius cursor indicator.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge would be thrown in front of a target unit rather than at the targeted cast point.
• Fixed an issue where some units' spells would not trigger Protoss shield-damage graphics (Purification Nova, Corrosive Bile, KD8 Charge).
• Fixed an issue where units with burrow move would lose their current orders when told to burrow.
• Fixed an issue where 'Zerg Rocks' were lacking polish. (Now uses correct wireframe, has a Zerg building armour icon, and uses animation state to communicate health level).
• Fixed an issue where a variation of large diagonal rocks still did not receive an attack command if certain portions of the rock were within vision but not others.
• Fixed an issue where attack commands with Adept Shades in the selection behaved erratically (Example: finishing a shade caused the attack target to be lost if the command was not issued by smart command/right click, units could unexpectedly move command etc.)
• Fixed an issue where the Nexus had no indication Nexus Recall nor Energy Recharge abilities' cooldowns were global. Command card now displays charge counters and minimap displays all Nexus range radius.
• Fixed an issue where the Nexus Energy Recharge ability range radius actor would display permanently rather than when the ability was being targeted.
• Fixed an issue where Lurker Attack Spike sounds could be heard through the Fog of War.
• Fixed an issue where Lurker eggs lacked polish during creation/destruction. Eggs now take less time to appear due to faster birth animation and play a death cry to communicate when destroyed early.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism would not display an unload visual model indicator.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism would not display a load range radius actor when the ability was being targeted.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism movement was highly variant/ sluggish if ordered to queue pickup orders or pick up units slightly out of immediate range.
• Fixed an issue where Banelings in splash range of enemy units but killed by enemy units would not spawn an audio cue indicating splash damage had been dealt.
• Fixed an issue where non-disguised Changelings would not play their full birth animation.
• Fixed an issue where commanding Oracles to build Stasis Wards in areas inside their range could result in slower execution than being commanded to build outside their range.
• Fixed an issue where Oracles would teleport short distances if told to build a Stasis Ward while overlapping with other air units (such as other friendly oracles).
• Fixed an issue where Stasis Wards lacked a distinct audio cue for their death.
• Fixed an issue where players attempting to attack a Stasis Ward could easily accidentally move command underneath it instead.
• Fixed an issue where Colossus could not be created/unloaded in space an air unit already was (this mostly affects the predictability of colossus drop positioning due to collision with the warp prism).
• Fixed an issue where Voidray Prismatic Alignment lacked a termination audio cue.
• Fixed an issue where Immortal Barrier lacked a termination audio cue.
• Fixed an issue where beam attack visuals would not terminate if targets were picked up by transports or teleported away (Sentry, Void Ray).
• Fixed an issue where the Sentry's beam attack visuals were misleading due to being significantly delayed during creation and termination. They should now feel much more responsive to control.
• Fixed an issue where the Cyclone basic weapon was unable to damage friendly cloaked/buried units.
• Fixed an issue where the High Templar's basic weapon's visuals and sounds were not proportionate in size/volume to its impact.
• Fixed an issue where Vespene Geysers did not update their model to tolerate shaders if players' shader graphics settings changed mid-match, allowing for re-enabling of the higher graphics option.
• Fixed an issue where Phoenix would not face their channeled Graviton target.
• Fixed an issue where killing a Viper prior to its Abduct tongue connecting with a target would not cancel the abduct.
• Fixed an issue where Nexus would still play Blinding Cloud visuals (despite no longer having Photon Overcharge).
• Fixed an issue where Planetaries lacked or had misleading visual and audio indicators (splash damage impact visuals, sound).
• Fixed an issue where Archons lacked several visual and audio indicators (birth sound, splash damage impact visuals, movement sound, attack physics).
• Fixed an issue where Disruptor Purification Nova cooldown/firing status was difficult to discern. Ability status should now be much more obvious due to increased colour states.
• Fixed an issue where friendly Disruptor Purification Nova range radius actors were displayed permanently, even if the unit was on cooldown, causing unnecessary clutter as unit count increased.
• Fixed an issue where Swarm Host range radius actors were displayed permanently, even if the unit was on cooldown, causing unnecessary clutter as unit count increased.
• Fixed an issue where Swarm Hosts lacked an equipment (weapon) display indicator for the Locust.
• Fixed an issue where Microbial Shroud's appearance happened gradually and unnoticeably due to lacking a sufficient impact model for the cloud.
• Fixed an issue where Hellbat walk animation speed was faster than expected.
• Fixed an issue where casting Generate Creep would only affect a subselection of Overlords or Transport Overlords rather than both variations.
• Fixed an issue where Creep Tumors lacked placement and placeholder models when spreading themselves.
• Fixed an issue where it could be difficult to distinguish if a research structure was active (Twilight Council, Fleet Beacon, Armory, Evolution Chamber).
• Improved an issue where injecting Queens 'shuffle'. Allowed re-issuing inject during ongoing cast so orders are not offloaded to others queen. Long-range orders are invalid if another queen is nearby the target hatchery.
• Improved an issue where units with their primary attack order on a changeling would lose their order if the Changeling subsequently disguised itself.
• Improved an issue where gather orders were clunky for workers. Workers adjacent and move commanding to a geyser now update their command to a gather order if a refinement structure gets built.
• Xel'naga towers can now be selected through the Fog of War. Xel'naga Towers now show their vision range radius when selected.
• Active Creep Tumors will now take selection precedence over Inactive Tumors.
• Active Creep Tumors in a control group at the time of exhausting their charge will now transfer control group membership to the spread tumor.
• Critters and destructible neutral objects have been standardized to share similar targeting/selection/collision values. They will no longer collide with/block player structures or units.
• Larva/Eggs will no longer collide with/block player structures or units.
• Locusts that were previously uncommandable during their swoop animation are now also unselectable (if already selected they will stay selected).
• Neural Parasite will now add the target unit to the current selection if the selection only contains one infestor.
• Protoss structures now generate additional 'damaged' graphical models.
• As larva increases, they will now spread further upwards around the sides of the hatchery. Larva will still start from the bottom of the hatchery.
• Music selection for spectator players has been adjusted to feature a greater pool of suitable tracks for spectating. Duplicate entries have also been removed.
• Slightly polished Oracles' Revelation and Build animation transitions.
• High Templar and Ravagers are now less likely to aggro towards faraway targets.
• Adjusted Warp Prism and Raven visual fly height to minimize clipping inside other models and reduced Warp Prism shadow size on low graphics to minimize shadow-casting on unloaded units.
• Commands to unsiege Warp Prisms will now be issued to all Warp Prisms in the selection.
• Healing Shrine visuals/sounds have received a minor polish pass.
• The Warp Prism will now attempt to immediately siege when instructed rather than prioritizing deceleration.
• Mapmaker support tools now include proper Worker-Only-Path indicators, No-Resource footprints, air unit height modifier doodads, and variable rock reduction units.
• Mule Repair is now set to auto-cast by default (Mules with a harvest order still do not attempt to repair units).

Overwatch fans have been dreaming of an official animated TV series for as long as I can remember. Sure there's plenty of stellar animated shorts, but with a narrative this good, fans want to appreciate it all in one cohesive project. But so far that's all it's been: A dream. Especially after word got out that Blizzard fumbled its chance at a Netflix adaptation.

But perhaps not all is lost, as in a recent interview with IGN, Overwatch's general manager Walter Kong explained that he wouldn't "rule out" an animated series in the future. "Every time we release assets, whether it’s a hero trailer or an event piece, there are all of these comments about, 'Hey, we would love an Overwatch animated series. Blizzard, what the hell? When's that happening?'

"So we certainly hear that and I think that it is not a huge stretch to believe that there would be a lot of demand for that type of content. So certainly, no, I won't rule out that sometime in the future there could be other storytelling experiences in the Overwatch universe.

“I think we got the sense that there was this desire to know more about the story of Overwatch, because we had quite a few of the cinematic pieces released before launch. I think they helped establish that kind of emotional resonance prior to the game's launch, but what we weren't prepared for was being able to support so many ambitions. I think very early on we knew that we wanted the game to have an ongoing release cadence to it and you don't know how hard that's going to be until you actually do it."

Overwatch's great animated shorts didn't just end on its release, though. Some of my all time favourites aired years after. Doomfist's origin story, Honor and Glory, and even the recent Reign of Talon are all icons in my eyes.

"We did give it a try in terms of resuming development of the story missions and releasing the first chapter in Season 6 of 2023," Kong adds. "We did get the signal back from players that it really wasn't resonant and I think that's when we made the decision to focus our resources on the core PvP experience."

But the tides have shifted once more. Overwatch's recent rebrand has brought a whole new wave of stories with it. After the Reign of Talon cinematic we saw a bunch of new comics get added to the game, labelled as Story Time, which sees an Overwatch voice actor read through each comic. Then there's Sierra's hero trailer which also brought this overarching story to the forefront. In other words, there's been a real effort to prioritise the overarching story.

This is all to say that it would be an excellent time for Blizzard to take Overwatch's narrative one step further by releasing an official animated series. It fits with the new direction of "narrative first" and would be an excellent way to celebrate 10 years of amazing storytelling.

For the first time in a while, I'm not so sure about Diablo 4's latest loot experiment. The prevailing complaint about the current season in Lord of Hatred is that Blizzard made the benefits of its strongest items too random compared to what we had in previous seasons. While Blizzard is working on a solution to that in its next season, it's also leaning even harder into uncertainty by gutting the only items we could really rely on.

Mythic Uniques, Diablo 4's rarest and strongest items, will no longer be limited to the same Mythic Uniques we’re used to going forward (not just season 14): Mythic will instead be a variant for all the Unique items in the game. Basically, this means the items that were once the ultimate tier of loot—and came with several guaranteed stats on them—won’t be anywhere near as powerful anymore.

Mythic versions of Uniques will occasionally drop and can be created through the new crafting system introduced in Lord of Hatred. These Mythic Uniques won't have set stats, though, nor will they have new skill-enhancing powers on them. The only difference between a Mythic Unique and a regular Unique will be that the stats on them are locked to their highest values and their powers will be slightly increased. The old Mythic Uniques will still drop as “Iconic” Mythics, but their relative strength compared to other Uniques will be gutted.

Theoretically, this solves the problem where some old Mythic Uniques were ignored because of their mediocre stats. There's a staff that randomly gives you powerful shrine buffs (periodic explosions, unlimited mana, etc.) that nobody used because the stats on it weren't particularly good. With the changes in season 14, it's possible you'll find one or craft one that might work for your build. Might.

The biggest issue I see with this change is the loss of knowing your desired Uniques will be powerful the moment you see them drop. Every top build uses the Heir of Perdition helmet for the surplus of rare stats on it and its whopping 80% damage boost. When you see that helmet drop, you know you're about to become a god.

In season 14, though, Heir of Perdition will only have movement speed guaranteed on it and its damage boost will be knocked all the way down to 15%. It’ll be more in line with other Uniques, which also received nerfs, but you'll probably trash more of them than you ever have before.

I imagine Blizzard's reasoning for dramatically nerfing almost every old Mythic Unique is because they want to normalize the power of this tier of items across the board. To maintain some semblance of balance, their absurdly strong buffs will have to come back down to Earth if they're not locked behind hours and hours of grinding. But I kind of liked the concept of having a small set of items that have no variations, making them feel like stumbling onto ancient artifacts passed down from well-known figures in the lore.

Season 14 will diminish that pinnacle tier of loot and replace it with items that will only be good if you're lucky. It opens the door for more Uniques to be dusted off and used for once, but it makes the late-game loot chase extremely RNG-heavy and grindy in a way that I'm not looking forward to.

Nothing is set in stone yet, however. Blizzard will be letting us test out all of this on a PTR starting June 2. I won't be surprised if some of the specifics on how these new Mythic Uniques work will change before the season properly comes out. My hope is that there's some kind of middle ground that doesn't completely tarnish the value of the old Mythics while still allowing some flexibility for the weaker ones.

Role queueing as a tank in 5v5 Overwatch requires you to have three things: the mental fortitude of a monk, the siteline knowledge of a OWCS player, and a heart of gold, because good lord can this role feel hellish.

That is partially because a good tank can make and break your team, more so than any other role, mostly thanks to the fact that there's only one per team now after Overwatch's shift to 5V5. Instead of having a main and an off tank, you're required to be everything wrapped up in one: someone that can make space, hold the front line, and peel when your supports need you. Needless to say there's a lot of pressure.

For those who don't want to succumb to the stresses and strains of that life, you can still play 6v6. Although, it doesn't have a role queue, and the heroes currently in it are mostly balanced for 5v5 (aside from some health and ability tweaks). For this week only, though, you can queue pre-OW2 6v6 Overwatch as part of the 10 year anniversary celebrations.

I've played all of the nostalgia modes, including OG Overwatch and the Mystery Heroes tribute, and I've enjoyed each one of them for different reasons. But playing this version of 6v6 Overwatch actually made me enjoy the tank role again.

I am, however, lucid enough to realise that this is the version of tank I like the most because I always played off tank. If I had been a main tank queuer, I perhaps wouldn't like it as much, as you have less impact on team fights. But as someone who enjoys hunting down enemy flankers with my DPS without having to worry as much about our backline, this mode is brilliant.

I'm also aware that while nostalgia can be fun, change is also necessary. I've largely appreciated the shift to 5v5 as it's streamlined teamfights, made individual contributions have more impact, and just generally made everything more concise. As a support main I forget how stressful it is to keep not just one but two squishy tanks up.

Either way, I can't get too used to this 6v6 mode as it'll disappear back into the ether at the end of the week when the 10 year anniversary celebrations finally come to an end. It's a melancholy thought. Although, on the bright side, Aaron Keller has already confirmed that more free stuff is planned for later this year. I'll always get out of bed for free stuff.

They say time flies when you're having fun, and boy did these past 10 years of Overwatch sure zip past. For the last few weeks Team 4 has been celebrating the momentous milestone with nostalgic game modes, cosmetics, loot boxes, and more loot boxes. But now game director Aaron Keller has taken to social media to share his own celebration: Overwatch's creation story.

"Happy 10 year anniversary Overwatch," Keller says. "While the game launched 10 years ago, Team 4 started working on it in mid-2013. I'd like to take you all through some of that original journey that the team took to launch the game."

It won't come as a surprise to many of you that Overwatch actually originated from a scrapped Project Titan, but Keller shows us just how much was used with concept art that would later become Cole Cassidy; it doesn't look like they changed a thing. But I suppose that's to be expected when the team was just given a few weeks to pitch Overwatch.

Keller then goes on to explain how Team 4 "codenamed the new project Prometheus and the development team called ourselves Prometheans," which is pretty fitting all things considered.

From this point onwards, the team began working on several aspects of what would later become Overwatch: "We quickly got to work, figuring out key issues for the new project like character and environment scale", alongside the "combat feel" including what being low health would look like in-game.

One feature I've always loved about Overwatch is how it can convey masses of information efficiently. This is through small aspects like a tinted screen to relay when you're low health or being healed, the sound design which can tip you off to what hero is around a corner or what ult is about to be launched into your team, or by the simple fact that its in-game UI holds so much information yet never feels overwhelming.

This precision also translates to Overwatch's character designs, which are still some of the best in the business. But they were so good at the time of pitching back in 2013 that it was actually credited "as the moment where the room transformed from doubtful to excited about what this game could be." I get it, I was also overwhelmed with excitement the first time I saw Roadhog.

Then there were all the map mockups located around the world, including what would later become the legendary King's Row and the not-so-legendary Throne of Anubis. Funnily enough, Anubis went on to become the "first real map" after the team "worked in paper for months", as they waited for the engine to be rebuilt from the scraps of Project Titan.

Overwatch's creation story is one of resilience, and that's something Team 4 have continued to draw from over the past 10 years, through all the ups and downs. But here's hoping for more ups going forward. "I am so grateful for our community, its players, past, present and future," Keller ends with. "This world means so much to us, and to me personally. I sincerely hope that 10 years from now, we're celebrating another decade together. From the bottom of my heart, thank you."

The Fortnitification of videogames has seeped into just about every live-service excursion at this point. You can play as Nicki Minaj in Call of Duty. Final Fantasy 14 is getting an Evangelion raid series in its next expansion. Tekken 8 just announced a Baki character as its final Season 3 DLC fighter. Media can no longer exist on its own, it must merge and coalesce into an amorphous glob of characters and celebrities.

One notable exception has been Riot's games, particularly League of Legends and Valorant. While there are skins that certainly appear inspired by other famous media, it's never outright crossed over with other characters. And it'll be staying that way, according to League's lead designer August Browning.

During a stream on his Twitch channel (clipped and edited by HeWhoQuacksss), Browning responded to a question on how open Riot was to including third-party skins. "We've been pretty not open to that," he said. "The second you do third-party skins, the tone of your game completely changes."

He then goes ahead and talks about some of the games that have gone all in on collaborations. "Now that doesn't mean it's bad—it's really cool to play Overwatch and play all these anime characters and K-pop idols and things like that, right? It's cool to go into Fortnite, and have Goku and Jinx fighting Ariana Grande and Peter Griffin. But tonally speaking, it is also very different from the tone of all the characters in [League]."

Browning goes on to say that "historically, Riot has been pretty hesitant to do skins from other IPs," though highlights that the game does have a Louis Vuitton skin for Sena as well as a Swain skin that "looks very similar to certain chicken establishments." But overall? Browning calls straight-up crossing over other characters "a big step."

I mean, I get it. I don't need every videogame I ever play to put all my favourite characters from other stuff in it. I love Persona 5, but I don't need Joker making an appearance everywhere I go, you know? I have to agree with Browning's sentiment that all of these collaborations can drastically shift your game tonally, and I'd even go so far as to say it can really water down a game's identity.

Is putting Godzilla in Crocs and making him do K-Pop dances in Fortnite inherently funny? Obviously it is, but that ridiculousness loses its edge when everyone is doing it. Though I wouldn't consider myself the biggest enjoyer of Riot's library, I certainly appreciate its desire to stay in its own lane.

The MMO is in dire straits at the moment. Don't get me wrong, it's popular—but it's an aging genre, to the point where we even didn't have a single MMO make it to our Top 100 list last year, because while there are still many popular ones going, they've been losing too many points for recency and relevancy.

Meanwhile, when it comes to new MMOs, it's a bloodbath. They're either getting axed like New World or snuffed in the crib like Project Blackbird—and the ones that do truck along with a few thousand players are small-scale indie projects like Project Gorgon. Everyone else is an old dog in search of new tricks to keep humble playerbases ticking over.

Sharing my consternation over the state of things is Jack Emmert, an MMO veteran designer who has worked on games like City of Heroes/Villains, Neverwinter, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and more—many of which are still up and running.

Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz, Emmert puts it plain: "People want MMOs, and the sales of New World proved it. But I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it, and so ultimately they shut it down.

"I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn't exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft, or in my games, or in the Daybreak games … They want something new."

He still believes that the spectre of being a WoW killer is haunting newer MMOs even to this day—killing them via ballooning scope: "In [the publisher's mind], they needed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and they also needed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

"These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

The antidote—and it is a big ask—is a publisher that's comfortable with setting reasonable expectations, rather than desperately trying to make the next WoW or Destiny. They need to "establish a reasonable budget with a reasonable projection, stick to it, and have a very distinct vision of what you're trying to do."

He uses the example of Neverwinter, which released with a pretty straightforward set of features: "A major publisher would have said to this game, 'Oh well, you're going to need to build your own house, and you're going to need to cut down forests: What's going to differentiate you from World of Warcraft?'

"When I made Neverwinter, I never even thought like that. I was just trying to make the experience of what I had work. I didn't worry about competitors. I didn't worry about the X factor that's going to make me stand out. Just didn't even think about it."

Makes sense to me. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play: "Players don't mind, it's the publishers who thought you needed a bajillion number of things."

I think Emmert's assessment here is fair—I can certainly see echoes of it in the horror stories surrounding Anthem, wherein Mark Darrah said that the ability for mechs to fly was tossed back in very nearly last-minute as part of BioWare's "highly dysfunctional relationship with decision-making."

But sometimes a game just gets kneecapped out of nowhere even if it's doing fine. Maybe New World didn't have too much soul—but it's still very possible to make money off a game with 10,000 players. Perhaps Emmert's right in a different sense. There's a humbler, leaner version of New World that would've made its publisher comfortable with those numbers.

Diablo continues to be a huge deal, and I'm not just talking about the latest entry, even if it is Blizzard's fastest-selling game ever. Millions of people went straight back to Diablo 3, and as the series' lead producer Matthew Cederquist told Polygon in a recent interview, Diablo's 26-year-old sophomore release is still surprisingly active.

It makes sense that there's renewed interest in D2 given that it just got an additional class, the warlock, via its first new expansion in a quarter-century, but the extent of its popularity might surprise you. Polygon points out that players created 1.92 million warlocks between Feb. 11 and March 11. Players also collectively played the expansion for a whopping 93.4 million hours, suggesting that Diablo is pretty moreish no matter which decade it's from.

"There's so many fans that were just screaming at the top of the mountain to give them something," Cederquist told Polygon. "It was nice because players moved extremely quickly from, 'I can't believe Diablo 2 has a new class, oh my God,' to actually doing what players do best, which is digging into the game, testing builds, arguing about synergies, making build guides, and then preparing for the new ladder that came out with it."

With a potential future for the pre-expansion version of World of Warcraft on the horizon and Heroes of the Storm continuing to get balance updates years after it was shifted to maintenance mode, it's interesting to see Blizzard's approach to its older games shift with the times.

The studio is so gargantuan these days that it can keep several versions of the same game afloat and active simultaneously. Given how diverse the larger ARPG space is even outside of the big dogs—a paradigm PC Gamer contributor Russell Adderson called "a golden age" for the genre—it's hard not to feel spoiled for choice.

Earlier this year, Overwatch shook things up: It dropped the 2, it dropped five heroes at once, and it dropped more story than it's ever had. Blizzard kickstarted a new era for the live service hero shooter almost 10 years after its debut, a plan that was partially inspired by the explosive success of Marvel Rivals.

When Marvel Rivals landed in late 2024, the Overwatch team saw it as the first direct competitor it had in years. As Rivals' player counts skyrocketed and the comparisons to Overwatch took over social media, Blizzard knew something had to change.

In a recent group interview with PC Gamer, Overwatch GM and SVP of Blizzard Walter Kong admitted Marvel Rivals' success "scared us a bit." The boundless enthusiasm for NetEase's crude hero designs prompted the team to "be less risk averse because we felt that if we stayed conservative then we're definitely going to feel some of the competitive pressure."

The first product of this reset came in the form of in-match perks introduced to core modes. Then came Stadium, a round-based mode with MOBA-style powers and builds, soon after.

While there were certainly concerns from players about the amount of sudden change, Overwatch was more vibrant and enjoyable than it'd been in years. Rapid patches to Stadium and perks, as well as regular communication from game director Aaron Keller, helped assure players that nothing broken or unfair would last very long. This was also around the time I would regularly see people in Reddit threads and on social media saying that Overwatch was finally back.

It took another year for Blizzard to overhaul some internal processes—primarily the time it takes to create new heroes—so that it could maintain this new, faster pace. Now, the plan is to kick off every new year with something huge, like releasing five heroes all at once. It also includes constant updates to the story and a new hero every season.

Whether or not Marvel Rivals sparked any of these specific ideas, it seems to have made Blizzard far less concerned about tainting the spirit of Overwatch. Nothing about it feels like it'll be left stagnant for too long. Several old maps and heroes have major reworks on the way, and fan-favorite features, like post-match accolades, have already made a return.

Things are going well: Season 1 saw one of the highest player counts Overwatch has had since the sequel was released in 2022. Players are busy speculating on who the next hero will be and if it'll be a recognizable face from the lore (it sure seems like it). And Doja Cat hopped onto a stream to settle the debate and proclaim that she thinks Overwatch is better than Marvel Rivals (she's correct).

Show of hands—how many of you know that the payload in Overwatch can heal you? How many of you know how to counter switch? And, now this is crucial, how many of you know not to run out and take on the enemy team all by yourself? I'm going to go ahead and say 100% of everyone reading this, but sadly not everyone can be as savvy as us.

But worry not, one Overwatch player has come up with a plan to help those who don't have great game sense figure it out, and the answer has been in front of us the whole time: "I thought the Overwatch spawn doors were a big unused billboard that could communicate effectively to players."

I thought the Overwatch spawn doors is a big unused billboard that could communicate effectively to players. from r/Overwatch

The idea's simple: you could place huge messages to players on the spawn doors, meaning they'll see it every time they respawn. Player pogstream comes up with a few tips which could be easily conveyed such as:

• You are staggered Group UP
• You have died x amount of times
• Interact Key not bound
• Ultimate held for x amount of minutes
• You are alone in voice chat
• Push the payload (it also heals you)
• Current K/D

Let's not forget old faithful:

• It looks like you are being countered by the enemy team. Have you considered switching heroes?

And the best part? It's actually not a bad idea. Having some visual queues could be a real asset for Overwatch, given how much its grown and changed over the last 10 years. Obviously, if this were to ever grace the game there would need to be an option to turn it off, but I'd certainly be up for a couple of reminders every now and then. I, too, have been guilty of holding my ult for a tad too long.

Just as pogstream says, "A little ego check never hurt anyone". I couldn't agree more. Yesterday, I played a competitive match with a Genji who went the full game against a Moira and Zarya without swapping. It didn't end well for them, needless to say my team could've really used one of these spawn door signposts for that match.

Week two of Overwatch's 10-year anniversary celebrations kicked off with more challenges, loot boxes, and a gamemode for us to try out. Instead of the OG mode that players got to check out last week, this time we've got a play on Mystery Heroes, the mode where each player gets a random hero when they respawn.

This version, called Mystery Showdown, is slightly different but just as chaotic. There's a little less uncertainty as you first pick a role queue, meaning there'll always be one tank, two DPS, and two supports in a team, and instead of swapping heroes when you die, you swap heroes when you get an elimination, or three assists as a support. Or, as I found out, until the game mercy swaps you if you're particularly awful at a hero and are incapable of getting elims or assists.

While I have enjoyed my fair share of regular Mystery Hero games, I wasn't prepared to enjoy this mode quite as much as I did. Largely because of how hilarious it is to change into a hero you've never played before in the middle of a huge teamfight during overtime.

I found myself in the middle of a ball of chaos several times, as I'd be gearing up to use a D.Va bomb against a whole team only to accidentally get an elim mid team fight and suddenly switch to Winston, with no bomb to use or clue as to what I'm doing.

I'm largely a support main, thanks to a time before role queue, but I still pride myself on knowing enough DPS and Tank heroes to role fill where needed, or at least I thought I did. Playing this mode on either of these two roles made me appreciate just how many heroes are out there and how little I know about them.

I understand the concept of plenty of heroes, but executing those skills is harder than it looks. Picture this: we're in the middle of a fight on payload, the enemy Orisa uses her ult and pulls my entire team into her AoE attack, but I'm playing Symmetra and I know I can teleport my team out of here, I just need my synapses to connect fast enough.

I place one teleport down and then the other, and then, we all die to the ult anyway. Turns out my synapses did, in fact, not connect fast enough and instead of placing the second teleport outside the range of damage I just TP'd us all back into the same ult. Whoops.

Aside from humiliating myself for most of the matches Mystery Showdown is a chaotic yet incredibly fun mode which showcases all the weird and wonderful heroes and abilities Overwatch has to offer. It feels like the right way to celebrate 10 years of Overwatch.

World of Warcraft: Midnight seems inclined, like its past couple of expansions, to be less demanding of entry-level requirements for Mythic+ and high-end raiding—there's more ways to gear up a character solo than ever via activities like Prey, and there's no mandatory Torghast-esque chores to tick off or borrowed power item to grind out points on.

And yet, some players have found themselves on an economic treadmill—as broken down by this solid analysis on WoWHead. This had mostly passed me by, given I'm not pushing keys—though I'd been aware of shield-wielding tanks getting shafted.

The issue? Repair costs. Now, repair costs are important to your average MMO—see, MMOs are technically printing money all the time. Every mob you kill, every bit of trash you vendor, every dungeon you complete, adds some form of money into the economy.

And if there's too much cash going around, then inflation becomes a major problem. And you can't just make non-player sources of gold generation more generous, because that'll only make it worse.

Still, when you look at WoW's repair costs for the highest-end players, it's nasty. Gear quality (what "track" it's on) makes a large impact, with Mythic gear being around 67% more expensive to repair—WoWHead compares a Mythic-tier two hander (523 gold) to a Champion-tier one hander (93 gold) to demonstrate.

Overall, WoWHead puts the average cost of a single death for a Mythic at 250 gold—if you want to kill the latest Mythic boss, WoW's Progstats puts that at an average of 343 pulls, rounded down. That's 87,750 gold to clear one boss—and that's not even including the extra gold costs required to raid at that level.

As a matter of fact, let's figure it out with the prices on my current server, even being charitable and assuming I've got a crafting friend who's willing to foot the bill for my gear and gems and enchants. WoWHead's Outlaw Rogue BiS for consumables suggests the following:

• Flask of the Shattered Sun (917g per hour).
• Thalassian Phoenix Oil (40g per hour).
• Void-Touched Augment Rune (846g per hour).
• For a total cost of 1,803 gold per hour of progression.
• (I've not put the recommended food here since it can be shared with the whole raid.)

That's just the hourly stuff—Light's Potential, a combat potion, and the SIlvermoon Health Potion can be added onto that per-pull cost, a combined total of 585 gold on my server. Using progstats' average progression timing of 29 hours (rounded up), we can actually figure out how much it costs to beat the Midnight Falls raid, purely in repair costs and consumables.

• Repair costs are 87,750 gold (250 gold x 343 pulls).
• Per-encounter consumables are an eye-watering 200,655 gold (585 gold x 343 pulls).
• Hourly consumables are 52,287 gold (1,803 gold x 29 hours).
• 52,287 + 87,750 + 200,655 = 340,692.

So if you're a Mythic raider, being as tryhard as you possibly can, it costs 340,692 gold to prog and clear Midnight Falls. Now, that number's probably a little high—that Light's Potential and health potion are by far the biggest cost factor, and you might not be using a per-encounter consumable on every pull if you still haven't seen enrage.

But even without them, repair costs being significantly more expensive than your hourly consumables budget is wild, and players are feeling the sting in their wallets. As one player pointed out on the WoW subreddit this month, it all adds up very quickly: "I as a Warlock am paying 20 THOUSAND gold in repairs and APPARENTLY I am on the LOWER END. The Protection Warrior is allegedly (in his words) paying over 35k a raid night."

Which is rough. I can absolutely see why some costs are there—again, MMO economies do need gold sinks, or stuff gets out of hand real quickly. You don't want a SWTOR situation circa 2023 where a level 24 accessory is being sold for 49 million credits.

But it does seem countermand to WoW's anti-busywork philosophy in recent years. Sure, you can get gold from just about anywhere, but demanding players foot a steep bill just for the honour of hardcore raiding does seem like an extra layer of unnecessary punishment.

A single skill tree upgrade in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred has sent its most loot-hungry players into a frenzy. In one click you can gain more power than Blizzard probably intended, covering the ground in so much loot the game can't handle it.

Lord of Hatred's new activity skill trees let you customize the game's various dungeon types with things like bonus loot and tougher bosses. Many players overlooked an option to respawn slain enemies while a shrine buff is active early on, but now they've recognized its true power. With it, you can create a chain reaction of respawning treasure goblins, Diablo 4's most lucrative monsters.

YouTube user FP has proven that the Nightmare Dungeon "Gauntlet" upgrade can net you over 2,000 treasure goblins—2,401 in their case—in a single dungeon. But, they warn, this is far too many treasure goblins for one player to kill. All the bright piles of loot eventually start to disappear as the game struggles to maintain the number of individual items on the floor, like some kind of cosmic punishment.

If anything, FP's video is a proof-of-concept for a farming strategy that beats out everything else in the game as long as you don't push it too far. The trick requires finding a dungeon filled with guaranteed shrines and resetting it until you find some treasure goblins—a rare event that can take quite a while to show up. Before you start smashing them, you need to plan out a route so you can activate several shrines in a row. Any goblins that are killed while the shrine buff is active will respawn as it ends, giving you an opening to activate another shrine and keep the chain going.

The "Gelatinous" goblins are what you're looking for because they split into several smaller goblins when you kill them. Those smaller goblins will respawn as bigger ones, raising your goblin stonks exponentially as they multiply.

Barbarian players using the popular Whirlwind build, like FP, can spin through the dungeon without having to actually see what's going on underneath all the item text. Everyone else might want to utilize Lord of Hatred's new loot filter settings to make only your desired items visible. I'd also recommend flipping on a podcast or a YouTube video while you sort through the heaps of loot the goblins drop.

FP says they lost pretty much all of the loot and will be reigning it in for the next run. They hope that a more modest 399 goblins will keep the game from deleting their rewards. Here's my worry though: Diablo lore tells us that demons never truly die and instead regenerate in the depths of hell. FP may be setting up their own demise when these goblins inevitably come back to life with a thirst for revenge. None of that loot will matter when an army of goblins come to take back what's theirs.

The Overwatch gang has finally arrived in Fortnite, and you know what that means. That's right, we're talking about Tracer's butt again. Fans are convinced that Tracer's backside got buffed in her Fortnite incarnation, and you know, I think they might be right.

Some quick history, for those who either weren't around 10 years ago, or are fortunate enough to have memory-holed the whole thing: One of the big controversies in the early days of Overwatch (and this is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I swear it's true) was the bodaciousness of Tracer's booty. First, gamers complained that an over-the-shoulder victory pose had too much ass, so Blizzard changed it and then other gamers complained that there was not enough ass.

Ten years later, former Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan said the amount of ass actually "stayed exactly the same"—it was merely the pose itself that changed. As PC Gamer's resident knower-of-Overwatch Elie Gould said, a decade of water under the bridge had turned the whole thing into something of a joke, although there's no doubt in my mind that an undercurrent of resentment and rage continues to flow through some corners of the online world.

Which brings us to today. Just a month after Kaplan's comment, Tracer's caboose is back in the conversation, because some of the folks on the TracerMains suibreddit—and today I learned there is a TracerMains subreddit—seem pretty sure that she's been re-proportioned for the Fortnite crossover.

Tracer has a bigger butt in Fortnite from r/TracerMains

Look, I'm not here to objectify videogame characters or anything, but speaking entirely observationally and clinically, yeah, that's a big dumper. The Unreal Engine's really working overtime to render this one.

For purposes of comparison, here's the original Tracer tush that caused all the uproar a decade ago:

So yeah, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that one of these things is not like the other.

Another angle:

The way I see it, there are two possibilities at play here—three, I suppose, if you include the possibility that we're all just imagining the maximizing of those glutes: One, the good folks at Epic know what they like and they're not afraid to let their freak flag fly, or two, the Unreal Engine is just naturally back-loaded, so to speak. I have no idea which it might be, but I hope it's the former.

As a conscientious videogame journalism professional, I have reached out to Epic Games to ask if they did indeed give Tracer some newly embiggened ham cakes, because that's the sort of thing I do on a Friday afternoon when everyone just wants to get out of the office and go home. I'll let you know if anyone replies.

Overwatch players expected a lot more for its 10th anniversary in-game event. For many, grinding for loot boxes that contain old skins with new colorways and some sprays didn't feel worthy of such a significant milestone, not to mention the huge amount of games you have to play to earn them in the first place.

In a game with a massive catalog of cosmetics—many of which were only available for a limited time—players had hoped there would be a way to earn them through the anniversary event. It was a reasonable expectation to have considering Overwatch 1 used to offer anniversary loot boxes that contained almost everything that has ever existed in the game. And it didn't help that the Chinese version of the event seems to shower players with rewards, some of which aren't even available for everyone else, like skins from old seasonal battle passes.

The disappointment players expressed on social media was strong enough to prompt a response from game director Aaron Keller on X. In it, he called the reactions "fair" and announced some improvements to the rewards coming next week.

Instead of needing to grind out almost 100 matches to earn the anniversary loot boxes, you'll only need to complete 60, with wins counting as two. In addition to that, the loot boxes rewarded to everyone for filling up a meter based on players collectively completing challenges will be doubled next week and tripled the week after. And in the final week, everyone who logs in will get a special anniversary loot box that has four Legendary skins.

Keller also announced that the next season will have a new event with "even more rewards" and that the team is working on ways to offer more free cosmetics "later in the year." In other words, the 10th anniversary celebration will continue for the next few seasons in some shape or form.

"I understand that future rewards don't make this specific event bigger, but I hope it gives some context for how we're thinking about this year as a whole," Keller wrote.

Early reactions to the news are mostly positive, although some players still think the recolored anniversary skins aren't good enough. I've seen people argue that Blizzard should be handing out some of the most expensive skins in the game for free and others say that they're surprised they got anything for free.

Personally, the flood of pricey shop cosmetics over the last few years has kept my expectations low when it comes to events like these, but I still think Blizzard could've done something more exciting for the 10th anniversary. The "classic" mode that attempts to emulate the original game as it was when it launched is a neat addition, and it would've been cool to see a bunch of cosmetics that actually tie into the game's history. It's Overwatch after all, an FPS that basically created an entire sub-genre. Not a lot of games do that and also manage to stick around for a decade. A set of slightly renewed skins and some sprays that recreate memes doesn't really match the gravity of such an achievement.

Blizzard recently dropped the first big patch for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, addressing several issues that cropped up in the first few weeks of the expansion. Disabled items that were breaking the game came back and a mountain of bugs were fixed, including one that was supposed to help players make their characters a little tougher against the demons of Sanctuary.

It was not, however, supposed to grant them near-immortality.

One of the main defensive mechanics in the game is called resolve. Basically, it's a buff several classes can stack up that reduces their damage taken from all sources. In Diablo 4, this kind of damage reduction is incredibly important as you move up in the difficulty tiers in your search for better loot. Monsters fling lightning bolts at you, leave poison pools on the ground, and make all sorts of other attacks that frequently overlap when you're clearing through crowds of them.

To not get popped like a balloon, you need a lot of damage reduction. The recent patch fixed one of the strongest ways to achieve this: a Legendary power called Glynn's Anvil. Before, it did absolutely nothing. But now, when you slap this power onto one of your items, you'll gain 4% damage reduction for every stack of resolve you have, capped at eight stacks, or 24% damage reduction, by default. That would be a lot on its own, but Blizzard didn't catch a separate bug that takes this to game-breaking levels of damage reduction.

Several classes, like paladins and spiritborn, can add a stat onto their gear that increases their resolve cap by three. That wouldn't be a problem if upgrading your item—and therefore the stat—didn't inexplicably bring it up to 12, an increase that was clearly not intended. You can exploit this weird math on three pieces of gear and increase your total resolve stacks to 44. With Glynn's Anvil now working, that gives you 176% damage reduction, AKA the closest thing to immortality you'll ever achieve in Diablo 4.

Diablo 4 creator MacroBioBoi demonstrated how ridiculous this bug is in a recent video. Without the resolve stacks, he took a 30,000 damage hit. With them, he was tickled for merely 4,000 damage. He still takes damage because the math for damage reduction is multiplicative, which essentially means you can't perfectly negate 100% of it. But Macrobioboi's results show how absurdly powerful this can be for max level characters who are already built to be pretty tanky. It's the difference between needing to chug an emergency potion and not drinking one ever again, especially if your build naturally regains life over time.

And this is without taking advantage of the unique mechanics different classes have that interact with resolve, like a Legendary power that gives you an increased chance to block incoming attacks for every stack of resolve (a 100% chance to block is easily achievable with this bug).

Blizzard must've been so busy playing whack-a-mole with people achieving infinite damage it missed a bug that let people achieve infinite defense. It's been a few days and the studio still hasn't mentioned that a fix is incoming, but I doubt this is a bug that will last very long. Some of the game's most valuable loot is locked behind bosses who can one-shot you with some of their attacks and I'm sure Blizzard wouldn't want half of the classes essentially getting it all for free.

Overwatch, one of the pioneers of the live service model, has finally come full circle with an official Fortnite collab this week. For years, Blizzard kept its iconic heroes close to its chest, but now they've been released, free to show up as premium cosmetics elsewhere in the live service multiverse.

It already felt like Blizzard was becoming less precious with its Overwatch characters after spending the last three years flooding the hero shooter with brands like Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Porsche. Collab skins went from being sorta like cosplay to near-copies of characters from other games.

In a world where Destiny 2 has a whole Star Wars-themed expansion and the stars of the Fallout TV show are earning killstreaks in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, anything is possible. So when the rumors of a Fortnite collab started a few months ago, they seemed plausible.

And here we are: Mercy from Overwatch has officially hit the Griddy, Genji is dancing to Cardi B, D.Va is editing her way to a victory royale, and Tracer is blinking across the Sandy Strip. Overwatch heroes are now skins in the game that took what Blizzard started and turned it into the business model that every major publisher is desperate to emulate.

Alongside the skins are recreations of popular Overwatch maps, like Hanamura and King's Row. While you're gathering loot, you can find Tracer's twin pistols which shift your view into first-person. It's just like playing Overwatch, if Overwatch were a massive battle royale where the only objective is to kill anything that moves until you're the last one standing.

There's something wrong about seeing Mercy, a support hero in Overwatch, carrying around an AK-47. Overwatch's universe is supposed to be a hopeful version of the future, and while there are major caveats to that, dropping these heroes into a completely different context renders them into the same charmless, plastic toys that every iconic character seems doomed to become.

It doesn't help that they all spout lines from Overwatch like you're pulling a string on their backs. In the trailer, Mercy floats onto the screen to say, "Heroes never die" like she does in the original Overwatch teaser cinematic, except she isn't really saying it to anyone in particular. She's just there to kick off more references as Tracer and D.Va join in with their own phrases from Overwatch. D.Va's "Nerf this!" is particularly nonsensical because, without her exploding mech, it's unclear what she's even referring to.

This is what the age of collabs has brought to gaming: An insatiable maw that chews up once-memorable characters and spits them back out as barely recognizable cosmetics for $19.99. Overwatch is just the latest game to be swallowed up in a trend that doesn't show any signs of stopping soon.

Overwatch's 10 year anniversary celebrations have begun and aside from giving players their body weight in loot boxes Team 4 has also added an OG game mode for day one Overwatch into the Arcade, and boy is it a reality check.

I really only tried the OG mode thanks to a mix of curiosity and a need for more anniversary loot boxes, but I ended up staying for more than just the required number of games mostly because it was just so chaotic. We played matches with 12 Winstons engaging in epic sky battles and fighting over the last med pack, subjected enemy teams to the cursed Reinhardt, Bastion, and Mercy team up, and relished in a time when Widowmaker had so few shields to contend with. It's a lot of fun and a very nostalgic experience, but it's also a complete mess.

First off, why is everyone and everything so slow? D.Va may as well be standing still when she's walking with primary fire engaged, trying to reach your team while in a Zenyatta ult is like wading through quicksand, and Roadhog? Well, he is actually completely still when self healing. It's so funny to me that all of this was normal once upon a time, especially when I see a Hog stop dead in his tracks in the middle of a barrage of fire to hopelessly heal himself only to flop over dead moments later.

I also forgot just how weak tanks were, with a Bastion being able to shred through a Zayra's bubble and health in seconds, and just how quickly ults were charged. It felt like ults were available for almost every single fight. Not to mention just how few heroes were available to play at launch.

Now, none of this is to dog on OG Overwatch. I loved it then and I love it now. But what playing this old version does do is make me appreciate just how far this game has come over the last 10 years.

The vast majority of heroes have improved leaps and bounds since they were first added. Bastion's grenade and Winston's right click both balance the heroes so well while giving them some much needed burst / long range damage. Removing crowd control abilities like Cassidy's flash bang or Mei's freeze effect also make such a huge positive difference, especially for tanks who don't like getting stunned every other second.

Even small things like adding some self healing or speeding up individual heroes over the years has gone a long way to making the game feel more exciting.

Many of these tweaks are small enough and have been implemented over such a long period of time that it's easy to forget just how much Overwatch has changed. But bringing OG Overwatch back really puts a spotlight on just how good we have it right now, and I think that's a pretty great way to celebrate the 10 year anniversary.

World of Warcraft: Midnight has had some trouble with its class balancing—some of this is fair enough, given Blizzard completely redesigned the game's specialisations (there's close to 40 of them) to better suit a world without UI mods. This had, uh, some consequences.

Consequences like, for instance, five bears rocking up to your dungeon and flattening it with absolutely no regard to the holy trinity. See, the Guardian druid tank spec received some buffs to help it maintain threat, as bear players were struggling to keep mobs hitting them as nature intended (thanks, WoWHead).

About two weeks ago, Blizzard wrote: "Guardian Druids have continued to overperform in single target contexts, while experiencing difficulties with threat and sustained damage outside of cooldowns. With these changes, we’re aiming to reduce burst potential and transfer some of that power into more reliable and consistent abilities to aid in generating and maintaining threat."

That's all well and good—Midnight's also been struggling with a burst-based meta that saw a lot of classes' power being funnelled into big damage spikes, which doesn't feel great in solo content especially.

The buffs, largely to the spec's damage with Thrash (200% to its direct damage, 100% to its bleed damage) quickly resulted in five Guardian druids rocking up to a level 20 Mythic+ dungeon key and managing to "time" it, which just means beating the dungeon within the stringent time limit. For context, gear rewards cap out at level 10.

Just hopping on over to the warcraftlogs of the run, and oop, yep. There's Thrash on the top tank of the group accounting for 59.38% of their damage. Anyway, Blizzard quickly stepped in to revert the change yesterday, with community manager Kaivax writing:

"Our recent adjustments to Guardian have made the Elune’s Chosen build stronger than intended. We’re going to take steps to bring this back in line with realm restarts during scheduled weekly maintenance this week."

Reactions have been pretty funny, all told. Here's a thread on the WoW Subreddit directly blaming these five bears for getting the class nerfed:

Guardian druids right now from r/wow

Honestly, while WoW's recent problems with its latest patch have been… let's call them not great, I think this sort of chicanery is to be celebrated. Not on Blizzard's part, but the players'. I just think it's neat to see folks trying absurd things just because they can. And also because Blizzard buffed one of their abilities by 200%. That also.

Ever since Blizzard released World of Warcraft Classic (and maybe even before), players have been begging for it to take a version of the old MMO and experiment with it. This proposed "WoW Classic Plus" wouldn't follow the timeline of updates the original MMO did, but veer off in a new direction as if it were a modern game—much like Old School Runescape.

With no major WoW Classic releases announced, WoW Classic Plus believers are convinced their time is almost here. Blizzard recently invited a bunch of well known WoW Classic creators to California for something none of them can talk about until an NDA is lifted. As far as I can tell, this hasn't happened before and is, at the very least, compelling evidence that Blizzard is working on something that isn't just another expansion re-release.

"I did just get approval to say that I will be gone a little bit next week," WoW creator Xaryu said during a recent Twitch stream, smiling as his chat exploded with "Classic+" messages. "Because I am visiting Blizzard next week—good news—for something that I cannot say, but I will be there."

If it wasn't for the fact that Blizzard specifically picked WoW streamers who focus on WoW Classic, like Sodapoppin and Esfand, I would've written this off as wishful thinking. But you don't invite these people to see the next release of an old expansion early. It might not be Classic Plus, but it's gotta be something new.

Even though Blizzard has never said it's working on a WoW Classic Plus, there have been a couple signs that it's interested in doing more with WoW Classic as a format. Chinese players currently have access to a version of WoW Classic that remixes old raids, and it doesn't seem to have an expiration date. And a 2025 wrap-up post teased that the team has been "cooking on the long-term future of WoW Classic," with a bunch of plus signs drawn below it.

It's possible the streamers are seeing the result of Blizzard's only WoW Classic Plus-like release, Season of Discovery. A seasonal version of the MMO that let you bend the rules with things like healing mages and tanking warlocks, Season of Discovery was an exaggerated version of the old MMO that didn't quite satisfy people who want a permanent version with new material. However, Season of Discovery's surprise success could've sparked Blizzard to start working on a Classic Plus for real.

Given how much nostalgia there is for playing with WoW's old systems in its old world through the likes of WoW Remix and Season of Discovery, I think a WoW Classic Plus, be it limited-time or permanent, is inevitable. BlizzCon is in September, which makes this seem like the perfect time to start teasing a new-ish version of WoW.

Diablo 4 has had its fair share of bugs that players have gleefully exploited. If it's not some item that gives you the power to deal infinite damage, it's a dungeon dropping too much loot. Diablo is a complicated videogame; unforeseen interactions are kind of inevitable.

But that's not how I'd describe the latest thing players are exploiting in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred. There's an item with a number so big that I cannot imagine anyone at Blizzard would've thought it was OK to do on purpose. Someone must've forgotten a decimal point because it's the sole reason players are currently making billions more gold than is normally possible.

A new Lord of Hatred Horadric seal item says you will earn 900% more gold when you equip it. Not 9% or 90%. It says 900% and it means it. No other item has a number that big, which is why many players think it's a mistake. The amount of gold that drops scales way up as you climb into the highest difficulty levels already, but with this item, you don't really need to worry about it again.

In the past, gold wouldn't be much of an issue. But in Lord of Hatred, there are quite a lot of things that will empty your pockets. Something as simple as swapping out a single stat on an item can cost millions of gold to gamble for the one you want. And the new skill trees that modify the game's different endgame activities charge you 40 million or more just to move your points around. Forget the ultra rare mythic uniques: Gold is the true endgame chase item.

Well, it was until word got around that this specific item buff can solve all your problems. The gold-boosting seal isn't hard to get either. You need to reroll other seals in the new Horadric Cube crafting system until it pops out. You then need a set of charms normally meant for low-level players to equip alongside the seal for the bonus to activate. Those require dropping your difficulty setting and rerolling charms until you get the right ones. Anyone who has been playing fairly regularly for the last week should have all the materials to do this in a few minutes. Diablo 4 streamer Wudijo has a quick video on how this process works if you've never done any of this before.

You sacrifice a bit of your character's power to become richer than you'd ever really need to be in just a few hours with the seal equipped. There are dungeons that drop extra gold and bonuses on the activity skill trees that make for a ridiculous combination, netting you a few billion every run. In just a few hours of grinding with this item, gold will no longer be a concern.

The only people who don't benefit from this little mistake are those who buy items from other players on trade websites. Prices are about to go way up as players get their hands on this broken item and it'll be mandatory if you actually want to be able to afford anything—at least until Blizzard notices and sticks a decimal point on there.

A new discovery in the hunt for Diablo 4's secret cow level was found over the weekend, continuing the quest that started when the game was originally released.

While no cow level has been found yet, there are several obscure quest objectives that were added in the Lord of Hatred expansion. Solving them requires exploring the new islands of Skovos in search of unique items, like a cryptic tome hidden in an unmarked room. And once completed, you're rewarded with a new item that has no known use at the time of this writing but is currently being investigated by the clever minds in the cow level Discord server.

I followed the full guide on the Discord, which took me all over the map looking for unique items that can only be found if you carefully follow each step. There's no way of knowing you did anything right until the items drop. There's a crow you have to chase that veers in and out of view until it eventually drops a skull, and then you have to take that skull to a brazier and light it on fire. Nothing in the game spells this out, nor confirms you did it correctly.

Compared to the relatively simple puzzles people found around the game's launch, Lord of Hatred's are a little more elaborate. I spent 20 minutes killing corrupted Amazon enemies so I could wear a full set of their armor. And later, I used the new fishing mechanic to pull up a coffin that took me to a hidden dungeon.

Eventually you find a new relic that can be combined with those from the original quests using the new Horadric Cube crafting system. I never got around to collecting the cow milk and the Rusted Bardiche, so I had to stop there, but crafting them together gives you another relic, a cow-themed emote, and a cow-themed player title.

The final known step of the quest involves finding a boat and taking it to a cow island. A cutscene plays as you approach and then you're left to ponder the humanoid cow statues, bizarre messages ("Do not feed the animals."), and the lone cellar dungeon located there.

Nobody has any idea what to do next, but there are some things that suggest there's more to be found. The cow island can trigger a popup notification with a row of portals on it, has a mysterious interactive bucket of milk, and is where you can catch a mythic-level fish that has a reference to Diablo 3 on its tooltip. The biggest clue, however, is an entry for a "Cow King's Crown" helmet transmog in the wardrobe menu that no one has been able to unlock.

Even with full access to the Lord of Hatred files via datamining, the people on the cow level Discord aren't confident enough to say the search is over for now. A new discovery or a patch containing a new step could come at any time now.

I'm hoping Blizzard isn't just toying with us and that there is indeed a cow level of some sort in the game that we just haven't found yet. It wouldn't make a new loading screen hint say "there is no cow level" if there weren't one, right? I don't want to wait for a third expansion to finally see what horrors await in Diablo 4's version of the series' most iconic Easter egg.

Part of the reason criticism of Warcraft 3: Reforged was so pointed was that the remaster didn't just suck on its own terms. As Fraser Brown wrote at the time in his review, "Unfortunately, if these things are putting you off, you can't simply return to Warcraft 3 Classic and forget about them. The original has been added to the new client, so the connection problems, lack of competitive ladders and other issues are now shared between them. This might be the first time a remaster has made its predecessor worse."

While subsequent patches ameliorated some of the issues with Warcraft 3 Reforged, it still isn't perfect. For starters, plenty of custom maps don't work if you play Warcraft 3's classic version from the Reforged launcher. Which is why it's nice that, out of the blue, Blizzard has finally relented.

As the announcement says, "All players who own Warcraft 3 now have access to the original 1.29 client from the Battle.net App. To install it, click the Game Version dropdown on the bottom left corner of your Battle.net Warcraft III playscreen and select Warcraft III - Legacy TFT 1.29. Please note: The Legacy client supports offline and LAN play only."

While version 1.29 wasn't the final released update, it was the last one you could easily play over LAN, and that seems to have been a priority given that online multiplayer isn't supported. (My friends and I played it via LAN as a break from our ongoing game of Dungeon Siege, to give you a glimpse at the peak of early 2000s PC gaming.)

If you install Warcraft 3 Legacy and the cinematics aren't playing for you, find the en-USMovies folder in your install directory and rename it to just Movies. You might have to do the same for the Maps directory as well.

As fun as it is to see bigger damage numbers than you probably should in action RPGs, Blizzard has been able to keep players from completely trivializing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's satisfying character progression, and—most surprisingly—its work-in-progress competitive leaderboards system.

Lord of Hatred has a mode called The Tower where you slay monsters to fill a progress bar as fast as you can. There are 150 levels of difficulty so players can measure how powerful their characters are compared to others on its leaderboards.

I'm not usually concerned with competitive integrity when it comes to games like Diablo, but I'm always fascinated by the people who do. Blizzard's swift patches have made the leaderboards a useful spot to check what builds and which players are crushing the game.

When you look at the leaderboards, you'll see a lot of names of players you probably won't recognize, save for a few notable streamers. Over the weekend, however, there were several top-ranked players on the NA and EU leaderboards sharing the same name: "INFbuilds".

It wasn't the world's most skilled Diablo player hopping between classes to hit rank 1 on each of their individual leaderboards, it was actually a group of players trying to prove that they know what they're doing when it comes to buildcrafting. The "INFbuilds" names refer to InfinityBuilds, a Diablo 4 build guides website helmed by Mekuna, a streamer and player who has been in the spotlight before.

The group's goal isn't to share the glory of being the best of the best, but to help more casual Diablo 4 players understand how to make their characters just as powerful. "Every build is actively played at the highest level, mathematically optimized, then refined to perform at every level," the website reads. The leaderboards are just a way the group hopes to legitimize their build guides over the many others out there.

I'm used to seeing World of Warcraft characters with names made to promote their gold selling website, not players trying to promote their guides. InfinityBuilds' stunt is clever, if not a little ostentatious, but I respect the hustle. It's easier than ever to freestyle a character build in Diablo 4 with the improvements in Lord of Hatred, but there will always be people who want the comfort of playing something that has been refined and tested by those who study the game's fluctuating meta like it's a job.

Marketing yourself through a leaderboard might get the attention of players who do actually care about that sort of thing, but the real challenge will be finding a foothold in Google (and YouTube) search results—which is where most people go looking for guides. The rank 1 stamp of approval can only get you so far, especially for a game that appeals to a much wider variety of players than something like Path of Exile.

Right now, the leaderboards are still shifting around quite a bit. The strongest classes are surprisingly not the two new classes, paladins and warlocks, but sorcerers and barbarians. Sorcerers have a popular build right now where they fry everything in their path with lightning orbs, and barbarians are enjoying the benefits of becoming a walking tornado with the return of 'spin-to-win' builds using the Whirlwind skill. I certainly don't have the time to min-max my characters as much as the players in InfinityBuilds do to top the leaderboards, but I'm excited to check their builds out if only to see how they tick.

I'm breaking my routine, here—typically, when I sit down to write Terminally Online, I'll alternate between a hot take or an interview and something a little more light-hearted, like a poll or a discussion. This week, though, you're getting two in a row, because recent subjects I've covered have me a little bummed out.

Maybe it's my allergies acting up, or a remnant of winter blues, or the fact everything feels just a little bit dire in the world at the moment, but I'm kinda bummed out about the state of MMOs, man. And it's not because of the experience of actually playing them, mind. There are a lot of great offerings out there right now (peep our best MMOs list).

Sure, WoW's having a bit of a tizzy right now, but the bones of Midnight are good and will continue to be so once Blizzard's gotten its act together. The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy 14, and Guild Wars 2 are all some degree of decent. Warframe's doing its own thing and Fallout 76 is good now.

If you want a taste of retro, you can hop back to several points in WoW's history via Classic, check out the still-stellar City of Heroes, or mess about in Old School Runescape. There are even some halfway decent indie MMOs making strides.

But if you want new MMOs to get excited about, you're out of luck. We literally described 2025 as an MMO massacre, because so many work-in-progress games were cancelled, and some younger blood shut down too soon after going live. Rest in peace, New World—as for Project Blackbird, we hardly knew ye.

Which leaves you and me stuck with the old guard. Ah, jeez. On second thought, maybe this is all just because I'm aging into my 30s and getting a proper sense of the passage of time.

Everything changes, and it has to

There's a sort of monkey's paw curse that happens when you're invested in an MMO—if you get particularly taken, the rewards are vast. These are sprawling, giant worlds filled with lovely communities that can absorb you for years at a time, giving you friendships and companions who can eventually become real-life pals.

But they're also in a constant state of flux. If I talk to a friend about a game I adore, generally speaking, I can go ahead and play it. If it's really old, maybe that's not a sure thing—but if I can get it to run, I can head back into those halcyon days without fear of things being different.

Not so for the MMO. Every two to three years, the game you love will change—and not always for the better. WoW's the biggest example of this, dipping in and out of controversy and catastrophic design like it's about to do the Hokey Pokey, turn itself around, and show us what it's all about. Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, Battle for Azeroth bad, Dragonflight good, and so on.

Sometimes not changing is a problem, too. Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and Endwalker made me cry dozens of times—but as a game, the stagnation has eaten at me terribly, to the point where Evercold's job shake-up feels like the light at the end of a tunnel.

And hey, let's say you boot up something like World of Warcraft: Classic for a hit of liquid nostalgia: Too bad, things are different here, too. Ragnaros dies in a matter of days, rather than months. The game has been optimised into something different, changed by the hands that hold it.

When I say loving an MMO is an exercise in frustration, this is what I mean. If there are no new games to go to, then you're either in a cycle of being happy with your lot and waiting for the other shoe to drop, or grappling with update-borne depression and anxiety that your game's on the decline. If you've seen it happen enough times, it might drag you out of love with a game entirely.

Nothing new can stay

Sometimes it all ends in tears: City of Heroes, Star Wars: Galaxies, Wildstar, Warhammer Online—nothing lasts forever. Maybe it'll take another decade or two, but there'll be a time when even Blizzard closes its doors for good, sure as death and taxes.

The upshot is that sometimes these games make their way into good hands. City of Heroes: Homecoming is on my recommendations list because it's pretty much in the best state it's ever been in—divorced from microtransactions and the need for profit, powered by donations and enthusiasm.

But there is this eerie sense that we MMO players are all sort of just in a retirement home waiting for the next one to pop off. Oh, sure, occasionally a game gets a golden era—sometimes bingo night slaps—but that doesn't change the fact we're all sitting here with dentures and knitted blankets.

How'd we get here? Well, a couple of reasons: Firstly, shareholders. While game cancellations have always been a thing, MMOs take a heck of a long time to make, and the hunger for quarterly growth makes that a terrible proposition for a late-stage capitalist system that only cares about the incline on a graph somewhere.

And that's not just my take. Listen to Matt Firor, steward of the trashed Project Blackbird this week, speaking to YouTuber MinnMax: "They want a business they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount—and this isn't [just] Xbox, this is all public companies, they want reliable, forecastable business."

Nothing described here works very well in the messy sprawl of an MMO. An MMO has ups and downs, busts and booms, and requires consistent, deliberate love to flourish. Instead what we get are $75 housing bundles chasing that sweet, sweet short-term payout, and seasons. Because you can align seasons with quarters, and a little bit of excitement probably looks great on the balance sheets.

And hey, seasons aren't inherently a bad thing—except for when you can't keep up. The price you pay for constant evolution is, inevitably, the embracing of instability. And the MMO genre writ large could really use a bit more stability right now.

Moving on

I really would love to be proven wrong. Maybe Riot's new MMO comes out of nowhere and ushers us all into a second golden age—after all, these trends come in waves. Just as WoW brought on its own flood of imitators, Fortnite begat more… well, Fortnites. We shifted from MMOs to battle royales to extraction shooters. There's every chance the pendulum comes back again.

But right now, in 2026? I feel a bit of vertigo for a genre I deeply adore. A lot of my favourite games will probably make it through the next decade, sure—but certainly not forever. And if there's no-one there to pick up the torch (and 2025 saw an entire generation of prospective MMOs wither on the vine), what happens then?

I don't really have an answer that isn't just a bummer, and hey—there are certainly bigger ills to worry about in this world than 'my favourite kind of game doesn't exist anymore'. But I'd still rather it did, because MMOs are lovely. I've made some of the most enduring friendships of my life in them, and I want that experience for future generations. Assuming we're not back in the stone age by then, or technofascist serfs, or something.

But this is my hope: If someone's still writing this column when I'm fifty, they won't be forced to pick a different genre to write about.

The battle against Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's main villain Mephisto is finally over, but the battle against the villain that has haunted the game since it came out might never be over: Items that mysteriously break the game have reared their ugly heads again.

In a hotfix earlier today, Blizzard disabled the Limitless Rage legendary item aspect because it was, well, too limitless. Every barbarian using it with two specific other items could ramp up their damage into the quadrillions, trivializing Diablo 4's hardest monsters.

Normally, Limitless Rage gives you a stacking damage buff for generating rage, the barbarian's primary resource for casting skills. It's a bonus that falls off after a mere four seconds to accommodate for the fact that it is—true to its name—limitless. Before Lord of Hatred, there weren't any ways of generating enough fury for it to be a problem.

But something funky was going on when you combined the aspect with the Melted Heart of Selig mythic unique and the Endurant Faith unique. If I had to guess, it probably had something to do with the way the Melted Heart of Selig gives you loads of extra fury (because it doubles it in exchange for using it as your life when it's equipped) and the way Endurant Faith spreads out any damage you take over a few seconds. This broken interaction caused Limitless Rage to stack over 15,000 times in an instant, multiplying your damage by tens of thousands more than intended.

YouTube streamer Rob2628 has a full explanation of how players were exploiting the bug with a build that could reach the highest difficulty tiers in the game with ease. By stacking loads of fury regeneration and tearing through packs of enemies with the Whirlwind skill, your damage would stack near-infinitely before falling off and starting back up again.

Now that Diablo 4 has official in-game leaderboards, Blizzard has been acting fast when it comes to game-breaking levels of damage like this. Earlier this week, it quickly hotfixed three bugs that let sorcerers, rogues, and spiritborn breeze through the toughest monsters. All of these bugs were pretty egregious, but it's still a little surprising to see how committed Blizzard is to maintaining some level of competitive integrity (for those who care about that in action RPGs). In the past, some of these might've been left alone until the next proper patch.

Until Limitless Rage gets fixed, barbarian players will see that any item with the aspect on it will state that it's been "temporarily disabled". A Blizzard community manager said that the issue will be fixed "as soon as we can." Judging from the speed of the previous fixes, I wouldn't be surprised to see it resolved by the end of the day.

World of Warcraft's player housing feature is great—the microtransactions involved? Not so much. To be clear: There's a huge list of decor you can get in the game without paying anything other than your usual subscription, and the system has enough freedom that you can absolutely build your own treehouse, if you wanted.

But it still doesn't smack of great optics when Blizzard trots out housing packages like the Cosy Treehouse Retreat bundle, which costs a whopping $75 in Hearthsteel. Yikes.

That is, for context, more than $25 more expensive than the Midnight expansion itself, and $5 more than the Heroic Edition. Now, the bundle itself does have some cool stuff in it—two treehouse variants and a bunch of secondary decor items, and you can grab just the treehouses themselves for $40—but still. Yikes.

That's not to say nobody's going to buy these. Back in January of last year, it was estimated that a $90 dinosaur mount raked in a cool $15 million for Blizzard. Developers don't just put packs like these out for no reason at all, and I've no doubt that the Cosy Treehouse Retreat will be seen as a very nice uptick on Blizzard's balance sheets.

However, it's pretty clear that this pack really is just oriented towards "whales", a somewhat derogatory term (nonetheless applicable here) used to describe the small section of any game's playerbase with deep enough pockets to be just fine dropping a cool $75 on whatever they'd like.

Your average player with a normal salary and bills to pay, even if they are very invested in Player Housing, isn't going to be taken by any of the offers Blizzard's putting out, here—the people actually using this system would likely go in for cheap, affordable kits full of miscellaneous items that'd help construct what they're actually making. Like a Star Destroyer.

That's not really a thing on the Player Housing store. The closest thing is this $35 starting decor pack, which gets you… uh, two gazebos and $25 of Hearthsteel, which you could use to buy a handful of items, I guess.

I think it's ostensibly whatever for Blizzard to be offering microtransactions for player housing—it's still adding decor items that're available through play, and if it wants to charge for prefabs designed for players who aren't artistically gifted enough to cobble sculptures together out of a dozen rugs, fine.

But it does dim my opinion of the entire feature to see the store so cynically angled towards the portion of the playerbase they can milk for dosh, rather than the humble proletariat that might be actually invested in the system they're making this stuff for. As one player on the game's subreddit puts it: "You can buy real trees for less."

Out of all the new things added to Diablo 4 with its new Lord of Hatred expansion, Echoing Hatred might be the most mysterious. It's not a dungeon, nor is it a boss fight: It's a fight to the death against relentless waves of monsters. But the only way to play it is by finding a rare item drop.

While I was reviewing the game on an early access server provided by Blizzard a few weeks ago, I never found a key to Echoing Hatred. I played the expansion for a little over 45 hours and in that time I completed the new campaign, fully geared up a warlock, climbed through most of the new Torment difficulty tiers, and did a little bit of fishing. It wasn't until the very last day the servers were up that I finally decided if I was ever going to see Echoing Hatred, I'd need to cheat.

Blizzard set up the friendly little demon who gives you free level boosts and gear in the review server just like it does in PTRs. In his list of freebies was an option for Echoing Hatred. I clicked it and out popped a "Trace of Echoes" on the floor. This item doesn't appear in your inventory or your list of materials; it simply activates a pedestal in the new region's city, Temis, and allows entrance to the mode.

After touching it, my character woke up in an empty arena with another pedestal sitting in the middle. Once you activate that, the mode begins and a bar starts to fill up as monsters come crawling in. The goal of Echoing Hatred is to keep that bar as low as possible as you clear monsters out of the room, but the catch is that each wave increases in difficulty and death is game over.

My warlock made quick work of the first several waves. Every monster would get smashed into pieces by my big demon buddy before they could even move. Treasure goblins would drop out of portals occasionally and killing them added bonus loot to the final rewards. It was going so smoothly that I didn't bother picking up the shrine buffs along the edge of the arena, but those could be helpful if you're struggling.

This is where I should mention the fact that I never died a single time during the Lord of Hatred campaign. I also never died running dungeons and killing bosses afterwards. Warlocks have a powerful ultimate that gets stronger the more life you have, so I was running around with near-immortality in torment 10 (out of 12). Nothing could get close to me with my demon crushing everything in his sight.

When the screen said that I was now on torment 12 difficulty in the Echoing Hatred, I immediately noticed that the monsters were starting to live through my demon's wallops. That also meant they lived long enough to realize there was a higher priority target than the unkillable demon. I tried to dodge and run out of their attacks, but a wave of fire incinerated my warlock on the spot, causing my first death and ending the run.

The monsters had all fled by the time I revived and a chest sat in the middle of the room. Items poured out of it like a hose while goblin portals opened up to drop even more loot. It was like playing Diablo 4 during its second season when I could barely see my character with all the glowing items on the floor. My inventory could not hold it all, forcing me to use the nearby NPCs and stash to help sort through it all.

For a 15-minute experience, Echoing Hatred drops more loot than anything else I've seen in the game. Most people who thoroughly gear their characters up in the endgame should be able to survive until at least torment 12, making the mode especially lucrative for legendary items you can upgrade using the new Horadric Cube crafting system. And based on early accounts of people trying the mode now that the expansion is live, it can drop items you can use to earn mythic uniques, some of the most powerful items in the game.

Echoing Hatred is pretty straightforward as far as modes go in Diablo 4. You don't have to do anything but slay monsters until you die. This is why, I assume, it's extremely rare to find. Nobody would want to play a mode like this over and over. It's supposed to be a treat for finding a key and having a character strong enough to survive several waves. If it were ever too easy to find, everyone would farm it dry, nullifying everything else in the game.

Needle in a haystack

It's been a few days since the launch of Lord of Hatred and it doesn't look like Blizzard has changed the frequency of Echoing Hatred key drops. Several players are talking about it on the Diablo 4 Discord, but nobody is quite sure what the best way to get a key is yet.

I do have some possible insights, though, because one of the developers was generous enough to give reviewers some clues on where to find Trace of Echoes in a private Discord. I would stop reading if you want it to remain a surprise, but this is what they said:

• Endgame lair bosses have a small chance to drop them in torment 10 or higher
• Any "activity keys" upgrade nodes in the new activity skill trees have a chance to drop them in torment 10 or higher
• There's also a small chance for them to drop off of anything in the game (presumably with a higher chance in torment 10 or higher)

Diablo 4 has needed more surprises that aren't just loot drops, and Echoing Hatred is a good example of that. Piles of loot are great and all, but if I've learned anything from Path of Exile, it's that it can be even more exciting to stumble onto things that unlock rare and special events. In a game and a genre where knowledge is so important, they make the world feel a little bit bigger and a little more mysterious. Diablo 4 tries its best to get you to settle into a loop of your favorite endgame activities, and that can be satisfying, especially as you chase after specific upgrades. But having your routine derailed because of some unexpected drop or event will drive you to keep playing if only to see what else can happen.

People will surely have Echoing Hatred all figured out soon, but most players won't know about it until the key drops. And even when that happens, they won't know what they're in for until they try it. I didn't even find one naturally and all I want to do is give it another go. I'm killing monsters left and right hoping to see that little key drop so I can go for a second round, and I'm sure many people will feel the same after they see just how much loot drops at the end.

According to Blizzard, there are a few more secrets hidden in the expansion that might take a while for people to find. One of them might finally be the cow level it's been teasing since Diablo 4 came out. A cow bell is one of the many pieces of "junk" you can fish up, which feels like a deliberate tease for something more. Hell, maybe the Echoing Hatred will start spawning cows if you make it past torment 12. Anything is possible in this rare time where Lord of Hatred hasn't been fully figured out, and I'm excited to see what people find in the coming weeks.

World of Warcraft is one of those old, dogged titans that've been trudging on in the MMO industry for over two decades, now—and even in a genre where the success stories are mostly ancient, that's some going. In its golden age, WoW was the game that all of its contemporaries were trying to dethrone. And even though it's been through several severe wobbles in the past few years (see: Shadowlands), it's not going anywhere any time soon.

But there is an alternate universe in which it might have at least diminished while its team focused on bigger and better things, per former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, who has had a lot to say about the game recently after a disastrously buggy patch has put things on thin ice.

Ybarra took to X to write that, during his tenure at Blizzard—which ended when the company was acquired for $68.4 billion from Microsoft in 2024, leading to 1,900 layoffs across Xbox and Blizzard and the closure of several studios to help foot the bill—he had quite a few ideas about the direction WoW should take.

This includes a "WoW that is about WAR" and an expansion "about how there is always a Lich King" after Arthas' dethroning at the end of WoTLK. He also advocated for "spending far more time on raids and new ideas for the CORE gaming audience vs. the casuals."

Quick point of order—while I can see a continuation of Bolvar Fordragon's story being interesting, I'm not sure the idea of focusing on that "core gaming audience" is necessarily the way winds have blown. Most successful MMOs, WoW included, have accepted that there's not a hardcore vs. casual divide anymore, while the ones catering to hardcore audiences are either niche or killed in the cradle (rest in peace, Wildstar). But I digress.

The biggest eyeraise is that Ybarra was also apparently advocating for a sequel to WoW: "WoW 2 instead of the same WoW 1 expansions over and over re-skinned."

He states, however, that he wasn't necessarily able to make that happen—that would've been a call by current game director Ion Hazzikostas: "The President of Blizzard doesn't pitch game ideas. He/She has little influence on the games themselves other than input at various stages and random ideation usually directly with the Game Director (who owns the creative vision for the game).

"The President is just one channel of input they can completely ignore if they choose. Ion did not ignore [me], he balanced a lot of things and ultimately decided where he wanted to take the game."

MMO sequels aren't entirely a crapshoot. Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14 both co-exist in their own spheres of success, while Guild Wars 2 was a solid move for ArenaNet. But would it have worked with WoW?

I mean, maybe. But when I look at the time period where a sequel would've made sense—probably 10 years ago—I can't really think of a good stepping-off point. Either you're ditching the game in some of its most beloved eras (Mists of Pandaria and Legion, respectively) or you're moving on without any goodwill from the playerbase. Maybe you could've done it instead of revamping the old world for Cataclysm, I dunno.

But otherwise, would Blizzard have been able to convince its subscribers that WoW 2 is a good MMO to hop to during the content droughts of Warlords of Draenor, the systems headache of Battle for Azeroth, or the catastrophes of Shadowlands? Probably not. And you can't stay sticking with WoW didn't work out.

Yes, it is a deeply inconsistent game, and its latest patch is a bit of a disaster. But it's still here, ain't it? In a genre filled with bloodbaths, WoW stands stubbornly profitable—at least, enough to cause Microsoft to spend billions on it. I don't know if anything short of a meteor hitting Earth would put it down for good.

One of the major changes in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is the ability to scale the difficulty way higher than you could before. Most players are gradually climbing the torment tiers as they gear their characters up, but some players are speedrunning to the top just to see how fast they can do it.

For Diablo 4 streamer Mekuna, the ascent from a level 1 sorceress to a level 70 sorceress capable of holding her own in the hardest difficulty took around 17 hours of non-stop grinding. And because Blizzard intentionally kept a lot of late-game details secret, he also had to quickly come up with a build that could take him there.

That build ended up being centered around a new variant of the Blizzard skill. Instead of dropping hail onto enemies, Mekuna spams the lightning variant of it to fry packs of enemies in seconds. Watching all the bright circles stack up in his final dungeon run is like opening a website in light mode at night—you almost have to squint to see what's going on.

He reached torment 12 on hour 20 of his Twitch stream, making him probably one of the first to get that far in so little time and on so little sleep. He kicked off the expansion playing the new warlock class through the campaign and eventually ditched it for the class that has taken him to the top of Diablo 4's unofficial competitive leaderboards before. By the looks of it, he still had quite a lot of upgrades to obtain when he achieved it. I didn't catch any infinite damage bugs going on, but it's possible the build is a little stronger than Blizzard intended.

A lot is possible when you have that much uninterrupted time to play, but Mekuna's achievement confirms that Diablo 4's new torment tiers aren't impossible to survive—at least with characters as strong as his. Blizzard told PC Gamer earlier this year that torment 12 would be "really fucking hard," and while I still believe that, it's clear there will be outliers as there always are with Diablo 4. That said, it's nice to see that it isn't some bizarre bug-exploiting build that made it that far.

There is one small caveat here that's worth mentioning though: Mekuna may have finished torment 12, but there are other ways of increasing the difficulty on top of that through the new activity skill trees. Some of the upgrades in there can boost monsters up a few levels even higher than the torment tier would normally allow. I'd be curious if he can survive those too.

Lord of Hatred's new skill trees, item crafting system, and reworked difficulty tiers mean all previous ways to measure a character's power are useless, so I'm excited to see how all the other classes fare, especially paladins and warlocks. Soon the game's leaderboards will go live and we'll be able to see what absurdly powerful builds players have come up with.

As someone who has already experienced the mountain of changes coming in Diablo 4's new Lord of Hatred expansion, I already wasn't expecting much from the new season that will begin shortly after it launches.

There are so many changes in Lord of Hatred that it already fulfills the purpose of a season that would typically introduce temporary powers or a limited story—with the significant caveat that it's a $40 add-on. Instead of placing a hat on top of a hat, Blizzard has decided to keep the focus on the new campaign and all the new system changes that come into play after the credits roll.

The Season of Reckoning will be a Diablo 4 season in name only: You can still create new seasonal characters and climb through the levels until you're a demon-slaying god, but nothing you experience will be exclusive to the next three months.

In a blog post, Blizzard acknowledged that it "represents a departure from past seasons," and promised that things will go back to normal once this one concludes. Probably as a way to make up for the lack of season-specific stuff, there are more rewards than usual for completing the list of seasonal objectives. Blizzard must've been feeling generous because you can earn enough materials to create at least seven powerful mythic uniques, the rarest and strongest items in the game—usually, you only get enough for one!

There are free cosmetics, like a pet made out of hellish roots, and all sorts of other useful crafting materials you'll need to gear up in the endgame. The majority of these won't require the expansion to earn either. You can also pay money for access to the seasonal reliquary and the exclusive cosmetics tucked away in that.

If Lord of Hatred hadn't impressed me as much as it did, the light season would be disappointing. But there are activity-specific skill trees and an entire endgame mode I barely touched in the 45 hours I spent playing it for the review. I can confidently say that nobody will find themselves starved of new things to do. Warlocks and paladins have joined the roster; every other class has entirely reworked skill trees and items; item crafting is a real thing now with the Horadric Cube; and Blizzard keeps teasing that the fishing mechanic might hold the key to a mysterious cow level.

It's worth noting, however, that the expansion will launch on April 27 at 4 pm PDT (7 pm EDT), but the season won't begin until 4:30 pm PDT (7:30 pm PDT). That'll give you 30 minutes to hopefully make it through the login screen before the servers buckle from the weight of all the Diablo fans lining up to stick it to Mephisto.

I'll hand it to Blizzard: There's not a better band to write a Diablo song than Korn. I may have been slightly too young to call myself a legitimate fan, but my dad regularly had Korn on in his truck when he took me to school, and I distinctly remember staring at the grinning skull on the Diablo 2 box whenever I was allowed to use the family computer back then.

It gives me just enough of the nostalgia Blizzard is trying to spark with Korn's new song Reward The Scars. An animated music video for the track just dropped—perfectly timed for anyone who wants something to blast while playing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred when it releases later today.

Even the music video feels like a throwback: The big demon lord Mephisto is drawn as if he was in a '90's comic book with his big hollow eyes and twisted horns. Once he fully abandons his human form and starts tearing people apart, the song erupts into a heavy breakdown that I'm sure 14-year-old me would've been obsessed with.

I'm also convinced Mephisto would love it too, if Sanctuary had access to YouTube or Spotify. Reward The Scars is the kind of song made for brooding demons intent on violently taking over the world. It's heavy and haunting and angry and could be used in an AMV for basically any moment cut from the expansion's campaign.

If anyone was worried Korn would change after going quiet for the last four years, Reward The Scars proves they've still got it. Singer Jonathan Davis is a known gamer, so I'm not surprised at all to see him agree to work with Blizzard on this one. Even though he's been writing a new album over the break, I don't think the guy who used to run his own World of Warcraft guild is going to ignore the phone when Blizzard calls.

Sadly, we won't be able to use that H.R. Giger microphone stand Davis is known for using as an in-game staff or anything. Missed opportunity, if you ask me.

Former president of Blizzard Mike Ybarra has entered the phase of being a videogame executive that involves, among a lot of things, some very unfiltered posting on social media. Like arguing with other CEOs over New Years, or telling people they need to "man up" over AI use.

Anyway, World of Warcraft: Midnight had a really rough patch, recently, and given his understandable investment as the former captain of the ship, Ybarra has taken to his X account (thanks, GamesRadar+) to comment on the state of the game once more:

"Unfortunate. WoW has to reset and the commitment has to be clear and firm or it will continue to decline."

As someone who has been keeping track of WoW, I am going to take a moment to quibble, here—"reset" is a big word, and not necessarily even what's in order. The baseline offerings of Midnight are good. Player Housing was a great success, the new Prey system has a lot of promise, its raids and dungeons are all solid and interesting, its zones are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There's a lot to like!

There's also the point of order that WoW has actually shaken things up considerably already, completely overhauling the game's class design to better suit a world without UI mods (addons).

The issue is that the train's moving so fast the wheels are threatening to come off of the dang thing. I actually wrote about it this weekend—while I wouldn't call the game perfect, the problem isn't with the MMO itself, it's with Blizzard outpacing its own quality control. Either the developer needs to slow down, or it needs to get a better handle on proactive bug fixes.

But "reset" implies a bigger scrapping and starting over—and trust me, compared to WoW's lowest low-points? We don't have it nearly as bad as we did back then. Need I remind anybody that this is an MMO that used to have 400+ day patch droughts.

Now, to Ybarra's credit, he did oversee the start of that turnaround. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight released in 2022, and Ybarra left Blizzard in 2024. Dragonflight itself was a genuinely solid start to a revitalisation of the game, one that saw Blizzard start to stick to roadmaps at an even tempo, focus on evergreen content, and hit the reset button on its story.

But he was also present for Shadowlands, one of the game's most disastrous expansions, and he also oversaw the $68.4 billion acquisition of Blizzard that resulted in 1,900 employees laid off across Activision-Blizzard.

While I wouldn't put much stock in the argument that follows—it's a slapfight on X—Ybarra does respond to some criticism over his tenure and where it led Blizzard: "You'd have to blow the team completely up to course correct. We did what we could under the circumstances, but clearly did not succeed."

Anyway, I'm not convinced that Blizzard needs a complete overhaul. There's a lot of work to do and good will to scrape back, but one bad patch doesn't make a dying MMO—I mean, unless you're Star Wars: Galaxies. Bugs can be fixed, and Midnight's not going to sink the ship just because of one sketchy update.

Is the studio at risk if it doesn't turn things around in the next few major patches? Sure. But we're seeing signs of ill health, not a game on life support, and WoW's a stubborn old beast. If it can make it through Shadowlands without exploding, I'm pretty sure a buggy patch ain't gonna do it.

Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is nipping at our heels, and to prepare I've been mucking around in Sanctuary again. I finally finished the OG campaign, which I initially bounced off in favour of seasonal distractions, and I've rolled a couple of new characters. And despite never vibing with Blizzard's latest before, I am finally enjoying myself.

I never thought Diablo 4 was terrible. The aesthetics and vibes are much more in line with Diablo 1 and 2, Lilith and Mephisto are great villains, and Blizzard's managed to do some interesting stuff with its seasons, running plenty of little experiments that reconfigure our path of slaughter through Sanctuary.

But it simply left me bored. Even Diablo 3's character progression and skills felt more compelling and primed for madcap buildcrafting, and honestly I couldn't come up with a good reason to keep playing when Path of Exile 1 and 2 were there, doing significantly bolder things with the ARPG framework.

Where Diablo 4 didn't come alive until endgame, and left you feeling underpowered and lacking in interesting build options before then, Path of Exile's passive skill tree means the wild experimenting can begin straight away, as you strike out on whatever path you fancy. The sheer potential of that tree is mesmerising.

If you try to follow a build guide in PoE or its sequel, or attempt to make your own build, it feels like you need a degree in dungeoneering. There's so much to wrap your head around, so much to pore over. It's intimidating but thrilling. Diablo 4 isn't comparable. It's a checklist that doesn't reward experimentation. Though it sounds like Lord of Hatred will solve this somewhat.

Per Tyler Colp's glowing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred review:

Freestyling a build in Diablo 4 used to be like being stuck in a maze and constantly running into dead ends. A skill could sound effective, but you'd all too often discover that it was garbage unless you paired it with a specific item. Now, a lot of the most powerful effects are in the skill trees themselves. Your gear still matters, but it's been moved to a more supplementary role.

In practice, playing through the campaign on my warlock gave me the same thirst for experimentation that Diablo 3 did. I swapped skills in and out in between quests just to see if they'd make the cut for my final build and found it hard to stick with one set. This is how, after going through some combinations I still want to explore in the future, I ended up with the world's strongest demon.

This is exciting! But since I've been waiting for Lord of Hatred like the rest of you, I've had to make do with the current version of Diablo 4. And I've still managed to have a good time. It's all because I've stopped giving a damn.

Instead of wishing Diablo 4 was as complex and compelling as Path of Exile, I've resigned myself to the fact that it never will be—and probably shouldn't be. We already have two of those games, and other ARPGs like Last Epoch that do more unusual things with skill trees and builds.

With Diablo 4, then, I've just been enjoying laziness. I have a popular Sorcerer build, I regularly spit three flaming rays of death out of my hands, and things explode. There's some solid crafting, allowing me to refine my build with new gear, but mostly I am just clicking things and watching them die. I don't need to dedicate entire evenings trying to figure out ways to not suck.

It's pretty satisfying! Does it feel a bit weird that death is only a worry if I literally step away from my PC to make a sandwich? Yes. It's hardly in keeping with Sanctuary's grim, everything-wants-to-kill-you vibe. But on the other hand, I can go to the loo or play with the dog without needing to portal back to town. That's handy. Not particularly exciting, granted, but when I'm a bit beat and just looking for a smooth power fantasy, Diablo 4's got me covered.

The current season also lets you temporarily play as the Butcher, which is immensely fun. Just running around utterly obliterating things for a couple of minutes, grabbing demons and humans alike with my meathooks and incinerating in my oversized grill. It's a good time. As seasons go, it's entertaining, even if it never comes close to the boldness of, say, monster collecting or running your own colony—two things that Path of Exile did.

There's something to be said for not getting too into the buildcrafting/theorycrafting that holds so much appeal in PoE. I just turn off my brain and run around Sanctuary, bringing death to all four corners of the map. And sometimes those simple pleasures are enough. Blizz knows what it's doing in this regard. If you want a flashy, polished and largely frictionless murder party, then yay, you're well-catered to here.

World of Warcraft's experienced a self-resurrection after the foibles of Shadowlands six years ago, and that's due, in part, to Blizzard worshipping at the altar of the roadmap—as opposed to past expansions, where content droughts could last into the hundreds of days, Blizzard has stuck to its plans with a religious strictness.

It's not hard to see why. MMOs are a difficult beast to wrangle, and being able to hit a consistent rhythm of patches is a great way to keep players subscribed. It's also something all the big live service games—which MMOs first inspired, and now have to draw from to keep current—hold as part of their core model.

And hey, it's worked. Dragonflight, The War Within, and now Midnight—while certainly not immune from criticism—have done a lot to build up goodwill. Especially when you combine them with the successful experiments of Season of Discovery and Remix. It's something I've complimented WoW on before.

But the latest patch, 12.0.5, shows the other side of this coin: It's become quite clear now that Blizzard might've needed a few more weeks to pull everything together. It's an update that's rife with bugs and design issues—some of which were called out on the PTR weeks in advance and were left unaddressed.

You can safely write out the devs burying their heads in the sand—no one's more aware of a game's bugs than the people trying to fix them. So the question is, why weren't they given the time to sort it?

I think it's due to that dogged adherence to the schedule, one that permeates the live service, roadmap-drowned structure. Releasing something a little under-tuned, or—as per Ion Hazzikostas—starting conservative with rewards and then tuning things up later? That's far, far more preferable to the horror of a delay, or so Blizzard's implied by its actions.

Water, water everywhere

It's almost hard to blame Blizzard for being afraid of this, because WoW's droughts have been some of the worst in MMO history. 6.2 for Warlords of Draenor was the last major patch before Legion dropped a whopping 400 days later. Mists of Pandaria saw another lull after the Siege of Orgrimmar—a teeth-grinding 14 months before WoD came out the following year.

I'm certain nobody wants to go back to those days, but there's something to be said for flexibility. If 12.0.5 needed a few more weeks, would anyone have complained? I mean, obviously they would have. It's World of Warcraft. But would they have complained more than they are now? I don't think so.

I have, however, been on the other side of that coin. My main love, Final Fantasy 14, has irked me quite a bit with its sluggish tempo—but a lot of that's due to its rewards structure rather than what Square Enix is putting out. A lot of column A, and only a bit of column B.

But even then, Square's inflexibility is a consequence of sticking too much to a schedule.

Moreover, I can't help but ask myself what all of this is for. The last slice of Midnight's first seasonal offerings, the March on Quel'Danas, dropped March 31. In comes in patch 12.0.5 less than a month later, hucking Ritual Sites, the Voidforge, and Void Assaults in an overstimulating wave of new crap to do.

Slow your roll

I'm slower than your average player that's entirely dedicated, given I need to play and write about a wide variety of games—but I wasn't nearly finished with my plate before Blizzard dropped a bunch more mashed potatoes on it. I'm full. Give me a second!

Maybe I'm complaining that my steak is just too juicy—and I would agree with you if the patch wasn't so riddled with bugs while my cup runneth over. But if we're already getting far too much, what's the actual trade-off, here?

I genuinely would not have blinked if the entirety of April had passed without an update, because there's already a lot to do in Midnight. A whole raid tier, delves, Mythic+ dungeons, rep grinds, Prey, player housing, and little Arcantina side-quests. I look at what I've got left to do and I get given a sense of vertigo that's honestly making it take longer.

I think there's been a misalignment here. Blizzard brought its premiere MMO back from the brink by adopting a live-service style structure of roadmaps, seasons, and promises kept, yes—but that doesn't mean that its playerbase has the same appetite as, say, someone who hops from shooter to shooter.

MMOs can survive a bit of a slower-paced release structure for a few reasons—firstly, the days when people are attached to one MMO as their main gaming diet are over. These games have a bit of an ageing population (a Google Play report from 2022 found that over half of players were between 25-44 years old) with more responsibilities, true, but also wider tastes.

Secondly, they're also just different at a structural level. An MMO like WoW has a broad range of things to do and a big historical backlog of expansions to thicken out the videogame soup. Natural lulls are a chance to dip into things you've not explored yet, help out your mates, go hunting for transmogs, level up alts, and so on.

Lastly, MMOs are primarily about investment. They're games where people make little homes and communities for themselves, and it's not a disaster if those communities have time to breathe and help each other out rather than chasing the next item level increase.

Does an MMO need to avoid droughts? Yes. Should it release things at a solid tempo? Yes. But WoW doesn't need to copy everything from the seasonal live service model—and it certainly doesn't need to avoid delaying a patch above all else.

I hope the lesson Blizzard learns (aside from giving more resources to its QA team, which I'm sure is full of people trying their hardest) isn't simply that it needs to be better at its current pace, but that it can slow down every once in a while. Maybe not for 400 days, sure, but if a patch ever needs a couple more weeks to cook, I can just go hunt for decor or something. It might be time for WoW to slow down just a little.

Sometimes I think I would be better off if I was one of those people who only likes one action RPG. But, sadly, I'm cursed to enjoy both Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, which means I'm forced to juggle both when they drop new stuff in the same month.

Diablo 4's shadow-drop of paladins last December came within 24 hours of PoE 2's new class (druid) and expansion, which, given their similar release schedules, was bad news for anyone who enjoys experiencing one action RPG season at a time.

This week, we learned that won't be the case for their upcoming major updates, as PoE's next expansion has been pushed almost a month later than it was expected to release. According to a recent post on X by lead community manager Kelly, the expansion is "shaping up to be one of the biggest ones we've ever released; it just needs a little longer to cook!"

Developer Grinding Gear Games will host an announcement stream for PoE 2: Return of the Ancients on May 7, but the expansion won't be out until May 29. That gives me and everyone else who is excited to jump into Diablo 4's new expansion, Lord of Hatred, on April 27 an entire month before it's PoE 2 time.

The teaser trailer for Return of the Ancients doesn't give away much about what's coming in the update, even though we already know some of what to expect from GGG's previous comments. A sprawling fortress rises out of the ground in the 30-second trailer, walling off a section of Wraeclast. The endless world map where the game's endgame takes place will also be getting a massive overhaul in the update, which could mean that the new version will involve whoever these returinng "ancients" are.

Kelly's suggestion that the expansion is notably bigger than the others has sent PoE 2 Reddit users into a Silksong-esque frenzy. One poster currently believes Kelly's recent photo of a spider on a keyboard is actually an elaborately disguised teaser for the duelist class.

"At first it seemed completely random… until I remembered the 2023 ExileCon trailer," PuzzleheadedHair2331 wrote before explaining their theory. In that trailer, a duelist character fights a spider in gladiator armor. Kelly replied to someone with a Gladiator movie GIF about a completely different post four days earlier, and new art of the duelist class appeared on a popular PoE 2 database website recently. "I have come to the conclusion that the duelist will appear in version 0.5," they wrote.

I'm not sure I need to analyze random social media posts and a three-year-old trailer to predict that a new class or new campaign act might be added in the update. PoE 2 is supposedly coming out of early access this year, and I imagine GGG will be adding a lot over the next several months in anticipation of that.

Regardless, it sounds like the expansion will be bigger than some of the recent ones. Luckily there will be plenty of time to dig into it all once I've started to wrap up my time with Lord of Hatred. Blizzard has reworked Diablo 4's endgame to have more meaningful progression over a slower timeframe—something I've wanted for a while. A month is a healthy amount of time to push a character pretty far before PoE 2 starts eating into my Diablo time.

Overwatch's new season kicked off last week, and alongside a new battle pass, hero, and a bunch of skins it came with the regular patch notes full of buffs and nerfs. I actually mentioned how, amid everything, the changes that stood out to me were Sierra's ridiculously strong kit as well as Roadhog's long-awaited nerf which increased the cooldown on his Chain Hook.

In the previous season Hog had been one of the strongest tanks and a real pain to go up against. As a support main, I tend to be on the wrong end of Hog's Chain Hook more often than not, so I was pretty happy to learn of the nerf. Well, I was happy while it lasted, as only a week later Team 4 has put everything back to normal.

Yesterday's patch notes revealed that Hog's Chain Hook cooldown is back down to just seven seconds. How the hell does this even happen? Well, it's been a particularly rough week for Hog players, with his pick rate dropping and the character suffering on the battlefield.

"The generation of Lucio players I ruined can't even lower his winrate to get a buff," Overwatch streamer Frogger shares on social media. "But Roadhog did it in a week. A WEEK!!!" Some people just have that Midas touch I guess.

Hog's biggest problem is that he's hard to balance, just as many hook characters are. When he's strong he's suffocating and can make the game feel awful for everyone else. But when he's weak, he plays like a piece of paper that has absolutely no presence and is practically a throw pick. Unfortunately, this probably means Hog and those who main him are cursed for a life of sporadic patches swinging from god-like to worthless, it must be a stressful life to live.

On the upside it means Hog players should make the most of the buffs as they currently stand and enjoy the lack of that extra second. It may not sound like a lot, but Overwatch deals in small measures, even the slightest change to an ability, damage output, or perk has the potential to completely change a hero's viability as well as others that fall in its counter-chain.

But what do you think? Is Hog right where he needs to be, is he too weak, or do you think Team 4 needs to pluck up some courage and drop the cooldown even more?

World of Warcraft's latest patch, 12.0.5, was a bit of a doozy—flooded with bugs from small irritants to busted classes, head-scratching design decisions, and raid-scuppering glitches. Not to mention just some confusing choices, like giving my class a new ability that makes it harder for everyone to not stand in the fire.

It's been one of the messiest updates in recent memory, and while I know Blizzard's halfway decent at sorting things out after the fact, the point remains that a lot of what players are griping about was brought up on the PTR—in some cases weeks in advance.

In a new post to the game's site, Blizzard has issued an apology: "The 12.0.5 patch launch was not up to our standards, and we know this disrupted your time and caused justified frustration.

"The team has been working around the clock since launch to stabilize the game and fix the biggest issues players were hitting right away," the post continues—which is fair enough. Several problems, like bonus rolls from the Voidforge and and the aforementioned class bugs have already been stamped out.

"The team is taking lessons learned from this launch to help ensure this doesn't happen again. We will also work harder to communicate openly, early, and often when a launch doesn't go as expected: the known issues we're working on, fixes as they roll out, and any other information that would be useful to our community as problems are worked on and solved.

"We care deeply about this game, and we play it right alongside you. We will do better."

It does seem genuinely heartfelt, and I don't envy being in the position of a developer having to bear the brunt of any irate fanbase—let alone World of Warcraft players, who are… let's just call them passionate, for better or worse.

But it's clear patch 12.0.5 was born of a structural problem with Blizzard's QA pipeline. Devs aren't just oblivious, they know when something's wrong, but they're also paid salaried jobs and, like any work, can't just pivot without upper management's say-so. Developers not being given the time to fix obvious, already-reported bugs before launch smacks to me of a management issue.

Fans are, understandably, waiting to see if Blizzard can do more than talk the talk. Over on the forums, one player writes: "All these bugs come from trying to release too many systems too fast. We don’t need all these side games in wow. Our classes don't function, communication in game doesn't function, pets are broken, battle pets are broken, UI is broken, Instances are broken. It would be faster to list what does work."

Over on the r/WoW subreddit, sentiment is also rough: "What I don’t understand is that some of these bugs were reported 3+ weeks ago on PTR," writes user tapwater86. "Who in their right mind would sign off to go live with all of this? There’s no way someone in the chain didn’t say 'hey guys we have a lot of issues we need another week or two'."

One option is just slowing down a bit—Blizzard's been on a roll ever since Dragonflight in meeting its roadmap goals, but the game's been getting… very ambitious, lately. An overhaul of the UI to fit a post-addon world, a player housing system (which is genuinely rather good), a narrative promising to span three entire expansions that were announced all at once, and a rapid-fire patch cadence.

As someone used to the arguably too slow cadence of Final Fantasy 14, WoW players have been eating good—but with patches like these, it feels like Blizzard is struggling to keep up with itself. For both the players and the development team's sake, I hope they can find a balance soon.