Blizzard and Warhammer 40,000
Hello hello. This post I want to talk about Blizzard and Warhammer 40,000. Basically just
things that I like from each, dislike and the hope that each could maybe learn from each other. I have a
lot of thoughts and I hope I can make everything coherent and flow well so let’s get to it.
The thing I can appreciate from both Blizzard and the Warhammer 40k games is the expansions. I know that I am in the very small minority that plays campaigns of competitive multiplayer games but that’s what I do and Blizzard is a big reason for that. I grew up with WarCraft 2 and StarCraft. WarCraft 3 is what I played the most both single player and random 2v2s but the thing I remember from each of them was how the difficulty curve went up in the expansions. I never finished The Dark Portal or Brood War without cheating and I’m not even convinced I finished Frozen Throne all the way through. I feel like I made it through the human campaign but maybe not the undead. But that’s what I like, I like the challenge, I like that they’re like “okay, you played the other game so let’s see how good you are.” I find the missions to be really fun and interesting in WC3. SC2 kind of fumbled in that category for me and I was disappointed how they handled the expansions. The campaign got slightly better in Legacy of the Void but I just could not handle the hand holding of Heart of the Swarm. Like, if you haven’t gone into a custom game or two as Zerg just to mess around and see what they’re like then I’m sorry. Learn as you go. Now with 40k Dawn of War, I got into it with Dark Crusade I believe. I found the idea of zombie robots to be a really cool. I didn’t play much of that campaign but I played a good share of custom games with my friends. But Dawn of War and a majority of the other Warhammer games have at least one expansion if not more.
The thing 40k does well is the use of its races. When I got into Dawn of War the game had seven races to play as and that was impressive to me. In Frozen Throne the Naga were a big focus of the Night Elf campaign and even had buildings and such in some missions so there was a chance for a new race to choose from. Now with World of WarCraft there really is no shortage of races Blizzard could pull from to make new RTS races, new alliances and new games in general. It’s different for 40k because, from what I can tell, just about anyone can make a 40k game if they want. If there’s a genre of videogame you like there is most likely a 40k game lurking in there somewhere. On Blizzard’s side it’s probably harder since they make all their games and since everything has to be a “games as a service” now they don’t have as many people to work on new things, I’m assuming. I imagine before, once they were done a game a small team would stick around with it and patch it and the bulk of the team would start on a new project but now they still need a large group of people making new characters, new maps and new pants for OverWatch and Diablo 3 respectively. I’ve mentioned in my other post about a RTS of WarCraft units in the StarCraft universe and how Blizzard could make a new WarCraft game with all the new WoW races but it just seems doubtful that anything like that will happen at this point.
What I like with Blizzard is if you buy say StarCraft 2 you get little things for everything thing else. You get a pet for WoW, a card back for Hearthstone, some aesthetic for Diablo 3 and maybe a mount for Heroes of the Storm. Is that for the base game or a deluxe version? I don’t remember, but it was an incentive to play the other games or if you already do play the other games to have something new to look at. I wish 40k did more things like that. I’ve started playing Mechanicus and after restarting the game several times because I didn’t understand something they probably explained, I’m having a really good time. The main enemies I’ve been fighting have been the Necrons. I’m not sure if there are any other enemy races I’ll encounter but it just made me think of Dawn of War 2’s mode, The Last Stand. Last Stand is a mode where you are in a group of three (perfect for us), pick a hero unit and fight waves of enemies. One of the DLC heroes being a Necron… hold on, Overlod, Necron Overlord. But that character is still $10 on the Steam store! It’s been out for like nine years! So, it’d be cool if they had a game that either was just The Last Stand or a new mode in Dawn of War 3, which may be dead, and added things in like that for playing other 40k games. So just for arguments sake and leaving out the nine year gap between games, a bonus for Mechanicus could have been the Necron Overlord for Dawn of War 2.
What I like with WarCarft and StarCraft is how things control. It’s probably a little bit influenced in the fact that I grew up with Blizzard RTS but I mean it makes sense. A is attack, S is stop, a majority of the hot keys and hero abilities are close to where your left hand rests on the keyboard, it’s nice. Trying to play Last Stand last week and not remembering how my character was built for starters but just some of my heroes moves were all the way on the other side of the keyboard. Like “O,” how is that convenient at all? O, pfft. I’ll show you O. What I did not like is when Legacy of the Void came out every unit had a button. Things that were just automatic had to be a button. I don’t want to micro manage that much! I’m just a simple boy! Let my Zealots run around if they want to! Some of my favorite things in Frozen Throne’s campaign are the Tomb of Sageras mission for the Night Elves and Rexxar’s bonus campaign. I think what I like about those things the most is that it’s more about the hero unit. In Tomb of Sargeras I really like the side mission of finding all the shadow orb pieces. I usually miss two or three but I really love that mission for it. I probably like them because they feel more like a dungeon crawler. There’s no base to worry about in those missions, just the units you got and the items you find. One thing though is I wish my ranged units would make way for my melee people. I move them to a location and the archers get there, blocking the way and my bears are just in back going left to right like, “I’ll figure this out.” Just get out of the way! Geez. But I really like those missions and I really like only being able to carry six items between heroes. You have to prioritize what’s important to you and what you can do without. I don’t like having too many items and spells, it gets messy. Like in the Division 2, I have so many different armors and guns for different builds I use that I get confused with what’s what. I would really love it if Blizzard made a game or new mode in Heroes of the Storm that was somehow similar to Dawn of War 2’s Last Stand or some kind of dungeon crawler within HotS. I really loved HotS but the changes they’ve made just pushed me away. Again, I’m weird and don’t exactly play the way you’re suppose to but I primarily played as WarCraft characters. I’d use a few StarCraft characters and I feel like a couple of Diablo characters and that was it. It’d be fine if we had a couple more friends to play with so my Hero choices wouldn’t matter so much since someone else would probably compensate and not care but people are so agro on that game if you don’t pick what they want you to pick and then they just don’t play or play badly and make excuses. I remember one game where a Rexxar was mad that I didn’t port down to save him as Brightwing because it was clearly a bad idea, I CLEARLY would have died also and he started bitching about what we were doing and how “he was doing HIS job.” Which, by the way, he didn’t even have the right talents to kill creeps faster at that point in the games life, but my fault for not helping him. Anyways, as he was dicking around with a creep camp we were pushing into the enemies base and winning and I was like “don’t worry, we got it.” It was a time. But it would be fun to have some three player mood I think. Have a tank, dps and support, have three dps, whatever.
When I heard there was going to be a Warhammer Diablo like game I was pretty excited. Like a real Diablo clone, not like Inquisitor. But then the game was shown and it was set in the normal Warhammer world and not 40k and I was just like “why?!” It’s so much like Diablo as it is, why do this? And Inquisitor has only three “classes” to choose from I think which is so weird to me. Like I said before, 40k has SO many races to draw from. Just from what I’ve played Mechanicus, because the lore of 40k is so deep I’m sure I only know of the dust on the top layer, the Mechanicus group works with the Imperials and Space Marines. They pretty much make all their ships and vehicles. Then there are this other groups units I get to use called the Skitarii. They’re pretty cool, fast little things with swords and tasers. And from what I gather from a few dialogs is they think really highly of the Tau. So that’s five different races/potential classes that could work together in some kind of dungeon crawler/looter shooter, which I think are just third person dungeon crawlers. You make the difficulty harder, do the same missions over and over, get better pants, yeah, it’s the same. The Tech-priest could be a healer/repairer/caster class, Skitarii and the Imperial unit could be dps, Space Marines could be tanks, and the Tau could be a tank or heavy dps type.
Those are my thoughts on that. I’d really like it if Blizzard branched out with their brands and/or made some new RTS and I’d like it if Warhammer 40k would bring back The Last Stand or something like it. I want each group to rub of on each other a little bit; I think there are things both could benefit from. Do you have any dream games that will never see the light of day because companies don’t like money? Let me know below and I’ll be back soon complaining about something I’m sure!
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