yay, it finally happened!

I can now say that this is probably my favorite cinematic as far as Overwatch goes. Looks amazing and makes me really excited about the character. Which is nice because I've been playing the crap out of her whenever I get the chance this week and it's been super fun

Still no cinematic lol

Really eager to play. Kiriko in particular is so cool, and will probably replace Ana as my most played support

@Shiebs said in Overwatch:

Oh yeah and there making you pay for the new heroes, they won’t be free anymore

not necessarily accurate on this one:
https://twitter.com/Spex_J/status/1567694080909660162?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet

"Addressing some incomplete info posted early about our Overwatch 2 Battle Pass – we'll be sharing all details ahead of launch, but want to confirm that new Overwatch 2 heroes will be available on the free track of the Battle Pass."

What characters are you guys playing?

For me the characters that have felt the most natural so far have been Wonder Woman and Arya Stark. But even though I like how they play, I feel like the game is not designed for them to be good, since it seems a lot of projectile spam characters are just plain better. Both Bugs and Tom&Jerry have excellent projectile game and disjointed aerials that make approaching them near impossible.
I'm also not a fan of Arya having the assassin passive of taking extra damage, especially when her reach is just nowhere as ridiculous as that of other assassins like Harley and Finn.

I'll probably keep playing though, of all the smash-likes this is the easiest game to just pick up and play, so it's easier to jump in and have good matches compared to games I enjoy more like Rivals and Smash. I wish Smash had this level of support for unlockable cosmetic content and online matchmaking.

@Shiebs:

Overwatch 2’s Beta is out now

I wonder if it will be any good?

I've been having a lot of fun with it! The game feels faster to me than before, and it's kind of nice going into fights without having to shoot at shields for five years before anything can happen.

The new reworks and new hero are all pretty fun too, though personally I've been having a good time with Mei more than anyone else. Feels more fair to use her when she can't just freeze + headshot, but at the same time she feels kind of really strong due to lacking falloff damage on her right-click and her ice wall essentially able to singlehandedly destroy aggressive enemy tanks.

E3 completely cancelled this year:
https://www.polygon.com/23005160/e3-2022-canceled-digital-event-esa

Honestly it could also mean the end of E3… the more years the industry goes without it the easier it becomes for the industry to stop needing it anymore

Hard to say. It takes millions to make those millions, and I bet that losing that much money is the sort of thing that wouldn’t affect the multimillionaire executives, but the people at the bottom whose output will be deemed less valuable as a result.

Do we really believe any Disney executive would eat this cost to make an ethical stand? No way, they’ll toss aside the management types that allow this to happen. I agree that we call egotistical maniacs out, but the harsh reality is that there’s also regular working people behind these executives who don’t deserve the hate falloff and repercussions.

These decisions are more complicated than the internet wants them to be. As evil and greedy as Disney can be, this is more of a globalization issue than a Disney-specific problem.

Proud Family is less likely to be marketed outside of the US, whereas something as big to Disney's portfolio as the next Pixar movie (that is also based on Toy Story) is the type of product you want to market globally as best as possible.

This in turn means that you have to dance around other countries where "promoting" LGBTQ stuff is deemed to either be criminal activity, or the type of offense that means you cannot sell the product in an entire region or country. In that sense it's not as hard being the artist who has to fight corporate while facing very limited repercussions for wanting inclusivity that matches the liberal landscape of west coast, USA. It's much harder being the person who has to consider that if you don't push back on this there's a possibility that the employees that work for your company while living in Russia or China could face much more serious repercussions. Not to mention that if as an artist you want everyone to see your product, it kind of sucks to know that one single scene that may have nothing to do with the core message could cause a significant portion of the world to suddenly lose access to your creation and its entire message.

I also hate to point out that it's not just entirely about "greedy corporate". For a lot of businesses that operate globally, the market in other countries can be as large as two-thirds of the entirety of what you make. This money isn't unfortunately just lining the pocket of higher-level executives, but also the operating income for all the artists at the company who want to be able to enjoy things like health insurance, benefits, bonuses, decent paychecks, etc.

The logical decision would be to just make different scenes/products for each region, but then you still have the problem of 1) that is still censorship and people will still not like it and 2) it massively increases the time and money cost of production. Especially if it is a story-significant scene that you cannot simply cut without affecting the integrity or value of the project.
Personally, I figure that if companies want to make global profit then they should commit to spending on the resources to make that profit without limiting what non-censory regions get to see…. but that's also me talking about this without knowing what the actual cost is of operating like this.

I'm really curious if part of what motivated this pushback is also the mentality that we don't need to worry about censoring same-sex kisses for Russia if the whole world is avoiding Russia. But I would still love to see the decisions that are made when selling this in areas like China where it could be considered "inappropriate". I'm more interested in this whole topic than in the actual movie at this point XD

Oh man, time to get excited about this game again! Lots of other games already for later this year, but I'll find have to find the time for this one

Honestly, it should all just become as simple as showdown, where if you have a pokemon in your pokedex or boxes you can pull it up and adjust stats and stuff based on how you want to use it. Probably broken in-game, but there's no reason to not have this in battle facilities post-game or for online battles. And also a great incentive for completing the pokedex, since it would mean being able to use anything competitively.

The effort system in Legends is ok, but not truly explained enough. It's hard to know when deciding what pokemon to use early on what those numbers mean, and I feel stupid having reset for a starter with better effort numbers without realizing that could be increased. I thought for sure those were IVs.
But I guess that's also a thing with the old system where gamefreak doesn't trust players enough to communicate that info. They probably are afraid that that will turn off players since they'll perceive they have to do math. For me I get more frustrated when I take a million damage and cannot understand why because the game isn't clear enough about how damage is calculated or how order stacking works.

And yes, the move selection improvement is huge and I really like it. It makes a ton more sense, and it will be hard looking back to the eras of move reminders and the like.