TGO Daily | February 22, 2021 | Full BlizzCon Coverage
February 22, 2021
Welcome back! Hope you had a tremendous weekend. It was a fairly big couple of days for news, though I’ve only got two major news stories for you today.
Until tomorrow,
Adrian
In The News
Full BlizzCon Coverage
Blizzard’s annual conference took place last Friday and Saturday, celebrating all of their IPs in a fully digital format. We got announcements and information about lots of games — let’s break it down.
Diablo II: Resurrected
Blizzard officially announced Diablo II: Resurrected, a full remaster of the original game. As emphasized by the developers, this is not a remake. They are simply taking the game, upgrading it to modern standards, and releasing it again.
It is — because it needed to be — the game players remembered. Blizzard felt that most deviations, even important quality-of-life features, would be a step too far.
The biggest change you’ll see is the graphics, which are going from 2D sprites to 3D models — though even then the aesthetic is maintained as closely as possible. There are many optional or toggleable features that have been added, such as a shared stash across all your characters, auto gold pickup, and skill point reminders. A friendlier experience, “but not one that’s so friendly it ever stops feeling like the dark, brutal, and occasionally frustrating Diablo 2 that catapulted the franchise into gaming history.”
This one is being handled by Vicarious Visions, which has a much better track record than the team who handled the disastrous Warcraft 3 Reforged launch. It’ll come later this year.
Diablo IV
It has been revealed that Diablo IV will allow you to play a Rogue class. The Rogue joins the Barbarian, Sorceress, and Druid classes already announced. Blizzard says it is a highly customizable class, allowing you to be a silent archer or the typical dagger-wielder. For a deep dive into the class, I recommend this Polygon article— they had great coverage of this event as a whole.
Blizzard Arcade Collection
Already available for purchase, the Blizzard Arcade Collection bundles together three early Blizzard games that you may not have played before. The three games are The Lost Vikings, Rock n’ Roll Racing, and Blackthorne, which all have some enhancements and extra goodies like concept art. It’s available in all the usual places for $20.
World of Warcraft
Warcraft’s latest expansion, “Shadowlands,” released last October and is now getting its first major content patch called “Chains of Domination.” It’ll add a new raid, mega-dungeon, and an area called “The Maw.” On top of all the usual story bits (again, Polygon has you covered), they’re adding improvements to the Covenant system.
World of Warcraft Classic is also getting an expansion of its own, which is a re-release of “Burning Crusade,” the first expansion the game ever had. Current Classic players will be able to transfer their character over, or remain on servers that don’t include it — which means that two versions of Classic will be running simultaneously. I wonder how many more expansions they’ll keep that going.
Misc.
Those were all the major things they talked about. There was a new expansion for Hearthstone announced, and they showed off some character revamps for Overwatch 2 which is still a long way off.
Valve Turns Down Apple
Epic Games and Apple are currently in a legal dispute over revenue sharing, and they’re pulling out all the stops. This weekend, it was reported by PCGamer that Apple subpoenaed Valve Software in November for “huge amounts of commercial data about Steam sales and operations going over multiple years.”
The argument was that Steam’s statistics would help Apple build a case against Epic to prove that they didn’t have a monopoly on the market. Keeping in mind that Valve has nothing to do with this fight, here’s what Apple is requesting:
“Apple wants Valve to provide the names, prices, configurations and dates of every product on Steam, as well as detailed accounts of exactly how much money Steam makes and how it is all divvied-up. Apple argues that this information is necessary for its case against Epic, is not available elsewhere, and ‘does not raise risk of any competitive harm.’”
— PCGamer
It’s wild — Apple is trying to acquire TONS of third-party data for absolutely no reason. The request was so extensive that they were requesting information that Valve didn’t even have, because they didn’t need it to operate their business. As Valve themselves put it,
“Somehow, in a dispute over mobile apps, a maker of PC games that does not compete in the mobile market or sell 'apps' is being portrayed as a key figure. It’s not. The extensive and highly confidential information Apple demands about a subset of the PC games available on Steam does not show the size or parameters of the relevant market and would be massively burdensome to pull together. Apple’s demands for further production should be rejected.”
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