The third point in the multiplayer game holy-trinity is moderation, especially if a game caters to minors as well as adults. Reports recently emerged that there were certain Overwatch 2 servers that weren't moderated properly, as they had inappropriately themed custom games modes like "Sexual Assault Simulat

It comes with its own risks though. If you’ve played Overwatch 2 at all, you know Moira is constantly played as a DPS . They shred through enemies, rush off to get kills, and rarely come back to help the team, leaving the job to rest on one support’s shoulders. I’m busy scrambling to hit the mute button while I keep a charging Reinhardt alive as he plummets into the entire enemy team, so my shoulders are more than strained. But Kiriko hasn’t ended up like Moira - at least, not yet. The ease of being able to jump between damage and healing is similar there, but the DPS doesn’t outclass the healing to such an extent that it’s worth dropping altogether. The two are well-balanced, meaning you can easily flit between keeping D.Va alive and taking out a cheeky Widowmaker perched in the dista

However, one Redditor wrote to Blizzard about this, and it turns out that it was an error. OW1 skins should not have been tagged as 'new', and should be redeemable via Legacy Credits . The customer support team asked them to submit a bug report after receiving their tic

Patches are par for the course in gaming these days. While your live-service behemoths are always tinkering with the meta, keeping gameplay fresh, and fixing all the bugs those first two fixes cause, even the smallest single-player titles come with constant post-launch care these days. Day one patch is now the norm, and while games like Cyberpunk 2077 which launch in historically unacceptable states benefit greatly from devs now being able to fix things in the wild, it’s unlikely Cyberpunk would have launched at all if the studio knew it would be stuck with what it had. On the whole, patches offer a safety net that’s good to the industry, but it sometimes feels like they take away a game’s personal

Everything must be realistic, atmospheric, and other vague adjectives taken from focus groups and written on white boards. It might remain as a callback, but if it does it will be an exception to the rule. Any of these sorts of things left in by mistake tend to be taken out immediately because players having fun in their own way isn’t part of the developers’ vision. Any way you find to exploit something, even in a single-player experience where no one else is impacted, is viewed as a mistake to be fi

Does anyone actually enjoy doing daily challenges in games? I for one resent logging in to play and finding a list of chores to do. Even trivial challenges - something I would accomplish through normal play - rub me the wrong way. I don’t know what I’m more upset about: that someone invented such an anti-player progression system, or that every developer in the world took one look at it and said "Yep, that’s good enough for

Part of the tinkering feels like vanity too. In Horizon Forbidden West , Aloy was too chatty when she was alone , remarking that items will be sent back to storage (somehow?) and repeating the same few lines over and https://overwatch2tactics.com over. People said it was annoying, so it was taken out. But surely they knew it was annoying? Surely part of the point was to make Aloy endearing in this way? I’m sure people think Aloy shutting the hell up is an improvement, but mostly it just feels like fixing something for the sake of it. It doesn’t feel like developers have the license to be creative and eccentric if a few people joking around online is enough for the studio to mandate changing the game. Gaming is becoming more risk averse, not less, in the presence of a constant safety

And then you get her cleanse ability which is perfect for tight spots where your healing just isn’t enough anymore. The amount of tanks I’ve saved in clutch moments in quick play with it is amazing and keeps the action going rather than leaving me helpless and doomed to sit in spectate while the overtime ticks down. Chuck in her ult that makes not only you heal and attack faster but your allies too, and she’s solidified as the best healer since Ana, but without the barrier to entry of using a sniper. I’m not very good at sniping, never mind juggling that and healing, so Kiriko is the perfect alternat

But it’s a problem in single-player games too. If I’m losing a game in Marvel Snap I can retreat and I won’t lose as much rank, but if I have a challenge to play cards in the last turn, I have to see it through to the end, even when I know I’m going to lose. In these instances I have two competing objectives - win the game or play a six-cost card. When you’re playing as though you’re trying to do something other than win, you’re engaging in deviant play. Games should not encourage this, yet almost all of them