Bill Gates is not simply the biggest owner of farmland in America. He’s the biggest owner of American video games.

RT:

Microsoft has announced it will purchase Activision Blizzard, the game studio behind several popular franchises, in a record-breaking $68.7 billion all-cash deal. Activision Blizzard has recently been engulfed in controversy.

The deal shatters the previous industry record set just last week when Take Two offered Zynga $12.7 billion for their acquisition. Microsoft’s announcement has seen shares of Activision soar some 37 percent, but Microsoft’s own shares have fallen more than 2 percent after the announcement.

If the deal goes through, Microsoft would become the third-largest gaming company in the world, behind China’s Tencent and Japan’s Sony. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, detailed their interest in acquiring Activision Blizzard as being excited to invest in an industry set to play a big role in the future metaverse.

“Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” she said in a statement. “We’re investing deeply in world-class content, community and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first and makes gaming safe, inclusive and accessible to all.”

Microsoft has bought up a bunch of indie studios and ruined them.

I can’t really see how they could make Activision-Blizzard any worse than it already is.

I mean, I guess they could like, add in ads for vaccines, and make every character in WoW wear a mask. Or somehow integrate the vaccine passport into their criminal microtransaction loot box illegal gambling scheme.

Did you know they still haven’t fixed Warcraft III: Reforged? Instead, they just stopped talking about it.

PLEASE boycott these games. Stop buying them.

I keep telling you: there are plenty of good indie games if you know what you’re looking for and you don’t have a 90 IQ. The last “blockbuster” game I bought was Cyberpunk 2077 and I promise you I will never buy one again.

STOP PAYING THESE JEWS TO JEW YOU WITH SUBPAR GAMES.

Such bold innovation. Bravo.

First of all, you may be surprised to learn that Call of Duty 15 is coming out. Weren’t there a whole lot more than just 15 CoD games out already?

Uh, let’s see here…

Okay, so scratch that 15.

CoD 40 is coming out. Wew.

I’ve got some images coming to mind, for some reason… Something involving a horse…

Mmmmhh.

Or, wait, something with a stone?

Maybe if you squeeze hard enough, blood will come out?

Either way, I’m sure this latest CoD game is totally not a cash grab, and is being developed because Activision had a bold artistic vision that desperately needed to be realized.

After all, all the previous CoD games have been totally original products bursting with new ideas.

Call of Duty 2.

Call of Duty 39.

The latest innovation is apparently to strip out the single-player campaign.

Games Radar:

This year could see some of the biggest changes to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, with this year’s entry dropping the single-player campaign and making big changes to some pretty core multiplayer mechanics. Things like tracer fire to locate enemies, manual healing, a bot mode for zombies so you can play solo, and [drum roll] a battle royale mod. While some of what’s happening might seem odd at first, it makes sense if you think about this as a potential stepping stone towards Call of Duty becoming an ongoing ‘live’ game; something like Overwatch or Fortnite, that relies on updates and seasons rather than yearly releases. There’s a lot happening here that feels like Activision is testing that water, especially when developers at Treyarch talk about things like plans to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Zombies an “evergreen mode, for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly engagement.”

Let’s take a look at all the big beats of the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 announcement and the differences to the latest instalment ahead of the Black Ops 4 release date on October 12.

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has no single-player campaign, it’s just multiplayer, zombies and battle royale

The rumour that Black Ops 4 wouldn’t have a traditional single player campaign seemed almost incomprehensible when it did the rounds recently, but it’s true. There will be single-player stuff in the game, but as Treyarch chairman, Mark Lamia, puts it, “no traditional campaign.” Instead the ‘three pillars’ are its multiplayer, Zombies and Blackout, Call of Duty’s new battle royal mode.

Wow, what a bold vision. I’m sure this has nothing to do at all with the fact that the single-player campaign is where most of the development costs lie, huh?

So this CoD will only cost around 25% to produce, as compared with previous entries. Actually, probably a lot less, since they can just recycle most of the existing content from the 39 previous games, along with the engine and most of the code. So it might cost 5-10%, considering that most of the cost would probably have gone to create the assets, levels, voice acting and so on for the main campaign.

Don’t worry, I’m sure Activision will pass the savings on to you!

3. The Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 battle royale mode is called Blackout

The fact that Call of Duty is doing a battle royale mode isn’t that surprising given Fortnite is the game mode right now, but it’s taking an interesting angle with the idea. Blackout, as the battle royale mode is known, takes place in a map “100 times bigger than your traditional [multiplayer] map,” according to studio director David Vonderhaar. The interesting thing, however, is this massive area appears to be mushing together the entire Black Ops universe: characters, vehicles, scorestreaks, multiplayer maps and more. Treyarch’s presentation suggested almost the entire history of the series was making an appearance, from Reznov to old zombie heroes, the RC-XD remote control car bomb was mentioned, and even set pieces and story beats appear to be on the cards somehow as well. Plus there’ll be land sea and air vehicles. There’s no player count yet other than “lots”.

In other words, they’re just recycling the old materials and assets from the previous games to make this one – to weasel into the market that PUBG and Fortnite are currently vying for TOTAL DOMINANCE of.

It is their duty to compete in the Battle Royale market – and they are heeding the call.

Fortnite would be #1 if they weren’t doing a radical “we’re not on Steam, brah” business model.

I mean, again, there wouldn’t be much room to complain if they charged, like, $5 for this. And $5 per copy would almost certainly be enough to cover the development costs, as mentioned before.

But charging full price for what is essentially a low-effort recycling of existing content to enter a market two other games are already dominating?

This is some top-tier kikery right there – just what you’d expect from a company like Activision.

Activision CEO (((Eric Hirshberg))).

Preliminary Stormer verdict: don’t buy this shit.

As far as PUBG vs Fornite… well, that is a battle we’re not willing to enter.

I hope you like spending $20 to get nothing in return, goy!

I remember having a blast playing Halo when it fist came out (on pc – master race 4 evah). Bungie, back in those days, was making great games, and seemed untouchable.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Ever since they’ve been working on their Destiny series, Bungie has been a nonstop shitshow, not only presenting us with subpar, unfinished products, but completely screwing over their customers with shit like locking away content you already bought unless you buy all the newest DLCs.

This is some next-level Jewing right there.

After overwhelming community backlash, Bungie/Activision reversed course on that one. So you’d think they’d have learned their lesson by now and their next DLC wouldn’t be a steaming pile of crap.

Well, you’d be wrong.

Forbes:

People were excited for Destiny 2.

Then Destiny 2 actually came out. At first, things seemed okay. The story was good this time around, at least. There was a map. Then we all started to notice the problems, and those problems just kept piling up.

The new weapon load-out system prioritized PvP over PvE, as did many other changes like slow cool-downs. 4 vs 4 in the Crucible was fine, but not at the expense of 6 vs 6. The game felt sluggish compared to the original. The end-game felt barren.

But it does feel strange that they had fixed so much in the original Destiny only to throw it all out for the sequel. The constant scramble to fix stuff is a turn-off for gamers and must be exhausting for Bungie and the other developers (Raven and Vicarious Visions) working on the game.

Initially, Bungie sold Destiny as a game that they would just continue to tweak and expand over time, like an MMO. That seems like a pretty good deal. Pay once for the base game, then buy regular content packs if you like the game, and never have to worry about all your items and progression getting scrapped when the next yearly sequel comes out.

A WoW FPS. Good business model. The customer wins, the company gets rich. Everyone’s happy.

Of course, things didn’t happen this way. After a little while, Bungie just threw Destiny in the garbage and released Destiny 2 for full price, almost entirely void of any content.

In other words, the only reason for this is to be able to charge $60 a second time – without delivering content – and then continue charging more money for the actual game.

A complete scam.

Which they don’t even end up delivering, lol.

It seems this newest “expansion” is just more of the same money-grubbing.

We keep hoping it will get better and it keeps getting a tiny bit better, inch by inch, but never enough to offset the things that are still mind-bogglingly bad about this game. For instance, the new Warmind DLC. It’s another DLC that feels woefully under-cooked. Over at Destructoid, Chris Carter gives the DLC a 5.5 out of 10. Ouch.

Carter sums up his feelings about the DLC thusly:

It seems obvious that the bulk of this DLC was developed before the game went into recovery mode. Destiny 2: Warmind is a better effort than Osiris, but its limited scope and re-used concepts prevent it from attaining greatness. Bit by bit, slowly over the course of the last eight months, Bungie has been making Destiny 2 a more complete experience. It’s a shame though that so many parts of that whole aren’t coming — as several of the studio’s own developers have put it — “until later in the fall.” For now you can rest easy skipping out on the season pass and possibly grab the inevitable Game of the Year Edition if the situation improves.

My colleague Paul Tassi’s early review of the DLC bemoans some of the new content’s biggest issues.

They’ve got good art direction, I’ll grant them that. It would be nice if there was an actual game with those assets.

These include:

• Rushed storytelling (Paul describes the ending as something that feels like the start of something cool, not the end of a complete story.)
• Recycled content.
• Strikes are repeated story missions.
• One new strike is a PS4 exclusive, which is something Bungie should have learned to never do long, long ago.
• Mars is cool (but honestly, it should have been in the game from the beginning along with the Moon etc.)
• It’s better than Curse of Osiris but that’s a low bar at best.
• The new Horde Mode has potential but you won’t be able to survive it until you grind levels.

This is all so very much what we’ve come to expect from Destiny 2 and Bungie (though this DLC is the work of Vicarious Visions, it is still Bungie’s game and their reputation on the line.) Half-baked content. Recycled content. Bare-bones storytelling. Big promises that almost always fail to deliver.

And this shit is selling for $20.

Wew.

For that kind of money, you’ll probably be able to buy Bum Simulator, which shows infinitely more promise.

I’d get this over Destiny 2 any day.

Moreover, the based Poles responsible for the Witcher series are coming out with a cyberpunk game soon, for which I’m a lot more excited than anything coming out of a AAA American studio.