April 2022

Update May 10, 2022

I tried out the latest changes to the Overwatch 2 beta. Honestly it doesn’t feel any different, though Zenyatta’s new melee feels amazing. I had a lot of fun booping bots to a platform that they can’t get back from. Soldier’s 76 crit scan ultimate change felt pretty great too. I think Overwatch 2 is in a good spot for a decent number of their characters and I can’t wait to see what changes are made before launch. Hopefully we won’t have much longer to wait for it to launch.

Overwatch Update May 5, 2022

Blizzard released an update for Overwatch 2 beta today. In it is a number of changes to characters, some nerfs like Soldier 76’s running speed and some buffs, like Zenyatta’s knockback melee. The original post was made before this update and I will probably write about it again on or around May 17th when the beta ends with my final opinion on how Overwatch 2 feels.

Original Post

It’s been three years since Overwatch 2 was officially announced at BlizzCon 2019. This week they finally put out a beta for the game. Overwatch 2 is not the traditional sequel, however. Overwatch will be entirely replaced with Overwatch 2 and everyone who currently owns Overwatch will get the PVP for the sequel for free. It’s an interesting model and one I could see more games doing in the future, especially Grand Theft Auto, since GTA: Online would more than likely be updated to the new city and engine once GTA6 comes out.

With Overwatch 2 having a new engine and updated visuals, the game looks great. All of your skins from the first game carried over to the beta, so seeing them with a fresh coat of paint makes them look like they’re brand new. The old maps being seen at different times of day also make them feel new, even though they’re the same ones you’ve been playing for six years. The game also sounds better. Guns sound like they are taken out of the real world and is an welcome change.

How Overwatch 2 Feels

Visuals are great, but they don’t make or break a game, so how does Overwatch 2 feel? That is complicated to say the least. It feels different than the first, but how could it not? When you go from a 12 person game of 6 vs 6 to a 10 person game of 5 vs 5, it’s going to feel much different.  Almost every character was reworked in some way, so they don’t play identical to how they used to play. Some of these changes include Orisa no longer having a shield and Reinhardt being able to throw two fireballs instead of just one.

When it comes to actually playing characters, something feels off to say the least. It could be a high ping issue, I don’t think we saw a ping below 300, so that could absolutely be the issue here, it could also be a bug in the game. When I was shooting the ceiling with Soldier 76, it looked like not all of his shots were visually hitting. I admit I am not the best at the game, however a lot of times it felt as though my shots weren’t even hitting the other team right in front of me. Since this is a beta on top of the high ping, it was hard to determine if there was something off with how I was aiming, a bug, or the high ping that was the issue.

The Push

Overwatch 2’s big feature for me was the new Push mode. In it you have one robot you need to take control of and have it push your barrier to somewhere on the map, if the other team gets control of it, they then go to their barrier and begin pushing it. The team who’s barrier is further along is the winner. It’s a really fun mode and probably my favorite mode in the game. The robot is so cute as well, last week I tried to find a 3d model so I could print one, but nothing came up, hopefully soon one will be available. My one gripe about the mode is that there’s a time limit. Even though games would be very long, I think that it should go on until one of the barriers reaches the destination.

Overall I am excited for the game, hopefully whatever the issue is with the aiming and shooting is fixed, but if it’s a ping issue, then that should be gone when it launches. There’s at least one other beta this year and no release date announced yet, for all we know this could be the first game released under Microsoft’s ownership. Either way, when it comes out I will definitely be playing it.

Update: May 29, 2022

Sony has announced a State of Play for June 2nd at 6PM EST. It’s going to be focused on third party and PSVR2 games.

Update: May 5, 2022

June 9th at 2PM ET, Summer Game Fest will be having a live cross industry showcase hosted by Geoff Keighley. We can expect some big video game news to come out of this, especially from companies that won’t be having their own conference and won’t be tied to another company’s, like the Xbox showcase. With so many companies out there, it’s impossible to guess what they’ll show, but what are you hoping they announce?

A new rumor suggests that the Xbox showcase will be longer than the usual 90 minutes. Xbox head of marketing, Aaron Greenberg, has said that they haven’t finalized the length yet. With an all digital event and nothing happening right after, they have no reason they need to stick to 90 minutes and with more than 90, they could show more game play. Would you want them to go passed a 90 minute conference?

Original Story

E3(Electronic Entertainment Expo) has been a staple in the video game industry for many years. Some describe it as Christmas for gamers and for some time it was shown on channels like SpikeTV. It’s something that I’ve wanted to attend for many years. Unfortunately due to the pandemic, whether or not E3 actually happens has been up in the air. It missed 2020, but returned last year. This year, however, it won’t be happening.

Back in 2020, shortly after E3 was cancelled, Geoff Keighley announced a new digital event, Summer Game Fest. The Summer Game Fest would step in and fill in the gap that the missing E3 left. This year, the online festival returns for it’s third year after being held last year alongside a digital E3. It’s important to note that it is not E3 and therefor won’t have E3 staples like EA Play, instead EA will be announcing things on social media.

While we don’t have the full schedule yet, recently some info has been announced. This page will be updated when more is announced.

Schedule

On June 6-10 Netflix will be holding their Geeked Week. With their recent announcement that they will have up to 50 titles by the end of the year, Netflix is ready to take the video game industry by storm. Last year during their first Geeked Week, they mainly showed video game shows, but this year with the expansion of their game library, the focus could shift more toward interactive content.

On June 10 at 3PM ET, the Tribeca Games Spotlight will happen. Tribeca will be featuring new IPs American Arcadia, As Dusk Falls, Immortality, The Cub, Thirsty Suiters, and Venba. In addition to these new games, they will also feature sequels to some of their most popular franchises and show off A Plague Tale: Requiem and Oxenfree II. They’ll also show off the highly anticipated Cuphead DLC Cuphead: Delicious Last Course.

On Sunday June 12, at 1PM ET, Xbox and Bethesda will be holding their press conference. Microsoft’s first party games come to Game Pass on day 1 as well as launched on PC and Xbox at the same time, so for a lot of people, including me, this is their most anticipated conference. Unlike Tribeca, they won’t reveal what games will be shown before the showcase. They have an impressive line up of upcoming games that they can show off, including a new Gears of War, Fable’s reboot/sequel, and the highly anticipated new IP Starfield.

Halo Infinite came out in December 2021 and it’s been a rough five months for the game. Since launch there has been bugs in big team battle, an outcry of players against the cosmetic store for various reasons, an overall lack of content updates in general, and a whole bunch of other issues. It looked like things would be bad when even after delaying the game a full year it still wouldn’t have campaign co-op or Forge at launch, but I don’t think anyone anticipated five months post launch and there would still be lack of content.

It looks like all that is about to change though, 343i has shared their roadmap up until November 7, which includes new game modes and maps for season 2, campaign network co-op, and Forge beta. Seasons are new terminology for the franchise, back when Halo 2 and Halo 3 came out, they would periodically reset ranks, especially when map packs dropped, but they weren’t known as seasons then. Forge mode, campaign mission replay, and network co-op have been a staple in Halo since Halo 3. The game looks like it’s finally getting to where it should have been when it launched.

Love of Halo

I love Halo. I have been playing the franchise since Halo 2 came out, it was pretty much the only game I played until well into the Xbox 360 generation. Even I was annoyed at the lack of updates. It’s hard not to be though, Halo 5 had constant updates when it dropped, if I remember correctly they were putting out content for the first six months or so. When games like Fortnite, Dead by Daylight, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have updates every few weeks, it’s easy to be annoyed when a franchise and game studio owned by Microsoft can’t do the same.

Regardless of the game’s downfalls so far, I am excited for season 2 and while I can’t be sure I will play it for the six months of the season, I will at the very least check out the new maps and game modes. I will also do my placements, I have done that twice so far (they reset ranks in the middle of the season) and I placed in gold twice. The first time I ranked up to platinum 2 before I stopped playing.

Forge Mode

Out of all the announcements though, I am probably most excited for Forge. I remember there was a lot of things I tried to do in Halo 3 Forge and it was just a pain with a controller, so I am looking forward to getting into it and playing around with it on a PC. If it’s anything like Overwatch’s map editor then you will be able to tweak almost everything and have conditionals that make game modes more complex than ever before. There was a screenshot that supposedly showed how customizable Forge would be and if that turns out to be real, then we will probably see things we’ve never seen before in a Halo game. That would definitely be a good thing.

For a while I had articles up and I was happy with them for a while, but then I wasn’t. I realized with the articles I was writing as if they were just factual and only news, but I didn’t want that, I wanted to have my opinion and my voice in there. I have absorbed the articles under blogs, so this way I can write and give an opinion and not feel guilty about it not being just the facts. All the articles still exist, they just changed to be under the blogs now.

I’ve missed writing and I want to write more. Just over the last few days, between the CNN+ and Playstation Plus blog posts, I’ve done more writing than I have in a while. For CNN+ I didn’t really get into much of an opinion and kept it pretty factual, but when it came to PS+ I went more in depth with a personal side of things. Expect to see more of that kind of thing on here. While articles were fun, they lacked me, a me that I feel I can put into blogs easier. I highly doubt I will be able to do a blog a day like I’ve been doing though, between work and creating other kinds of content, it doesn’t seem feasible, but if there’s something I want to give an opinion on or write about, it will most likely be put up.

Since I am a nerd and into technology, video games, 3d printing and other things like that, expect to see more writings about those kinds of things. Hopefully I can get to the point that I want to with this, but I am feeling reinvigorated now for some reason, so maybe the drive I have can keep me going.

Sony announced today that their new Playstation Plus plans will launch in the US on or around June 13, 2022. It will first be launching in Asia (not Japan) on May 23 with Japan launching on June 1. These are all listed as targeted dates and not set release dates though, so it’s possible that it could happen a few days after the one listed.

The plans that are being launched is their new games as a service option. They’ve gotten rid of Playstation Now and has rolled that into the higher tiers.

Playstation Plus Essential

It’s essentially the same as Playstation Plus as it stands today.

• $9.99 a month, $24.99 quarterly, $59.99 yearly.
• Discounts on Store items
• Cloud storage
• Online multiplayer

PlayStation Plus Extra

• $14.99 a month, $39.99 quarterly, $99.99 yearly
• Discounts on Store items
• Cloud storage
• Online multiplayer
• Up to 400 PS4 and PS5 games from Playstation Studios and other third party studios. These are downloadable and can be played on the system itself.

PlayStation Plus Premium

• $17.99 a month, $49.99 quarterly, $119.99 yearly
• Discounts on Store items
• Cloud storage
• Online multiplayer
• Up to 400 PS4 and PS5 games from Playstation Studios and other third party studios. These are downloadable and can be played on the system itself.
• Up to 340 additional games including PS3 games available via cloud streaming and a catalog of Playstation 2, original Playstation, and PSP games that can be streamed and downloaded.
• Cloud streaming for original Playstation, Playstation 2, PSP, and PS4 games where PS Now is currently available. Customers will be able to stream games using PS4, PS5, and PCs.
• Time limited game trials so you can try some games before you buy them.

In some markets where PS Now isn’t available, Playstation Plus Premium will be replaced with Playstation Plus Deluxe that will be a lower price, but not include streaming.

The Games

While most games for the new tiers have not been announced, Sony has confirmed that Death Stranding, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Mortal Kombat 11, and Returnal will be on the system at launch. Like Xbox Game Pass, it’s expected that games will be added and removed periodically.

The two biggest difference between Xbox Game Pass and Playstation Plus is that Playstation Plus will seemingly have more games at launch than Game Pass has currently, even when combining both Xbox and PC games, but first party games won’t come to Playstation Plus at launch. Since all first party Xbox games come on day 1 to Game Pass, that is a big draw for the service, allowing gamers to play games they never would before when factoring in 2 brand new games is the same price as a year of Game Pass.

Personally I am excited for the new Playstation Plus tiers. I have not used my PS4 as much as I’d like, but when it comes to the controller I prefer Xbox’s and I never saw the need to go out and get a Playstation controller that was shaped like that, but maybe with more games to play I will. I loved the Spider-Man games and the Last of Us was probably my favorite game I played on PS4. I am hoping that the new tier system gets me playing more Playstation games overall, there are a lot of games that I missed that I was interested in playing, so if they come to the service, I will definitely check them out.

Are you excited for the new Playstation Plus? How do you think it compares to other services like Game Pass and Ubisoft+? Let me know in the comments.

On April 8, 2022 Discovery acquired WarnerMedia. The new company name is now Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Including in the assets that Discovery CEO David Zaslav now has access to is HBO, HBO Max, TNT, TBS, Warner Bros movie and TV library, and CNN.

CNN was founded in 1980 as the first 24 hour cable news channel in America. Since then it’s grown to include multiple channels, text news on their website, radio, and a large international presence. They also recently got into streaming as well. In fact it just launched it’s streaming service CNN+ on March 29,2022, a mere ten days before the acquisition was completed. It was announced that they had just reached 150,000 and for a news streaming service that just launched weeks prior at $5.99, that’s pretty good.

CNN+

Based on the success the streaming service seemed to have, you can imagine the surprise when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that on April 30, 2022, CNN+ will be shut down. It was previously reported that HBO Max and Discovery+ along with other programming from Warner Media would be merged into a single streaming service at some point in the future. With CNN+ shutting down, it is looking more likely that a news portion will be a part of this new streaming service whenever it launches.

CNN+ currently has over 600 employees that will lose their jobs once the service shut down. They’ve also invested hundreds of millions of dollars on talent and programming for CNN+, but it sounds like some of that programming will move to HBO Max, CNN.com, and the free CNN app. If they are shifting the programming over to HBO Max, then the new streaming service combination could be coming sooner than expected, which would make sense if they were immediately shutting down CNN+. If it was still at least a year away then it might make sense for CNN+ to continue to run as it was to recoup some of the money that was spent, but shutting it down sounds like we could see the new service in a few months.

Bundles

Merging HBO Max and Discovery+ (and assuming CNN+) is a completely different direction than Disney did when they launched Disney+. Instead of merging Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, they launched a bundle where you get all 3 services. They could have went with a bundle since they don’t own Hulu outright and wasn’t willing to buy out Comcast’s 33% of the service, however since Disney has operational control of the service, they might be able to shut it down completely without Comcast’s permission.

Hulu’s big draw is the next day content, after it airs live, it is available on the platform the next day. Comcast is going to be pulling some content from the service starting in Fall 2022, which makes sense as they also have their own streaming service, Peacock. If Peacock gets NBC content like Saturday Night Live the next day, that could be a huge draw for them.

What do you think, do you like the bundle option that Disney has or would you prefer everything to be in one service like Warner Bros Discovery seems to be doing?