T w e n t y S i d e d

If you’re reading my humble site, then you’ve heard about the controversy surrounding Blizzard with regards to China and the Hong Kong protests. However, it feels wrong to start an  article with no context whatsoever, so here’s is a super-fast one-paragraph summary:

A week ago the pro Hearthstone player Blitzchung won a tournament. Afterward, he appeared in an interview wearing goggles and a face mask and shouted “Liberate Hong Kong!”, showing solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters. The interviewers ducked behind their desk and laughed, and then the interview was terminated. Two days later, Blitzchung was stripped of his prize money, stripped of his title, removed from the grandmaster league, and banned from Hearthstone competition for a full year. Additionally, the interviewers were also fired, even though they didn’t express any overt support for Hong Kong.

Everyone hated this move. The entire gaming community has already expressed their disgust for Blizzard’s behavior. I realize I’m showing up a week late to this party. I wouldn’t bother weighing in at all, except there’s another angle to all of this that I want to explore.

So here’s what I want to do: I want to defend Blizzard.

Also here is the video version of this article, for those of you who aren’t into the whole reading thingI really need to come up with a graceful way of offering both of these options without it feeling awkward.:

Defending Blizzard

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Blizzard’s Folly”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Like most of my work, this video / article was completed over a week before publication. Below, I brought up a lot of gripes about how the Borderlands 3 loot system works. Then early last week we got a patch to address these problems. I was worried I was going to need to rewrite the video or scrap it entirely. But as luck would have it, Gearbox’s changes were quite small and timid, so the patch didn’t fix my gripes so much as mitigate them very slightly.

Maybe some future patch will fix my concerns, but this seems less like a balance problem and more like a deliberate (although somewhat inexplicable) design decision. I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks. At any rate, to make sense of this we need to jump back a few months.

Back in January of this year – back before Borderlands 3 was announced – I had an article on the Escapist listing 5 reasons why I was worried about the game. Now the game is released and we’ve all had a chance to play it, so I thought it would be good to look at how it turned out in light of my concerns.

You can read the article below, or you can see the video version on YouTube.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.