Presenters were caught somewhere between amused and a bit annoyed. Zenimax Online studio director Matt Firor particularly found many of his announcements cut off by raucous “WOOOOs” and “YEEEEEAAAAHs.” Was this mysterious man a studio employee, psyched to see The Elder Scrolls Online on stage? Was he simply a mega-fan? I don’t know; I wasn’t there to investigate. Whatever the case, those whoops and hollers danced the line between charming and bit disruptive.
JimmaJamJamie
I am all for people getting excited but the presenters would simply say their name or announce the title of a game and they would cheer for the next 10 seconds.
Most insulting thing is people cheering for Fallout 76 'new content' that should have been included in the original game, which is only being added now due to the backlash/poor reviews they received.
TheBionicAnkle
my 2 favorite moments where when the cut to someone almost crying because of Fallout 76 updates and then hearing the crowd roaring only to be shown people barely clapping.
LionCashDispenser
Front couple rows were reserved for people suspiciously looking like either A.) employees or B.) actors to hype up the crowd. I get that they want to play it safe and not get condemned for eternity like blizzard did. They have more than enough resources, why don't they just make a good fucking game instead of having to resort to playing the crowd. They just keep releasing half baked crap that revolves around bordering pay-to-win mechanics and medoicre gameplay.
frosty_farralon
they learned a lesson from Blizzard: a ton of mobile games tonight so they stacked the audience with people acting like they want that crap.
haduki41
Someone got paid a little too much to cheer cause holy crap the presenter cant even speak without getting interrupted by this random asshole.
tehPeteos
It was amazingly obvious, like they had to do the job they were paid to do but ramped it up to 11 so there's no way people wouldn't know. Good Guy Gregs, all of them!
nuclearc
Absolutely. the front 3-5 rows were full of shill plants... Was hard to hear the boo's over them, but they were there and plentiful at times.
ReaperEDX
They dodged the, "do you not have phones" meme, and now have the single guy cheering meme. Bethesda and EA are trying their best to be unmemeable, but that's how how memes work.
Thanks for sharing.
It's good to know some Relicans still care about CoH and WW2 sacrifice.
The CoH community can be tough on each other and Relic but many fans do love this game.
Among many of the privileges I have as a game designer at Relic is being able to travel for research on the games I've worked on. I visited St. Petersburg in winter, and the battle sites around the harrowing Siege of Leningrad; the Sinyavino heights, Shlisselburg, the banks of the Neva river, Kronshtadt, the Siege Museum in Leningrad, Piskarevskoye.
We overlooked the Oder River at the escarpment at Seelow, saw the narrative of battle left written in the physical damage on many street corners in Berlin, experienced the deeply powerful Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, saw where the final armistice was signed at Karlshorst.
In January of 2018 I finally had an opportunity to visit Normandy, France. We centered our visit in Caen, and traveling around the area was a tour of history I’d been reading about since childhood; Mike-Green to Nan-Red, Cruelly, Authie, Buron, Place des 37 Canadiens, Arromanches, Omaha, Pointe du Hoc, Carentan, Villers-Bocage, Verrieres, where the Black Watch bled itself dry, Bourguebus, Falaise.
Nothing, however, prepared me for the raw emotion I experienced at Bretteville-sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery. South of Caen near Cintheaux, where almost 3000 allied dead lie, casualties of Goodwood, Spring, Totalize and Tractable. You see little of the cemetery as you approach the stone portico at the entrance, but as you pass through those columns, the simple shape of the almost white Portland stone grave markers appear arranged with utter exactness so that in every direction you look, the lines are perfect. The design alone illustrates deep respect and reverence – grief manifested physically with military precision.
Seeing it for the first time brought a catch to my throat. Battles became instantly less abstract because the cost of those terrible moments was visible and tangible, touchable. As I wandered the rows in the fading light of a cool Calvados winter, many stories emerged – there were soldiers from all over Canada and the Commonwealth, there were great clusters of marker dates that signified the big battles and terrible casualties, personal inscriptions memorialized the fallen, tiny flags and fresh flowers showed that many were still visited, and remembered, and loved. I thought of my grandfather and my great uncles, all of whom, blessedly, survived the war.
The men buried in Bretteville-sur-laize were mostly young. A 22 year old from the Calgary Highlanders, a 19 year old from the British Columbia Regiment, but that also made me think of the war memorial I had visited at Tiergarten in Berlin where many of the Russian soldiers there seemed surprisingly old – I guessed that the flower of youth had long since been spent in the horror of the Eastern Front before the final battles in Berlin, and older and older soldiers had replaced the young. Fathers fighting after their sons had died. There’s a lesson there on the cost of war if what I think is true.
The 75th anniversary of the D-day landings has passed. Soon we will reach the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. These milestones certainly make one remember in a more focused way. I feel however, we’re one more year from understanding real sacrifice, one more year removed from knowing how to band together and tackle existential threats, one more year from the cost of lessons learned about the willingness, and need, to put the collective good before self.
And that’s something we should never, ever forget.
------------------
It appears that Bonnie Jean Mah (former AoE4 narrative lead) also visited France in 2018:
Bonnie Jean Mah @BonnieJeanMah
Such a great thread, @QuinnDuffy . Visiting those sites was incredibly moving and struck home, imagining what those soldiers and civilians went through. Juno Beach affected me deeply, thinking of the Canadians who stormed the beach. Thank you so much for writing this.
Actually, it's more like a loophole. Since Exodus is available on Xbox One, it's eligible for the cross-buy/cross-play "game pass" Microsoft has been working on for bridging Windows 10 and Xbox Live. It's pretty safe to assume Epic never considered that when penning the terms of the agreement.
New Epic E3 Exclusives
Includes former Sega IP, Shenmue and Valve Dota Auto Chess (mod).
Dota Auto Chess is a wildly popular Dota 2 mod that we summarised as "the joyful deck-based Dota 2 game that Artifact isn't". It's so good that Valve is making a version for Steam
It's almost like Activision doesn't care about the long term viability of Blizzard as a company but is mostly concerned with doing the video game equivalent of asset stripping where IPs are exhausted by releasing high margin mobile games that alienate the core fan base and slowly lead to the demise of the company and its brands.
The problem is that Activision has a very shortsighted view of things. They're obsessed with quarter on quarter growth and making sure everything the company does shows a direct profit. But competent business involves thinking past the current quarter to ten years down the line. Blizzard has been a staggeringly successful independent company but has been making bad decision after bad decision since it was acquired by Activision. It doesn't take Nostradamus to project what will become of Blizzard in five years.
*SNIP*
Part of the problem is that claims such as Activisions that RTS games are unprofitable are not based on solid evidence, nor are they unchangeable, natural facts. The reality is that StarCraft I and II have made a ton of money for Blizzard, so not continuing the series because RTS are unprofitable is just stupid.
Capitalists are not necessarily rational or intelligent. Many of them are not particularly knowledge about the industry they are in. As a result, they end up taking a lot of received wisdom on-board and just mimicking other big companies rather than seriously thinking through a long-term growth strategy. Activision has been on the yearly sequels until an IP stops being profitable train for a long time, and I suspect that's what they'll try to do with Overwatch (Blizzard's most marketable franchise).
*SNIP*
Except there's a reason that publishers have systematically been killing game studios for decades now: the research they do is inherently conservative in it's outlook. The focus is on genres with consistent sales over and above doing something more risky that has the potential to be way more profitable.
Consider where innovation and smash hits have come from in the last decade. A lot of them have come from Indie studios. Minecraft has been insanely profitable, PUBG has created a genre of imitators while making tons of money, etc. AAA game publishing has been stagnant and slowly eroding itself through running IP after IP into the ground with annualized releases that are more or less identical to what they were before.
This isn't because there are necessarily a bunch of morons at the top but because they have systemically short sighted incentives (namely, quarterly profit reports). The long term trajectory of this strategy, the one Activision appears to be pursuing with Blizzard, is a long term loss of profitability and probably the closure of the studio.
CAN BLIZZARD BUY BACK ENOUGH SHARES TO GET RID OF ACTIVISION?
On July 25th 2013 Activision Blizzard announced they were buying back 429 million and million ASAC II LP, an investment vehicle led by Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick and Co-Chairman Brian Kelly, to which they have personally committed $100 million combined, separately will purchase approximately 172 million shares.
Most notably that investment group has since sold off a majority of it’s shares.
Source Jason Schreier: https://kotaku.com/the-past-present-and-future-of-diablo-1830593195
Activision merged with the publisher Vivendi (at the time, Blizzard’s holding company) to become Activision Blizzard in 2008, but over the past decade Blizzard has prided itself in remaining a separate entity. With its own management structure and its own campus in Irvine, California, Blizzard has always stood out from Activision’s other divisions and subsidiaries. (Activision HQ is based about an hour northwest, in Santa Monica.) Rather than sticking to strict production cycles that result in, say, annual Call of Duty games for Activision, Blizzard has traditionally given its developers as much time as possible. That’s one of the reasons the company has been renowned for making some of the greatest games in the world.
This year, however, Blizzard employees say that one of the biggest ongoing conversations has been cutting costs. To fans, and even to some people who work or have worked at Blizzard, there’s a concern that something deep within the company’s culture may be changing.
Unusual they did not announce this new studio on stage.
The in-house AoE studio headed by Shannon Loftis and Peter Wyse (see below).
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/06/09/double-fine-productions-joins-xbox-game-studios/
With the addition of Double Fine, there will be a total of 15 unique, standalone studios that comprise Xbox Game Studios, including our newly-created Age of Empires studio headed by Shannon Loftis and our Publishing group headed by Peter Wyse. We are committing more resources and dedicated leadership to the Age of Empires franchise to ensure that its legacy on PC continues in service of the passionate community of faithful fans.
"Activision doesn’t see any money in real-time strategy games"
My condolences to Starcraft fans, chinese mobile here we go.
Jason Schreier
6/06/19
Problem is, I’ve talked to a lot of Blizzard people over the past few months and one of the things I’ve heard quite a bit is that Activision doesn’t see any money in real-time strategy games.
Jason Schreier
6/06/19
I have no idea whether the cancelation is good news or bad news, but it bums me out as a StarCraft fan - what this means is that AFAIK there’s nothing StarCraft-related in development right now. Hopefully the Warcraft 3 remake sells gangbusters and convinces Blizzard that RTS games are worth supporting again.
“You would’ve thought Blizzard was going under and we had no money,” said a former Blizzard staffer, who told me they left the company this year in part because of Activision’s influence. “The way every little thing was being scrutinized from a spend perspective. That’s obviously not the case. But this was the very first time I ever heard, ‘We need to show growth.’ That was just so incredibly disheartening for me.”
Jason Schreier
6/06/19
Problem is, I’ve talked to a lot of Blizzard people over the past few months and one of the things I’ve heard quite a bit is that Activision doesn’t see any money in real-time strategy games.
Sources internal to Blizzard confirmed the reason for the latest round of departures as being linked to low morale, especially surrounding the development of the esports divisions of their games.
“People are really getting tired of working for Pete Vlastelica,” one source said. “The focus has become commercializing the esports titles instead of making good programs for the community. Many people internally are laying that on Pete, and it has crushed morale among the Call of Duty and Overwatch teams especially.”
Activision was killing Destiny
Let this info from Bungie sink in to what is going on behind the scenes and Activision Blizzard:
Tweet from industry veteran Jason Schreier tells of Bungie staff cheering loudly at the announcement of split from Activision
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1083474033033777152
@jasonschreier
At today's meeting announcing the news, Bungie staff cheered loudly. Can't over-emphasize how happy they are not just to get away from Activision, but to have a game that they now own completely. Imagine a Destiny free from Activision's restrictive annualized schedule!
Denmark
SturmTigerCobra
DonnieChan
Inane EliteVideoGameMasturbater
SturmTigerCobra
Relic Entertainment
