Some Thoughts about Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct

Warcraft 30th Anniversary Key Art. Taken from Blizzard.

Despite having some ideas and intentions to write something prior to Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct, life have kept me too busy for me to dedicate some time to that. All I could manage is post some tweets about Warcraft 3's Patch 2.0 and Warcraft 2: Remastered "leak". It was quite rejuvenating to be kind of exciting about Blizzard event after stepping away from Warcraft franchise. World of Warcraft Classic's Season of Discovery managed to reignite the remaining appreciation for the series that laid mostly dormant in my mind.

Since my interest are centered around the good old days of Azeroth, I won't have much to say about Hearthstone, Warcraft Rumble and remaining World of Warcraft news. You know, something like Undermine would've been very interesting to me... around 6-7 years ago, but the few things from The War Within that I saw didn't really have any reaction on me. I guess the Khadgar nonsense has a potential of being interesting if they take some inspiration from Earthsea's Ged, but even then I have my doubts. And the same can be said about Housing in Midnight expansion: neat on paper, who knows how it'll turn out.

Either way, it's time to throw some general thoughts from my messy mind into the void to clear my head. Maybe someone will even waste their time reading it and have only themselves to blame for it, but still thanks for that time.

Late Thoughts about Realms Deep 2023

Realms Deep 2023 Key Art.

Another year, another rare Events "article" about some silly gaming event. This time I encouraged by scuffed sleeping schedule by watching Realms Deep 2023 from start to finish. Similarly to the previous one, I was tuning in with moderate curiosity. After all, it's best to avoid rising up your own expectations to a point where they just can't be fully met and instead get pleasantly surprised when or once you start getting some surprises. Thankfully, the latter is excited what happened this time around.

Each Realms Deep took different approach and this year was no exception. We had a very packed 3,5 hour livestream full of announcements and reveals with occasional "storyline" breaks, so sometimes things were getting a bit weird. To be fair, what else you can expect from a bromance drama starring Ty Brannan & Mike J? Let's just hope that Jared CatMilk would be able to help these two overcome their conflict and embrace their true feelings.

A Couple of Thoughts about Minecraft Live 2022

Minecraft Live 2022 Thumbnail. Taken from YouTube.

Starting with "maybe I'm getting too old for gaming events" seems both cliché & ridiculous because the latter implies that I'm wise enough to not spend my time on something as pointless as writing this text. Minecraft Live 2022, everyone! Aside from a reminder about the existence of Minecraft Dungeons and some shared details on Minecraft Legends (including the gameplay in cooperative mode), the show itself... went kind of the same as the previous year.

Another highlight of creator tools for Bedrock Edition with that Blockbench segment is fine. Don't have much to say about the mob vote: I like turtles, I don't care. Good on them for using their own platforms for collecting votes, but Mojang Studios has more than enough ideas from previous years that they should focus on slowing bringing back instead. Especially with their current pace when it comes to new content for both versions of Minecraft across a whole lot of platforms. There're better ways to ensure interaction with the community.

Late Thoughts about Realms Deep 2022

Realms Deep 2022 Key Art.

It's been a long time since the last Events post from me. Usually I tend to write those a day after specific event, but there was nothing that really interested me for the last year. Not to mention that we exist in crazy and often surreal times. So I eagerly waited for Realms Deep 2022. Kind of. It's actually funny to think about in retrospective. I wasn't disappointed by it (show was nice), it's just the stages of anticipation I went through.

I didn't know what to expect. Didn't want to expect anything. Not after the last year, which had its ups and downs. The only think I had in mind in regards to Realms Deep 2022 was "When they will just announce it already?" because it was obvious that the show will go on. Once teaser trailer came out, I was just too busy with work to really get excited. However, I managed to be there in time. All three days. I'll go over each one of them.

A Couple of Thoughts about Minecraft Live 2021

Minecraft Live 2021 Thumbnail. Taken from YouTube.

Minecraft Live 2021 just wrapped up, which means it's time to share some of my thoughts about what I consider to be cool or interesting. At first, I think it's no surprise that pretty much no gaming event goes perfectly. There's always something that drags it a bit for a specific person: from cringe performance and clear fillers to technical issues with lack of appealing announcements. For me, it was mostly the first half as I don't really have any expectations this time around. Probably due to rather intense and rough daily routine.

I guess you can say that they were making up for the lack of new YouTube videos from those famous scuffed interviews from Minecon. It would've been nice to see Mojang not play it too safe for once and just embrace the memes... Anyway, I'll keep this short and focus just on two things, similarly to QuakeCon 2021. I'm out of the loop when it comes to Minecraft Dungeons to really comment on its updates, getting both versions of Minecraft on Xbox Game Pass is just good and Blockbench looks neat.

A Couple of Thoughts about QuakeCon 2021

Taken from QuakeCon's fan kit.

There were many reasons to wait for this year's QuakeCon, mostly due to Microsoft acquisition and Quake's 25th Anniversary. If there's anything to take away from it, it's that Bethesda haven't changed a bit. Technical difficulties during event's beginning were just perfect. I wasn't even annoyed that it affected Quake side of things as in fact it was funny to see them cut off Phil Spencer in favor of Quake World Championship 2021.

Besides that, I would say that QuakeCon 2021 was pretty humble and quiet overall. I'm not interested in The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76 and Deathloop, so these three just went by for me. As for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition... Look, I don't want to poke that meme. There's not really much to talk about, so let's just get to it.

Modest Thoughts about Realms Deep 2021

Realms Deep 2021 Key Art.

Saying that I anticipated Realms Deep 2021 would be quite an understatement. After its great debut a year ago, I was very excited to see what it's going to be like this time around. As days went on and harsh reality kept reminding me about itself, expectations for Realms Deep were growing through glimpse of hope for bright days to come...

And, in all honestly, I wished I kept that in check. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this event and there were some good and interesting games. However, I definitely expected something a bit different. That's really on me, but I would still like to talk a bit about both good and bad parts.

A Few Thoughts about E3 2021

Taken from E3.

Despite the fact that it did lost quite a bit of relevance in recent years, many people still anticipated E3 2021. Including myself, in a way. Obviously, I didn't have any specific expectations as 94% of the titles that get announced here are "out of my jurisdiction", but it's still often interesting to look at what comes out when it, well... interesting.

For example, only Metal Slug Tactics caught my attention during the opening of this years' Summer Game Fest. I really love the artstyle of this series ever since I've seen my dad playing one of the games from it (I don't remember which one it was) on original Xbox. There's still so many games to play, really. Here's yet another series in my "Should play it one day" list.

Happy Thoughts about BlizzConline 2021

BlizzConline 2021 Cover Art.

BlizzConline went by and that was something. Opening Ceremony was quite cringe and it definitely could've been shorter. The absense of Chris Metzen was always noticable and this year its obvious more than ever. They really should find someone to replace him for these events in order to have this vague ghost of old Blizzard.