HotS Alpha

I'm honestly a little disappointed in the type of company Blizzard is becoming. They're catering to extremely casual players across many of their IPs, and HoTS is a prime example of this.

I'm not a hardcore LoL/Dota player, and was hoping HoTS would be a game that could get me into the genre. After watching the streams last night, though, I'm a bit turned off from what I've seen. Player movement in the game is exceptionally slow. There are no items and no individual character levels. No last hits. You can't see how many kills you've registered at the end of the game. You can't communicate with your opponents (just like in Hearthstone). It's all an effort to "protect" bad players and normalize any skill gap.

So, I don't look at this game individually, but more as a referendum on the evolution of Blizzard as a company, and assess it in the context of their other games. They introduced purchasable level 90 characters in WoW, effectively destroying class equilibrium and removing one more RPG element from the game (the actual process of leveling). Their other new IP, Hearthstone, can be played on tablets and phones.

The company that brought us Starcraft and Diablo ~15 years ago is now developing games to appeal to an entirely different audience. It shouldn't be difficult to determine why Titan was cancelled or "rebooted". It was likely a relatively intensive RPG, which Blizzard simply felt wouldn't be viable in today's market.