Blizzcon Cinematics.

Blizzard on point with their cinematics.

The Reinhardt Honor and Glory short is amazing, everything about him in one short and very compelling cinematic. Blizzard is being very effective with these animated shorts to tell the “story” for Overwatch and being quite versatile with the tones for each video. The Junkrat and Junkertown one was over the top and funny, with this one about Reinhardt being somber and reflective that effectively tugs at your emotions.

And 2 more for World of Warcraft’s Expansion called Battle for Azeroth.

Dat Cinematic Trailer doe. Makes you wonder why Blizzard didn’t do a Completely CGI movie.

I find it interesting that this new expansion is trying to recapture the “Drums of War” feeling from vanilla WoW.

Which seems to be the intention because Blizzard also announced WoW Classic.

I’m not really thrilled about because I played a lot of Vanilla WoW and there is a lot of people who seem to remember and view it through some major rose-colored glasses because of nostalgia. People already complain how grindy and repetitive WoW is now while completely ignoring how tedious and tiresome Vanilla WoW was. Does anyone even remember how hard it was to get gold for an epic mount or 50 gold respecs? Or the difficulty in getting 40 people together for a raid? Or that Warriors were the only real tanks and that some specs were completely not viable at all in a raid setting? Vanilla was not Alt friendly either. There will be no groupfinder for quests or raids or dungeons either, which was also a problem in Vanilla unless you were in a helpful guild.

Anyways, some pretty good cinematics outta Blizzcon today with some interesting direction and changes to WoW with new expansion. I am looking forward to see how it plays out.

What I am playing/listening to/watching/reading/looking forward to for November 2017.

Only 2 more months left in the year, it’s gone by pretty fast and I already know what the best series I listened to this year is Glen Cook’s Black Company series. The narration, which changes a few times, is very good. The overall story is great. The characters are excellent, and for it me it was my favorite part of the series. Croaker, One-eye, Goblin, Murgen, Raven, Lady, Sleepy and really most of the company are all enjoyable and well written characters. So far, it’s the Black Company best thing I’ve listened to this year, easily surpassing N.K. Jemisin’s well written and very good Broken Earth Trilogy and more enjoyable than Bernard Cornwell’s extremely entertaining and compelling Saxon Stories/Last Kingdom series.

This month I’ll be listening to Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy, The Metro Trilogy by Dmitry Glukhovsky, and Mass Effect: Initiation by N. K. Jemisin and Mac Walters. I am also looking forward to reading the recently announced Mass Effect Book called the Last Ark as it is supposed  to resolve the very loose ends of the Quarian ark and I am hoping to at least address, and possibly resolve the Benefactor and the Jien Garson murder story line.

I am also looking forward to picking up and listening to Strange Weather by Joe Hill, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, and I also have Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey to listen to as well which I will probably listen to after the Metro Trilogy by Dmitry Glukhovsky.

I picked up a cool game called Castle Story on Steam for about 20$ CAD, it’s like a lite RTS with minecraft like elements. I like games like this because I can just put on an audiobook or a podcast and play it while it scratches my lite rts/crafting itch.

I am also currently playing Total War: Warhammer and learning to play it, instead of playing it like Civ or SC2. I will probably pick up the sequel when it’s on sale.

On the topic of gaming, I was extremely tempted to pick up Castlevania Lords of Shadow Ultimate Edition, Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 , and Castlevania Mirror of Fate as they were all on sale during the halloween steam sale for near historic lows. However, I did not pick any of them up as I already have an enormous backlog of games that I am still slowly making my way through. I will possibly pick them up during the new years/christmas sales. At the moment though, I am extremely tempted to pick up Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, you should also add Prey and Dishonored 2 to that as well.

I started playing Doom and I was extremely impressed with how well it runs while looking extremely good because of that I was why I was tempted to pick up the new Wolfenstien game. The game runs extremely well, looks great, the gameplay is very fun, and the soundtrack actually fits the game and environment perfectly. It’s well worth the money and definitely worth picking up when on sale.

I have also, finally, started working my way though the Crysis Trilogy. I’m looking forward to playing Crysis 2 as it is written by Richard K Morgan, author of one of my favorite all time series, The Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

I think I’ll pick up a couple of PS4 games this christmas, probably Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted 4.

For blurays I am looking to pick up this month are: Atomic Blonde (November 14, 2017), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ( November 21, 2017), The Dark Tower, and Wind River (November 14, 2017.) Dunkirk which is scheduled for release on December 19, 2017 is something I am also looking forward to picking up. It and Bladerunner 2049 do not have release dates but I am definitely looking forward to watching those on Bluray.

I am looking forward to a couple of things in 2018: Altered Carbon on netflix, Red Dead Redemption 2, and The Last of Us 2.