As soon as they announced battle passes in diablo 4 it was a hard pass for me. I just knew they were gonna nickel and dime every loyal fan to the very end. FF16 at least seems to be a complete game with no battle passes or seasons, no “surprise mechanics” or buying power, just a standard off the shelf video game made by people who create games for the love of the craft and not to milk you like a cow.
Some ex-Blizzard devs? Try like half of the Starcraft dev team. The other half went to one of Dreamhaven’s studios. Blizzard is just kind of creatively dead at this point, they have no imagination, they steal animations and ideas from other games like the whole flying stuff in Dragonflight being stolen from Guild Wars 2, and now they’re making a game in the survival genre that hasn’t really been popular since the launch of Ark.