How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Its debut was an epic win for Blizzard. It made more money the year it came out than any Hollywood movie. WC3 also set the stage for World of Warcraft, which would not have experienced nearly the same uptake without it.
Truly a glaring omission in an otherwise interesting article.
I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft 1/2/Starcraft manuals
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manua...
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20...
Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get autoexec.bat tuned right...
The planned expansion packs were cancelled, major bugs in the client went unfixed for years, including serious maphacks that allowed a few griefers to completely ruin the once-strong online tournament scene and break apart the community.
The WC3 installer won't even run on Macintoshes newer than 10.6.8. Fixing that would be a matter of recompiling it and making a couple of minor tweaks -- perhaps a week's work, tops.
Even if you have an old version already installed when you upgrade your OS, you suddenly find that network games don't work at all anymore once you upgrade - that is, the major feature that you bought the game for in the first place. It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix. The best people have come up with is dual booting into Windows or running Wine.
Perhaps this is why they didn't want WC3 mentioned in the article.
> It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix.
If they are going to get rid of their old packages, they should open-source it so people who care can do something about it. That is the proper way.
That said, given that they haven't, it'd be nice if Blizzard would assign a programmer to this for a month or two and just port it to the current Apple networking stack.
I don't know the author and his gaming background but he certainly hasn't spent much time playing blizzard games. At least he isn't a 'hardcore' gamer. Truth is, if you are a casual gamer you probably won't notice how dumb their current development is.
In short: WoW: Numbers don't lie. People would still play mmos if there werent any worth playing. http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-to-5-6-Mil...
Diablo: Current content is shit, multiple design failes that needed to be corrected. Both D3 and the addon weren't ready on release, needed patches to correct the bad quality.
Hots/Hearthstone/Overwatch: Knockoffs of Dota/LoL, Magic, Team Fortress. I don't think a knockoff should be called a quality game. Also, both Hots and Hearthstone have/has horrible balancing issues => bad quality considering being balanced is the core content of the game. Not to mention that Hots was really shitty from a technical pov (after beta).
You might not enjoy the game, but it will not be because of game breaking bugs, poorly translated ports, low art quality, or unpolished game systems. Blizzard takes these things very seriously. If something is broken they often fix it.
It's certainly NOT common for parents to dump 10-20K on you, and say go have travel and have fun. That's laughable.
[1] http://www.nafsa.org/explore_international_education/advocac...
Rich kids are also much better positioned in terms of parental funding and familial social connections to do things that bring them international acclaim afterwards. They then get a platform to tell a worldwide audience about their life story and their parent-subsidized gap year, creating a very distorted view of American culture abroad.
In other words, only a tiny percentage of American kids get 10k from their parents to go on vacation in Europe. It's just that the international circulation of media that say "I had kids and worked two jobs to be able to pay the bills and never got to go anywhere" is far lower.
Median household (not individual) income in the US was 51k in 2013.[1] A 10k vacation to Europe is indeed out of reach for most of the population of the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
When they do save up some money, it's an emergency fund, not a European vacation fund.
I gave World of Warcraft a go for around two weeks because my friends were playing it religiously but I just couldn't get into it. MMOs in general don't do it for me though.
I mean I loved Diablo 1 and 2 but they were developed by Condor (later became Blizzard North), Diablo 3 became something other than what I wanted from a sequel to that series. It was full of World of Warcraft's cartoonish art style, complete with huge shoulder pads on armour and massively oversaturated colours and terrible Blizzard-standard writing. They even managed to make Diablo himself completely unintimidating as a character due to how shitty his lines of dialogue were. They should have kept him a silent antagonist as in previous games and stuck with the dark gothic-horror aesthetic that made D1 and D2 so memorable.
Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun.
Overwatch looks very promising.
WoW is just old now, and it's still an alright game, but it's been out for too long. I believe TBC and WOTLK came out after Activision purchase and those expansions were great.
Starcraft 2 is okay. They messed up a lot with trying to be social allstars with bnet2.0.
Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark, can maybe blame Activision here. As the real money auction house wasn't that great of a success, and it seems Activisiony to me.
Now it's much more based around set bonuses and builds. No more AH, so all gear is self found. But now you have random drops, rift drops, blood shards, cube upgrades, rerolls. So multiple ways to acquire and improve existing gear.
Those were my two favorite expansions. I quit when Cataclysm was released. That said, I recently resubscribed and have been enjoying playing it periodically. Unfortunately, the skill set "crunch" feels too much like the game mechanics have been dumbed down, sapping away the spirit of the game. I thought I liked the changes at first until I discovered they ripped out a ton of core class skills and pushed forward with some really bizarre decisions. (My girlfriend is playing a death knight, and she's perplexed as to why only frost spec allows her to dual wield--almost as puzzled as I was to discover that shaman totems feel more like a bolted-on mechanic than they were before.)
But, I assume this change was an attempt to pull new people into the game and not leave it with a decidedly intimidating number of talents and spells. I liked it the way it was, some people didn't, and that's just the way things are, I suppose. Nostalgic folk aren't the target demographic at this point, and while I think I can live with that, I'm still undecided if I'm going to continue my subscription after this month. MMOs seem to be in a race for the bottom, and I don't really have the time anymore to invest in new ones. C'est la vie.
One thing I wish they'd do is bring back the old expansions in a manner that would allow you to play them mostly as they were (perhaps with some improvements, such as reduced raid sizes, but keeping the spirit of the game as close to how it was when that expansion was released). I wouldn't even care if I had to re-roll, but if I could level through all the expansions as I did before--the ones I enjoyed, anyway--or lock into one and play that content at the appropriate level, I'd happily pay the subscription indefinitely. Sure, there are private servers out there (requiring one to break the EULA) that attempt to recreate older versions at various points, but the quality varies so wildly they're almost not worth it--legal issues and ethics aside.
Hey, I can dream. It won't happen. It'd be too costly to implement with very little reward, and I doubt it'd bring back many of the older players who swore off the game due to whatever recent changes drove them away (possibly alienating the new players in the process). WoW is a cash cow now, so there's unlikely to be any disruption that could threaten that income. Sadly.
It's good but it's not great. League of Legends and Dota2 are both superior games in just about every way. Honestly Blizzard is just really late to the table with this one, which is surprising seeing as how MOBAs started in War3.
> Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun.
Hearthstone is Magic: The Gathering with most of the pain points removed. I'm not saying it isn't fun or commercially successful, but there's nothing innovative about it. MtG never produced a viable online game, so Blizzard did.
> Starcraft 2 is okay. > Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark
I agree with both statements. SC2 will never be as popular as Brood Wars, and they seem to be struggling with game balance a lot more. D3 completely missed the mark with the auction house.
What I see happening to Blizzard is a focus on micro transactions, with gameplay coming second. I think this article accurately summarizes their history, but ignores recent changes to their company that paint a different picture going forward. I'm not expecting SC3 (should it ever happen) to be as amazing as SC1, and I certainly won't be happy to pay $1 each time I run out of pylons.
WoW is a direct, improved copy of EQ and others. The default hotkeys for EQ and WoW were even the same - NumLock was autorun on both.
How is this a bad thing? You could just as easily have critiqued google for not being "innovative" - they weren't the first search engine. Taking an idea and executing it well is a skill, and a profitable one for Blizzard.
This makes them good at making money, not necessarily good at making games. I personally see WoW as the beginning of Blizzard's decent. I can't argue that it made a boatload of money though, or that millions of people love it.
As for how it's a bad thing, Blizzard used to develop some seminal games in the RTS genre. These games showed significant innovation and shaped the genre (though they didn't invent it). Compare that to their current lineup of rehashed and cloned games. I don't see the same level of innovation anywhere.
I think Blizzard is so focused on profits at this point that monetization is the primary concern of any new game. It's just my personal, anecdotal opinion but it's also the reason I don't buy Blizzard games at release anymore.
Before WoW EQ had no instanced content (had to camp every mob spawn), mobs were rare especially the ones you wanted to take on on the later levels and it's name was a bit of an oxymoron as it barely had any quests.
WoW pretty much "invented" the modern quest based leveling instanced content PVE-Theme-Park MMO genre, and people who played WoW Beta/Alpha know just how much it changed it pretty much started as an EQ clone questing was scarce Blizzard initially planned to have about 30 quests from 1-60, then said it will take a 100, but eventually the figured out the correct formula (even with having orders of magnitude more content than any other game at the time it still was an utter grind to get to 60 in vanilla some people took months to level to that).
WoW initially launched with more content than any MMO on the market which is something that will not and could not ever be repeated again, they launched at an almost perfect a storm sort to speak, as all of the late 90's fresh 2000's MMO's were dying out due to lack of content and game play becoming stagnant.
If SOE at the time decided instead of working on EQ2 which came too late with too little content (and required a computer from the future to play at high settings not to mention ultra, as even my ATI X800 pro at the time couldn't run it well) and instead worked full steam on putting out content for the original EQ with maybe a slight engine overhaul WoW might not have became the monster it is, however anyone who played / still plays EQ1 will tell you that the best content for it came out after WoW was released and it was almost a direct clone of the WoW style of content delivery and progression.
> Starcraft 2 is okay. They messed up a lot with trying to be social allstars with bnet2.0.
WoW is still the biggest meanest MMO out there when it comes to subscription based games they still have a larger market share than all other subscription games combined and more than any western MMO combines regardless of the business model.
They aren't in their peak of 12M players but the market just doesn't have place for such whales anymore.
As for the RMH I don't think you can "blame" anyone, especially not Activision, Blizzard always has done pretty much what it wanted and they've always wanted to monetize multiplayer beyound the usual sub/cash shop that WoW has, they had plans to introduce a map market in SC2 but it never gotten of the ground.
Any business will strive to make as much money as possible game companies are not excluded from this paradigm so it's a bit funny that people think that some game developers are some angelic unicorns.
The problem is, most of them are repeats of games I played as a teenager. They just aren't what appeals to me anymore. Excessive masculinity, simple stories, sexy women. I think they're still this; I see college students playing hearthstone all the time.
I don't think Blizzard changed after Activision, but rather I did. And I don't want Blizzard to change - I'd like the next generation to enjoy the games of my adolescence even if I've moved on.