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Comment by mewse-hn | Hacker News Reader

As a veteran WoW player now playing classic, I hope this play works out. There was a ~40 min youtube video released a couple months ago that details the many ways contemporary Blizzard has lost their soul:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg

The short version is Blizzard is a shell of their former glory, and they are making decisions based on cash and appeasement of the Chinese govt. Most of you probably remember the Diablo: Immortal reception (Chinese mobile game presented as a keynote at the American, PC-playing blizzcon fan convention).

I deeply hope Morhaime is able to recapture the lightning in a bottle that existed at old Blizzard, and this doesn't end up as another Hellgate: London fiasco.

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Man...the record layoffs immediately after announcing record profits really chapped my ass.

Last year I had a Blizzard recruiter reach out to me. It was sad because when I got my CS degree in 2014, I had a dream of working for Blizzard. I told the recruiter that I had that dream, but after they decided to lay people off after reaching record profits, I no longer had any interest in working for them.

I ended up looking on Glassdoor for the position I would have worked and the pay was absolutely abysmal. Not sure how they would expect someone to live in or near Irvine, CA for $90K/year, or why anybody would accept that salary when other companies would pay nearly double that for the same work and experience.

I loved Hellgate: London. The game definitely lacked polish (ran out of money, I assume), but the general gameplay feel was great.

I agree and the timing was pretty poor for that game. Windows Vista was JUST out the door and the graphics card drivers were downright terrible at the time, often crashing. Reason being Vista used a completely new driver model (WDDM).

I recall HGL also had some unfortunate memory leak issues.

In general I think that game was largely hamstrung by performance issues for one reason or another.

The idea of a FPS Action RPG like that wa as simple as it was brilliant. I've wondered why it hadn't been done before and still hasn't quite been done again. Games like Dark Souls exist but I don't think they're quite the same. Rumor is Diablo IV was going to go there but Blizzard later changed their mind, rather opting for a traditional isometric view. I think they lose a lot of immersion doing that. Imagine sneaking through damp, dark cellars and have demons lurk around the corners, and everything built upon a solid itemization system and replayability with randomized maps.

> "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg"

Content aside - I feel like this video is terribly edited, scripted and produced. It's impossible to follow - thanks to all the shallow jokes, weird cuts and messy presentation. Almost like it's intentionally made for people without an attention span...

A 37 minutes video for people without an attention span?

You may not have been on YouTube lately, but yeah. That's kinda how it works. It's weird. Think a lot of people put them on in the background.

Watch this video instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPFtUiTncy8

Seth Schiesel, an NYT vet and old school WoW player interviews Morhaime during April of this year.

i still play WOW but i really dislike Blizzard kowtow to China.

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