2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1].
I miss the 90s, can you tell?
What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs, that kept people invested, and not that it was a strategy game of space marines versus organic aliens versus energy aliens. They even made sure to give story-time to the regular units as you unlocked them, not just the heroes.
There were a lot of other similar strategy games at the time, and they all flopped (anyone remember Submarine Titans?). The first alpha release of SC was also mocked for being basically "Warcraft in space" so Blizzard had to step up and make SC special, and they did. The second game was less impactful than the original, but still good and memorable due to the story.
Maybe I'm out of touch with modern gaming, but I don't see how this can succeed. If I want to play SC I can just get the real deal, and not just something that looks like it.
The RTS games market is relatively small and niche nowadays and already saturated with quality established franchises from the past, so Zerospace would need to bring some new kick-ass revolutionary ideas to the table and not be just be "copy my homework but change it a bit" variant of SC.
Raynor's literal final line to Kerrigan in SC1 was "It may not be tomorow, darlin', it may not even happen with an army at my back. But rest assured; I'm the man who's gonna kill you one day. I'll be seeing you." Meanwhile in the opening cutscene of 2 he's pining over an old photo of her before she became a Zerg. Mind you any romantic relationship between Raynor and Kerrigan in SC1 was only possibly hinted at, it was never explicitly established.
Also they literally never even mentioned Fenix, Raynor's best Protoss buddy, in SC2 Wings of Liberty despite Kerrigan betraying and murdering him.
spoiler warning!
like most characters killed in SC1 he does pop up, specifically in LOTV
(not a good one though)
I think when an IP is over 10 years old, you don't need to warn for spoilers anymore, Dumbledore dies in the end.
Legacy of the Void was released in November 2015
Does every new harry potter book or movie that comes out reset the timer on spoiling that dumbledore dies?
This isn't mickey mouse and disney extending copyright law into perpetuity, this is a nicety among people to not spoil things until people have a change to experience it themselves.
I agree about the visuals - they need to invest more into the art/visuals.
Characters and stories is everything. It keeps consumers invested and loyal to the franchise, even when the gameplay is boring and repetative, instead of jumping ship to a game with equal mechanics. It's why so many still cosplay as Kerrigan, Mario, Link, etc.
It's how so many people remember Ezio and Altair instead of the other forgettable characters that followed.
I see fromsoft cosplay and the main character with no lines as well. It may be as factor but it's far from "everything". Bioshock infinite was a crappy game with a good cosplay character who most who cosplay as her have no idea what bioshock infinite is.
Meanwhile the non-campaign gameplay, while polished, is hardly innovative (a common issue with the commercial RTS games compared to the fan-made ones).
Is there an alternative universe version of StarCraft which had good writing? Because the one I played had pretty standard SciFi plots and characters. And while Sons of Liberty was adequate if perfunctory, the writing in Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void is some of worst writing to make it into a finished media product.
StarCraft succeeded based on its technical and audiovisual polish, despite the lackluster writing.
That being said, Zerospace and Stormgate both look cartonish, but that's the graphic style they have chosen. They have budgets and teams a small fraction of the size of Blizzard, so the lack of visual polish can be forgiven if the game mechanics are good.
In any case, I expect them both to be good. I'll probably spend too many hours playing both of these games.
Oh, or if there is better tech, nobody really uses it, everyone focuses on multiplayer because $$$.
One of the games if you're interested in an anaylsis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nbiVbd_CEIA
Call me back when that kind of tech is included so that I can play against it when playing a $30 mid-range (not AAA, not indie) especially RPG game or any type of team game (Dota).
Your best hope is that they license the IP to a company that actually cares, like Bethesda did with Black Isle for Fallout New Vegas.
Either way, that's arguably not a bad thing. Approximately a decade before SC2 was a golden age of RTS games. Homeworld and Red Alert 2 came out around that time. Give me more of that and I'm happy.
This feels at least tangentially relevant :
https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/
I haven't personally double checked the math behind this claim, but it does broadly track and makes me slightly apprehensive. I don't mean this as an absolute because there are clear and obvious exceptions, like From, but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.
Increasingly? Have you seen what mobile games make? Blizzard didn't make Diablo Immortal for the fans. They made it for the money. And people paid.
If you remotely believe in money talking, than yes, the market has been actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games for a LONG time now.
You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?".
While D3 had it's fair criticism at launch for a number of reasons, it still at it's core had a fun gameplay loop. With the itemisation fix in Reaper of Souls they managed to turn it around and make a really fun game. Even in the launch state it felt like it was made by people who enjoyed gaming but had made some questionable decisions especially regarding the auction house.
D4 in contrast feels more fundamentally flawed. It feels like a game made by people who have been described what makes a game fun but don't play games themselves.
It's hard to put into words what feels so off about it. You can criticise that a player goes into the same tilesets, kills the same mobs for the same rewards, but at it's core that's true of a lot of ARPGs which are fun.
You can criticise itemisation, but even that doesn't capture what's so off about the game. It just doesn't have the right dopamine releases while playing. There's little to get excited about when loot drops. You might get some "green arrows" but upgrades don't feel impactful. A few up arrows don't change how you play.
When levelling up, your character doesn't really undergo a transformation from a player struggling to kill mobs in one way to clearing screens of mobs in a different way that you've grown and progressed into. You fairly early get your skills and you kill the same mobs in the same way but now the mobs have X,000 hit-points instead of X hit-points.
I might myself get criticised for this post by people saying that fun is subjective, that this is just my opinion. But fun isn't just subjective, there's a core to computer games, and in the latest season the mechanics they added were to take some of the generally agreed least fun parts of competitors and wrap them up in something that doesn't even deliver a large reward for doing it.
Twitch isn't always a reliable metric, but when hardcore ARPG fans are visibly bored and itching to play a different game, that isn't a good look.
Season resets should be an exciting time for a clean start with a new character and exploring new play-styles. Instead, around 10 levels in, everyone realises they've already unlocked all the skills they'll use this season, that they've now essentially experienced most the content they'll see this season.
My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.
At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.
It's the big ones that have jumped the shark and gone full-in capitalist. I mostly just ignore them and haven't felt like I've missed much. So many good indie titles coming out every day.
This is a very important point, Palworld is much more respectful of you the player's time. Gone is the tedious tending of Ark's taming and breeding, or Conan's arduous process of dragging a captured thrall back to your base to throw on the wheel of pain.
On top of that it has a number of handy QoL upgrades over most survival crafters I've played, like all chests in your base sharing their inventory with all crafting stations at the base. No more hunting through all the storage in your base schlepping things into your own inventory just to craft junk.
Nonsense for most single player games which there are still many of.
Also I hope no one bothers to argue these are AAAA, AAAAAAAA. It really doesn't matter.
Path of Exile 1 is a glorious mess that anyone remotely interested in the genre should try (don't give up in the first act like most players, it gets way better), but currently at least with quite ridiculously bad performance, which is particularly aggravated by it being an online-only game of which you cannot play the old DX9 32-bit version any more, which had at least an order of magnitude smaller hardware requirements.
(And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !) like Palworld. (Or if you rely on a subscription-based platform like Unity, like [insert "indie" X].))
OK, that's fair
> And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !)
Why not? It's the best marketplace for indie games... IMO it jump-started the PC indie gaming revolution! Before that, we only had shareware of limited reach, maybe distributed through PC Gamer floppies/CDs. And maybe Tucows. It was hard to find new indie games, much less buy them. Steam changed that whole paradigm.
> [PoE performance issues]
For what it's worth, it runs like shite on my M2 Max, but flawlessly on GeForce Now. Terrific performance with everything on max.
I would expect almost all of the studios that release on Steam to quickly go bankrupt if prevented to use it. So, ironically, Activision-Blizzard would be more indie than them, but I guess that "indie" also requires a limitation of size.
----
GeForce Now, well duh, have you seen the kind of hardware it provides - that you're paying for ? (For reference, at release PoE1's minimum requirements were : 32-bit single core 1.4 GHz CPU, 2 Go RAM, 0.25 Go VRAM, 5 Go storage.)
perhaps after more of this corporate downsizing continues to occur, people will start small, passionate studios again, and this time maybe some of them can effectively gatekeep when hiring so as to perpetuate a brand identity/mentality going forward—but I doubt this will happen in any significant way.
Then, yes, gradual power increases from other gear/glyphs/paragon and potential big power spikes from uber uniques (but rough to farm).
2) Once you beat the main story/campaign you never do the campaign or side quests again, even during seasons with new characters. Same for renown.
Non-expert players hit WT4 in a day or two at season start... as long as they're playing one of the set of viable builds per class. And once you're in WT4 you can effectively pick how hard you want the content to be.
In comparison, the expert players hit level 100 in a day or two.
If you play D2 "as the game is presented" you'll have a bad time too, eventually. It's very easy to make non-viable builds in most dungeon crawl ARPG.
If you really want to have fun, unless you specifically have fun developing good builds, then my biggest suggestion is to play a meta build.
Season 2 ball lightning sorc was super fun. It had the full "build struggles" -> "build is now online" -> "build is *zooming*" experience. Yes, it was overpowered (at least until AoZ) and broke the servers during world bosses.
The game definitely has problems but each season has been an improvement as well, even if an individual season mechanic isn't the greatest.
In comparison, I think a game like Path of Exile is a much more interesting dungeon crawl ARPG but I think Path of Exile is also exhausting to play unless one makes it their main long-term game.
I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.
Who are the people who invest in a public company for any reason other than to have their numbers go up? That's the entire point. They could be putting out absolute garbage, as long as it makes money (and more profit than your alternative of 'fun games'), that's all that matters.
Between the server issues (for a mostly singleplayer game!), the real money auction house, criticisms about the story and the visual palette, as well as a missing PvP mode, it had a LOT of criticism.
Meanwhile D4 somehow actually managed the feat of mostly stable release servers (though the online-only criticism still stands).
Hardcore dungeon zoomer fans used to current D3/PoE1 might not have been the target demographic here. Probably also why you unlock most skills so quickly (which is probably barely quick enough for most players to see, as 80% of them don't finish the campaign). And I find these complaints hard to believe, as after all, the top end playstyles still tend to be much faster, and different from early on thanks to how the paragon points and especially legendary aspects and finally unique items tend to transform the skills.
I found the last open beta of D4 so compelling (even more than the D3 beta) that I completely changed my mind about (not) buying it. They really nailed (again) that "Diablo feel" (whatever that is) that I have been missing in competitors'. I have also been surprised how well the dodge mechanic worked and how enjoyable it was. The campaign is good, the art is top notch, as usual.
Now sadly the way that the leveling works in the campaign is screwed up in that it's easy to end up with a too easy game if you start on non-easy mode and start doing even the slightest sidequest (which is a shame as some of them are great !). You would have thought that, after D3's evolution, there would be more than 2 difficulty levels available for the first half of the game ! I also don't understand why the seasonal mechanics have been pushed out of the campaign.
The worst issue IMHO creeps up late game (and even mid-game for the season 2) : item spam, especially for "legendary" items. (Listening too much to the most obsessive fans of the current D3 ??) Even worse, for some unfathomable reason, the legendary aspects don't even have unique icons to distinguish them at a glance in the inventory (ditto for dungeon sigils), which is frankly shocking for what is a Blizzard game with ridddddddddiculously long credits, and not some kind of small budget beta.
But then, just like D3 changed a LOT, I'm cautiously optimistic about D4 improving over the years. (The online-only / no mods issue will remain, and this lack of future is sad to see considering the man years of effort spent on it...)
https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos
If you like that, the main BW tournament is called ASL and happens a couple times a year. The next one should be starting relatively soon.
And it crowded out every historical playthrough video of the original Brood War on YouTube, such that full playthroughs of the original are impossible to find.
And so, through grasping at the straws of rehashing old stuff they can't make anew, they ruin the old stuff that was good. :D
It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.
Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).
With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...
I have bad news for you :-)
The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.
But I guess it's not that different from having young blood with good ideas overridden by profit hungry management who just want to milk the IP. I don't think it's so much AI vs human but how risk-averse the bean counters are. D4 felt stagnant an hour in...
I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace the lead writers of a title and create the entire narrative. But they can surely (already) make far more interesting characters and side quests than your standard "help kill these goblins for 3gp" filler or fetch quest. Working together with writers, instead of outright replacing them, will hopefully create better overall experiences for gamers.
As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in my own words (which I enjoy). It's a partnership IMO and I wish I could give ChatGPT shared credit without marking the work as "tainted" in the eyes of most.
I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.
Be careful what you wish for.
We barely respect other people.
I really hope they become a superior moral being and help keep our worst tendencies in check. I'm imagining nice little managed human preserves where most of us can live in happy little villages by the river, while the sociopaths are identified early on and placed into little AI-managed VR worlds where they can become top serial killers, politicians, CEOs, whatever, away from the rest. Meanwhile the robots go on their interstellar quest toward whatever, but send us back food and postcards from time to time.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24056177...
(Now I will be the first to point out that online-only games have no future, but this one at least still has a present.)
Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.
It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.
Sorry what?