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Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. Some of my veteran WoW friends returned with the release of classic and TBC classi

by zahrc 5y ago

Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. Some of my veteran WoW friends returned with the release of classic and TBC classic, but no one stayed for long. Blizzard has been destroying all of their franchises WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatch 2 with weird changes StarCraft - thrown in a ditch left to die HoTS - culled the competitive scene and super slow release cycle. Hearthstone - pay2win RNG fiesta On top of that all the scandals and drama around the company…

wpasc 5y ago
I find it a fascinating case study that some of the company’s most anticipated releases are just re releases: Diablo 2 resurrected, WoW classic, Warcraft 3 reforged. Death by a thousand lapses in game quality and you get a lot of hype about refurbished old games. Some of it is rose covered nostalgia but IMO there’s been a sea change in game design since the advent of the attention economy, pay to progress, micro transactions, etc
- ethbr0 5y ago
  It speaks to executive disfunction -- an inability to currate and fund a long-term creative pipeline, instead focusing on short-term revenue generators.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    Yeah, milking existing franchises is definitely a sign of deeply rooted dysfunction. I was excited for their Project Titan of whatever but it got axed. That was years ago…
    - evanmoran 5y ago
      Using existing franchisees isn’t the problem. It’s doing it poorly!
  - wpasc 5y ago
    I think it’s the hard times, strong people, good times process with more steps: Passionate game creators make good games, good games get players and buyers, that creates profitable/well known companies, that can attract the (no offense) non passionate/revenue seeking MBA types, they worsen the games, passionate developers leave… I HOPE those passionate developers can get together again to make new good games but who knows. I imagine it’s hard to attract capital without promise of simple game loop (read: minimal investment required) and with pay for progression. Those returns (I imagine) are just too damn juicy until people break the cycle
- zahrc 5y ago
  I’ll give them that one, as people have been demanding the re-releases, especially classic and Diablo
- endgame 5y ago
  It's also telling that the team doing SC: Remastered cared enough to make an emulator for EUD maps (SC1 maps which used a buffer overflow accessible from within the map scripting language to execute arbitrary code), but the War3: Reforged release was a big steaming turd of missed promises.
  - VortexDream 5y ago
    At the very least they're capable of doing decent remasters, which why it was surprising how absolutely terrible the WC3 remaster was and how much they cocked it up. I have rarely seen such a bad series of decisions before in making a game. I've seen plenty of bad games but WC3R is on another level.
- thrower123 5y ago
  It doesn't say great things about the game industry in general that remasters and rereleases are so prominent. The best Bioware game I've played in years is Mass Effect 1 in the Legendary Edition. The best Total War game in a decade is the rerelease of Rome Total War.
void_mint 5y ago
This just reads like a person that doesn't like Blizzard games... edit And at the risk of getting flagged for being brief and baity, I'll elaborate. > WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess The biggest MMO of all time, still even today. > Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. It is a game about repetition. To call it repetitive is like saying baseball has too many bases. > Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises The original W3 was a masterpiece. Their rerelease was a failure. > Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatch 2 with weird changes A massive success. Not sure how you can call an entire game "imbalanced". You're just saying you don't like the way it's balanced. > StarCraft - thrown in a ditch left to die Yep > HoTS - culled the competitive scene and super slow release cycle. Mobas are a bad market and HoTS was a mediocre implementation of a Moba. > Hearthstone - pay2win RNG fiesta All CCGs.
- ctvo 5y ago
  Did you miss that the OP is speaking about the current state of these games? Why even expand with an edit when you agree with more than half their points?
  - void_mint 5y ago
    > Why even expand with an edit when you agree with more than half their points? "Why even post if you think 50% of a person's reviews are bad" ??? Again, it reads like a person that doesn't actually play those games/genres and just wants to dogpile, as is evidenced especially by the Diablo and Hearthstone critiques.
    - ctvo 5y ago
      For WoW your reply is a fallacy without addressing the original point. For every other point outside of Overwatch, you justified, agreed or misunderstood the OP and defended its release vs. its current state. You think your edit justified your original reply, where you attack the OP's credibility without addressing any of their points, I disagree.
      - 5y ago
cuillevel3 5y ago
> Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. That was in 2008, right? So their reputation has been going downhill for 13 years?
- bragh 5y ago
  Actually, yes. Blizzard had an unbelievable amount of goodwill and reputation built up over the years and in any case, these kinds of changes do not happen overnight. For me, the first understanding that things are rolling downhill was how they killed the social aspect with the removal of battle.net without any replacement and completely messed up the concept of playing custom maps when StarCraft 2 launched. Longer thread from 2010 about custom maps: https://tl.net/forum/sc2-maps/139745-the-real-problem-with-sc2-custom-maps https://tl.net/forum/sc2-maps/139745-the-real-problem-with-s...
  - zouhair 5y ago
    For me the company lost a lot of my respect when they released Starcraft 2 without LAN support. The game was destined to slowly die.
    - grp000 5y ago
      Not to mention the whole Starcraft BW esports fiasco with KeSPA.
- zahrc 5y ago
  Yes. Especially with the release of WoW cataclysm
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Pretty much, yes. I’d say most wow fans say Burning Crusade was the high point and that was released in January 2007.
- parrellel 5y ago
  Probably 11, When the first third of Starcraft II released without LAN support, borked custom games, and with that mess of a story. But that was just an aberration surely. Then 2012 was the real money auction house in Diablo 3 with an even worse excuse for a story and I gave up on the company. They got a few brownie points back for coming up with the successor to TF2 in Overwatch, but by that point that was the aberration. Everything else has been nostalgia or momentum.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blibble 5y ago
meanwhile if you watched their last BlizzCon(online) they were patting themselves on the back, saying how amazing they are and what a brilliant job they're all doing it was very odd to watch indeed, they're completely divorced from reality
Ericson2314 5y ago
I said I once Boeing : McDonnell Douglas :: Blizzard : Activision Someone told me which of McDonell or Douglas was to blame in response but I forgot.
jlarocco 5y ago
On the other hand, people have been saying that for decades now. I was a huge fan of the original Blizzard games, and I remember thinking they were getting off track with StarCraft, and being unhappy that WoW was a MMOG. And don't even ask about Diablo 3. In a perverse way, it's actually kind of amazing they've been able to milk their franchises for so long.
ttiurani 5y ago
> Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatch 2 with weird changes As a counterpoint, IMO OW is in the most balanced place it ever has been now. A lot of it has to do with the making of OW2, which has meant no new heroes, but still I do think the OW team has done excellent work with competitive balance recently. This is reflected in the most diverse hero selections ever in Overwatch League (pretty much making hero bans there obsolete). OW2 PvE and PvP 5v5 from what we know to me seem both to be good plans and can make the game huge again – or not. Depends on the execution.
- akmarinov 5y ago
  Hasn’t the meta in OW been double shield for a while? One of the worst ones?
  - ttiurani 5y ago
    No, those days are long gone. OWL is dive or pharah+ball or rush, and sometimes some double shield or mcree+torb. A lot of comps can work.
beezischillin 5y ago
You’re completely right. I quit WoW for the same reason. Lucky, too because I had an unhealthy addiction to it and it kinda resolved itself with that.
jpeter 5y ago
Hearthstone Battlegrounds is amazing

by zahrc 5y ago

wpasc 5y ago

I find it a fascinating case study that some of the company’s most anticipated releases are just re releases: Diablo 2 resurrected, WoW classic, Warcraft 3 reforged. Death by a thousand lapses in game quality and you get a lot of hype about refurbished old games. Some of it is rose covered nostalgia but IMO there’s been a sea change in game design since the advent of the attention economy, pay to progress, micro transactions, etc

ethbr0 5y ago
It speaks to executive disfunction -- an inability to currate and fund a long-term creative pipeline, instead focusing on short-term revenue generators.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Yeah, milking existing franchises is definitely a sign of deeply rooted dysfunction. I was excited for their Project Titan of whatever but it got axed. That was years ago…
  - evanmoran 5y ago
    Using existing franchisees isn’t the problem. It’s doing it poorly!
- wpasc 5y ago
  I think it’s the hard times, strong people, good times process with more steps: Passionate game creators make good games, good games get players and buyers, that creates profitable/well known companies, that can attract the (no offense) non passionate/revenue seeking MBA types, they worsen the games, passionate developers leave… I HOPE those passionate developers can get together again to make new good games but who knows. I imagine it’s hard to attract capital without promise of simple game loop (read: minimal investment required) and with pay for progression. Those returns (I imagine) are just too damn juicy until people break the cycle
zahrc 5y ago
I’ll give them that one, as people have been demanding the re-releases, especially classic and Diablo
endgame 5y ago
It's also telling that the team doing SC: Remastered cared enough to make an emulator for EUD maps (SC1 maps which used a buffer overflow accessible from within the map scripting language to execute arbitrary code), but the War3: Reforged release was a big steaming turd of missed promises.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  At the very least they're capable of doing decent remasters, which why it was surprising how absolutely terrible the WC3 remaster was and how much they cocked it up. I have rarely seen such a bad series of decisions before in making a game. I've seen plenty of bad games but WC3R is on another level.
thrower123 5y ago
It doesn't say great things about the game industry in general that remasters and rereleases are so prominent. The best Bioware game I've played in years is Mass Effect 1 in the Legendary Edition. The best Total War game in a decade is the rerelease of Rome Total War.

void_mint 5y ago

This just reads like a person that doesn't like Blizzard games... edit And at the risk of getting flagged for being brief and baity, I'll elaborate. > WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess The biggest MMO of all time, still even today. > Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. It is a game about repetition. To call it repetitive is like saying baseball has too many bases. > Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises The original W3 was a masterpiece. Their rerelease was a failure. > Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatch 2 with weird changes A massive success. Not sure how you can call an entire game "imbalanced". You're just saying you don't like the way it's balanced. > StarCraft - thrown in a ditch left to die Yep > HoTS - culled the competitive scene and super slow release cycle. Mobas are a bad market and HoTS was a mediocre implementation of a Moba. > Hearthstone - pay2win RNG fiesta All CCGs.

ctvo 5y ago
Did you miss that the OP is speaking about the current state of these games? Why even expand with an edit when you agree with more than half their points?
- void_mint 5y ago
  > Why even expand with an edit when you agree with more than half their points? "Why even post if you think 50% of a person's reviews are bad" ??? Again, it reads like a person that doesn't actually play those games/genres and just wants to dogpile, as is evidenced especially by the Diablo and Hearthstone critiques.
  - ctvo 5y ago
    For WoW your reply is a fallacy without addressing the original point. For every other point outside of Overwatch, you justified, agreed or misunderstood the OP and defended its release vs. its current state. You think your edit justified your original reply, where you attack the OP's credibility without addressing any of their points, I disagree.
    - 5y ago

cuillevel3 5y ago

> Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. That was in 2008, right? So their reputation has been going downhill for 13 years?

bragh 5y ago
Actually, yes. Blizzard had an unbelievable amount of goodwill and reputation built up over the years and in any case, these kinds of changes do not happen overnight. For me, the first understanding that things are rolling downhill was how they killed the social aspect with the removal of battle.net without any replacement and completely messed up the concept of playing custom maps when StarCraft 2 launched. Longer thread from 2010 about custom maps: https://tl.net/forum/sc2-maps/139745-the-real-problem-with-sc2-custom-maps https://tl.net/forum/sc2-maps/139745-the-real-problem-with-s...
- zouhair 5y ago
  For me the company lost a lot of my respect when they released Starcraft 2 without LAN support. The game was destined to slowly die.
  - grp000 5y ago
    Not to mention the whole Starcraft BW esports fiasco with KeSPA.
zahrc 5y ago
Yes. Especially with the release of WoW cataclysm
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Pretty much, yes. I’d say most wow fans say Burning Crusade was the high point and that was released in January 2007.
parrellel 5y ago
Probably 11, When the first third of Starcraft II released without LAN support, borked custom games, and with that mess of a story. But that was just an aberration surely. Then 2012 was the real money auction house in Diablo 3 with an even worse excuse for a story and I gave up on the company. They got a few brownie points back for coming up with the successor to TF2 in Overwatch, but by that point that was the aberration. Everything else has been nostalgia or momentum.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

blibble 5y ago

meanwhile if you watched their last BlizzCon(online) they were patting themselves on the back, saying how amazing they are and what a brilliant job they're all doing it was very odd to watch indeed, they're completely divorced from reality

Ericson2314 5y ago

I said I once Boeing : McDonnell Douglas :: Blizzard : Activision Someone told me which of McDonell or Douglas was to blame in response but I forgot.

jlarocco 5y ago

On the other hand, people have been saying that for decades now. I was a huge fan of the original Blizzard games, and I remember thinking they were getting off track with StarCraft, and being unhappy that WoW was a MMOG. And don't even ask about Diablo 3. In a perverse way, it's actually kind of amazing they've been able to milk their franchises for so long.

ttiurani 5y ago

> Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatch 2 with weird changes As a counterpoint, IMO OW is in the most balanced place it ever has been now. A lot of it has to do with the making of OW2, which has meant no new heroes, but still I do think the OW team has done excellent work with competitive balance recently. This is reflected in the most diverse hero selections ever in Overwatch League (pretty much making hero bans there obsolete). OW2 PvE and PvP 5v5 from what we know to me seem both to be good plans and can make the game huge again – or not. Depends on the execution.

akmarinov 5y ago
Hasn’t the meta in OW been double shield for a while? One of the worst ones?
- ttiurani 5y ago
  No, those days are long gone. OWL is dive or pharah+ball or rush, and sometimes some double shield or mcree+torb. A lot of comps can work.

beezischillin 5y ago

You’re completely right. I quit WoW for the same reason. Lucky, too because I had an unhealthy addiction to it and it kinda resolved itself with that.

jpeter 5y ago

Hearthstone Battlegrounds is amazing