7 ms·

"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microso

• AlexandrB 3y ago
  > I need Starcraft 3 badly :) I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1]. [1] https://playstormgate.com https://playstormgate.com
  • iammjm 3y ago
    Have you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/
    • AlexandrB 3y ago
      No, I hadn't. This also looks great! Nice to see some action in this space - RTSs have been life support for the last little while.
    • whoswho 3y ago
      As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.
      • jprd 3y ago
        Preach!
      • solardev 3y ago
        As another grown ass man (well, more or less) who also played those games, what really bothers me is that dude's haircut. It's like a grease tsunami had sex with a chia pet. I miss the 90s, can you tell?
      • gary_0 3y ago
        It's kind of weird how much of the gaming industry still caters to the teenage boy demographic.
        • graphe 3y ago
          Why it it strange to cater to a demographic and not stranger to shotgun everyone into liking something?
          • gary_0 3y ago
            I don't think there's that kind of singleminded focus in other entertainment industries, is there? Only a few movies or streaming shows are that pigeon-holed; usually the broader the demographics, the better. I would say comic books are more teen-boy-focused, but oddly the majority of the enthusiasts I've met were women (a classic Marvel fan, someone who had artier stuff like Alan Moore, and my sister who collects Archie) so I'm not sure.
            • graphe 3y ago
              Sports is men. eSports is men. From this logic we can understand why. YouTube is mostly men. Porn caters to men.
      • otikik 3y ago
        Hear, hear
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • grotorea 3y ago
        They do mention in the description being inspired by Mass Effect so I guess they felt a visit to the $COLOUR-Skinned Space Babe spin wheel was part of the deal.
    • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Unfortunately, I'm not impressed at all. It looks and feels like a cartoonish bootleg of SC with AI generated Fortnite-looking artwork. 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.
      • HideousKojima 3y ago
        SC1 had a great story with excellent writing, especially for the time. SC2's story was schlocky garbage. The biggest example of this is the opening cutscene of 2 with Raynor in the bar. 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.
        • blibble 3y ago
          > 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)
    • zelias 3y ago
      Having spent some time watching showmatches for both games, my observation based on current 1v1 development is that Stormgate is intended to appeal to a wider audience whereas Zerospace targets the more "hardcore" RTS fanbase. In any case, I expect them both to be good. I'll probably spend too many hours playing both of these games.
  • aaomidi 3y ago
    With the advances in AI, I really hope coop vs AI gameplay will be made better.
    • oblio 3y ago
      I don't think there are any advances in real time AI. We're still stuck with the same bad AI from the late 90s. Oh, or if there is better tech, nobody really uses it, everyone focuses on multiplayer because $$$.
      • pohuing 3y ago
        The world's best starcraft players got smashed by Deep minds AlphaStar a while ago. The only way to win was by limiting the apm. Turns out with perfect control you don't need very complex strategy. One of the games if you're interested in an anaylsis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nbiVbd_CEIA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nbiVbd_CEIA
        • oblio 3y ago
          To be frank, I don't care. That was a custom built AI for a special event. What I'm talking about is industrial strength, cheap, fast, smart, <<immersive>>, ubiquitous AI available in normal games with hundreds of thousands or millions of users playing at the same time. 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).
  • startupsfail 3y ago
    Hey Microsoft, no StarCraft 3 please. This will be a huge distraction and will surely cause an AI Winter.
  • HideousKojima 3y ago
    And even if they did, after they failed so miserably at remastering an RTS they'd already made I don't trust them to make a good one from scratch. Nor do I trust them not to screw over the mapmaking and modding communities after the license changes they made in SC2 and WC3 Reforged
  • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Anything coming out of modern Blizzard will be garbage, like with Bethesda. 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.
  • thejackgoode 3y ago
    Stormgate looks like it was developed a decade before SC2, not a decade after
    • AlexandrB 3y ago
      In what sense? Graphically or gameplay wise? 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.
• CobaltFire 3y ago
  Quick web search indicates that Activision Blizzard was 13,000 before MS bought them and Zenimax was 2,300. I have no idea how they split that layoff up, but 1,900 of ~15,300 (or 12.4%) is more accurate.
• fxtentacle 3y ago
  I recently saw that ZeroSpace is raising money. Looks like StarCraft 2 and the investor brochure confirmed that there's lots of ex-Blizzard on the team.
  • lrae 3y ago
    Are you mixing it up with Stormgate? ZeroSpace doesn't have much if any ex-Blizzard on the team, do they?
• xnorswap 3y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead. 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.
  • asylteltine 3y ago
    I agree. D3 at launch was meh but over time became excellent and super fun. D4 at launch was good but then it wore off and everyone I know stopped playing even one person who was a d3 fiend.
• wseqyrku 3y ago
  > 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. Sorry what?
  • iammjm 3y ago
    What I meant to say: a game studio dropping 2000 employees seem like A LOT until you consider it's Microsoft and it's "just" 8% of their workforce.
    • wseqyrku 3y ago
      You're looking at it just like how Microsoft did, either way 2000 people lost their jobs. And I'm down voted for some reason.
• asylteltine 3y ago
  The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.
  • weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    "No one" is not accurate. But you are almost entirely correct, yes
  • eigenket 3y ago
    Its not quite true that none of those people are still around - a bunch of them work for Frostgiant & are working on Stormate.
    • oblio 3y ago
      He didn't mean they died, he meant that they no longer work for Activision Blizzard.
  • solardev 3y ago
    I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness. 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...
    • oblio 3y ago
      > With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. I have bad news for you :-) The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.
      • 3y ago
• thinkingtoilet 3y ago
  If you love Starcraft just a quick reminder that the Korean Brood War scene is still going strong, and is now getting bigger. BW is a near perfect game and it's clear with how they handled SC2 "Blizzard" is not going to make anything close to BW ever again. I would highly recommend checking it out if you love Starcraft. For starters, Artosis casts a pro-level ladder game every day on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos 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.
  • oblio 3y ago
    You're bringing back memories of Jaedong :-))
    • thinkingtoilet 3y ago
      He's still playing! He is often in the ASL.
  • cauthon 3y ago
    I’d love a brood war remaster
    • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
      ... They already made one. 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
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    > BW is a near perfect game It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.
    • antisthenes 3y ago
• doktrin 3y ago
  > I need Starcarft 3 badly This feels at least tangentially relevant : https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/ 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.
  • picadores 3y ago
    Behavioural hacking people is certainly cheaper then making them happy, and the ultimate hack - is heroine. The final form of all unchecked buisnesses is virtual drug dealing. Invest now into the ultimate society meltdown..
    • pfdietz 3y ago
      Or, consumers grow more and more resistant to the BS. Ultimately, we insist on authentic experiences, not virtual fakery.
    • pdimitar 3y ago
      This is true but I'm observing more and more casual players and just regular humans begin to catch up and become resistant. They understand they're being addicted and milked and started pulling back.
  • jasonlotito 3y ago
    > 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.
• otikik 3y ago
  As long as they don't fire the Starcraft 2 intern I am good.
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    I bet they could get Lowko to do it for free.
• araes 3y ago
  The 22,000 number makes it look better, yet if they're "mostly" coming out of the Blizactivision employees, then the real math is ~1900/9200 (Wikipedia article number), or 20%. So, welcome to Microsoft, there goes 1/5 of your coworkers.