7 ms·

They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut

They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons that don't actually look any better, added some realtime shadows that don't fit with the style of the game, and called it a "Warcraft 3 2.0". Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM. I buy all games on GoG when I can, especially classic games, but new ones as well. It's so nice to just have a collection of DRM-free installers, and be able to support a company that does right by the classic games.

hulitu 2y ago
> Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM. Oh, Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs. I tried AoE 3 on Steam (demo). It was a total disaster. Downloading was slow and then the game: At the first start would not let me build barracks (no suitable place found). At the second start it was hard to found the baracks again (all icons look the same - Windows style enshitification) but the peasants will not harvest berry bushes.(bugs) They made the UI much worse. The playground is round. The icons look the same so one has to look at tooltips to build a house. All in all a crappy experience. I guess i will stick with AoE 2.
- fifticon 2y ago
  my child insists, reasonably, on playing minecraft, so we must endure the microsoft launcher ui stewardship for mc. what a hot mess of bloated bureaucracy-software-dungheap. It is as if even their installer has an installer and a loadscreen. Consider if you, gosh, want to continue PLAYING EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS LAST NIGHT. The launcher design response: ouh, i did NOT expect that! Please wait while we reauth and 2FA and sync your account and download and reinstall your game client.. wait a minute.. hmm, on second thought, Im not SURE we can just let you continue the game from "last night"..? oops, no wait.. WE CAN?! I swear there is more code in, and people assigned to, their crappy bloated launcher, than to the game itself. Ironically, their store features are so buggy I often dven cant manage to buy their DLC theft-as-servjce stuff.
  - breakingcups 2y ago
    Good news! There are alternative, unofficial launchers! Check out Prism or POLYMC for example.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Luckily with Minecraft there are lots of alternatives, you don’t need to use the MS crap.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  > Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs. In the past I would have complained, but as someone that has foolished invested into UWP and WinRT siren song, I can't but fully agree.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Never bet against Win32.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Kind of yes, the bigger problem is that Azure and XBox are now the money makers, so even Win32 isn't being updated that much since Windows XP, note that most Win32 APIs are now available via COM, and that is what UWP/WinRT offered, COM vNext, instead they messed up, and now we're back into COM classic with crappy tooling, even though it is the main API delivery mechanism.
smolder 2y ago
Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short term gain. Maybe companies should consider limiting their growth to stay nimble enough to provide value and stay viable. Maybe they do more good by being good at what they do than by chasing peak profit and diminishing their brands. Either way, Bobby Kotick was a bad CEO.
- 0dayz 2y ago
  Nope, it started waaay before that. * The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public * real id debacle * Diablo 3 * shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3 * spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump * x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled * spent years trying to create a dedicated moba, and hots came out after the hype of the genre was gone * Cancelling semi-experimental games (the Warcraft Point'n Click Adventure game, the Starcraft: Ghost game, and many others[1]) I'm sure there are more issues/fuck ups blizzard did, the point though is that the company couldn't adapt to the new norms of the industry (some are excusable due to the fuck you money wow gives) and thus became the black sheep. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4rrc/cancelled_games_at_blizzard_throughout_the_years/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4... Certain games on that list tbf is way past 2008.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Shutting down Blizzard North was when it began to get real shitty
  - realusername 2y ago
    I kind of forgot but it's true that Starcraft 2 used to be a joke in itself somewhat similar to Duke Nukem Forever at its time.
portaouflop 2y ago
I used to be the biggest fanboy - buying everything they released without hesitation. But their treatment of Warcraft III opened my eyes - the company I fell I love with that produced quality games no matter what does not exist anymore. So long and thanks for all the murlocs…
donatj 2y ago
Don't forget their handling of Overwatch. Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one. Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions. The day they launched Overwatch 2, they entirely shut down the Overwatch 1 servers. Something they had said earlier on that they were not going to do, before they later changed course. They took away the game I loved, the game I paid for, and replaced it with a junky free-to-play game dancing around in its skin like Edgar the Bug in Men in Black, all "Look at me, I'm still Overwatch, pinky promise", but anyone with a sense of taste can tell it really isn't. They ruined it. Literally all my friends played Overwatch. My wife was in an Overwatch League. I don't know a single person who stuck with Overwatch 2 for more than a couple weeks. My wife's entire league just shut down. I hear people play it but I sure don't know anyone. I would estimate mostly people who never played the original? Left such a sour taste in my mouth that I am hesitant to ever give Blizzard money again.
- xeonmc 2y ago
  Your wife was in Overwatch League? Is she Geguri?
  - donatj 2y ago
    No lol. Not "The" Overwatch League. I should have maybe chosen my words more wisely, though I'm pretty sure they referred to themselves as a "league" though. My wife is asleep, otherwise I would ask her the correct terminology. Basically she was on a non-professional all woman team for almost six years that would go head-to-head with other teams in scheduled tournaments. Her team even managed to get one-on-one coaching from some guy on the actual official "Overwatch League". They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant.
    - Ragnarork 2y ago
      > They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant. This is so sad to read. :( Grassroot competition like that is the basis on which esports scene thrives... Blizzard really wrote down the manual of everything you shouldn't do to make a game into an "esport", from the competition structure and insane costs (remember the initial slots for a league that hadn't had its first season yet was between $2 and $15 millions...), to the game balance which led to one meta destroying interest completely for way too long, making an entire role useless in the process, and the list continues.
Gud 2y ago
Frankly, as an avid AoE 2(now DE) player, I wish they hadn’t. AoE2 is slowly losing its uniqueness with each update. The new matchmaking sucks, can no longer select which map to play on ranked, pathing is broken in new ways. Don’t get me wrong, the new civilisations are nice, just kind of hoped they wouldn’t have done a total revamp.
- patates 2y ago
  It feels like the movement in the community is also slowing down. One of the most popular streamers T90 for example, has had less and less views through the last years, a reversal of a long trend upwards. They also added easier ways to do things which were giving competitive edge to the players who could efficiently do them the hard-way, perhaps reducing the motivation to train further for the top players (why train to do hard tricks if they could be automated by the game later).
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  DE? I didn't know AoE2 was getting content updates or balancing. I thought it was the same game, locked in. I notice aoe4 has seasons and rebalancing... Not sure how to feel about it.
  - Gud 2y ago
    Some of the new civs are amazing. Two of my favourite civs are Lithuanians and Romans. I can also tell you, since there is a whole new generation of gamers out there who have practiced countless hours of various games, the game play and what is a n00b has dramatically changed. Plus us old timers are really good as well.
valenceelectron 2y ago
They added insult to injury to the 2.0 upgrade by releasing promo material (supposedly screenshots) [0] that looked exactly like what fans wanted from them. Turned out, those were fake and they quickly removed most of them and what they actually did was a bad AI upscale instead. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/1gr3win/how_to_make_my_warcraft_3_rereleased_20_look_like/ https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/1gr3win/how_to_m... They had images like that on their website but removed them later.
jmyeet 2y ago
All true. For anyone unfamiliar, WC3 Remastered also did two other things: 1. It changed the ToS so Blizzard owns the IP rights to any third-party maps, effectively killing this community. Why? Because of Dota 2. There was a customm mode called Defense of the Ancients ("Dota") that somebody took and basically created the MOBA genre. Blizzard decided to sue and lost. They tried to create their own (ie Heroes of the Storm) but the space came to be dominated by League of Legends. Blizzard didn't want a repeat of that. Ridiculous; and 2. WC3 Reforged ("Refunded" as it was commonly called on release) also made the original game worse even if you didn't have Reforged. The game downloaded a bunch of assets you didn't use. It broke compatibility with some maps. I think there were a bunch of other problems too. More [1]. Some of these might've been fixed by later updates now. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_everything_wrong_with_reforged/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_...

hulitu 2y ago

> Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM. Oh, Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs. I tried AoE 3 on Steam (demo). It was a total disaster. Downloading was slow and then the game: At the first start would not let me build barracks (no suitable place found). At the second start it was hard to found the baracks again (all icons look the same - Windows style enshitification) but the peasants will not harvest berry bushes.(bugs) They made the UI much worse. The playground is round. The icons look the same so one has to look at tooltips to build a house. All in all a crappy experience. I guess i will stick with AoE 2.

fifticon 2y ago
my child insists, reasonably, on playing minecraft, so we must endure the microsoft launcher ui stewardship for mc. what a hot mess of bloated bureaucracy-software-dungheap. It is as if even their installer has an installer and a loadscreen. Consider if you, gosh, want to continue PLAYING EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS LAST NIGHT. The launcher design response: ouh, i did NOT expect that! Please wait while we reauth and 2FA and sync your account and download and reinstall your game client.. wait a minute.. hmm, on second thought, Im not SURE we can just let you continue the game from "last night"..? oops, no wait.. WE CAN?! I swear there is more code in, and people assigned to, their crappy bloated launcher, than to the game itself. Ironically, their store features are so buggy I often dven cant manage to buy their DLC theft-as-servjce stuff.
- breakingcups 2y ago
  Good news! There are alternative, unofficial launchers! Check out Prism or POLYMC for example.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Luckily with Minecraft there are lots of alternatives, you don’t need to use the MS crap.
pjmlp 2y ago
> Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs. In the past I would have complained, but as someone that has foolished invested into UWP and WinRT siren song, I can't but fully agree.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Never bet against Win32.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Kind of yes, the bigger problem is that Azure and XBox are now the money makers, so even Win32 isn't being updated that much since Windows XP, note that most Win32 APIs are now available via COM, and that is what UWP/WinRT offered, COM vNext, instead they messed up, and now we're back into COM classic with crappy tooling, even though it is the main API delivery mechanism.

smolder 2y ago

Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short term gain. Maybe companies should consider limiting their growth to stay nimble enough to provide value and stay viable. Maybe they do more good by being good at what they do than by chasing peak profit and diminishing their brands. Either way, Bobby Kotick was a bad CEO.

0dayz 2y ago
Nope, it started waaay before that. * The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public * real id debacle * Diablo 3 * shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3 * spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump * x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled * spent years trying to create a dedicated moba, and hots came out after the hype of the genre was gone * Cancelling semi-experimental games (the Warcraft Point'n Click Adventure game, the Starcraft: Ghost game, and many others[1]) I'm sure there are more issues/fuck ups blizzard did, the point though is that the company couldn't adapt to the new norms of the industry (some are excusable due to the fuck you money wow gives) and thus became the black sheep. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4rrc/cancelled_games_at_blizzard_throughout_the_years/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4... Certain games on that list tbf is way past 2008.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Shutting down Blizzard North was when it began to get real shitty
- realusername 2y ago
  I kind of forgot but it's true that Starcraft 2 used to be a joke in itself somewhat similar to Duke Nukem Forever at its time.

portaouflop 2y ago

I used to be the biggest fanboy - buying everything they released without hesitation. But their treatment of Warcraft III opened my eyes - the company I fell I love with that produced quality games no matter what does not exist anymore. So long and thanks for all the murlocs…

donatj 2y ago

Don't forget their handling of Overwatch. Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one. Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions. The day they launched Overwatch 2, they entirely shut down the Overwatch 1 servers. Something they had said earlier on that they were not going to do, before they later changed course. They took away the game I loved, the game I paid for, and replaced it with a junky free-to-play game dancing around in its skin like Edgar the Bug in Men in Black, all "Look at me, I'm still Overwatch, pinky promise", but anyone with a sense of taste can tell it really isn't. They ruined it. Literally all my friends played Overwatch. My wife was in an Overwatch League. I don't know a single person who stuck with Overwatch 2 for more than a couple weeks. My wife's entire league just shut down. I hear people play it but I sure don't know anyone. I would estimate mostly people who never played the original? Left such a sour taste in my mouth that I am hesitant to ever give Blizzard money again.

xeonmc 2y ago
Your wife was in Overwatch League? Is she Geguri?
- donatj 2y ago
  No lol. Not "The" Overwatch League. I should have maybe chosen my words more wisely, though I'm pretty sure they referred to themselves as a "league" though. My wife is asleep, otherwise I would ask her the correct terminology. Basically she was on a non-professional all woman team for almost six years that would go head-to-head with other teams in scheduled tournaments. Her team even managed to get one-on-one coaching from some guy on the actual official "Overwatch League". They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant.
  - Ragnarork 2y ago
    > They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant. This is so sad to read. :( Grassroot competition like that is the basis on which esports scene thrives... Blizzard really wrote down the manual of everything you shouldn't do to make a game into an "esport", from the competition structure and insane costs (remember the initial slots for a league that hadn't had its first season yet was between $2 and $15 millions...), to the game balance which led to one meta destroying interest completely for way too long, making an entire role useless in the process, and the list continues.

Gud 2y ago

Frankly, as an avid AoE 2(now DE) player, I wish they hadn’t. AoE2 is slowly losing its uniqueness with each update. The new matchmaking sucks, can no longer select which map to play on ranked, pathing is broken in new ways. Don’t get me wrong, the new civilisations are nice, just kind of hoped they wouldn’t have done a total revamp.

patates 2y ago
It feels like the movement in the community is also slowing down. One of the most popular streamers T90 for example, has had less and less views through the last years, a reversal of a long trend upwards. They also added easier ways to do things which were giving competitive edge to the players who could efficiently do them the hard-way, perhaps reducing the motivation to train further for the top players (why train to do hard tricks if they could be automated by the game later).
unethical_ban 2y ago
DE? I didn't know AoE2 was getting content updates or balancing. I thought it was the same game, locked in. I notice aoe4 has seasons and rebalancing... Not sure how to feel about it.
- Gud 2y ago
  Some of the new civs are amazing. Two of my favourite civs are Lithuanians and Romans. I can also tell you, since there is a whole new generation of gamers out there who have practiced countless hours of various games, the game play and what is a n00b has dramatically changed. Plus us old timers are really good as well.

valenceelectron 2y ago

They added insult to injury to the 2.0 upgrade by releasing promo material (supposedly screenshots) [0] that looked exactly like what fans wanted from them. Turned out, those were fake and they quickly removed most of them and what they actually did was a bad AI upscale instead. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/1gr3win/how_to_make_my_warcraft_3_rereleased_20_look_like/ https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/1gr3win/how_to_m... They had images like that on their website but removed them later.

jmyeet 2y ago

All true. For anyone unfamiliar, WC3 Remastered also did two other things: 1. It changed the ToS so Blizzard owns the IP rights to any third-party maps, effectively killing this community. Why? Because of Dota 2. There was a customm mode called Defense of the Ancients ("Dota") that somebody took and basically created the MOBA genre. Blizzard decided to sue and lost. They tried to create their own (ie Heroes of the Storm) but the space came to be dominated by League of Legends. Blizzard didn't want a repeat of that. Ridiculous; and 2. WC3 Reforged ("Refunded" as it was commonly called on release) also made the original game worse even if you didn't have Reforged. The game downloaded a bunch of assets you didn't use. It broke compatibility with some maps. I think there were a bunch of other problems too. More [1]. Some of these might've been fixed by later updates now. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_everything_wrong_with_reforged/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_...