Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 123

On May 28 2024 09:34 MegaBuster wrote:
The fundamental problem of Blizzard and its imitators is that they can not puncture their endlessly layered baklava-like internal bureaucracy with any argument nor prototype, but they are deeply persuaded by things that are succeeding in the market.

So everything Blizzard has done from the WoW-era onward (aka the sociopath era) is about taking shit. They call it being good at 'polish' or 'honing'. For some reason you could have the exact same shit outside the company that someone inside the company said 5 years ago but they won't pursue it until somebody else did it.

The only tiny points of light that get through this system is those key individual figures who had some kind of pushing power (Metzen).

It just gets the wheels turning for them in incredible ways to see someone else succeeding with something. I worked for someone at Blizzard on a very teensy tiny modding thing where just the slightest bit of either them making a decision, or giving me the power to make a decision would have multiplied the usefulness of what was produced by like 100x. I would email them like "HEY - can I do it like this? Or can you choose a way to do it?" And they would respond with a mousy squeal of "OH GOSH" and ghost my emails for a month.

That same person at any earlier time, when I was a doing events for StarCraft, took an entire event I did, went to Blizzard and worked with Blizzard themselves to clone my work down to the fine details. They busted ass and launched something with a corporate sponsor real fucking fast, and to my knowledge it was the only time Blizzard ever made anything for a StarCraft event that used custom maps in it. (shy of like some Archon mode stuff). Same person — when they were stealing they were decisive and deadly — when they had to make new creative work they were terrified and timid.

Somehow they select for these behaviors amongst the people at these companies (Blizzard and now Frost Giant). This is why its obvious to me the only thing that fulfills this kind of mission statement for Stormgate 'to heighten the skill ceiling and lower the skill floor' is the stuff they could look at in TotalBiscuit's Axiom mod and then put in their game. They just refuse all innovation unless someone else did it first. Once its been done they can somehow quickly motivate themselves to sidestep the bureaucracy and just clone that thing from the market, in this case their own mods. Its almost like procrastination in a way — they need to wait until the decision has been made for them to finally act.

That's why they want the modders fucking outside the company where they may be harvested from rather than inside the company where they would add the terrible tension that comes from creativity. It works for modern Blizzard but for a startup its a different story. At Frost Giant you have a group of 'honers' and 'polishers' very out of their element.

On May 29 2024 17:43 Harris1st wrote:
Big week ahead:

Uncapped games reveal on Summer Game Fest June 7th
Stormgate 3rd race reveal on PC Gaming Show June 9th