Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 16

On March 24 2023 03:19 Miragee wrote:


I think people forget D3 was in development since 2005 or so and was completely scrapped once between 2005-2012 and developed basically from scratch. Now, I don't know if it was ever a passion project but I could at least imagine it being one when they started originally before WoW became their financial success story.

I would also like to hear honest thoughts of people who played WoW a lot on whether they think WoW was originally a passion project, if they try to put away their biases. I personally can't tell because the genre in general isn't for me I think. I tried to get into WoW multiple times but the time wasting mechanics, mind-numbing quests, boring item/skill system etc. were too off-putting for me to ever get far.

On March 24 2023 06:16 Southlight wrote:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyocC15CyN0

One can certainly argue that Wilson didn't have the greatest of ideas as pertains to Diablo 3 game design but I lean toward believing their hearts were in the right place.

On March 23 2023 11:03 Manit0u wrote:
In any case, somewhere along the way Blizz seems to have lost some of it passion in pursuit of money. When WoW blew up they pooled most resources into it to the detriment of their other IPs, which is now kinda biting them in the ass with WoW being on the decline and having increased competition.

Thankfully there are still some passion projects out there for the RTS fans. There's a pretty dedicated Total Annihilation fanbase that's working on reviving the franchise (since Supreme Commander wasn't enough).

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

On March 29 2023 04:38 Manit0u wrote:


Well, I guess most of it comes down to the fact that small studios tend to make games they'd like to play themselves while big studios have to focus on recouping the costs and making big bucks for the shareholders. It can be clearly seen in how Blizzard started approaching their own games, with D4 being the most recent example. Some stuff in there is good but quite a bit of it seems completely unnecessary and made solely for the purpose of adding monetization (extensive character customization in a game where you barely even see your character?). Those are resources that could've been spent on improving more vital areas (like character run/attack animations for example).

Just like the BAR video by Winter shows how important it is that the game is done with passion for it, where devs are also players and have added features he didn't even know he needed before he found out about them but are absolutely brilliant from the gameplay perspective. Or when people keep asking people behind Last Epoch why they don't have gender select on characters or customization and they explained that they're focused on developing gameplay first and adding more options to your character is just a lot of dev time spent on duplicating and adjusting assets and animations, time they'd rather spend polishing the core experience.

It's often small details like that which tend to get lost for big studios who just keep flaunting their amazing cinematics, graphics and customization options but their game is just disappointing in practice.