Mike Morhaime founds new gaming company - Page 5

On September 24 2020 02:07 JimmyJRaynor wrote:

before ATVI , Blizzard had all kinds of crazy messed up deadlines and processes. Its part of what inspired the name "Blizzard" because the place was total chaos.

i seem to recall Bob Fitch getting locked in a room for 6 weeks to build the engine for SC1. Software projects go awry all the time. My best customer has a service called "Project Rescue". She sends me on these crazy assignments working on projects that have failed 3+ times and have been going on for 5+ years. That is the way the entire industry is. Its not like video games are some special case.



"we were no where near the home stretch". crunch lasted 8 months.

I love doing the hermit coder 24/7 thing. its a blast. its also clear Bob Fitch loved it as well. When the project is a success... you gain legend status.

In conclusion, Blizzard had all kinds of issues before ATVI took over. Bungie also jettisoned ATVI and kept their Destiny franchise. Has Destiny2 gotten much better without ATVI? I'd say its a little bit better. But its not some dramatic night-and-day improvement.

On September 25 2020 23:24 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
How quickly memories forget. Wasn't Dustin Browder responsible for the travesty of the boring gameplay of the protoss deathball as derived from the power of the Colossus (it's so cool, lasers! war of the worlds! Splash in a line to kill infinite marines!), unfun game mechanics like forcefields, and the utter defensiveness of Zerg gameplay (Zerg having to be extremely cost inefficient in the intial stages of the game with barely any strong micro effects) and tiny tiny maps, as apparently according to Dustin Browder people don't have the attention spans to play longer than 10 mins or to appreciate longer games.

"Terrible terrible damage." What terrible terrible words. For who needs to give all three races the tools to thrive on different maps styles and develop the gameplay in their preferred playstyle, if you can just give them terrible terrible damage.

On September 26 2020 06:18 Sigh1022 wrote:
yoooo this is GREAT news. Browder was such a boss, glad to see him on board.

On September 28 2020 16:06 Harris1st wrote:


And yet somehow everything he touches has now legend status. Strange

On September 28 2020 23:55 followZeRoX wrote:


And yet somehow game wasn't nearly balanced ever as now (racially) since he left SC2 team. Strange.

On September 28 2020 01:42 TheYango wrote:

It's really, really reductive to attribute things like this to one person. Being the lead designer on a game with a large dev team like SC2 is rarely going to mean that you directly control particular aspects of gameplay like this.

On September 29 2020 01:45 eviltomahawk wrote:

I believe he was at EA for RA2, Generals (and Zero Hour), and Battle for Middle Earth 1. I consider RA2 to have the best gameplay of the classic C&C games. Generals was controversial as an outlier in the C&C series, but I thought it had fairly robust gameplay and a thriving modding scene. BFME1 purposely simplified and streamlined a lot of stuff like base-building, but I thought it was still an enjoyable use of the setting, and Halo Wars would later use a similar system of base-building.

On September 29 2020 21:17 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
it is interesting to note that "co op" campaign missions first became a thing with RA3's co-op campaign. many of the devs behind that ended up at Blizzard for SC2 a few years later. THen, a few years later.. SC2 got a co op mode. Competition between top RTS dev studio ends up producing better games.

Browder is a great example of why competition amongst studios is good. He moved up in the world... going from the #3 RTS franchise to the #1/#2 RTS game franchises.

Its kinda funny hearing fans vocally criticize Browder when its clear the men whose lives revolve around making video games speak with their actions that Browder is a top notch game designer.

Actions speak louder than words.

just to add to your points. RA2 sold great. More importantly, RA2's long term engagement #s were great. So people didn't just buy the game and quit after the campaign was over. RA2 had long term sustainability.

Thus , by objective metrics, RA2 was a great game.

On September 30 2020 05:27 dUTtrOACh wrote:
To address the comparitive ease of balancing in C&C RA2 vs that of other competitive RTS games (SC1&2, WC3, AoE2), I would say RA2 is still easier to balance.

At its core, the "racial diversity" of C&C RA2 has two factions (Soviet and Ally). Each sub-faction of the two factions has a unique unit or structure, which seeks to imbalance some aspect of the game into their favour and force some alteration by the opponent if used. It's also quite simplistic from an economical standpoint, so there's no need to even consider things that arise from multi-resource RTS games.

In contrast to RA2, a game like Age of Empires 2 has one race (humans), but each civilization has a number of different numerical modifiers, tech tree options and limitations, as well as unique units. Add to that the multiple resources of AoE2 (wood, stone, food, gold), and it becomes quite apparent that the depth of balance is far greater.

SC and others mentioned above have very distinctive races and are multi-resource. They're more likely to be on the upper end of difficulty than the lower end, in terms of balance.

Browder did decent work at Blizzard for a better wage than many of his colleagues. He achieved his status in the industry through his work and has been rewarded with a ticket off of what is beginning to look like a sinking ship. Wouldn't anybody take it?

On September 27 2020 09:45 DeepElemBlues wrote:


I think Fitch locked himself in that room, he was so frustrated with the (modified?) war2 engine they were using he said this isn't working for what you want to do let me write a whole new engine for this okay then he went and did it like a boss