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Northern Ireland23752 Posts
On August 27 2021 07:10 kupsas wrote:Show nested quote +On August 26 2021 22:45 farvacola wrote:On August 26 2021 22:34 Jockmcplop wrote:On August 26 2021 19:51 kupsas wrote:On August 26 2021 18:59 Manit0u wrote:On August 26 2021 07:53 kupsas wrote:
Werent the "Old" Franchises just ripoffs of Warhammer? How is that more creative? What exactly was more creative?
Wasnt Warcraft 3 already casual trash? Blizzard wanted to make a Warhammer game (StarCraft was 40K) but Games Workshop saw the alpha and bailed so Blizz had to make their own setting based on what they already had. Warcraft 3 is one of the best RTS games ever made that's being played competitively to this very day. Basically everything Blizz did after TFT was just contributing to their downfall - WoW which took most of their time and effort because money and all the other games they released were not really Blizzard stuff. SC2 was crap, D3 was crap, HotS was a desperate attempt to salvage the loss of DotA (which they weren't interested in when IF came to them first), Overwatch is a kneejerk reaction to CoD's success, Hearthstone is just a way to monetize more things. What Blizzard lacked for the past 15 years is the vision and a plan for their existing IPs that would allow them to expand on them with quality products up to Blizzard's old standards. Starcraft 2 was crap? Fuck, people are still playing this game. Why? Isnt it CRAP? Diablo 3 was crap? Odd, i played the game a shitton. Especially after the patches. Whats wrong with HotS? The game is fun. I played a shitton of DotA and couldnt stand DotA 2. People started farming for 20 minutes. League of Legends was an awful DotA ripoff and unplayable bad, more costly, gated and still WAY more successful than DotA. Makes sense. Overwatch is a kneejerk reaction to CoD's. What? Hearthstone is just a way to monetize more things. What? EVERYTHING CRAP BESIDES DOTA CS OG CREW By the way, what company has been orginal for the past 15 years? What popular games right now arent just "Other games" or sequels? Bohemia Interactive...ArmA 3 springs to mind. Its still incredibly popular for its age (like SC2) and although its a sequel, its a type of game no other company is going near, and the DLC content is really original. I thought SC2 was really good. Just about the best modern RTS you can get. Overwatch was clearly just an attempt to try and get in to a market that was already saturated. Never played Hearthstone, D3 or Heroes or any of that stuff. Its clear that Blizzard ran out of ideas a while ago. The list of innovative, popular games created in the past 15 years is actually quite long, it would include titles like Hades, Little Nightmares, Valheim, Returnal, Disco Elysium, Elite Dangerous, Terraria, Binding of Isaac and a ton more. The idea that there's nothing original and popular coming out is stark nonsense, nonsense that only further highlights Blizzard's creative drought !!!WHAT COMPANY!!!! NOT WHAT GAMES. What the fuck. Imagine Blizzard releasing some shit like Little Nightmares which pushes another game away. Holy fuck i would be pissed Let me just pick your games apart: Hades is another Roguelike. There have been thousands already. Its apperantly just better Valheim is another Open World which every basement developer shits out nowadays. Its flushed 2-3 Weeks after Returnal? What? Its a Shooter. Elite Dangerous. Space Shooter. Disco Elysium>Fallout Remember how Valve used to be creative? Why arent there 1000 pages of discussions?
I’m not sure what your argument is.
Blizzard is bad because lack of originality, but all these games that are seen as original aren’t because there’s nothing truly original in games?
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"Originality" is a bullshit concept, everything has been done and everything is adapted from something else, the reason for this is really simple, you dont actually want whats left out of true originality, true originality would be something like a world made of bubblegum and broccoli thats covered in barbed wire with hot dog cats flying upside down in space. Something utterly ridiculous that noone has really thought to do because why would they?
Any intelligent designer understands that conveying an idea is made immeasurably easier by using whats culturally understood about something. As mentioned before, WarCraft draws heavily from Tolkien-esque fantasy, thats partly because Tolkien's fantasy world is so culturally ubiquitous its hard not to want to draw from it since it provides an easy read for a common audience. Short man live in mountain? Is Dwarf! Big spiky armored skull looky man? Is bad guy! There is a ton of design language thats "unoriginal" and it exists because your brain has been programmed to associate colors and shapes with things, and its dumb not to use those associations because youre very likely to confuse people if you dont.
People don't want originality, they want something else but can't articulate what precisely they want.
Blizzard didn't and doesn't do anything super original, but they did make polished games with fun gameplay loops, charming stylized art, and tight mechanics. Noone liked Blizzard because their games were so original.
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How does ANY of this relate to the fact that women have been treated worse than equipment for seemingly the majority of Blizzard's existence and not only did the highest members of the company know it, they protected it, supported it, participated in it, and are now destroying evidence in violation of basic precepts of the law in order to hide and maintain it?
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Yeah, this thread has been properly side-tracked. The strength of their games (or lack of) doesn't matter in the slightest
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Northern Ireland23752 Posts
On August 27 2021 10:29 Circumstance wrote:
How does ANY of this relate to the fact that women have been treated worse than equipment for seemingly the majority of Blizzard's existence and not only did the highest members of the company know it, they protected it, supported it, participated in it, and are now destroying evidence in violation of basic precepts of the law in order to hide and maintain it?
Yeah fair, shouldn’t have contributed to the derail.
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On August 27 2021 02:59 Yurie wrote:
After Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 the thing Blizzard has been doing is release polished and tweaked games in established genres.
WoW is a better Everquest.
Hearthstone used their platform and the timing of free to play going big to expand the genre.
Overwatch being a modern version of Team Fortress.
HotS is a tweaked game in a hard genre that was a decent success considering multiple better games existed and still does.
There is nothing wrong with making good games in existing genres. That is what most game companies does and it is what Blizzard has been doing after the major genres were established. Many of them good or even great games, the problem is people hold them up as greater than they are.
While I agree with this I am of the opinion that they've kinda mismanaged their IPs. Most of their fans feel really strong about each IP (just try and recall the SC vs WC3 mudslinging) and I guess they felt mistreated and cheated?
WoW was a HUGE success but its success started leaking into other games which begun to look more and more "warcrafty". Common complaint with D3 was that it was way too bright, colorful and cheerful - big departure from the previous grimdark and gothic entries. Then Hearthstone is basically just WoW the card game...
I wouldn't mind if they started mixing the IPs a bit. Instead of colorful Diablo why not release WarCraft ARPG? Overwatch should be StarCraft: Ghost revived as a team based FPS. WoW should be sidelined for next gen MMO, this time perhaps targeted at mature audiences and set in the Diablo universe.
I think they lost a lot of fans and faith when they abandoned some darker themes and started making everything PG.
I'm starting to wonder when things started to go so wrong for them? When the big WoW money started coming in? After the merger with Activision?
Is it possible to find a single point in time when Blizzard fully embraced corporate culture and started caring more about money than the people (both customers and their own employees)?
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On August 27 2021 08:11 Zambrah wrote:
true originality would be something like a world made of bubblegum and broccoli thats covered in barbed wire with hot dog cats flying upside down in space. Something utterly ridiculous that noone has really thought to do because why would they?
Because... this idea sounds awesome af, someone should do it 
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I just want to note that a lot of people, I think, had a similar sort of misconception about gaming studios about 15 years ago. I should know, I was one of these people. That was that it was synonymous with studio in the art sense, where it was the same group of people mostly making decisions and doing work, even if there were some inflow and outflow.
Instead, it turned out to be like a movie studio, where the studio has fuck all to do with the quality besides who they hire.
Basically no one at Blizzard in 2008 was the same as in 1992 aside from a few big names. Metzinger could write well, sometimes, and that was about it. One of the very first big warning signs about SC2 being more of a cash grab than faithful sequel was when they hired Dustin Browder as the director. Broodwar was and is still regarded as the best RTS ever made. Browder's command and conquer commands weren't bad but... any of the past directors would've done better. To give a movie analogy, this was like hiring Micheal Bay to direct Godfather Part IV. The rest of the cast were similar downgrades. All of them perfectly capable at their role, but not good enough to justify the franchise. The insane decision to split it into 3 parts ahead of time prevented this problem from ever being fixed with some sort of reset.
Anyways, if you really liked a game, look up the credits and find the name of the person who worked on that aspect. Then hunt down what else that person has worked on. You can learn some very wild things, like that the sprite artist for Final Fantasy I is still actively making very. FF1-esque sprites for newer games. Or more generic things on writers or directors.
So if you really like a battle design, find the battle designers, story find the writers, and directors for an overall good game - or for a game that works better than the sum of all it's parts(an Indy game with subpar graphics, weak gameplay, a bad story, but a theme that ties it all together in an enjoyable way is an example here).
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I know this is contributing to a derail but I do feel I need to get this out of my system.
On August 28 2021 10:24 Manit0u wrote:
While I agree with this I am of the opinion that they've kinda mismanaged their IPs. Most of their fans feel really strong about each IP (just try and recall the SC vs WC3 mudslinging) and I guess they felt mistreated and cheated?
WoW was a HUGE success but its success started leaking into other games which begun to look more and more "warcrafty". Common complaint with D3 was that it was way too bright, colorful and cheerful - big departure from the previous grimdark and gothic entries. Then Hearthstone is basically just WoW the card game...
That was a common complaint but the art direction isn't the problem with Diablo 3. The problem with Diablo 3 was that it was a legitimately bad game at launch.
Let me bring you back to 2012 and talk about how the game worked.
Playing the game wasn't possible during launch because the servers were slammed to hell. Error 37 if you want a trip back in history.
The gameplay loop was simply atrocious. The core component of Diablo 2 was that it was a hack and slash game with a randomized loot system. What made Diablo 2 special was the breadth of the skill tree and loot system (eg. it wasn't deep but it offered a lot of options) that allowed for a lot of customization that would work with all difficulties.
You'd go through one difficulty, go through another with more skills and items to play with, go through the next difficulty with even more skills and items to play with. The game would change the enemies around (eg. more immunities) and the new items and your expanded skill tree you obtain helps you deal with these new challenges. You'd collect loot, trade loot with friends and so forth. Its got a great gameplay loop, especially for LAN parties for those that still remember them.
Diablo 3 not only made the game punishingly hard at Inferno difficulty, it had none of the breadth of Diablo 2. You wouldn't find good loot a significant amount of the time and the Legendary Items were also shit. They were items with better stats and mostly useless special effects. They also catered loot drops for your character, which completely killed part of the fun of holding onto other class items to trade to friends. Its an exceedingly tedious game and, perhaps worst of all, boring.
The expansion didn't really fix this game completely, they went the other way and had the loot system drop Legendary items everywhere. Its to the point that you don't even bother picking up them up because every third item is a Legendary.
Then we've got the whole Auction House. People like to talk about the Real Money Auction House but the real cancer was the Auction House itself.
Even if the story and art direction was good, it would still be a horrible game. It was actually unfun to play.
I wouldn't mind if they started mixing the IPs a bit. Instead of colorful Diablo why not release WarCraft ARPG? Overwatch should be StarCraft: Ghost revived as a team based FPS. WoW should be sidelined for next gen MMO, this time perhaps targeted at mature audiences and set in the Diablo universe.
I think they lost a lot of fans and faith when they abandoned some darker themes and started making everything PG.
I'm starting to wonder when things started to go so wrong for them? When the big WoW money started coming in? After the merger with Activision?
Is it possible to find a single point in time when Blizzard fully embraced corporate culture and started caring more about money than the people (both customers and their own employees)?
"Dark" themes don't make a good game. Good games are good games. Blizzard just hasn't been making good games for a long time. And if they have an interesting game in Overwatch, they don't know what to do with it and somehow end up destroying their own product by making it play worse and worse while trying to address player concerns.
Hearthstone is a good example. Its a fun game until they ramped up the number of expansion sets per year and the number of legendaries in those sets. Its near impossible for newer players or returning players to play the game because you need the right cards to have fun and you can't get those cards because the crafting is extremely expensive, disenchanting gives awful value and card nerfs don't get a whole load to dust to compensate. The only way to keep up is to either keep playing the game religiously and/or blow heaps of cash. Which is intentional but can be done without making it hard for new/returning players.
Diablo 3 was the sign that Blizzard is no longer a good developer. But tone isn't the problem with their games. They're either bad from the start or end up being bad because they're unsure of how to deal with player base issues.
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many people refer to blizzard as a singular entity for the sake of brevity, but it's really comprised of multiple different teams responsible for different aspects or different franchises.
although it's not anywhere close to a 1:1 analogy, i liken to how authors have very little communication with the people who eventually illustrate their novel covers/jackets.
there was a team that handled just cinematics, there was a team that worked on just diablo games.
dustin browder transferred to heroes of the storm along with parts of his team when LotV was wrapping up.
decision making is obviously very different as it is helmed as a large publicly traded merger.
so on and so forth.
as Nevuk mentioned, they're about as good as who they hire, and it's obviously been this way for quite some time, even without the hindsight.
it should honestly be no surprise that the work culture, even behind great results and great games, is quite toxic underneath. any enterprise out there that does exceedingly well, does so with some sort of cheap labour or poor work conditions. just a fact of life.
zero surprise over here that riot games is like this, EA, activision itself, etc... were all terrible in their own ways.
what we see or want to see is the final product that ends up in our hands.
it's just the convenience that we enjoy that lets us so conveniently overlook the other details.
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On September 06 2021 21:49 nanaoei wrote:
many people refer to blizzard as a singular entity for the sake of brevity, but it's really comprised of multiple different teams responsible for different aspects or different franchises.
although it's not anywhere close to a 1:1 analogy, i liken to how authors have very little communication with the people who eventually illustrate their novel covers/jackets.
there was a team that handled just cinematics, there was a team that worked on just diablo games.
dustin browder transferred to heroes of the storm along with parts of his team when LotV was wrapping up.
decision making is obviously very different as it is helmed as a large publicly traded merger.
so on and so forth.
as Nevuk mentioned, they're about as good as who they hire, and it's obviously been this way for quite some time, even without the hindsight.
it should honestly be no surprise that the work culture, even behind great results and great games, is quite toxic underneath. any enterprise out there that does exceedingly well, does so with some sort of cheap labour or poor work conditions. just a fact of life.
zero surprise over here that riot games is like this, EA, activision itself, etc... were all terrible in their own ways.
what we see or want to see is the final product that ends up in our hands.
it's just the convenience that we enjoy that lets us so conveniently overlook the other details.
Your argument here doesn't work for a multitude of reasons. If one of your teams does something wrong, you are responsible for it. Disagree? You think a platoon commander is off the hook if one of his teams does something wrong, despite the fact that he's not there to overlook every one of them at all times? Training, preparations, culture, and check-ups are required. If you can't handle that as a boss, you are the one who haven't done your job. Even if you had no idea anything was going on, the fact that you could have prevented it by just doing a better job makes you wholy responsible for what happened.
Also, authors often have very good control over their cover artists. Of course, 100% so if you are self published, but often you'll have a lot of say if it's through a publisher as well. They can overrule you, but why would they want to do that when a good relationship with the author is that much more important? Otherwise he takes his next book elsewhere
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I will note that there's basically been a pattern since the beginning of game making :
Studio A mistreats employees, they leave to start Studio B, Studio B treats employees better and their games sell like crazy, then 10 years later the founders get bought out by the owners of Studio A and retire as gazillionaires at 35-40, leaving the same incompetent people that ran Studio A in charge of Studio B.
(This happened with Atari and Activision, and looks like it's happened with Activision and Blizzard, at least. And the incompetent people I'm referring to aren't any specific individuals so much as the class of people who winds up in charge from that group being a very specific type of incompetent)
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On August 26 2021 08:16 Fleetfeet wrote:
Wat. A lot of old blizzard titles are genre-defining. The diablo franchise will be heralded as a major pillar of the dungeon crawling genre for as long as the genre is around.
Diablo 1 was made by hungry people who had an (at the time) groundbreaking idea. Diablo 2 was made by people who had to prove they could top Diablo 1, and they did it. Diablo 3 was a C- paper turned in late, a low-effort title that followed the rubric and had a completely different visual style. Too clean with the saturation turned up instead of gritty and dark.
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On September 08 2021 04:03 postcount69 wrote:Diablo 3 was a C- paper turned in late, a low-effort title that followed the rubric and had a completely different visual style. Too clean with the saturation turned up instead of gritty and dark.
StalkerTL wrote a very nice post just a few days ago, on this very page, that explains how the problem with Diablo 3 wasn't "the colours were too saturated". The actual horror atmosphere wasn't even present in Diablo 2, your character runs around slaying the majority of foes with ease and it's still a great game.
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On September 09 2021 08:36 Turbovolver wrote:Show nested quote +On September 08 2021 04:03 postcount69 wrote:Diablo 3 was a C- paper turned in late, a low-effort title that followed the rubric and had a completely different visual style. Too clean with the saturation turned up instead of gritty and dark. StalkerTL wrote a very nice post just a few days ago, on this very page, that explains how the problem with Diablo 3 wasn't "the colours were too saturated". The actual horror atmosphere wasn't even present in Diablo 2, your character runs around slaying the majority of foes with ease and it's still a great game.
Dunno about that. I was pretty scared playing D2 for the first time at a pretty young age. The music, atmosphere, and gritty graphics does indeed make it quite scary, even if that wears off after the 300th time running through it grinding for legendaries
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Northern Ireland23752 Posts
On September 09 2021 16:14 Excludos wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2021 08:36 Turbovolver wrote:On September 08 2021 04:03 postcount69 wrote:Diablo 3 was a C- paper turned in late, a low-effort title that followed the rubric and had a completely different visual style. Too clean with the saturation turned up instead of gritty and dark. StalkerTL wrote a very nice post just a few days ago, on this very page, that explains how the problem with Diablo 3 wasn't "the colours were too saturated". The actual horror atmosphere wasn't even present in Diablo 2, your character runs around slaying the majority of foes with ease and it's still a great game. Dunno about that. I was pretty scared playing D2 for the first time at a pretty young age. The music, atmosphere, and gritty graphics does indeed make it quite scary, even if that wears off after the 300th time running through it grinding for legendaries
Diablo 1 was way scarier for me, but I played it when I was really quite young. The Butcher man. D2 has spookiness but especially act 2 and places like the arcane sanctum I got more high octane adventurer a la Indians Jones vibes, with the occasional bit of horror like Temple of Doom does.
Has there been any recent developments in Blizzard land on the issues in this topic?
I’ve seen they’ve removed a few lame but ultimately inoffensive bits of innuendo as quest names in WoW recently, anything actually impactful/meaningful though?
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No, this is the phase where they hope this all burns out so they dont have to acknowledge employee demands or make any real meaningful changes. Y'know, Ubisoft strategy.
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lol people have short memory and Ubisoft knows it.
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EPT
