i really want to put all the blame on the downhillness on bobby kotick of activision--- mainly based on an old TL thread i read about blizzard's history post-merger.
i still have hopes to get a job at blizz and maybe pull a john lassetter (do for blizzard what john lassetter did for disney) but it's a long shot of a dream.
i really hope the result of the sale of activision-blizzard does the company some good and allows some restoration of integrity in their game design philosophy.
djWheat: "A pitchfork is for fucking hay. A trident is for killing bitches."
No game was perfect and had a lot of problems. Remember Diablo II it was not very good. Only when Lord of the Destruction came out it became better. Yes Diablo III isn't as good as we hoped. They will keep patching and keep adding more to it to get it better.
Even Starcraft BW wasn't even that great at first either. It took multiple patches to make it what it is today. People's memory is horrible. Yes Blizzard the company has humans making video games...So mistakes do happen and they will figure out new ways to make there games better.
Now for people not buying HotS because Diablo III...That is like saying EA released Madden 2011 and I am not going to buy Battlefield...Or Activision made iCarly video game so I am not playing Call of Duty
.
Stop fucking using the "give it time, it will get better" excuse. People are annoyed because instead of building on the success of the past games, they instead chose to remake everything only to make it worse. Blizz isnt making Starcraft or Diablo for the first time mind you. They've had so many years to analyze what made their games so good and yet failed to capitalize on that.
You know the saying "Dont reinvent the wheel"? Well it can be applied perfectly here. From wikipedia: "Reinventing the square wheel is the practice of unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a square wheel)." This is what I feel when someone mentions SC2 or D3.
All of this is IMO
I agree with you don't reinvent the wheel. In my opinion Starcraft II is amazing. I love watching it and I love playing it. I still think it is going to keep getting better with Heart of the Swarm. I also find Starcraft II more enjoyable to watch then Broodwar.
Now Diablo III has some problems. Some of those problems couldn't of been predicted by just looking at Diablo II. What people were complaining about Diablo II was something they were trying to fix in Diablo III. It didn't work out the way they wanted and will be trying to fix the game with patches and expansions in there *near future.
*Blizzard near future is typically 2 years.
Yeah I think you completely miss the point. How much you enjoy it is pretty irrelevant to this, it's about removing greatly loved features and trying to replace them with new ones that are clearly not capable of the same level of depth, purely for the sake of being original and making it all noob friendly. If you look at a great sequel like D2, W3, Red Alert 2, hell, even a shooter like Max Payne 2, ask yourself, what gameplay elements did they remove? Almost nothing, they just try to expand on these successfull concepts, while dropping the unsuccesfull ones. Starcraft Brood War was a beautifully crafted game, and had relatively little units that where not used, however, because Browder needed to put his big fat ego into the title they just axed tons of intricate mechanics because "that's not what they wanted" and replaced them with simplistic and shallow "cool" versions.
Opinions are irrelevant, this is about the way they built the game, and the guy they chose to do it.
Even if they just removed the problems caused by what was honestly fairly bad UI, still good for time though, that still is not enough to justify a new game. They really wasnt any unit that could realistically be added to BW without removing and reinventing which is essentially what they did. A lot of the core units still exist but they built something different enough to justify its existance. Honestly I thought they did a great job developing SC2 and made a sequal that they can be proud of and not just BW in HD which while fun can be done as a UMS game.
I'm not sure where you got the notion from that the only thing they should have done is updated UI and graphics, as I stated in the post you quoted, successful sequels rely on building on what made the previous game good, in this case they threw out most of what made the game good and tried reinventing it for a different audience, faster games because kids are fucking stupid and can't focus, more strength to cheeses and coinflip builds because even people who can't macro deserve to win, right? Even the very few unit's they kept in changed drastically, the zealot's importance was drastically cut, but not even close to the fate of the hydra or the BW capital ships, becoming obsolete in favor of Browder's new 'cool' unit's, and naturally all the BW splash had to be weakened, but even when fans where begging for them to nerf the collosus, he picked the high templar, was this a well thought out decision, or does he actively enjoy seeing his 'own' unit's above the original ones? The only unit's I can think of that retain some of their former glory are the zergling and the marine (and ofcourse the Observer).
There might not have been able to add any unit to the Broodwar roster (something I'm not convinced of but alas), but that does not automatically mean they had to replace NEARLY EVERY SINGLE UNIT, oh it's all well and fun that most buildings are relatively unchanged, but buildings are not what made Broodwar, they where just there to add flavor and mechanics. They changed nearly every single aspect of the game to make it playable for everyone, but at the same time giving real pro players far less material to work with.
If you still don't understand what I'm talking about, let me paraphrase what I said before, look at Warcraft 2's unit's and compare them to Warcraft 3's, as you can see, most of those unit's where still intact in W3, for the most part they added elements, 2 more races worth of them. I could go on about how other game's build on their predecessors but I believe the Warcraft example is quite fitting, it shows the kind of inovativeness Blizzard is capable of without needing to destroy the predecessor's uniqueness that got a lot of people interested in the game in the first place.
10 years ago they called what you were describing (keeping almost everything and adding 1-2 new things) an expansion pack. HotS basically is what you described because SC2 is a game and HotS is an expansion pack. There really wasnt anymore to pack into BW because it was complete. It might not have been a perfect game but there was nothing really to add to it.
As a whole blizzard games typically dont do the CoD thing where you add one new gun, an 8 hour campaign and call that a whole new game. They make games that have a reason to exist and thats one of the reasons that blizzard games always seem to sell (well that and quality). An HD BW with a whole new campaign and some of the issues resolved would be fun and I would probably buy it but does it really need to exist as opposed to trying to make a true sequal?
Edit: Yes I know CoD is an activision game but its why I have weird feeling about this that Blizzard is still miles better than Activision.
Holy shit are you incapable of reading the post you're replying to? You don't need to destroy to create, see my W2->W3 example. Also, I never described anything, so I have no idea what kind of idiotic idea you're trying to argue against. Just imagine, a new race to play with, maybe, I dunno, I think I heard this mentioned before, XEL FREAKING NAGA, I could be a bit tough to balance, but considering the time they had I don't think it should be too much of a stretch. Like in Warcraft 2->3 you would not need to replace 80% of all unit's and their mechanics because you're throwing you're creativity into other things. Warcraft 2 wasn't even that brilliant of a game, yet they respected it and build their game onto it, increasing it's depth. But with Starcraft they felt the need to reinvent it all and sadly enough that reinvention has proven to be far shallower then it's predecessor.
And ofcourse the Activision merger is the root cause of all of this crap, I mean holy shit, you look at what Browder did to the Red Alert franchise and you think "I want me some of that!" (although kudo's to him for getting Takai and Curry involved).
eviltomahawk United States. July 18 2012 15:32. Posts 8940
No game was perfect and had a lot of problems. Remember Diablo II it was not very good. Only when Lord of the Destruction came out it became better. Yes Diablo III isn't as good as we hoped. They will keep patching and keep adding more to it to get it better.
Even Starcraft BW wasn't even that great at first either. It took multiple patches to make it what it is today. People's memory is horrible. Yes Blizzard the company has humans making video games...So mistakes do happen and they will figure out new ways to make there games better.
Now for people not buying HotS because Diablo III...That is like saying EA released Madden 2011 and I am not going to buy Battlefield...Or Activision made iCarly video game so I am not playing Call of Duty
.
Stop fucking using the "give it time, it will get better" excuse. People are annoyed because instead of building on the success of the past games, they instead chose to remake everything only to make it worse. Blizz isnt making Starcraft or Diablo for the first time mind you. They've had so many years to analyze what made their games so good and yet failed to capitalize on that.
You know the saying "Dont reinvent the wheel"? Well it can be applied perfectly here. From wikipedia: "Reinventing the square wheel is the practice of unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a square wheel)." This is what I feel when someone mentions SC2 or D3.
All of this is IMO
I agree with you don't reinvent the wheel. In my opinion Starcraft II is amazing. I love watching it and I love playing it. I still think it is going to keep getting better with Heart of the Swarm. I also find Starcraft II more enjoyable to watch then Broodwar.
Now Diablo III has some problems. Some of those problems couldn't of been predicted by just looking at Diablo II. What people were complaining about Diablo II was something they were trying to fix in Diablo III. It didn't work out the way they wanted and will be trying to fix the game with patches and expansions in there *near future.
*Blizzard near future is typically 2 years.
Yeah I think you completely miss the point. How much you enjoy it is pretty irrelevant to this, it's about removing greatly loved features and trying to replace them with new ones that are clearly not capable of the same level of depth, purely for the sake of being original and making it all noob friendly. If you look at a great sequel like D2, W3, Red Alert 2, hell, even a shooter like Max Payne 2, ask yourself, what gameplay elements did they remove? Almost nothing, they just try to expand on these successfull concepts, while dropping the unsuccesfull ones. Starcraft Brood War was a beautifully crafted game, and had relatively little units that where not used, however, because Browder needed to put his big fat ego into the title they just axed tons of intricate mechanics because "that's not what they wanted" and replaced them with simplistic and shallow "cool" versions.
Opinions are irrelevant, this is about the way they built the game, and the guy they chose to do it.
Even if they just removed the problems caused by what was honestly fairly bad UI, still good for time though, that still is not enough to justify a new game. They really wasnt any unit that could realistically be added to BW without removing and reinventing which is essentially what they did. A lot of the core units still exist but they built something different enough to justify its existance. Honestly I thought they did a great job developing SC2 and made a sequal that they can be proud of and not just BW in HD which while fun can be done as a UMS game.
I'm not sure where you got the notion from that the only thing they should have done is updated UI and graphics, as I stated in the post you quoted, successful sequels rely on building on what made the previous game good, in this case they threw out most of what made the game good and tried reinventing it for a different audience, faster games because kids are fucking stupid and can't focus, more strength to cheeses and coinflip builds because even people who can't macro deserve to win, right? Even the very few unit's they kept in changed drastically, the zealot's importance was drastically cut, but not even close to the fate of the hydra or the BW capital ships, becoming obsolete in favor of Browder's new 'cool' unit's, and naturally all the BW splash had to be weakened, but even when fans where begging for them to nerf the collosus, he picked the high templar, was this a well thought out decision, or does he actively enjoy seeing his 'own' unit's above the original ones? The only unit's I can think of that retain some of their former glory are the zergling and the marine (and ofcourse the Observer).
There might not have been able to add any unit to the Broodwar roster (something I'm not convinced of but alas), but that does not automatically mean they had to replace NEARLY EVERY SINGLE UNIT, oh it's all well and fun that most buildings are relatively unchanged, but buildings are not what made Broodwar, they where just there to add flavor and mechanics. They changed nearly every single aspect of the game to make it playable for everyone, but at the same time giving real pro players far less material to work with.
If you still don't understand what I'm talking about, let me paraphrase what I said before, look at Warcraft 2's unit's and compare them to Warcraft 3's, as you can see, most of those unit's where still intact in W3, for the most part they added elements, 2 more races worth of them. I could go on about how other game's build on their predecessors but I believe the Warcraft example is quite fitting, it shows the kind of inovativeness Blizzard is capable of without needing to destroy the predecessor's uniqueness that got a lot of people interested in the game in the first place.
10 years ago they called what you were describing (keeping almost everything and adding 1-2 new things) an expansion pack. HotS basically is what you described because SC2 is a game and HotS is an expansion pack. There really wasnt anymore to pack into BW because it was complete. It might not have been a perfect game but there was nothing really to add to it.
As a whole blizzard games typically dont do the CoD thing where you add one new gun, an 8 hour campaign and call that a whole new game. They make games that have a reason to exist and thats one of the reasons that blizzard games always seem to sell (well that and quality). An HD BW with a whole new campaign and some of the issues resolved would be fun and I would probably buy it but does it really need to exist as opposed to trying to make a true sequal?
Edit: Yes I know CoD is an activision game but its why I have weird feeling about this that Blizzard is still miles better than Activision.
And ofcourse the Activision merger is the root cause of all of this crap, I mean holy shit, you look at what Browder did to the Red Alert franchise and you think "I want me some of that!" (although kudo's to him for getting Takai and Curry involved).
If you're talking about Red Alert 3 (since that had Takei and Curry), then I can assure you that Browder had no part in the production of that game since he was already at Blizzard when that game was being made. Browder did help design Red Alert 2, Generals, and Battle for Middle Earth, and Red Alert 2 was the best classical C&C game IMO. Heck, one could say that Red Alert 3 copied a few of SC2's early designs and was rushed out to cash in on the RTS market before SC2 engulfed it almost completely.
Last edit: 2012-07-18 15:33:27
<3 <3 IU Ailee Minzi Gain <3 <3 ㅇㅅㅌㅅ
NoobSkills United States. July 18 2012 15:58. Posts 1291
No game was perfect and had a lot of problems. Remember Diablo II it was not very good. Only when Lord of the Destruction came out it became better. Yes Diablo III isn't as good as we hoped. They will keep patching and keep adding more to it to get it better.
Even Starcraft BW wasn't even that great at first either. It took multiple patches to make it what it is today. People's memory is horrible. Yes Blizzard the company has humans making video games...So mistakes do happen and they will figure out new ways to make there games better.
Now for people not buying HotS because Diablo III...That is like saying EA released Madden 2011 and I am not going to buy Battlefield...Or Activision made iCarly video game so I am not playing Call of Duty
.
Stop fucking using the "give it time, it will get better" excuse. People are annoyed because instead of building on the success of the past games, they instead chose to remake everything only to make it worse. Blizz isnt making Starcraft or Diablo for the first time mind you. They've had so many years to analyze what made their games so good and yet failed to capitalize on that.
You know the saying "Dont reinvent the wheel"? Well it can be applied perfectly here. From wikipedia: "Reinventing the square wheel is the practice of unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a square wheel)." This is what I feel when someone mentions SC2 or D3.
All of this is IMO
I agree with you don't reinvent the wheel. In my opinion Starcraft II is amazing. I love watching it and I love playing it. I still think it is going to keep getting better with Heart of the Swarm. I also find Starcraft II more enjoyable to watch then Broodwar.
Now Diablo III has some problems. Some of those problems couldn't of been predicted by just looking at Diablo II. What people were complaining about Diablo II was something they were trying to fix in Diablo III. It didn't work out the way they wanted and will be trying to fix the game with patches and expansions in there *near future.
*Blizzard near future is typically 2 years.
Yeah I think you completely miss the point. How much you enjoy it is pretty irrelevant to this, it's about removing greatly loved features and trying to replace them with new ones that are clearly not capable of the same level of depth, purely for the sake of being original and making it all noob friendly. If you look at a great sequel like D2, W3, Red Alert 2, hell, even a shooter like Max Payne 2, ask yourself, what gameplay elements did they remove? Almost nothing, they just try to expand on these successfull concepts, while dropping the unsuccesfull ones. Starcraft Brood War was a beautifully crafted game, and had relatively little units that where not used, however, because Browder needed to put his big fat ego into the title they just axed tons of intricate mechanics because "that's not what they wanted" and replaced them with simplistic and shallow "cool" versions.
Opinions are irrelevant, this is about the way they built the game, and the guy they chose to do it.
Even if they just removed the problems caused by what was honestly fairly bad UI, still good for time though, that still is not enough to justify a new game. They really wasnt any unit that could realistically be added to BW without removing and reinventing which is essentially what they did. A lot of the core units still exist but they built something different enough to justify its existance. Honestly I thought they did a great job developing SC2 and made a sequal that they can be proud of and not just BW in HD which while fun can be done as a UMS game.
I'm not sure where you got the notion from that the only thing they should have done is updated UI and graphics, as I stated in the post you quoted, successful sequels rely on building on what made the previous game good, in this case they threw out most of what made the game good and tried reinventing it for a different audience, faster games because kids are fucking stupid and can't focus, more strength to cheeses and coinflip builds because even people who can't macro deserve to win, right? Even the very few unit's they kept in changed drastically, the zealot's importance was drastically cut, but not even close to the fate of the hydra or the BW capital ships, becoming obsolete in favor of Browder's new 'cool' unit's, and naturally all the BW splash had to be weakened, but even when fans where begging for them to nerf the collosus, he picked the high templar, was this a well thought out decision, or does he actively enjoy seeing his 'own' unit's above the original ones? The only unit's I can think of that retain some of their former glory are the zergling and the marine (and ofcourse the Observer).
There might not have been able to add any unit to the Broodwar roster (something I'm not convinced of but alas), but that does not automatically mean they had to replace NEARLY EVERY SINGLE UNIT, oh it's all well and fun that most buildings are relatively unchanged, but buildings are not what made Broodwar, they where just there to add flavor and mechanics. They changed nearly every single aspect of the game to make it playable for everyone, but at the same time giving real pro players far less material to work with.
If you still don't understand what I'm talking about, let me paraphrase what I said before, look at Warcraft 2's unit's and compare them to Warcraft 3's, as you can see, most of those unit's where still intact in W3, for the most part they added elements, 2 more races worth of them. I could go on about how other game's build on their predecessors but I believe the Warcraft example is quite fitting, it shows the kind of inovativeness Blizzard is capable of without needing to destroy the predecessor's uniqueness that got a lot of people interested in the game in the first place.
10 years ago they called what you were describing (keeping almost everything and adding 1-2 new things) an expansion pack. HotS basically is what you described because SC2 is a game and HotS is an expansion pack. There really wasnt anymore to pack into BW because it was complete. It might not have been a perfect game but there was nothing really to add to it.
As a whole blizzard games typically dont do the CoD thing where you add one new gun, an 8 hour campaign and call that a whole new game. They make games that have a reason to exist and thats one of the reasons that blizzard games always seem to sell (well that and quality). An HD BW with a whole new campaign and some of the issues resolved would be fun and I would probably buy it but does it really need to exist as opposed to trying to make a true sequal?
Edit: Yes I know CoD is an activision game but its why I have weird feeling about this that Blizzard is still miles better than Activision.
And ofcourse the Activision merger is the root cause of all of this crap, I mean holy shit, you look at what Browder did to the Red Alert franchise and you think "I want me some of that!" (although kudo's to him for getting Takai and Curry involved).
If you're talking about Red Alert 3 (since that had Takei and Curry), then I can assure you that Browder had no part in the production of that game since he was already at Blizzard when that game was being made. Browder did help design Red Alert 2, Generals, and Battle for Middle Earth, and Red Alert 2 was the best classical C&C game IMO. Heck, one could say that Red Alert 3 copied a few of SC2's early designs and was rushed out to cash in on the RTS market before SC2 engulfed it almost completely.
I don't get why everyone seems to be trying to find a single person to blame for X and Y game's failures. It is the evolution of the market and every game company is coming aboard. Make a shit game as quickly as possible to capitalize on the series name aka COD GR Assassins Creed SC ect ect ect then produce expansions for more money making the total game cost $100 for something that is crappier gameplay/storywise than Golden Eye, Mario Kart, BW, Quake, ect. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but I can't stand how games are made nowadays it isn't just the money it is the quality per dollar that has been downgraded ever since expansions and micro transactions have come into the picture.
To me blizzard's biggest failure wasn't D3, RMAH, or WotLK/Cataclysm, it was Battle.Net 2.0, honestly it was the biggest flop ever, the way they hyped it up pre-sc2 release and had absolutely nothing to show for it really showed blizzard is capable of failing hard.
Last edit: 2012-07-18 16:12:03
to live is to suffer
Panasony Switzerland. July 18 2012 16:17. Posts 11
On July 18 2012 15:21 Scootaloo wrote: You don't need to destroy to create, see my W2->W3 example. Also, I never described anything, so I have no idea what kind of idiotic idea you're trying to argue against. Just imagine, a new race to play with, maybe, I dunno, I think I heard this mentioned before, XEL FREAKING NAGA, I could be a bit tough to balance, but considering the time they had I don't think it should be too much of a stretch. Like in Warcraft 2->3 you would not need to replace 80% of all unit's and their mechanics because you're throwing you're creativity into other things. Warcraft 2 wasn't even that brilliant of a game, yet they respected it and build their game onto it, increasing it's depth. But with Starcraft they felt the need to reinvent it all and sadly enough that reinvention has proven to be far shallower then it's predecessor.
And ofcourse the Activision merger is the root cause of all of this crap, I mean holy shit, you look at what Browder did to the Red Alert franchise and you think "I want me some of that!" (although kudo's to him for getting Takai and Curry involved).
Warcraft 2 to Warcraft 3 was an epic huge change in all sorts of ways. SC 1 to SC 2 is the same, and in fact definitely much less drastic of a change. It seems you're quite biased or something to say that SC2 was made from scratch and WC3 wasn't. Much of the core game mechanics and principles are still identical in SC2, as-are units and abilities.
Activision merger probably didn't have any affect on most of this. The only thing I could maybe understand is certain junk like Facebook integration or lack of LAN or something, but even that I doubt. The developpers have not changed from the Activision merger. That said, you should realize that the developpers HAVE CHANGED since Starcraft 1, and if you want to say SC2 is bad, THAT is your reason — the huge change in staff (aside from the possibility of SC1 being a fluke, something which I believe even the developers said they think is true)
On July 18 2012 16:10 daxile wrote: To me blizzard's biggest failure wasn't D3, RMAH, or WotLK/Cataclysm, it was Battle.Net 2.0, honestly it was the biggest flop ever, the way they hyped it up pre-sc2 release and had absolutely nothing to show for it really showed blizzard is capable of failing hard.
Yeah I'll jive with that I guess. D3 was pretty bad from what I heard (and played a bit of), but I've definitely been pissed off at battle.net 2.0 for the last 2 years and am still really ragemode.
On July 15 2012 04:58 Coolness53 wrote: No game was perfect and had a lot of problems. Remember Diablo II it was not very good. Only when Lord of the Destruction came out it became better. Yes Diablo III isn't as good as we hoped. They will keep patching and keep adding more to it, to make the game better.
That excuse right there is complete bullshit. They have a ton of experience already from diablo 2 and how to make a diablo game great, they just ignored all that information, so no they shouldn't be given so much slack. Same goes with SC2 and the lack of clans/proper custom games/build in tournies like in wc3/so much more. They had all the information needed to make an amazing battle.net and they purposefully fucked it up.
Yeah I honestly am completely clueless how they managed to screw up battle.net. That said, the developers are very different now than they were when Making Diablo 2. By that I mean people came and left (as well as mentally change too I guess) — you can't always expect developers to be the same, the same way you can't expect a country to remain the same — people come and go, change minds, and elect different leaders.
Last edit: 2012-07-18 18:18:43
"Then he told me to tell you that he wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire" — "Well, you tell him that I said that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on Jeopardy!"
On July 18 2012 23:41 ahswtini wrote: Will lan ever make it in?
You will never get LAN in any Blizzard game again. In fact as the worlds internet improves I would expect to see less and less games even provide an offline option much like Blizzard.
wo1fwood United States. July 18 2012 23:51. Posts 2339
On July 18 2012 23:41 ahswtini wrote: Will lan ever make it in?
idk the inner workings exactly, but iirc every aspect of how SC2 functions (matchmaking, ranking, etc) is inextricably tied to the battle.net service. They would have to design an entirely new construct for LAN to even be possible if I understood all of the snippets they've given us. So in other words, not likely.
No game was perfect and had a lot of problems. Remember Diablo II it was not very good. Only when Lord of the Destruction came out it became better. Yes Diablo III isn't as good as we hoped. They will keep patching and keep adding more to it to get it better.
Even Starcraft BW wasn't even that great at first either. It took multiple patches to make it what it is today. People's memory is horrible. Yes Blizzard the company has humans making video games...So mistakes do happen and they will figure out new ways to make there games better.
Now for people not buying HotS because Diablo III...That is like saying EA released Madden 2011 and I am not going to buy Battlefield...Or Activision made iCarly video game so I am not playing Call of Duty
.
Stop fucking using the "give it time, it will get better" excuse. People are annoyed because instead of building on the success of the past games, they instead chose to remake everything only to make it worse. Blizz isnt making Starcraft or Diablo for the first time mind you. They've had so many years to analyze what made their games so good and yet failed to capitalize on that.
You know the saying "Dont reinvent the wheel"? Well it can be applied perfectly here. From wikipedia: "Reinventing the square wheel is the practice of unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a square wheel)." This is what I feel when someone mentions SC2 or D3.
All of this is IMO
I agree with you don't reinvent the wheel. In my opinion Starcraft II is amazing. I love watching it and I love playing it. I still think it is going to keep getting better with Heart of the Swarm. I also find Starcraft II more enjoyable to watch then Broodwar.
Now Diablo III has some problems. Some of those problems couldn't of been predicted by just looking at Diablo II. What people were complaining about Diablo II was something they were trying to fix in Diablo III. It didn't work out the way they wanted and will be trying to fix the game with patches and expansions in there *near future.
*Blizzard near future is typically 2 years.
Yeah I think you completely miss the point. How much you enjoy it is pretty irrelevant to this, it's about removing greatly loved features and trying to replace them with new ones that are clearly not capable of the same level of depth, purely for the sake of being original and making it all noob friendly. If you look at a great sequel like D2, W3, Red Alert 2, hell, even a shooter like Max Payne 2, ask yourself, what gameplay elements did they remove? Almost nothing, they just try to expand on these successfull concepts, while dropping the unsuccesfull ones. Starcraft Brood War was a beautifully crafted game, and had relatively little units that where not used, however, because Browder needed to put his big fat ego into the title they just axed tons of intricate mechanics because "that's not what they wanted" and replaced them with simplistic and shallow "cool" versions.
Opinions are irrelevant, this is about the way they built the game, and the guy they chose to do it.
Even if they just removed the problems caused by what was honestly fairly bad UI, still good for time though, that still is not enough to justify a new game. They really wasnt any unit that could realistically be added to BW without removing and reinventing which is essentially what they did. A lot of the core units still exist but they built something different enough to justify its existance. Honestly I thought they did a great job developing SC2 and made a sequal that they can be proud of and not just BW in HD which while fun can be done as a UMS game.
I'm not sure where you got the notion from that the only thing they should have done is updated UI and graphics, as I stated in the post you quoted, successful sequels rely on building on what made the previous game good, in this case they threw out most of what made the game good and tried reinventing it for a different audience, faster games because kids are fucking stupid and can't focus, more strength to cheeses and coinflip builds because even people who can't macro deserve to win, right? Even the very few unit's they kept in changed drastically, the zealot's importance was drastically cut, but not even close to the fate of the hydra or the BW capital ships, becoming obsolete in favor of Browder's new 'cool' unit's, and naturally all the BW splash had to be weakened, but even when fans where begging for them to nerf the collosus, he picked the high templar, was this a well thought out decision, or does he actively enjoy seeing his 'own' unit's above the original ones? The only unit's I can think of that retain some of their former glory are the zergling and the marine (and ofcourse the Observer).
There might not have been able to add any unit to the Broodwar roster (something I'm not convinced of but alas), but that does not automatically mean they had to replace NEARLY EVERY SINGLE UNIT, oh it's all well and fun that most buildings are relatively unchanged, but buildings are not what made Broodwar, they where just there to add flavor and mechanics. They changed nearly every single aspect of the game to make it playable for everyone, but at the same time giving real pro players far less material to work with.
If you still don't understand what I'm talking about, let me paraphrase what I said before, look at Warcraft 2's unit's and compare them to Warcraft 3's, as you can see, most of those unit's where still intact in W3, for the most part they added elements, 2 more races worth of them. I could go on about how other game's build on their predecessors but I believe the Warcraft example is quite fitting, it shows the kind of inovativeness Blizzard is capable of without needing to destroy the predecessor's uniqueness that got a lot of people interested in the game in the first place.
10 years ago they called what you were describing (keeping almost everything and adding 1-2 new things) an expansion pack. HotS basically is what you described because SC2 is a game and HotS is an expansion pack. There really wasnt anymore to pack into BW because it was complete. It might not have been a perfect game but there was nothing really to add to it.
As a whole blizzard games typically dont do the CoD thing where you add one new gun, an 8 hour campaign and call that a whole new game. They make games that have a reason to exist and thats one of the reasons that blizzard games always seem to sell (well that and quality). An HD BW with a whole new campaign and some of the issues resolved would be fun and I would probably buy it but does it really need to exist as opposed to trying to make a true sequal?
Edit: Yes I know CoD is an activision game but its why I have weird feeling about this that Blizzard is still miles better than Activision.
Holy shit are you incapable of reading the post you're replying to? You don't need to destroy to create, see my W2->W3 example. Also, I never described anything, so I have no idea what kind of idiotic idea you're trying to argue against. Just imagine, a new race to play with, maybe, I dunno, I think I heard this mentioned before, XEL FREAKING NAGA, I could be a bit tough to balance, but considering the time they had I don't think it should be too much of a stretch. Like in Warcraft 2->3 you would not need to replace 80% of all unit's and their mechanics because you're throwing you're creativity into other things. Warcraft 2 wasn't even that brilliant of a game, yet they respected it and build their game onto it, increasing it's depth. But with Starcraft they felt the need to reinvent it all and sadly enough that reinvention has proven to be far shallower then it's predecessor.
And ofcourse the Activision merger is the root cause of all of this crap, I mean holy shit, you look at what Browder did to the Red Alert franchise and you think "I want me some of that!" (although kudo's to him for getting Takai and Curry involved).
What in the world are you even talking about. Warcraft 3 is like a 140% different game from W2. Did you ever play warcraft 2?. There's not a single aspect of the game that works the same. In making war3 they scratched EVERYTHING except the storyline and started from zero. It was, as you state it your posts, a complete reinvention. If you think SC2 is a reinvention and W3 isn't you're completely blind or didn't play W2 AT ALL. They replaced literally every mechanic possible, even mining resources works differently.
If anything, SC2 "fails" (IMO it doesn't), because it tried to remain true to it's source but changed the basics enough to make it odd for veterans. We wouldn't be having this discussions at all if SC2 was a completely different game and a reinvention, since such discussion wouldn't apply to such immensely different games. The problem with SC2 (Again I don't think it's a problem though), is that it is "so close but yet so far".
"I haven't prepared anything in particular. I'm naturally good at everything. I'm good at eating too, so that's why I can't lose weight. I'm thinking maybe I'll dance as a ceremony, a dance that's popular lately" MC - discussing GSL grand finals
Zaqwert United States. July 19 2012 00:01. Posts 388
On July 18 2012 16:10 daxile wrote: To me blizzard's biggest failure wasn't D3, RMAH, or WotLK/Cataclysm, it was Battle.Net 2.0, honestly it was the biggest flop ever, the way they hyped it up pre-sc2 release and had absolutely nothing to show for it really showed blizzard is capable of failing hard.
I would agree, in that bnet is hillariously awful, however I think it's on purpose. The problem with bnet 2 is blizzards vision of it. It's how it is on purpose, they didn't accidentally make all the same mistakes in D3 again that they did in SC2. For whatever reason they got it into their head that bnet2 should be consolized and facebook'ized, for lack of a better word. The old way of doing things, chat channels, named game instances, etc. they thought were archaic and wanted to get rid of them, but they failed to realize how important those things were.
BNET 2.0 is a product of a flawed vision more than anything.
Adreme United States. July 19 2012 00:37. Posts 4004
On July 18 2012 16:10 daxile wrote: To me blizzard's biggest failure wasn't D3, RMAH, or WotLK/Cataclysm, it was Battle.Net 2.0, honestly it was the biggest flop ever, the way they hyped it up pre-sc2 release and had absolutely nothing to show for it really showed blizzard is capable of failing hard.
I would agree, in that bnet is hillariously awful, however I think it's on purpose. The problem with bnet 2 is blizzards vision of it. It's how it is on purpose, they didn't accidentally make all the same mistakes in D3 again that they did in SC2. For whatever reason they got it into their head that bnet2 should be consolized and facebook'ized, for lack of a better word. The old way of doing things, chat channels, named game instances, etc. they thought were archaic and wanted to get rid of them, but they failed to realize how important those things were.
BNET 2.0 is a product of a flawed vision more than anything.
They probably didnt consider it enough of a dealbreaker to continue to hold up the game. I remember when people looked at the HotS list of new features and people would complain about why they werent in the origanal game as though Blizzard was intentionally holding them back when it was simply that at some point you have to actually release a game especially when you have expansions (not sequals) to bulid upon it.
On July 18 2012 16:10 daxile wrote: To me blizzard's biggest failure wasn't D3, RMAH, or WotLK/Cataclysm, it was Battle.Net 2.0, honestly it was the biggest flop ever, the way they hyped it up pre-sc2 release and had absolutely nothing to show for it really showed blizzard is capable of failing hard.
I would agree, in that bnet is hillariously awful, however I think it's on purpose. The problem with bnet 2 is blizzards vision of it. It's how it is on purpose, they didn't accidentally make all the same mistakes in D3 again that they did in SC2. For whatever reason they got it into their head that bnet2 should be consolized and facebook'ized, for lack of a better word. The old way of doing things, chat channels, named game instances, etc. they thought were archaic and wanted to get rid of them, but they failed to realize how important those things were.
BNET 2.0 is a product of a flawed vision more than anything.
Pretty much this. Blizzard evnsioned that chat channels and more social interaction between players only put people off playing since it lead to flaming and casual's feelings get hurt and they quit cause they cannot handle the cesspool that is the internet.
This has however proven to be 100% wrong as social interaction is what drives most people playing online games, that and competition. My girlfriend likes Diablo 3 but doesn't play it as much because she feels like its a ghost town. There's no way to find someone to play with(i cannot play with her, i play HC she plays SC) and to be social and meet new people is like half the reason she enjoys online gaming.
I interviewed the lead developer of Funcoms The secret world a few months back and to quote him in some way:
"The social aspect is critical to an online games survival. We've learned that even if people don't wan't to play with other people they want to play besides other people. It's like riding the buss, if you are all alone you get kinda weirded out. Us humans need to have other humans around us even if we don't interact with them as much or else we feel lonely"
And say what you will about funcom and their games but i feel that quote pretty much nails it. And that's the issue with bnet 2.0, there's 50k people playing Diablo 3 at the same time as i am, i just have no way of knowing who they are, what they are playing and how i can play with them(other then starting some boring public game with 3 other players).
Last edit: 2012-07-19 02:12:28
Zaqwert United States. July 19 2012 05:39. Posts 388
When you log into SC:BW or WC3 or D3 you actually feel like you have logged onto this huge world of players all playing this game,a nd yu can choose top lay with them or not.
BNET 2.0 goes out of it's way to hide the world from you, it's like a completely isolated, single player game and then you randomly get thrown into a game with some stranger out of no where. It's just odd.
Blizzard envisioned that people only wantedt o play with their friends and missed the importance of feeling part of a large player base even if you don't interact and play with them.
On July 18 2012 23:41 ahswtini wrote: Will lan ever make it in?
No because Blizzard has to stop piracy at the expense of its paying customers and its competitive scene. Even though removing LAN didn't stop people from setting up private pirate servers and let tens of thousands of people play. But Blizzard can't admit defeat against the pirate menace, so they will not falter and actually include a basic feature!
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