Blizzard is a quality game maker the same way Square Enix is.
sorry, it was illustrating the essence of the attitude that people who state that they prefer previous game-states can only possibly be motivated by nostalgia.
based on forum reasoning, the only possible reason you could prefer old coke today is nostalgia. the different taste, use of sugar instead of corn syrup, etc., are totally irrelevant - its nostalgia, damnit!! Even if you get a foreign bottle where sugar is still used and the syrup was never changed and enjoy it as much as you remember (private server), its still nostalgia!!!!!!!!!
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
That's what I said, yes; all games have down time. Some let you get a cup of coffee, some don't.
Though admittedly there are a few that do a good job of keeping the action fast and removing play slowing mechanics like inventory micro-management and non-intuitive content gating such as numeric hard level requirements.
I think they can still make a quality game in terms of polish. When it comes to running around and combat, things always seem to feel the way they should.
When it comes to the content available in their games I feel like they could a much better job.
No, their creativity and ability to create quality story/quest content is in the gutter, rendering most of their games unplayable. I barely made it through D3 because the writing and story were embarrassingly bad. StarCraft II was a little better, but still dreck. And I just quit World of Warcraft because they have the factions doing illogical shit and seem to heavily prefer one side of the other, leaving the cast aside faction little in terms of development or quality content.
And don't get me started on the dialogues...
Hard to say whether Blizzard are still making quality games. I played WoW for 5 or 6 years, and I can't argue that it provided many hours of entertainment until Cata which I quit during the first 3 months through boredom. I played MoP until January and haven't played it since. I think I got to the stage where I got bored of MMO's as I did for FPS games back in the day. Shooters were fun until the cheats ruined the online experience, the casuals moaning because they couldn't compete with half-decent players, but they just got boring, different versions of the same old game with different maps.
D3, my favourite game turd. I won't lie, the first play through was great, but literally it was just plain boring after that, then hours of farming for nothing, buy gear off AH. But after 200+ hours, what was the point. I think it was one of the most disappointing games I have ever played, imo.
It seems to me nowadays that the games companies keep one eye on the spreadsheet when making games. They're not interested in innovation or making fun games to play anymore, it all comes down to time/costs/resources/profit. The technology has moved on significantly from the 1990s, but sadly the games companies haven't.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
///The scene of the Supernova\\\
The stupid response Raynor said is actually suppose to be their for the scapegoat character for the "dummy" audience viewers of science-fiction.
It's a poor writers choice of explaining something to the viewer. Instead of addressing the viewer directly (Which would cause a lot of problems) they use a scapegoat, use the game characters and have them act stupid who is then answered promptly by another "smarter" character.
If it was done like this, It might be a lot better...
Pilot A: "Sir (Addresses Horner), the sun's energy level just jumped 500%!"
Horner: "Sir (Addresses Raynor), I recommend we stay a safe distance between us and that supernova."
*Jim Raynor stays silent, thinking for a moment.*
Raynor: "No, we need that Artifact. We can't grab it if the planet is fried like a... *Insert corny southern food joke*" *Pause* "Matt, how much time do we have before our asses are cooked?"
Etc... But I hope you get the point.
I'm sure what I have written could of been tweaked better, but you don't need to treat the audience like a bunch of shit-heads. So what if they don't understand, explain it to them like adults or try to mask it like your talking to an adult.
If they didn't understand it at first. They would either not care at all or they would go out of their way to figure it out. And it's their job to creatively tell the player without using a terrible choice scapegoat.
^
To which I tried to do my best above, Raynor & Horner knows it's going Supernova. But Raynor has to make the tough judgement call to whether they should go retrieve the Artifact or not in such dangerous conditions.
I added in the Pilot, because in my mind the Pilot should be the only technically monitoring "Energy Levels" and he would address to the next higher-rank which would be Horner I suppose, and then he would address Raynor.
I also agree Raynor is suppose to be this veteran warrior, yet he is portrayed like a dumbass in this situation.
/////////////
Also for me personally, the cutting edge of young inspiration in the company just feels stale. 10 years ago this would of been great releases, but now I just see the company becoming very stale, very slow in reacting to other competing products and dying very slowly if it hasn't accelerated already.
Don't take what I said a bad thing necessarily, I grew up on Blizzard games ONLY (I literally spent 1-2 hours a month on a N64 console or trying out some other game before returning to any of the Blizzard games). Starcraft from age 6 to 11. Warcraft was my immediate game afterwards for another 3-4 years, and World of Warcraft was my next 24/7 addicted game I played till the age of 18.
I've played a little more of a decade of ONLY BLIZZARD games, my dream use to be working for them one day. But after quiting WoW and moving on to the world wide side of games, I just can't see how Blizzard can ever redeem themselves as top dog of the niche gaming market (RTS, ARPG, MMORPG). They are good, but they are "old" good.
Last edited by Shurkuris; 2013-08-07 at 10:58 PM.
You're more talking about the story, which is granted pretty horrible. Wish they would have kept it gritty like the original.
But gameplay-wise, the campaigns are much more inventive than any missions from Starcraft 1, which were pretty much variations of "Survive for X", "Obtain artifact" or "Destroy all enemies".
How are people even defending diablo 3? The game WAS NEVER even beta Tested. If they actually tested the game then maybe it would have been a great game at launch because all of the broken stuff would have been fixed during proper testing using player feedback. Go back and find the old Diablo 3 videos from 2-3 years ago showing what the game was SUPPOSED to be like. It just looks awesome. Then for some reason they just scrapped it all. Even something as simple as not having the RMAH and actually getting your drops from playing the game would have been awesome.
Don't think there's a question that their reputation has declined because of some of the changes they've done.
"How are people even defending diablo 3?"
I am defending D3 because my wife and I got hundreds of hours of fun entertainment out of it. What more can you ask out of a game. We started at launch, and the only reason we stopped is we switched to WOW. So, for us, D3 and WOW have been very high quality fun games that have provided us quite a bit of entertainment and helped keep us together. This is FAR more than we would expect out of getting D3 well for free (Annual Pass) plus our sub fee for WOW.
The money we have given to Blizzard is VERY well worth it. In our opinion, WOW puts out VERY HIGH quality games.
Thank you Blizzard
I think they absolutely were, without any doubt - but I say that as past tense because it seems to me that once 'Lackavision' slithered into Blizz, the quality began a downhill slide, favoring profits over quality - something 'Lackavision' is known for.
I used to be snow white, but I drifted...
a fair counter-question is, if you are an activision-blizzard shareholder, who do you want running the games at blizzard? gamers who want to make a game more or less that they would enjoy, or businessmen who want to maximize revenues?
Once you accept the premise that you want the game to attract people who may never have played a video game before and broadly tune the game towards that market, then I don't see where the gamers' game fits in anymore.
blizzard isn't even shy about this in general - look at d3. real money microtransaction ah with all kinds of hurdles against converting that 'money' into non-blizzard held currency...
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.