What the hell happened to Blizzard?

[Socialhealer]

Chris Metzen did say many times how Titans failure was very negative on them, not to mention how it massively effected and costed blizzard
they were planning a mmo that would eclipse wow, and it failed

Yeah now they struggle to make a good WoW xpac let alone a whole brand new next level mmorpg LUL. fucking casuals couldn't design their way out of a paper bag now all the talent and creativity is long gone, just a bunch of pencil pushing yesmen left now all they know how to do is make everything grindy and reptitive as possible, with fucking awful story.

EDIT: with RNG turned upto eleven!

[This One Time At Bandcamp]

Well.. The art team and music is still so awesome!

I have a feeling that the community and Activision destroyed the game design.

[SirCowdog]

Witcher 3 says hi, it has the infamous roof horse bug yet most ppl praise the game
Heck doom is praised, Skyrim with all its bugs was praised until bethesda 76 happened
no ppl still forgive, check how blizz still has white knights even now, in fact most gamers have memory of goldfish, it is companies who are real shit now, with micro transaction everywhere and the focus is how to squeeze the victims who buy instead of actually offering quality products

Witcher 3 is praised largely due to excellent writing and free DLCs/Updates.

Skyrim is praised largely due to the modding community, not Bethesda.

Doom 2016 I don't recall having many bugs, even at launch. Although the multiplayer fiasco was a complete joke. The game got priase for the singleplayer aspects anyway. The multiplayer got shat upon by the community.

Not that any of this refutes your points. Too many players have this weird psychological state where they are unable to accept that a game they purchased might be bad, because if they admit it, that purchase reflects on themselves. And that somehow means they're bad for making the purchase. So they double down and defend it to the death. This gets 1000x worse in a game like WoW, where the player also has time, emotion, and financial investment to reinforce things. Changing opinion on Blizzard at this point, over a decade in, requires exceptional willpower or shock.

I mean, think about it. Even after all the crazy roller-coaster fiascoes of the past year that Blizzard has been involved in. Even after Azerite gear, the GCD change, the weaksauce final raid cinematic, the obvious abandonment of BfA after 8.3, the crowdfunded tournaments, the absolutely retarded headless chicken storytelling....people STILL go to bat for Blizzard. And that's not even everything.

At some point people have to realize that Blizzard just isn't doing good for the community or the games they publish. Because if they keep defending the situation it's only going to get worse.

[ParanoiD84]

They lost their touch and pasion long ago, just look what a mess the writing and lore is a complete joke.

[Beefhammer]

Money. It happens to every company eventually. They get so big that money isn't some mythical thing you can just start a patreon for, you have to start balancing your books, getting investors, being beholden to said investors.

It's not selling out, it's natural.

As to why they're seen as bad as EA, most of that is straight hyperbole, but also Blizz is comically bad about their PR (see: China).

91% of Blizzards shareholders are institutional. Share holders are not controlling anything.

[Dracullus]

Well.. The art team and music is still so awesome!

I have a feeling that the community and Activision destroyed the game design.

Devils from Activision works in mysterious way. They cut all resources to make game more profitable (since we buy everything 5 years before it comes out), but invest all money for stuff like Azerite that got redesigned every patch (as Bellu... "sources from Blizzard " say, Ion must call Kotick to approve every single change in WoW) and highly expensive shit like 30 minutes long CGI movie. Somehow.


Oh, forgot about it - /s.

[sam86]

shock.

i can't talk about other ppl, but wod made me question if i was burned out of game or game is bad, legion confirmed to me that wod was just flat out piece of shit
i don't question myself anymore, BFA is shit, i'm not burned from game, when i saw Legion trailer specially after druid artifact i subbed 6 months to wow immediately, then realized like idiot that legion is still over 8 months away, and i don't even play druid
tbh i wonder why did blizz make Legion, it doesn't 'fit' what they doing since post activision, legion has problems but still overall was amazing exp

[Gimlix]

i can't talk about other ppl, but wod made me question if i was burned out of game or game is bad, legion confirmed to me that wod was just flat out piece of shit
i don't question myself anymore, BFA is shit, i'm not burned from game, when i saw Legion trailer specially after druid artifact i subbed 6 months to wow immediately, then realized like idiot that legion is still over 8 months away, and i don't even play druid
tbh i wonder why did blizz make Legion, it doesn't 'fit' what they doing since post activision, legion has problems but still overall was amazing exp

In my opinion the last actual expansion that made me feel like i was playing the WoW i used to know was in Mists of Pandaria.
WoD,Legion,Bfa and soon shadowlands are a whole different game with just the same skin.

[Oneirophobia]

Snorelords down the Drainor

nose air thing

-------

It's not just blizz (not defending), it's all AAA game devs. I don't know what the shareholders are up to, but it's like they think video games are a passing fad and are trying to squeeze as much short term money out of the industry as they can before the whole thing tanks and they move on to be parasites off something else. Maybe it's the US trying to turn video games into the scapegoat for violence that's scaring them, maybe it's the anti-gambling and other pro-consumer laws coming out of Europe that's bothering them (good for Europe though, not implying these laws aren't warrented).

Incidentally, if they stopped treating the industry like it was dying and making decisions around that idea, it wouldn't be dying and they'd make a looot more money in the long term.

The craft of making video games will survive. It survived the ET crash decades ago, it'll survive the AAA dev crash.

[Shadowsgrace]

The total content quality Blizzard has been giving us has been quite bad lately.
Promising us features and not deliver them.

Blizzard used to have a great title under his name, nowadays Blizzard is seen just as bad as EA.

What the hell has happened to the quality blizzard used to put into their games?

All the Quality people that made the company great, are gone.

[Schizoide]

I think this post is less about WoW and more about Blizzard as a whole though, especially with WCIII Reforged just releasing and flopping.

Ahh, OK. Thanks, I'm not following the WC3 remake, no interest in playing it. Only care about WoW and Diablo.

[SirCowdog]

i can't talk about other ppl, but wod made me question if i was burned out of game or game is bad, legion confirmed to me that wod was just flat out piece of shit
i don't question myself anymore, BFA is shit, i'm not burned from game, when i saw Legion trailer specially after druid artifact i subbed 6 months to wow immediately, then realized like idiot that legion is still over 8 months away, and i don't even play druid
tbh i wonder why did blizz make Legion, it doesn't 'fit' what they doing since post activision, legion has problems but still overall was amazing exp

Legion was pure fanservice. They had to do something to bolster the faith of the players after WoD. So they break out Illidan(a fan favorite), then they also gave players the most powerful and iconic equipment in the lore, as well as a fight against the big bad of the entire series: The Burning Legion. Then they stirred the pot by doing the game of thrones thing, killing off big name NPCs.

It was a good move. But you can tell they played all the trump cards in their hand. That's why BfA was such a joke. They had nothing left. And I don't think SL is going to be much better. They have no more story left from the golden age of Warcraft. So they'll have to make up new stuff. If you thought BfA was bad in that regard, don't expect better out of SL. The only saving grace for SL is going to have to be gameplay, and I have very little confidence of Blizzard's current leadership to make that happen with any lasting quality.

[lockybalboa]

If anything,the standards have been rising since Ion took over. We had BFA and WoD, two of the best expacs in recent years.

[Verdugo]

they couldnt have just kept classic, people speficiyl were mad that blizz was gunna update the game, and it was gunna be something new, not just an update, you can look to these very forums for people for MONTHS, upwards of a year complaining "wow blizz changing the good lore to be shit.... wow blizz ruining cinematics.... wow blizz ruinign charecters and want to alter gameplay? wow."

Are you actualy serious? Are you really pretending that somehow, few people complaining made Big Blizzard change their mind? It was pure cost cutting with convenient excuse that people like you can hang on.

[RoKPaNda]

The total content quality Blizzard has been giving us has been quite bad lately.
Promising us features and not deliver them.

Blizzard used to have a great title under his name, nowadays Blizzard is seen just as bad as EA.

What the hell has happened to the quality blizzard used to put into their games?

Blizzard stayed the exact same, the industry changed for the better and Blizzard stayed the same. They've always released the bare minimum. Slow content cycles, small amounts of content, bugs, poor balance, etc.

[Schizoide]

Denigrating it as fan-service isn't really fair. Legion had its problems but it was a well-crafted expansion, chock-full of content.

[Gimlix]

Blizzard stayed the exact same, the industry changed for the better and Blizzard stayed the same. They've always released the bare minimum. Slow content cycles, small amounts of content, bugs, poor balance, etc.

Excuse me? You seem to be in a massive denial.

[Snuffe]

They lost their touch and pasion long ago, just look what a mess the writing and lore is a complete joke.

They lost their touch when the orginal blizzard left, the people that loved making games, great games, they were famous for "Dont release it untill it's finished".

you can find old videos of them on lunch breaks playing magic the gathering and talking about games, they were just pure nerds that wanted to create the best games for the people that loved games, and they did, and thats how the built upp the blizzard name to something you could trust.

But they got to big and to famous, they got bought, got shareholders to please first and customers second. The top have the final say, and they look at numbers, they are a company now that goes for the money.

They certainly have workers that want to make good games, but they have no say in it. anyone of them could start upp wc3 reforged and say this is not finished by a longshot.

And like i said, the orginal members of blizzard have pretty much all left the company.

I still hope they fix the game doh.

[The Emperor]

Have people who might be described as hopeless blizzard shills started defending a very buggy and overall disappointing WC Reforged yet?

[McNeil]

This phrase has never been more true than now ''you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain''. Activision and EU used to be pretty good publishers aswell in the old days, same goes for a lot of great devs at the time. But the gaming industry has gotten so big that they started trading away their companies pride for more money.

Blizzard suffers from pure incompetence from within the company. They have that clown J Allen Brack behind the wheels who doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to publishing good games. Most people who were with the company from the beginning are gone and they were the one with their games visions. If they move on and you get a new team, then the new team is supposed to start up a new franchise that is made by THEIR vision, not start tinkering around someone elses project.

They have been down this road for quite some time and I keep getting surprised at how late people start to realise this. I guess the failure that is WC3:R (loved the original btw ) is whats really opening peoples eyes and see the company from behind the curtains.