Blizzard was once the king of innovation, what happened?

[dwarven]

Dragonflight looks like it might turn out okay. Talent trees returning and the UI changes will be good. The one race one class idea could be great, or it could be a disaster. But this is an rpg, not an action game, so I’m not sure what they’re doing there really. Probably ran out of time/lore excuses to let more races be evokers. Dragon riding looks ok. It would be great if this was 2012.

All of these features could be okay, and that’s about it really. But, this isn’t Blizzard’s style; to just make things “okay”. They were once a titan of gaming, with each of their games selling like mad, with groundbreaking features and gameplay. Diablo and Starcraft were unicorns in their own right as well. And after WoW came out, it seemed like Blizzard couldn’t be stopped.

So, what the hell happened? We have two mobile games coming out that have been copy pasted from other games, a dead rts and a dead Dota clone, and a string of mediocre WoW expansions. Not to mention OW 2, which is an actual copy paste. Is Blizzard just in maintenance mode? I remember when Warcraft 3 came out, it was like the second coming for gaming. Diablo 2 probably still hasn’t been surpassed to this day as the best ARPG ever. Was it the Activision merger? Talent leaving? Entropy taking its ugly toll? Probably all of them, but the Blizzard of today is not what I remember them as a kid.

Do you think Dragonflight will bring a return of Blizzard’s old greatness?

[Nymrohd]

Blizzard almost always copied a different game's formula and refined it. Innovation has not really been their strong point.

[dwarven]

Blizzard almost always copied a different game's formula and refined it. Innovation has not really been their strong point.

Battle.net was a big innovation of theirs. They actually might have been the first to enable online play for an RTS in WC2.

[kranur]

Greed happened.
They went from designing something that was cool and even they wanted to play (even though it was just taking something and making it 10 times more enjoyable), to trying to please everyone and pull in as many as possible (this is that crowd that doesn't stick around anyway) to designing systems that punish the player if he's not continuously playing, or should I say doing the chores regularly.

I don't believe they will ever again design something that is cool for the sake of being cool, simply because there's the over the shoulder entity that pushes for milking one way or another.

[Nymrohd]

Battle.net was a big innovation of theirs. They actually might have been the first to enable online play for an RTS in WC2.

Battlenet is probably their greatest success, true. But it has nothing to do with genres, game mechanics or anything similar. It just tells us that early Blizzard had a superb team when it came to creating their engine and network. While many of things achieved in this manner are possibly innovations (though they still might be things executed better than before instead as I said, I am not that familiar with that) they are more support structures for their games. The games themselves were rarely innovative. Heck WoW's biggest innovation was reduced reliance on grind and a focus on questing and we know now that it happened entirely as a response to player feedback and not by design.

[LordVargK]

When was Blizzard even the King of innovation? The entire Warcraft franchise is a ripoff of Warhammer and Ultima online.
Overwatch is a refinement of TF2.
Hearthstone is just a copy of any TCG on the Computer.

[rayvio]

Blizzard used to be perfectionists. the Warcraft adventure game was finished but cancelled because they didn't believe it would measure up against the recently released Curse Of Monkey Island, a similar thing happened with Starcraft Ghost. with WoW though sarcrifices had to be made or content would never get released. I'd imagine that having to make compromises, along with completely taking over the MMORPG market, resulted in some changes of direction. things get released with less polish, more bugs slip through, riskier ideas get turned down and attitudes change. it often happens to small companies that make it big. it's too risky to try new innovations and so they stick with the ones that took them to success, but it's the fact that those ideas were innovative that made it work rather than the specific ideas themselves (which eventually become stale and obsolete)

[Inukashi]

Blizzard forgot the target audience. WoW was a huge success because it was so much more casual than any other game. No XP loss on death, much less grind than any other MMO out there (yes, that's true). It was easy and everyone enjoyed it. It wasn't actually innovation. It was taking something that already exists and adding tons of QoL on it. Also Warcraft wasn't innovation. Blizzard just didn't get the warhammer license back then, so they made their own warhammer. (it's true, google it)

Then, at some point (I wonder whose fault that is) WoW changed from making the game fun for everyone into some pseudo competition game where only the most dedicated ones should be able to get something.So everyone who doesn't dedicate his life into one game, just moves on to the next game.

Now they have another problem. Blizz is milking WoW while trying to invest as less as possible resources. They try to implement the cheapest carrots on a stick they can find. And who is implementing that carrots? Some elitist that think raiding and wiping for weeks is the apex of joy, combined with a writing team that just collects successful ideas from movies and series without any own creativity.

I can only imagine the meetings. They went from "What can we steal and improve" to "What can we steal and implement in the cheapest possible way, because we aren't getting much money and time. Also we only have some junior devs left, that implement more bugs than features"

So they need to stretch out content as far as possible. Different challenges? No, just loop existing challenges and make them harder every time. That's also 'content'.

Beside from that. Blizzard now = Blizzard back then - the good developers (because they all left)

[vian]

What innovation?

Pretty much everything they've done is pretty much copying others, then refining it.

[Soulwind]

Blizzard used to be perfectionists. the Warcraft adventure game was finished but cancelled because they didn't believe it would measure up against the recently released Curse Of Monkey Island, a similar thing happened with Starcraft Ghost. with WoW though sarcrifices had to be made or content would never get released. I'd imagine that having to make compromises, along with completely taking over the MMORPG market, resulted in some changes of direction. things get released with less polish, more bugs slip through, riskier ideas get turned down and attitudes change. it often happens to small companies that make it big. it's too risky to try new innovations and so they stick with the ones that took them to success, but it's the fact that those ideas were innovative that made it work rather than the specific ideas themselves (which eventually become stale and obsolete)

This is accurate.

A group of passionate developers make succesful games, which allows them to create a big company in which teams of passionate developers must answer to businessmen who are only passionate about charts and profits, which burns the original developers, and, in time, even the newer ones. The ones who stay lose their spark, the ones who leave, often leave the gaming sector entirely. Because all big companies are like this, which is why the AAA market is as formulaic as it is.

[Santti]

What innovation?

Pretty much everything they've done is pretty much copying others, then refining it.

True, but I think it's good enough to call that innovation. Like making WoW casual-friendly, which was rather fresh and new for an MMO. Video game industry is getting old enough, that pretty much everything is a variant of something.

[potis]

Do you think Dragonflight will bring a return of Blizzard’s old greatness?

Blizzard literally stole everything from other games and simply tweaked it 5% to fit World of Warcraft, gaming wise, not gonna talk about tools like Battle.net

The most obvious is if you played different games, how Guild Wars 2 didnt require you to return to complete the quest and it auto-completed, which then appeared in WoW also cause of that, and slowly became something that happens a lot, the whole "Run in area to trigger it".

World Quests are the same, they were stolen from Guild Wars 2 and tweaked, they are "Quest Events" there, "World Quests" in WoW.

The same thing happened with many other things, Blizzard has the resources/man power to take something and introduce it very fast into the game in terms of "Development Time", so to the average clueless person it seems like innovation, when its just taking from other games.

[Lochton]

What innovation?

Pretty much everything they've done is pretty much copying others, then refining it.

Copied a lot, and made it function better within their setup. Alas, now we see it less and less as it is more of a game of playing it safe. Invest for the minority, push aside the adventure to a second-grade level, and dump everything else even further down.

[Mysterymask]

Blizzards Innovations This is a list of every game they ever made...not counting expansions to anything/

RPM Racing: First game..a Racing game

Lost Vikings: Puzzle Platformer...was mildly innovative at the time due to interesting control scheme but nothing steller

Rock N Roll Racing: What if Racing game HAD LICENSCED MUSIC!

Death and Return of Superman: Forgot they made this....yay Superman Game

Blackthorne: Basic 2d Shooter

Warcraft: RTS's did exist Warcraft mearly streamlined it

Justice League Task Force: Oh I guess Blizzard did Injustice before NetherRealm in the time when everyone was trying to copy SF2's success (Oh gee look what blizz usually does)

Warcraft 2: Better Streamlined Warcraft

Diablo: Will give them this..nothing like Diablo really ever came out before

Lost Vikings 2: Oh look more Lost Vikings

Starcraft: Online play was really the clincher here and the custom scenarios you could do so yay a little innovation

Diablo 2: Better Diablo with online play...not saying this is bad but was hardly innovative

Warcraft 3: Better Starcraft

Wow: Casual Friendly Everquest

Starcraft 2: Better Warcraft 3..yet also somewhat worse

Diablo 3: Ahh yes the massively singleplayer online game..such innovation

Hearthstone: Ok...MTGOnline did it first and I'll give Blizz this they really set a standard for F2P games and they were the first online card game made specifically with being digital in mind. So yeah they took MTGOnline and made it better (Debateable)

Heroes of the Storm: Today on Blizzard was mad they didn't get DOTA..also more casual friendly League of Legends

Overwatch: Let's make the TF2 classes actual characters!

Then games not out yet OW2, Diablo 4, and Diablo Immortal which can be summed up as Mobile Diablo, Different Diablo, and Overwatch with an instagram filter.

There got that out of the way.

[Lochton]

Battle.net was a big innovation of theirs. They actually might have been the first to enable online play for an RTS in WC2.

Honestly. We can't down-sell this point. It was a big step, to the point where other companies have tried to leech in on it or make their version of it.

[Nymrohd]

True, but I think it's good enough to call that innovation. Like making WoW casual-friendly, which was rather fresh and new for an MMO. Video game industry is getting old enough, that pretty much everything is a variant of something.

For it to be innovative it needs to be intentional though. WoW becoming casual friendly was not intentional. It was response to feedback back in Vanilla. The original plan was for it to be grindy with just a few quests for world building. But people loved quests so more were added. Which is why there are entire zones that are nearly devoid of quests or why there is a significant disparity between Horde and Alliance quests available; none of it was planned, it was all done in reaction to feedback. That they embraced the feedback is admirable but not innovative.

[Mysterymask]

Battle.net was a big innovation of theirs. They actually might have been the first to enable online play for an RTS in WC2.

not to be the correction nazi but BattleNet came with Starcraft they later released an updated version of WC2 to support Battlenet.

[Nymrohd]

Honestly. We can't down-sell this point. It was a big step, to the point where other companies have tried to leech in on it or make their version of it.

Honestly think it's the biggest reason Microsoft is interested in them.

[MoanaLisa]

Diablo: Will give them this..nothing like Diablo really ever came out before

Diablo was essentially a lift of many of the roguelike games that were around at the time. They added a graphical interface and designed it to be action-oriented but the bones of the game can be found in titles like Angband.

[Lochton]

Honestly think it's the biggest reason Microsoft is interested in them.

Oh, I can believe it, but we know there was more on the shopping list, else they wouldn't have made such a large purchase.