Blizzard was once the king of innovation, what happened?

[Beefhammer]

Companies often go to shit when they become public-traded as shareholders only care about things they can easily measure like revenue and profits. It's the crush of greed that's let inside when solid companies pursue funding for expansion and big projects. They ride that good reputation and prestige for as long as they can but ultimately it's not something that's easily measured and gaged by beancounters that just see news-mentions as free advertising regardless of the subject/issue at hand.

Blizzard had basically been owned by a publicly traded company from day one.

[Kallisto]

I mean....it's like how people think the 80s had all these great movies cause back to the future and Empire Strikes back came out then but easily forget all the crap in between

Video games are the same the vast majority of 8 and 16 bit games were unplayable garbage with a handful of honest to goodness great here and there. The whole rehash something that did well existed then too and a LOT mainly when Street Fighter 2 and Sonic blew up so everyone made their own 2D fighter and edgy mascot playformer to try to cash in. Add in all the shovelware and bad movie/tv show games and suddenly it's not so pretty anymore

Speaking of Street Fighter 2. How about the multiple re-releases all at $70+ in the early 90s
SF2
SF2 Champion Edition: AKA rebuy the game, this time you can play as bosses + multiple of same person
SF2 Turbo: The above, but faster
SSF2: Same as above but 4 new characters. Plus 1 new move for Ryu + Ken to make them more than just pallet swaps
SSF2 Turbo: Same as the previous. Just faster

[Celement]

When was blizzard ever innovative?

I guess lost Vikings?

Every they do is copying another successful project and adding quality to it. Now they no longer seem to have the talent nor direction to do that successfully but that isnt innovation more mastery.

[arkanon]

Blizzard were amazing at iterating, not innovating. They were very, VERY good at seeing potential in certain genres, and acting very swiftly to create a functional, visually appealing, thematically strong iteration of something that already existed, while applying very broadly appealing setting / npc's / stories to it.

I dont know what changed, but trying to make HOTS so, SO late into the genres development was a big issue. It actually had most of the Blizzard hallmarks - broad appeal, good visuals, simplistic and addictive gameplay - it was all there. Only one issue - it was like a decade too late.

I dont think anything dramatic changed - they just had more competition and an indie company can churn out the same type of game in the same popular genre in 1/10th of the time it takes big old chonky blizzard to react. Sure, when the chonk finally releases their game, it looks better, and sounds better, but by then you have invested literally YEARS into the indie / AA game devs version of basically the same thing.

Now, this might be a bit more controversial, but, i think Blizzards tunnel vision on "e-sport" or competitive games goes against everything many people loved about their earlier games. Lets look at their recent 'new" games:

- Hearthstone: competitive pvp, with some "story" fluff added later when people complained - overall, a pvp game
- HoTS: Almost entirely pvp game with E-Sports being the focus
- Overwatch: Entirely pvp game, again with E-Sports being the focus.

Two of those 3 games are essentially dead, with the development of OW2 reported to be an absolute clusterfuck. When OW2 was first announced, there was a HUGE focus on their plans to refocus the game into a coop shooter, while maintaining the pvp elements. I would jump in with a group of friends to do the coop events if we had nothing to do, and would often comment on how fun it was, and it was a shame it was just a micro event and not a major feature of the game. I dont want the pvp gone, i know some people love that, but when i heard thats what OW2 was gonna be focused on, I was pumped.

As time has gone on, it has been watered down more, and more, and more, until we are left with.......a change in vs count, some new maps, new game mode, and a new hero and some reworks. AKA an expansion, with no talk of coop stuff at all.

[Mysterymask]

Speaking of Street Fighter 2. How about the multiple re-releases all at $70+ in the early 90s
SF2
SF2 Champion Edition: AKA rebuy the game, this time you can play as bosses + multiple of same person
SF2 Turbo: The above, but faster
SSF2: Same as above but 4 new characters. Plus 1 new move for Ryu + Ken to make them more than just pallet swaps
SSF2 Turbo: Same as the previous. Just faster

You know let's look at how that woulda been today

World Warrior to Championship Edition: Free balance patch $15 DLC character pack

Championship Edition to Turbo: Balance patch $5 color pack

Turbo to Super: $25 upgrade for people who already have it $50 for new players

Super to Super Turbo: Free balance patch Akuma DLC $6.99

[Kallisto]

You know let's look at how that woulda been today

World Warrior to Championship Edition: Free balance patch $15 DLC character pack

Championship Edition to Turbo: Balance patch $5 color pack

Turbo to Super: $25 upgrade for people who already have it $50 for new players

Super to Super Turbo: Free balance patch Akuma DLC $6.99

Funny enough combined it's still cheaper than having SF2 than buying Champion edition xD (Not defending today's practice, just saying at times it was worse back then.)

[Nemah]

Nothing sucks the soul out of basically any company like a board of directors.

The minute you answer to outside capital/private equity, or sell off ownership of any significant percentage, you are not your own anymore.

[deenman]

what innovation? blizzard made a casual friendly mmo that played and looked pretty good,at a time when most mmo's were janky and hardcore,thats about it

[Mysterymask]

what innovation? blizzard made a casual friendly mmo that played and looked pretty good,at a time when most mmo's were janky and hardcore,thats about it

Less hardcore and more used arcade old NES style bullshit to legthen content

[deenman]

Less hardcore and more used arcade old NES style bullshit to legthen content

i am amazed sometimes how my tolerance for these things changed,i used to play an mmo prior to wow that had death penalties,2 quests per level,couldnt solo quest outdoor mobs etc,and now i find classic wow leveling to tedious lol

[KainneAbsolute]

The king of refinement, and notice where the fun begins.

[Biomega]

The king of refinement

This, if anything.

The only really original thing Blizzard made was Diablo, and one might even squabble and say that was Blizzard North.

But they took existing concepts like MMORPG and RTS and polished them to #1 main stream levels of quality. If they hadn't been complete imbeciles about DotA they could have done the same with MOBA, too, but that's really where the downfall began: the meteoric success of Blizzard made them think they were the emperors of the gaming world and could do it all themselves, but dragging their feet with HotS for years meant they completely missed the boat on the next new thing. And that spiraled into a feedback loop of let's-play-it-safe-and-stay-formulaic that even the unexpected surprise of Hearthstone couldn't get out from under.

Now innovation is just a red flag for the suits in charge, who don't want to gamble shareholder money but instead squeeze existing and proven properties for every cent they've got. It would take monumental vision and/or creativity to escape from this self-limiting trap that effectively amounts to a pacemaker, requiring swift and regular battery changes every couple of years to stave off the probably inevitable coronary. Whether Dragonflight and Diablo 4 can deliver on that is up in the air.

[Th3Scourge]

They became beholden to shareholders, and delivering short-term shareholder value at expense of long-term sustainable growth by a modest stream of quality products.

Have they been successful from a business perspective since the acquisition of Blizzard by Activision? Definitely, but its fleeting and now those returns are falling due to short-sightedness, shitty products and crappy business practices

[Tojara]

With the exception of Battle.net, which basically every game company in the world copies now, they've never truly been the 'kings' of innovation. I might be ignorant towards the state of ARPG, but I don't really remember any ARPG games prior to Diablo so that might be the only instance where they truly were innovative.

Blizzard has mostly been kings of improving genres and just making them way better. While there were certainly good RTS games, SC and WC 1-3 massively improved on those formulas and straight up took designs and concepts from things like Warhammer to craft both of these genres. MMOs were getting bigger, but WoW essentially made them incredibly popular. Was there anything in WoW that blew your balls off in regards to cool new features when it first released compared to previous MMOs? No, but it made basically everything about the genre much more accessible, fun and well, polished. I'd argue OW is generally the same as well. Revolutionary? No, but it was fun and polished as you would expect from a Blizzard game. It's just not as popular as it was because Blizzard has recently been bad at keeping the finger on the pulse in regards to ever shifting game direction.

Speaking of BNET in general though Blizzard let major genres just slip through they're fingers. Whether it be the companies holding the strings at the time financially thinking some of the genres that were massively popular and created by BLIZZARDS OWN MAP EDITOR weren't worth pursuing, or it was the developers at Blizzard themselves thinking it was a short term fad (or their own egos), we will never know. What we do know is that it inspired a surge of tower defense games and essentially launched many standalone versions of DOTA from WC3, with LoL and DOTA2 still being relevant today.

The above is an interesting thought because if Blizzard actually took it seriously and didn't fuck with it too much, LoL and Riot as a whole probably would've never gotten off of the ground and DOTA and it's IP would've belonged to Blizzard entirely. Instead because of ego or higher ups, they introduced HoTS years later when the popularity of both previous mentioned games had already taken off. At that point it was hard to get people from other established series to leave arguably good games in their own right, and Blizzard tried and true philosophy just never worked when applying it to HoTS. They were both late to the party, and they tried to makes a MOBA which is traditionally pretty difficult too 'casual' for people to really enjoy.

Kings of innovation? No, but BNET was solid, early Diablo was solid and pretty much everything they made early as a company was just solid improvements to every genre they approached. Lately they just don't really improve anything like they use to, and in some cases just make established genres that they put in the limelight arguably worse. WoW actually needs innovation, Diablo actually needs some sort of complexity added to it, HoTS was just way too late to enter the arena, nobody really plays RTS anymore, and they just never really kept up with OW to keep people interested in it.

Blizzard does make quality products, and you can tell when you play them. Most of them are super responsive and just feel good to play. It's the same feeling when you play one of their RTS, ARPGs, WoW or even OW. PoE is a great game but it doesn't run the best and the visual clarity is a mess, but I'd still take PoE over D3 simply because the game is iterated on and isn't afraid to make changes. Diablo 3 however plays well, it's just missing soul.

[Nymrohd]

Honestly. You just described the majority of the issues with the teams at WoW. The bag has been tightened it feels like, so they are giving us what they can, meanwhile under major pressure from a new legal team, a new HR team, new diversity management, new employees/teammates, and new skillsets of varied portfolios (we've seen a lot of great work done which is hardly praised in recent content), and threats to the fear of unionizing.

I don't think the bag was tight in either Legion or BfA. Both expansions were very ambitious and either of them delivered more content than any other expansion. And with SL we cannot judge because a) pandemic b) dumpsterfire in their office.

[ZoomButLee]

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

Weren't they initially set on making World of Warhammeer 40k ?

[Nymrohd]

Weren't they initially set on making World of Warhammeer 40k ?

Yeah I've heard that as well and they could not get the license but I am not sure if that's a fact or not.

[Drench]

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.

Never understood this argument? I find it many many many times easier now to get 99% of everything in the game.

Current wow feels like the D3 inventory system vs D2 inventory to me.

Streamlined into oblivion, to the point it all looks and feels the same because of this. There's no soul to anything just a icon and a list of generic stats.


I would almost nearly flip around your description of wow old wow vs current wow.

[Nyel]

Innovation? Dungeon browser in WotLK, raid browser in Cataclysm and maybe artifact weapons and Mythic+ in Legion are the only "innovative" things I think of when it comes to Blizzard/WoW. They've hardly been innovative, most of their ideas are redundant and have been copied / improved.

Look at Dragonflight: Dragonriding is a worse version of Guild Wars 2's mount system. I wish if they'd copy stuff they would make it at least as good as the original.

[Mendzia]

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

It won't.
Blizzard no longer cares about high sub count nor quality content.
They are happy sucking all remaining whales in the game that are willing to pay literally for everything: mounts, pets, transmogs or buying gametime in 6 months advance.