Blizzard was once the king of innovation, what happened?

[Sinured]

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.

so your logic is every game is pong, because in every game we move pixels.
got it.

[Nymrohd]

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.

I'd say world quests are D3 bounties. What with D3 team being the ones who made the system. And the emissary system being the zone bounty system, what with complete 4 world quests to get a cache of items.

[saixilein]

Blizzard was mostly not well knowed for innovation, they was well know for taking formula A and making it (mostly) perfect.

[Lochton]

Blizzard was mostly not well knowed for innovation, they was well know for taking formula A and making it (mostly) perfect.

Indeed. This is mostly what they are marked for. Perfecting an idea to function better in their content.

[Mysterymask]

honestly would argue king of innovation in gaming is really not blizzard....Id, Capcom, Nintendo, Atari, Sega, Bethesda, Even friggin EA probably has been more innovative than Blizzard has been

[Asrialol]

The market changed. The gaming industry changed. The players changed, and the companies changed. This wasn't in any way exclusive to Blizzard.

[Lolites]

what happened? COMMUNITY happened...
every time they try something new in wow, instead of actual useful feedback we get forums swarmed with threads how its the worst thing ever, and how it killed the game and how its the end of the world...
if people shut you down every single time you try something new, you will try less and less, and eventualy you will completely stop trying to experiment and stick to good old stuff that you know will work... honestly with how whiny wow community is im surprised blizz still havent reached that point

im not saying all their features were briliant or whatnot, but some, with some tweaking could be good rather than discarded, but that would require some proper feedback, not just "omg, its shit" or "it ruined the whole game"

[Sauredfangs]

Maybe they ran out of people to copy

[Skirdus]

Everyone recognizable at Blizzard jumped ship and started their own company is what happened

[Iain]

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.

Surely Retail is way easier and has far more hand-holding than Classic?

[Khaza-R]

Blizzard was a victim of their own success. The quality really dropped when they started prioritizing making profitable games over well designed ones. They could get away with it too because they had fans who would blindly gobble up their products no matter what. But that's been the norm for nearly a decade now and certainly not anything new with Dragonflight.

[Pakheth]

The market changed. The gaming industry changed. The players changed, and the companies changed. This wasn't in any way exclusive to Blizzard.

Yep, look at Bioware, SquareEnix(oh boy they have hit rock bottom apart from FF14), Konami, Bethesda, etc.

[crusadernero]

They got commodofied.

- - - Updated - - -

Surely Retail is way easier and has far more hand-holding than Classic?

Yes and no. In many ways, classic is alot more straight forward than retail and vice versa. Leveling in retail is very streamlined and hand-holdning, while on classic its quite different. Especially if someone runs without questie(addon). The base retail game doesnt need addon for questing, everything goes on rail. Classic quests takes you all over the place and theres really no clear telling on what the best leveling route is.

Retail at max level can also be quite min numbing compared to classic. Classic is ; reach max level, gear. Retail is; Reach max lvl, gear, aquire legendaries(which one?), pick covenants(which one?). Theres m+, 4 raid difficulties and so much more. I would think new players can get overwhelmed on retail.

So yeah leveling is much more hand holdning, but at max level it feels different. More options sure, but it can be quite convoluded.

[Nymrohd]

The market changed. The gaming industry changed. The players changed, and the companies changed. This wasn't in any way exclusive to Blizzard.

I'd say the cost of making games changed. What we expect from games nowadays costs so much that you need a public company to finance it and with that come so many strings attached. Sure there are great indy games released every so often but most gamers focus on AAA gaming.

The smaller companies owned by developers that manage to break the mold usually do at the expense of ludicrous crunch from the developers who once successful are extremely tired and welcome an IPO so they can actually cash in on their hard work.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Blizzard was mostly not well knowed for innovation, they was well know for taking formula A and making it (mostly) perfect.

This was mainly true for WoW and their later games.

The 3 WC RTS games and SC1 were all massive innovators that pushed the RTS genre forward.

Diablo invented a completely new genre on its own...

[Icathian]

They became lazy and greedy. Specially because of the army of fanboys behind them, making sure that they always had hundreds of thousands of people 100% supporting all of their worse decisions.

That's one of the reasons of why they ruined WoW. The groups of people who back Blizzard up are the extreme casuals and the pro players who depend of WoW for their income so they basically hype the game up for free.
So Blizzard made sure that WoW is a great game for those 2 extremes, turning the game into a nightmare for the average player.

[Iain]

I'd say the cost of making games changed. What we expect from games nowadays costs so much that you need a public company to finance it and with that come so many strings attached. Sure there are great indy games released every so often but most gamers focus on AAA gaming.

Right but every once in a while an indie or low budget game comes along an completely clobbers the big budget titles in revenue, and therefore especially in profit.

Most titles need big budgets to be competitive. But there's also a group-think illusion amongst executives that believe video games need to be like user-apps where everything needs to be polished and smooth. Show the gamers some creativity and they'll gladly forgive the rough edges.

[DingDongKing]

They were the king of creating the best knockoffs in the industry. Never really 'innovation'.

But even that trend has fallen behind, because they've gotten rich, entitled and lazy.

[Mysterymask]

Right but every once in a while an indie or low budget game comes along an completely clobbers the big budget titles in revenue, and therefore especially in profit.

Because they aren't bending over for shareholders usually it's only a handful of people who thought "hey this might be cool" and sometimes they are right

You think any AAA company would look at 5 Nights at Freddy's or Undertale and greenlight that shit? Shit 5 Nights at Freddy's was like 10 jpegs and some literal called in voice linea and that spawned a fucking franchise

[Syncr]

Blizzard was the king of execution and perfection. Not innovation. They would take a game that has already been made and make it better and clean it up to perfection. Outside of Diablo all of their games of carbon copies of others.

There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s the truth.