Blizzard was once the king of innovation, what happened?

[StillMcfuu]

Blizzard is the Gutenberg of gaming, there were printing presses before, but Blizz tend to take the formula and perfect it.
And ultimately it doesn't matter who does it first, it matters who does it first in the best most repeatable way possible, just ask the Wright Brothers.

[Ielenia]

Blizzard was never innovative, unless you consider "let's take this idea that someone else had and change it just enough to not be called 'plagiarism'" to be "innovative".

[La]

I remember the first time I started getting into Warhammer stuff, and quickly realized just how much they ripped from them. And that's just one that comes to mind the heaviest. They're the kings of stealing and being lazy. Maybe innovative isn't the word you're looking for? Someone might call M+ innovative for an MMO, but in reality.. what does it remind you of? Perhaps something you'd find in an ARPG maybe

[Relapses]

Yawn, more nostalgia baiting. Do you guys not tire of pretending everything new is bad and everything old is good?

[ulululu]

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.

And you are a ripoff of you parents, what can you say?

[Orby]

Yawn, more nostalgia baiting. Do you guys not tire of pretending everything new is bad and everything old is good?

There's a lot of really great new games actually that are so much better than stuff before it. Blaming it on nostalgia is a pretty cheap excuse used to excuse criticism of something they love. I am looking forward to the new Baldur's gate game, Its very different than the old Baldur's gate but from what I have seen it looks like fun. I aint looking from nostalgia goggles and thinking just because its new its bad.

Unfortunately most tings new from Blizzard considering their current reputation isn't good. Kinda like Bioware, once a great games company who made critically acclaimed games is now making half baked horrible messes of games. Most of us are just not drinking the Blizzard Kool-aid to not see that their games are not as good as they used to be.

Now with that said this is a matter of perspective, if you enjoy their three new recent games like their mobile game and Warcraft 3 Reforged, or the upcoming Overwatch 1.5... I mean 2, then good for you. But the company is driven by greed, toxic work conditions and low morale within the company. and it shows in their games. Their games are not fun right now, and maybe thats due to the developers behind the scenes are not having fun either. Who'd a blame them?

Sure there are a lot of bad faith haters out there, who will hate blizzard because 'lol Blizzard'. I was literally going to bat for blizz in BfA I enjoyed that expansion (until the end, the end sucked) but the fact is there are a lot of us who want Blizzard to be better, to be that company we loved... Not me though I gave up on that philosophy and just stopped playing their games period, I think people holding out for hope Blizzard to be the 'old Blizzard' are delirious... But I been blizzard clean for 18 months, but people are entitled to love their games just as much as people can not like them and feel free to criticize them.

OT: With that said blizzard have never been an innovator, more like a perfecter, they take games of other genres and perfect them and make them better, the RTS genre, (although some will argue AoE is better), Diablo, Hearthstone, and even Overwatch). Now their recent outings haven't been as good, their new clash Royale game will rake in some cash but if its a better alternative to it that remains to be seen, Overwatch 2, hasn't gone over well, outside from core esports players, and Warcraft 3: Reforged... well... we don't speak of that. some would even debate are they even perfectionists anymore? Guess the real test would be their survival game that's in the distance somewhere.

[OrangeJuice]

Its really not a fucking mystery, the people that established blizzard don't work there anymore. The chicago bulls won 6 championships when Jordan played for them and haven't won since the dream team split up. Do you really not understand how that works?

[Xerberous]

I think this hits the spot. The "Jordans", the people who created games because they were gamers, left and the controllers and lawyers took over. Don’t get me wrong, Dragonflight will be a nice expansion, but nice and nothing more.

[kasuke06]

Hate to add to the echo chamber, but blizz hasn't really innovated since like the 90's. Their biggest innovations right now are "TF2 but even more casual, and throw in some wokeness so people look the other way when it comes to being derivative and the massive lawsuit we're facing" and "Hey guys, no one's heard of this small indie MMO called Guild Wars 2 right? Let's lift from them since our writers kind of lost their shit when we tried to make them do an FFXIV size story for WoW"

Also just looked it up, Diablo was being worked on by another studio, they bought said studio a year before it came out.

[Lex Icon]

chasing that e-sport money and failing over and over again? idk.

[Eosia]

Bobby Kotick happened. Granted he saved Blizzard from a probable death at Vivendi's hand, but in the end he did almost as much damage.

[Rawrajishxc]

What innovation?

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

Either refining or fucking it up, either way all they've ever done is incorporate other game's ideas into their own.

[Ezyah]

Twitter era happened

[Irian]

The old developers who knew what they were doing quit, we literally watched it happen with retirement announcements every other week from Legion until now.

We're left with new people who don't know the game, don't understand MMORPGs and don't have even the slightest idea what made WoW a good game to begin with.

[Hctaz]

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.

My answer is the same answer I give for the decline of modern gaming and the rise of so many popular Indie or smaller developers. It's simply the case of corporate big business sucking the life out of the practice of whatever it is that they touch.

I totally understand what you mean when you say "innovative." As many others have pointed out, the Blizzard of old was not very "innovative" in terms of taking completely original ideas, but they did refine game genres into something greater than we had ever seen before.

What you are mistaking for pure "innovation" is simply enthusiasm and enjoyment. Essentially, Blizzard of old was composed of nerds who wanted to take something to the next level because they were passionate about it. Think of like... as a teenager you were obsessed with collectible card games, and you've always dreamt of making your very own card game inspired by the one you played a lot of as a teen BUT with all the refinement you and your friends thought up while playing. Maybe there were some aspects of the CCG you didn't enjoy, so you trim the fat and make a wholly better experience. I think that was what the Blizzard of the past did with their game franchises.

I think what happened was just the fact that gaming became profitable. It wasn't driven by a bunch of nerds excited to create their dream game, it was run by corporate suits who looked at data and wanted to minimize risk.
The old Blizzard was not nearly as risk averse as modern Blizzard is. They would cancel games that they worked on for years if it didn't pan out despite sinking a ton of money into it. The risk/return didn't matter as much to them because they weren't concerned with maximizing their profits and returns for the shareholders.

Now, I'm not saying that Activision was the sole reason why Blizzard changed. I think that change was inevitable as Blizzard became a larger company. You kinda start to lose some of the things that made you unique the more and more money is on the line. They started to do things less for "This will be an amazing idea because I'm a nerd and I love this and all the nerds will love this!" and more for "Our loss aversion department has looked into the numbers, and it seems like implementing this feature will cost too much money. We're only seeing a 46% chance of returns on this investment, and it's just not acceptable."

It's basically the entire reason LFR was introduced. Raids cost too much development time and money to be seen by only a smaller percentage of the playerbase, so they either needed to find a way to get more people to see the content in one way or another or they'd have to deal with reduced budgets which... people were not happy with in Cataclysm.

[Aggressive]

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?

They were too busy stealing breast milk, and grabbing ass instead of making good games that is what happened.

[Neuroticaine]

Innovation was never Blizzard's strong point. Taking ideas from competitors and doing it better is what they were good at.

[KevyB]

The devs worth a damn left and got replaced with a bunch of tumblr-tier garbage.

That's pretty much all there is.

[Ersula]

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

This. The problem with "copying what other games are doing & do it better" is that over the years WoW happened to kill almost every other MMO. The latest thing they copied was TLP servers from Everquest. Now Physics based Flying from Guild Wars 2.

- - - Updated - - -

The devs worth a damn left and got replaced with a bunch of tumblr-tier garbage.

I think a bigger problem is that the game director, Ion Hazzikostas is neither a programmer nor a game designer.

[dwarven]

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.

Yeah, this is probably true. I resubbed to WoW last night to compare Classic and Retail. Classic is actually more fun than retail despite the fact that it's almost 18 years old. That's nuts to me. I bet the same is also true of Diablo 2 vs. Diablo 3.