Blizzard was once the king of innovation, what happened?

[cparle87]

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.

Wasn't Starcraft gonna be a WH40k game but they lost the business deal at the last minute. Some name changes and out comes SC2. The terrans, zerg, and protoss are pretty obviously Dominion of Man, tyranids, and Eldar.

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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)

Not saying you're wrong but they rushed vanilla out the door half done just to get a product on the market.

[Romanthony]

As a Famous warchief once said.

"Times Change"

[Venziir]

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?

Were they though? Blizzard's core strength was, always, been to copy and vastly improve what others did first.

[conkrete]

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 perfectionist, which was great, not innovators. You didn't expect anything less than top quality when blizzard dropped a game. Those were the times. Frozen Thrones to WoW was peak Blizzard, they couldn't be touched. SC2 was great too, the aura diminished after it.

[username993720]

Kid-appropriate content. That's what happened.

[Aleksej89]

game designers stopped being players themselves and were replaced with managers, HR, PR, analytics, finance people etc.

they turned their games designing processes into statistical charts of player retention and every other inhuman metric they could find.

all they had to do was keep the players as the designers but the people who never played a game in their life thought they could make better games through statistics and PR.

[Tarba]

Reading the posts of how blizzard has never been innovative is pretty funny. It's like the only guy innovative was the man who invented rock paper cisor.
Diablo, warcraft 123, starcraft and battle.net are standards for a reason.

[Inukashi]

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.

If you wanted to raid in classic, you just went into the raid and that's it. Yeah, some raids had a small questline before, but there was no need to farm outside of raid except for some buff food or resi gear. But that wasn't even needed. We did Molten Core every thursday for some hours, then later bwl and so on. It didn't matter if you were offline for the rest of the week, you could still come to the raid.

Today you need to do dailys, covenants, torgast, you need to do at least one high m+ run each week and non of that is really optional. If you don't do his content, you lock yourself out of the funcontent.
Statistically most people play around 14-16 hours a week. That's already the amount of two workdays, but in WoW it won't get you done anything. How long do 2-3 raids take? 8-12 hours depending on the guild? Perhaps more?
The time most people want to realistically invest in a game is not enough to really enjoy wow.

It's not about 'easy' its about the dedication you need. It's not 'hard' to run torgast and do your dailys. But why on earth would I want to work after work? That does only make 'sense' for very few people.

There was also stuff to do in classic wow like the snowtiger q-line or achievments, but if you didn't do them, you didn't miss out on anything.

[Harthmut]

Management happened.
Managers who have nothing to do with the actual field of work, who create charts and numbers and checkmarks to be fulfilled which the devs have to design their game around, ultimately screwing themselves and the customers over.

What remains is the die hard fanbase, who accepts all of Blizzards shortcomings, pouring all of their expandable income on their games and Blizzards job is to suck their wallets as dry as possible.

[Greyvax]

If you wanted to raid in classic, you just went into the raid and that's it. Yeah, some raids had a small questline before, but there was no need to farm outside of raid except for some buff food or resi gear. But that wasn't even needed. We did Molten Core every thursday for some hours, then later bwl and so on. It didn't matter if you were offline for the rest of the week, you could still come to the raid.

Today you need to do dailys, covenants, torgast, you need to do at least one high m+ run each week and non of that is really optional. If you don't do his content, you lock yourself out of the funcontent.

covenants ended in 9.1. dailies? which ones? Torghast, i think needed 1 run maybe 2 to finish legendaries for the entire xpac.

believe it or not, it's actually nice to have content outside of raids. if people are willing to do extra content to optimize their character, shouldn't they have more power than someone who decides to only raidlog?

[Zyky]

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

Enabling online play was not "innovative" from Blizzard. Command & Conquer was the first RTS with online play back in 1995. And Bnet was a cheap ripoff from steam

[Hellobolis]

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.

were they?

i always thought warcraft was the rts game "where you right click" and westwood was the rts game "where you left clicked".

attack move was a neat thing though, don't think they had that in dune or early C&C. but for the rest they mostly just felt like different flavors rather than one being a massive innovator.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Blizzard have pretty much never been innovative. And I wouldn't even agree that they take existing ideas and make them "better". They polish them, sure, they knock off any rough edges. But then they tend to simplify for the mass market.

HS took MtG, dumbed down the gameplay, removed most of the depth and strategy and created something that people could get into much more quickly. Basically turned chess into tic-tac-toe. That was about as symbolic of the Blizzard approach as you could possibly get.

[Inukashi]

covenants ended in 9.1. dailies? which ones? Torghast, i think needed 1 run maybe 2 to finish legendaries for the entire xpac.

believe it or not, it's actually nice to have content outside of raids. if people are willing to do extra content to optimize their character, shouldn't they have more power than someone who decides to only raidlog?

There should be content outside of raids, I'm totally fine with it, but it's not about optimizing, it's about not locking yourself out.
An Mmo should be like a themepark where you log in and be like 'today I feel like raiding' or 'today i'm gonna do dungeons and enjoy it'
There shouldn't be any 'must have' things.

How did you do it in 1-2 runs? When you needed 1250 soulash for the first ilvl of one legendary and the cap per wing was 305?
Also if you don't upgrade your legendaries you aren't gonna get invited to raids.

Zereth Mortis dailys for rep for another legendary?

[Necromantic]

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.

This sounds very pessimistic but it's unfortunately true.

We're living in the gaming age where microtransactions, cash shops and aesthetics are what make money, not quality content. FFXIV is just as bad, if not worse in that aspect.

I cannot imagine after a decade how much all these obsessive players have shelled out with nothing to show for it.

[Necromantic]

Poor decisions have been made.

Look who they've hired and that's no surprise. Ion? lol

[anveena]

diversity hires

[melodramocracy]

The game currently comes across as if it's designed with significant input from financial department, whereas the 'old guard', for all their flaws, came across as mostly avid gamers first and foremost.

[AlmightyGerkin]

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?

No company rules forever my son

[Pratt]

Capitalism happened.