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Blizzard Entertainment

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
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16,947
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Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
diablo 3 is still going strong

No one plays d3, like seriously, grim dawn has more people playing online.

Not to talk about SC2 and the huge RTS e-sports following, eventho the singleplayer component was p. bad

Yet 80% of people played SP and dropped it, e-sport scene is pretty much dead.
Do you have some source on these? I think the SC2 e-sports scene is still quite huge.
 
Joined
Apr 3, 2013
Messages
2,071
Location
Siberia
Can't remember seeing a tournament with more than 10k views in the past few years. Shit's going downhill since HoTS (sc expansion, not their shitty ass moba). Vast majority of players/casters and people involved in it moved on a long time ago. (mostly to other blizz games, but still) So yeah, it's deader than dead. There are still some Koreans that farm each other for pennies in local leagues, but meh. HoTS (their shitty ass moba) has better viewership numbers and that's saying something.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
Heroes of the storm is the best MOBA out there

:prosper:

diablo 3 is still going strong

No one plays d3, like seriously, grim dawn has more people playing online.

Not to talk about SC2 and the huge RTS e-sports following, eventho the singleplayer component was p. bad

Yet 80% of people played SP and dropped it, e-sport scene is pretty much dead.


Overwatch is good tho, so there's at least one thing that you got right.

SC2 esports is not dead. D3 still lots of ppl play it, more than grim dawn, don't troll. HOTS is super great and fun.
 

cvv

Arcane
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Kingdom of Bohemia
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For the past 15 years Blizzard is setting the standard of plot stupidity, aesthetics juvenility and character moronism. Is Metzen the one responsible for that? If so then I hope he gets so fat eating all those stacks of cash he made he bursts and rots on his damn couch.

Maybe new hope for Blizzard (I know I know, hope'n'change etc.).
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
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Platypus Planet
TBC almost killed WoW

By making the number of active players go up even higher than it was ever before without declining within a few weeks or even a month? Ok.

TBC is solely responsible for the massive difficulty drop in WotLK in anything but end game raiding.

"Because of TBC they made WotLK suck" seriously what? Are you even reading what you're saying?

You ejaculate remembering the challenging heroics (because you were bad mostly)

Or, because, *shock*, they were challenging and fun? Not everyone was a scrub who got carried through raids and then did heroics in full raid epix.

but forget TBC introduced the "can't get lost even if you tried" dungeon design

It's not like it was the rule in Vanilla WoW either. Dungeons like LBRS and Uldaman were the exceptions. TBC dungeons did feel quite a bit more linear since they ditched the snake-like dungeon design that gave the illusion of non-linearity in Vanilla dungeons. OTOH what they lost in dungeon design they made back with better encounter design. Not to mention that TBC had Karazhan which shat all over anything Vanilla had to offer and is still one of the undisputed heavy weight champions of WoW raids.

and the "follow the quest hubs" world design.

You mean like starting out in Durotar, going down to Barrens, working your way from top to bottom into the thousand needles? Maybe taking detours in Ashenvale and/or Stonetalon which were right next door? The haphazard quest progression in Vanilla WoW was a result of Blizzard not knowing what they were doing and figuring things as they went. The Horde faction, zones, quests and instances were made last, which is why they were superior to what the Alliance was subjected to. That quest design was just a continuation of what they were already doing by the end of Vanilla WoW's development.
 

hello friend

Arcane
Joined
Feb 26, 2012
Messages
7,847
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I'm on an actual spaceship. No joke.
WoW circa TBC was their best game

Blizzard North : Diablo II and Diablo I
Condor Games. Only good games Blizzard proper made was Lost Vikings and the first Starcraft.
By making the number of active players go up even higher than it was ever before without declining within a few weeks or even a month? Ok.
Similarly, Fallout 3 was superior to the originals because more people played it?
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
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Platypus Planet
Similarly, Fallout 3 was superior to the originals because more people played it?

There's nothing similar between either games. Fallout 3 could've been called anything else and it still would've been just as popular. OTOH MMOs were not a very popular genre and not only did Blizzard bumble into popularity with WoW, they kept the momentum going on and even escalated it with TBC. Not an easy task.
 
Joined
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Messages
5,871
MMOs were not a very popular genre and not only did Blizzard bumble into popularity with WoW, they kept the momentum going on and even escalated it with TBC. Not an easy task.

Wait, what? Everyone was trying to tap into the budding MMO market and strike gold back when WoW came out. Everquest numbers weren't as expressive as WoW's eventually became, but they were still proportionately pretty massive back then. Didn't take a rocket scientist to know it was the 'next big thing', something similar to what happened to Dota-likes a few years ago.

Re: vanilla dungeon design, I'm pretty sure complex design was the rule and not the exception - in addition to your examples I would cite Blackrock Mountain (most people didn't even run it because it was so big and convoluted, but raiding guilds had to do it because of the tavern event and to farm FR gear for MC), Scarlet Monastery (multiple wings even though it was pretty linear), Scholo, Living Stratholme (not Ustrat, that was pretty boring), even fucking Wailing Caverns was more complex than the room-corridor-room design that became the norm later on. Now, encounter composition and design is something else...

As for Kara being among the undisputed king of raid content, I'm personally partial to Zul'Gurub (a vanilla raid, believe it got reworked into some kind of heroic shit dungeon or whatever, but I didn't see it) - my fav WoW raid of all time. It was a great median between the early poopsocking 40-man snoozefests and the trivial 10-man zergs of later day. It was fucking great, honestly.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Still not sure what there is to retire from... what did he do all day? I can't imagine much. 99% of what he does can probably be done from home or the beach. Being he was one of the original employees at Blizzard and quite possibly a share holder I'm sure he made tons of money from the Activision merger. Oh well.
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
13,999
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Platypus Planet
MMOs were not a very popular genre and not only did Blizzard bumble into popularity with WoW, they kept the momentum going on and even escalated it with TBC. Not an easy task.

Wait, what? Everyone was trying to tap into the budding MMO market and strike gold back when WoW came out.

And most of them failed. There was something about WoW that captivated a lot of people, even people who had no interest in the genre to begin with and would never play a single MMO after. It's a genre mostly for hardcore nerds and not normies.

Re: vanilla dungeon design, I'm pretty sure complex design was the rule and not the exception - in addition to your examples I would cite Blackrock Mountain (most people didn't even run it because it was so big and convoluted, but raiding guilds had to do it because of the tavern event and to farm FR gear for MC), Scarlet Monastery (multiple wings even though it was pretty linear), Scholo, Living Stratholme (not Ustrat, that was pretty boring), even fucking Wailing Caverns was more complex than the room-corridor-room design that became the norm later on. Now, encounter composition and design is something else...

Living Strath is pretty linear and so is Wailing Caverns (going back to the Snake-like design where it feels less linear than what it is). My point was that Vanilla dungeons are mostly linear, even if they sometimes don't feel like that. There's only a few dungeons where you can actually get lost.

As for Kara being among the undisputed king of raid content, I'm personally partial to Zul'Gurub (a vanilla raid, believe it got reworked into some kind of heroic shit dungeon or whatever, but I didn't see it) - my fav WoW raid of all time. It was a great median between the early poopsocking 40-man snoozefests and the trivial 10-man zergs of later day. It was fucking great, honestly.

Zul'Gurub is one of my favs as well, especially the flavor. But looking from a purely design POV, Kara is one of the real kings. Of course people can have their own favorites for other reasons, like AQ, which is pretty unique.
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,892
@HoboElf
People started quitting in droves at start of TBC which made them release BT in a rush nerfing heroics, throwing more items at people and releasing 2 raids so easy they had lesser gear requirements than the tier before.
The feedback they got from TBC is the reason WotLK was so easy.
 

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
@HoboElf
People started quitting in droves at start of TBC which made them release BT in a rush nerfing heroics, throwing more items at people and releasing 2 raids so easy they had lesser gear requirements than the tier before.
The feedback they got from TBC is the reason WotLK was so easy.

which timeframe do you define as "start of"? I level very slow and when I reached these heroics they were still hard and as far as I remember werent nerfed until later. also, which two raids? Nothing in TBC was nearly as easy as the stuff they brought in with lichking.
 

KK1001

Arbiter
Joined
Mar 30, 2015
Messages
621
Diablo 3 - degenerate cartoon garbage that plays like molasses, looks like shit, and has the 2nd worst story ever written by Blizzard. Feels like a watered down WoW rather than a gothic horror trip. The existence of PoE (which continually improves) makes Diablo 3 purposeless.

SC2 - over-designed garbage. Also happens to look like shit. Story starts out bad and gets worse and worse. Competitive scene uncomfortably falls between too hard for the retards of Twitch and too easy compared to its predecessor.

WoW - It's overall design has improved with quality of life changes but at the expense of nearly everything else. Handing everything to the player meant stripping away the things that make MMOs worth playing. No sense of community, no sense of the largeness of the world when you can teleport to
instances or fly around. Game has been on life support for the past 4 expansions and has slowly catered to the slightly older Blizzard fans that, while they've grown up, have yet to develop any taste.

HOTS - HAHAHAHA

Overwatch - In comparison to Blizzard's other releases in the past decade, Overwatch is a breath of fresh air. I want to shit on it but I can't. Blatant balancing issues and slow content release aside, the game is condenses the things Neo-Blizzard does well while avoiding the bad.
 
Joined
Jul 4, 2015
Messages
920
Is there ANY chance that Blizzard will go defunct over the next 20 years? Or will it be around 100 years from now, a media empire like Disney?
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,892
which timeframe do you define as "start of"? I level very slow and when I reached these heroics they were still hard and as far as I remember werent nerfed until later. also, which two raids? Nothing in TBC was nearly as easy as the stuff they brought in with lichking.
Before patch 2.1.0.
BT and Hyjal.
 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
Metzen started out good, and then became prideful and lazy and the quality of his work would degenerate over time into this inane and insipid quagmire, like the SC2 or D3 plot. The usual story.
You could say he became corrupted.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
That would be retarded saying that. He is obviously quite talented. Quit hating on him. His abilities might have waned over the years, but he made blizzard what it is today.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
he made blizzard what it is today.
Isn't that the point?

What point? He made great games in the past, and ensured the company's survival and growth. That's talent.

The company still makes great games today, because of him and his energy. Regardless if he was involved in them directly or not.

Denying Blizzard's success is just butthurt. You might not like their newer games, but they have all been extremely well recieved by a large majority of gamers, and rightly so.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
Metzen was never great. He did decent work at a time when he was forced to comply to an higher standard and was paired with people who weren't complete retards. He is a bit like a David Gaider in that regard. He started semi-good when the environment he was in demand it but went completely south once there were no chains holding his retardation back. Just look at this fucker, total poser douche bag:

Blizzard-MEtzen-Shot-01.jpg


Those kind of people don't really care about the craft. They do what they do to try to get ahead socially. Once they achieve their goal their interest in whatever field they started drops suddenly.
 
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