
How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games - doppp
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/08/how-blizzard-stayed-laser-focused-on-quality-games-for-25-years/
======
pjlegato
How can they fail to even mention Warcraft III, an epic multiyear development
effort and one of the most commercially successful video games of all time?

Its debut was an epic win for Blizzard. It made more money the year it came
out than any Hollywood movie. WC3 also set the stage for World of Warcraft,
which would not have experienced nearly the same uptake without it.

Truly a glaring omission in an otherwise interesting article.

~~~
douche
Really the last Blizzard game that I enjoyed.

I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly
compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft
1/2/Starcraft manuals

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-
Manua...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-
Manual#scribd)

[http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF](http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF)

[http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20...](http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20edition.PDF)

Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the
entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their
mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop
the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get
autoexec.bat tuned right...

~~~
ambicapter
You didn't think Warcraft III was cartoony?

~~~
douche
It was, but aside from the awful character portraits, it's not much worse than
other low-poly 3D games of that era. That's right around the cusp of where 3D
engines started to overtake the older 2D/isometric engines for RTSs and
strategy games.

------
J0-onas
From my perspective the quality of their games is declining. Rapidly.

I don't know the author and his gaming background but he certainly hasn't
spent much time playing blizzard games. At least he isn't a 'hardcore' gamer.
Truth is, if you are a casual gamer you probably won't notice how dumb their
current development is.

In short: WoW: Numbers don't lie. People would still play mmos if there werent
any worth playing. [http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-
to-5-6-Mil...](http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-
to-5-6-Million-Subscribers)

Diablo: Current content is shit, multiple design failes that needed to be
corrected. Both D3 and the addon weren't ready on release, needed patches to
correct the bad quality.

Hots/Hearthstone/Overwatch: Knockoffs of Dota/LoL, Magic, Team Fortress. I
don't think a knockoff should be called a quality game. Also, both Hots and
Hearthstone have/has horrible balancing issues => bad quality considering
being balanced is the core content of the game. Not to mention that Hots was
really shitty from a technical pov (after beta).

~~~
nightski
Regardless of your personal opinion on the design of their games, one thing
they retain is their quality. Blizzard games are some of the most polished bug
free experiences available (especially given their scope/size). You are never
going to have a poor experience with a Blizzard game.

You might not enjoy the game, but it will not be because of game breaking
bugs, poorly translated ports, low art quality, or unpolished game systems.
Blizzard takes these things very seriously. If something is broken they often
fix it.

------
melling
"On graduating from UCLA in December 1990 with a computer science degree,
Adham received $10,000 from his parents to go to Europe. But he loved video
games, and he wanted to make a living making them. He used the money instead
to start a video game company, Silicon & Synapse–the predecessor of Chaos."

~~~
sanoli
I always hear about how american college students, upon graduating, take a
year off to travel around. How common is this? 10k should be around 20k by
now, how common is it in the US for parents to give 20 thousand in free travel
money to a son who graduates?

~~~
eachro
A lot of fresh college graduates travel for a bit before starting their job.
Anecdotally, all of friends used money from past internships/summer jobs and
signing bonuses to pay for their trips. It really is not that expensive to
travel if you choose the right places and purchase tickets well in advance.

~~~
lettergram
A bunch of people I went to school with teaveled independently through Asia on
the cheap. Signing bonuses were enough to move and live in SF for 3-6 months
prior to starting work, instead they traveled. I suspect it was roughly the
same price

------
ionised
Can't say I've enjoyed much of Blizzard's work to be honest. They're style has
always turned me off somewhat. I really liked the Warcraft I, II and III games
but beyond that there's nothing that ever really grabbed me.

I gave World of Warcraft a go for around two weeks because my friends were
playing it religiously but I just couldn't get into it. MMOs in general don't
do it for me though.

I mean I loved Diablo 1 and 2 but they were developed by Condor (later became
Blizzard North), Diablo 3 became something other than what I wanted from a
sequel to that series. It was full of World of Warcraft's cartoonish art
style, complete with huge shoulder pads on armour and massively oversaturated
colours and terrible Blizzard-standard writing. They even managed to make
Diablo himself completely unintimidating as a character due to how shitty his
lines of dialogue were. They should have kept him a silent antagonist as in
previous games and stuck with the dark gothic-horror aesthetic that made D1
and D2 so memorable.

------
exar0815
One of the few other companies that made games of similar quality for me was
Bioware. The critically acclaimed Star Wars RPGs, the Mass Effect and
DragonAge franchises started as something new and special, with MassEffects
focusing on epic interactive storytelling and DA on complex yet accessible
RPG. Sadly, after EA (the dev killer) bought them, DA turned into a hack n
slay, and ME into a CoD in space. With a VERY bad ending.

------
rnernento
Misleading title, should read "How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games
for 17 years" It's been all downhill since the Activision purchase...

~~~
eugenekolo2
HOTS is good. Just hasn't taken off.

Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun.

Overwatch looks very promising.

WoW is just old now, and it's still an alright game, but it's been out for too
long. I believe TBC and WOTLK came out after Activision purchase and those
expansions were great.

Starcraft 2 is okay. They messed up a lot with trying to be social allstars
with bnet2.0.

Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark, can maybe blame Activision here. As the real
money auction house wasn't that great of a success, and it seems Activisiony
to me.

~~~
dexwiz
D3 is a completely different game than on release. On release it was all about
maxing a few stats (main stat, attack speed, crit chance, crit hit). The
differences between one piece of the gear and the next was just a few points.
Also gear was almost 100% random drops. This made the AH better, as you could
never be expected to find a full set of top tier gear.

Now it's much more based around set bonuses and builds. No more AH, so all
gear is self found. But now you have random drops, rift drops, blood shards,
cube upgrades, rerolls. So multiple ways to acquire and improve existing gear.

~~~
toast42
I'm fairly certain that D3 was originally built around the auction house. They
started with a solid stream of monetization and then built a game around that.

~~~
sangaya
The thing about D3 though is that Blizzard continued to take feedback from the
community and iterate through the game by adjusting and introducing new game
mechanics with each update. The current 2.4 is so far different from the
original release that its shocking. I played at the start and quickly got
tired of the horrible drops and Auction House. Now the variety of entertaining
builds that are possible is huge. I'm playing Season 5 and my friends have
started again too. It's great for both short (<10min) sessions as well as long
ones.

~~~
toast42
That is certainly a good sign. I played in the beta and decided it wasn't for
me, so maybe I owe it another chance!

