"During a milestone check-in with Cyberlore, however, Blizzard’s managers had deemed the work subpar. They cancelled the contract, finished the add-on pack, Beyond the Dark Portal, themselves, and resolved that only an in-house team could nurture a Blizzard property to an acceptable level of quality."
I was working at Cyberlore as a playtester when Blizzard pulled the plug on the Warcraft 2 expansion. It was baffling to us all. They never explained why, to us anyway. All these years later, to read that they felt the work was subpar is a surprise. We tried to get more info, but all we got was "Decision is made. Hand over all assets." We just thought it was some kind of internal political struggle.
These days everyone does agile, so these kind of big expectation mismatches don't happen so often anymore. In theory, anyway.
Anecdotal: from talking with my friends who still work in game dev, something management calls "agile" is relatively common. Lean developer staffing makes having much agility in practice kind of tough.
Do you know anything about the interactions between Cyberlore and NWC for The Price of Loyalty? I'm generally curious, as I lead a large modding project for that game. (I've gotten a couple case studies out of hacky Cyberlore code.)
I didnt work on Majesty, myself, but I do remember when my friend Jim came up with the concept. We were walking down the street talking about games, and he said "I want to make an RPG game where the heroes control themselves."
I loved every Blizzard game as a kid. Warcraft 2, Diablo 1, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and then WoW. I can't stress enough how much of my life was consumed by Blizzard games.
Warcraft 2 was one of the very first games I ever owned. I still remember my dad taking me to Comp USA to buy it for me after I read about it in PC Gamer. You can hear Starcraft 1 sounds in the background in a bunch of the camera footage that my mom shot in our home while I was still in grade school. I nearly failed out of junior high because I would do nothing but play Diablo 2 outside of school. I spent all of my free time in 10th grade playing Warcraft 3 ladder and DOTA. I was playing WOW on prom night.
Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 were two of the biggest disappointments of my life. Not just gaming-wise, but out of everything. It was obvious that the people involved with making the originals great were either not involved with the new games at all, or they no longer had a major say in anything.
I heard a second-hand account from someone who used to be high up at Blizzard in regards to what happened with Blizzard North. They said the original BN guys felt they were owed more than what they were getting, that what they were receiving in terms of overall compensation and creative control was disproportionate in comparison to their contributions for the Diablo franchise, which had become a flagship Blizzard IP on par with Starcraft and Warcraft.
They gave an ultimatum, and Blizzard scrapped all of the ongoing Diablo 3 work (the Diablo 3 we got was not what BN had initially started making) and shut down Blizzard North in response. They then made Hellgate London. This is in contrast with the Guild Wars people, who left of their own accord.
> Per the terms of the sale, Ken Williams was given a verbal promise by CUC management that Serra[sic] and the other studios wrapped up in the purchase would retain their independence.
That does not make sense to me, though I may be missing something. It's either a "verbal [only] promise" or in the "terms", no?
One of the level designers for WoW has apparently written a book on the game's original development. The Kickstarter [1] for it failed due to an unrealistic funding goal, but if you're looking for something along those lines it might be something you'd be interested in keeping track of as he's planning on re-launching a funding campaign with a smaller budget.
Not a book, but the blog posts on making the original Crash Bandicoot [2] make for a great read, especially due to some of the issues they ran into in trying to squeeze out every last bit of performance from the original Playstation. [3]
You may find that such a book, while interesting, will be a hard read. Writing is a skill, and one crafted by journalists, not necessarily by game development experts.
I... don't know about that. I reckon lots of folks rather read the comments at HN than the piece itself.
The journalistic 'style' of journalistic pieces seems 'too fiddly' for some, and even 'infantilized' for other people. It's a matter of taste and I'm sure this style is set as standard because it works, i.e., pleases the majority of readers.
I have an interest in this bacause I accidentally studied a bit (one of my majors shared some of its credits with the Journalism program at my college).
The things people dislike, as I see them:
1- Giving context through elongated prose or "fluff", instead of straight to the point facts.
Some people would just rather have a list of the games Synergistic worked in instead of the five first paragraphs of this piece, for example. Also: "Blizzard’s protests fell on deaf ears. CUC was determined (...)" vs. "Blizzard protested but CUC did not comply".
2- Using examples when they're not needed (for that audience). Explaining what happened of relevance in the 70's for someone who was _there_ during said period, for example.
3- Nonlinearity in telling the story. Going back and forth on quotes from different people. Presenting the controversy kinda like a conversation. Makes the editing clear and some readers reject pieces where it's clear some stuff was left out or is out of order.
Anyway, maybe I've written too much about this. In any case, I really do believe that, in this age of personalized content, there are enough people who reject the 'journalistic style' to warrant publications that actively avoid it.
Something tells me that folks like Jason Schreier or Patrick Klepek or--in a different sort of way--Jeff Gerstmann are actual industry insiders. Despite being, hisssss, journalists. Maybe we shouldn't play the dismiss-it-out-of-hand game.
Also doesn't qualify due to being written by a 'journalist' but Blood, Sweat and Pixels is a great book. Has a lot of behind-the-scenes stories / vignettes about your favorite games of the past couple of years. Was a very informative read.
For real. I got a strong whiff that the author had little to no familiarity with Sierra or Dynamix and the cult adoration their games and creators had.
Somebody should make a dramatized documentary about the making of diablo. It's discussed like every 2 weeks on here, somebody should make a documentary.
Off topic: the cookie acceptance dialog that polygon uses is broken. It shows a spinner and doesn't disappear. Why does this even need a spinner? I'm seeing similar behaviour on multiple websites now, it's infuriating.
The user is only given one option here, to accept tracking - the website isn’t even trying to be GDPR compliant, apparently they do not foresee having any EU visitors and so have no need to be. As a result, I’m not reading the damn thing.
If you make money off E.U. citizens, you should comply with E.U. laws. Simple as that. If you don’t want to comply with the laws of a country, do not make money off people there.
Diablo 3 was far from a failure as it broke a number of financial records; the main problem was the game-design pitfall of basing a loot-based game around the Real Money Auction House. (which they fixed in the expansion)
In a way the Diablo 3 RMAH helped validate the modern freemium/gacha business model for mobile platforms.
Diablo 3 sold 3.5 million units the first day and 30 million units total as of 2015, so I'm not sure by what metric it would be considered a failure... aside from "I personally didn't like it"?
The relevant metrics would be daily/monthly active useres (DAU/MAU) and churn rate. But Blizzard doesn't report those number's unless they're good (e.g. Hearhstone/Overwatch hitting new record MAU last year), and hasn't ever released any such numbers for Diablo 3.
This article[0] claims Blizzards overall MAU was close to flat YoY-Q4 2016-2017, knowing that Overwatch and Hearthstone are hitting records high MAU, while overall MAU is flat means that the other games (D3, SC2, HotS) are losing players.
It's a success in the way Matrix Revolutions was a success, massively profitable[1] yet a disappointment to fans (see diablo 3 fan ratings[2]).
That's an arbitrary statement. The only relevant metric is revenue outside of whatever bars you would like to matter. Over time, units sold is a poor return and D3 was disappointing against every prediction beyond units sold. It was a disaster, in comparison to the recurring success of PoE.
> The relevant metrics would be daily/monthly active useres (DAU/MAU) and churn rate.
This metric doesn't really make sense for a (mostly) single player game like Diablo. Once the player has finished the game they're unlikely to return. For a game released six years ago of course we would expect the current active player base to be very small - most of them have since moved on to other games.
The fact that D3 outsold D1 and D2 combined suggests that while it might have been disappointing to some subset of players, clearly they managed to find a much bigger audience that enjoyed the game nonetheless.
You are still comparing sales to game engagement and longevity.
You also need to shrink the amount of D3 sales to compare it to D1/D2 sales because the game market has grown wildly since they released. Then adjust that because it was a sequel a decade in the making.
It's like comparing the star wars sequels to the original films. The nominal values are way bigger, but if you adjust them for inflation they might tell a different story.
I think it's hard to find an objective measure, given that there are so many franchise fans that solid sales are basically a given - I wouldn't expect to see the consequences play out until D4.
That said, the fact that they rebuilt the absolute core gameplay loop - loot collection - to incorporate a real-money auction house, and had to roll it back, speaks volumes. Business-people do not abandon a monetization strategy unless it's proving to be costly in unintended ways.
The "consequences" were the sales of the $40 Reaper of Souls expansion to Diablo 3; if players were so put off by the core gameplay loop, even the removal of the RMAH wouldn't bring them back.
Many Diablo players have said they will never play another game in the franchise afterwards. I know about 5 people who bought it, played it for a few hours and promptly returned it for a refund. For some the laughable event of leveling up and having nothing to select or choose even if you went into the options menu and enabled the "Advanced Level Choices" option was a far cry from the enjoyment of getting your first level in D1/D2 and seeing all the choices you had.
Diablo 3 is a good game with alot to recommend it. It wasn't ideal at launch, but they've worked out the kinks and it's still fun to pick up and play.
I think the problem is that Diablo at launch was a test bed for some of their other properties so it ended up with some bad ideas. The RMAH (for example) was a bad idea, but it helped to point them to the right direction in their F2P and other monitizing approaches. The way they handle auto-generated maps and monsters is used quite a bit in the changes they've made to WoW as well as some of their talent choices.
I think for alot of hard core RPG fans, Elder Scrolls and other similar titles do a better job of hitting the sweet spot as they support alot more long term character growth and have a bigger world. But Diablo 3 is still great for people who want to just beat up some pixels and enjoy a little gothic storytelling.
Really? From my read of the article it seemed like most of the staff at Blizzard was incredibly immature and the kind of folks that bury their heads in the sand while ignoring reality.
And just to double down on my unpopular opinion, Diablo 1 was the best game in the franchise.
That is a bold statement, but I am inclined to agree. Obviously D2 is bigger, prettier, has more varied classes, more items, more everything. I absolutely adore that game, and I have spend hundreds and hundreds of hours playing it.
But the original... It just has that darker and more grim, less cartoons tone. Plus it came out when I was 10 years old, which obviously influences my opinion a lot.
I was 9. It's one of my favorite games ever. I lost interest in D2 pretty quickly, but I still come back to D1 every few years. I made my wife play it too and after about an hour she was hooked and became inseparable from the computer until beating the game a week or two later.
Reaper of Souls and loot 2.0 really redeemed Diablo 3.
The season 14 tier ranking video has 350k views in 2 weeks[0], which is great considering patch 2.6 is essentially 3 seasons old now and RoS is several years old.
I honestly don't know, I remember there was some clause where one promises not to sue then there's a payout for accrued PTO and severance which could be all standard boilerplate but not an expert on any of that. IIRC the founders of the studio got fired the day their employment contract expired and then Blizzard North got taken over by the guys from Blizzard HQ, then everyone at Blizzard North all had to re-interview for our jobs, first the IT guys so they could lock out everyone they were firing/laying off and what not.
Yes. To elaborate better, I would imagine most of the people involved probably want to be able to work in the industry again (or are still working in the industry) and are not independently wealthy and are keeping mum about the details they know. At least back then Blizzard the company was pretty secretive and we had to get approval for any media contact - it's probably like any larger organization, everything you see in the media is already pretty curated. The GDC presentation Dave Brevik tells about the Diablo 1 development process is extremely consistent and he's an excellent story teller - I heard almost the exact same thing in abbreviated form during my lunch interview more than 10 years before that and at some other candidates lunch interview when I went to that candidate's lunch as the interviewer.
Using the name and legacy of a good game to market a different game that is basically nothing like its predecessors in spirit. Diablo 3 is Jar Jar Binks to the original Star Wars trilogy.
They did the same to SC2. It was like the summer interns that wrote the plot had never actually played SC1.
(yes, I'm salty that I played through a huge chunk of a single-player campaign chasing "prophecies" in what had previously been a sci-fi setting, even if it was 50s psionics sci-fi).
I was working at Cyberlore as a playtester when Blizzard pulled the plug on the Warcraft 2 expansion. It was baffling to us all. They never explained why, to us anyway. All these years later, to read that they felt the work was subpar is a surprise. We tried to get more info, but all we got was "Decision is made. Hand over all assets." We just thought it was some kind of internal political struggle.
These days everyone does agile, so these kind of big expectation mismatches don't happen so often anymore. In theory, anyway.