Has there been any information as to why those were so screwed up, compared to other blizzard titles? Blizzard used to be on my "buy everything they make you can trust it to be good" list but Starcraft II knocked them off that and Diablo 3 made me rather dislike them.
I know the Diablo 3 performance issues weren't picked up in the open beta stresstest - because I played that and the performance was good enough to make be buy the game after being hesitent to buy an online-only ARPG when I live in Australia.
What really shocked me in Diablo3 were some really simple programming mistakes that never should have passed Q&A or even be implemented in the first place.
Like one where you could change your local computer time and affect the auction house online to cancel your account at will and get the money bidden on these items.
They either had to finish the product on a tight schedule and did not focus on core aspects of the game or they had no real talent on the project. But this has probably something to do with the day Vivendi took over and they had to deliver ROI at any cost.
WoW is still a first class game but we will see if they are able to convert enough of their player base to Titan. But it looks like the brand name is starting to lose value.
Do you really consider SC2 a screwup? Remember, SC1 was far from perfect as well when it came out. The only blizzard game that was perfect right from release IMO was warcraft 3. SC2 might not be their best, but it is still a really great game. So I can't really follow that SC2 bashing.
Can't talk about Diablo3 though, that series never interested me.
SC2 wasn't terrible. I think a lot of people were angry (and still are) about the state of custom games, which were a lot of fun for a lot of people. The implementation in pre-Arcade-patch SC2 was so bad that only ~15 maps were ever played. Post-Arcade is better but still misses the mark in several key areas.
I think it shows that (a) the staff is being manipulated by upper management, who doesn't understand what made Blizzard games good in the past or (b) the turnover has been so high in this industry that the designers and developers themselves don't know what made these games great.
