Intrested noises
That would be fudging hilarious.
Hey, Windsor was actually pretty alright MMO that came out in recent years and had a good potential. It just wasnât able to sell itself to the large audience.
Turns out all the doom-sayers who were angry with Activision werenât so far off the mark as some of us thought.
Not that there was much point - it wasnât a fight we could take.
But here it is, being taken.
Iâm very interested to see where this is headed.
WildStar was a great game as an MMORPG - it had a lot of the elements such a game needs to work - but with one crippling flaw: It didnât feel snappy and good to control your character.
Thatâs an instant death sentence.
Not sure.
I can definitely see the increased business presence in Blizzardâs games over the recent years. But then again, thatâs the same across the industry.
And I still donât feel Blizzardâs ability to squeeze more money out of me is having a negative impact on my gameplay experience. For the most part. But they walk a fine balance that doesnât leave much room for error.
I think most of the Activision problems are still.internal and mostly affecting the employees, not the gamers. Yet.
Maybe, nothing that couldnât have been fixed though. There have been mmorpg existing with far worse character control and lived longer, different times different needs I guess.
CDPRâs days are numbered. Enjoy it while it lasts. As it is yet another publicly traded studio funded not by its own sales, but by investors, itâs bound to end up in the same trap as Activision and EA. The reason why EA and Activision fell from grace is that their corporate structure relies on infinite market expansion. CDPR has the same structure, they just havenât hit critical mass yet. They can still expand. But at some point, theyâll be unable to expand further, because infinite market expansion is a lie, and then theyâll become like EA or Activision.
This is my fear for this new studio. If they decide to build from nothing and be debt-free (which is possible, just takes years to build the studio structure and funding model), itâll be great. If itâs yet another studio whose business model is âtake debt, then pay it back with interestâ, Iâll curb my enthusiasm. Iâm sure theyâll produce some great games, but yeah⌠Iâm not a fan of debt-based game development anymore. Itâs all rotten.
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Absolutely couldâve been fixed, but they didnât before the game crashed and burned. 
I definitely think it has.
Old Blizzard wouldnât have allowed Warcraft 3 Reforged to release in that state. No way in hell.
Old Blizzard wouldnât have neglected the MMORPG elements of the most famous MMORPG in the world.
But yes, Iâm sure the real butting-of-heads was going on internally, and I imagine it has been extremely fierce. One does not leave a company that one has been building for 28 years, only to found a new one just like it, unless something dramatic happened.
And with this kind of loss of talent, we will notice it eventually - even if new talent replaces them. I promise you. Even if the games donât get worse, theyâll change radically.
The game died because it was a hardcore raid or die mmo and provided little to no content for the casual crowd. Itâs just not possible to design a niche game and expect a huge success nowadays.
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Oh yeah, I will agree with that one. I had blissfully forgotten that. 
Eh, not sure. Design-wise I think WoW is pretty Blizzard-esque through and through. The business model for the game is a field study in criticism, but gameplay design is old Blizzard to me.
Sure. Iâll throw in that Allen Adham is there now, so theyâve kind of exchanged one founder for another, which is both funny and odd and crazy. 
But yes, Blizzard are a humongous company that feeds on cash to survive, so thereâs only one way itâs going to go.
Iâm a fan for as long as they make great games. So weâll see how long that will be.
And of course, if some other companies make absolutely amazing games of their own that I want to sink a silly amount of time into, then I can quickly become a fan of other game developers. Iâm just not seeing those right now, and WoW still does it for me. For now.
Thatâs because they were obsessed with making it for the hardcore crowd, which is why I dislike the whole âweâre composed of ex-Blizzard employeesâ thing, because then they try to be different opposed to being better.
Quite a few of them seem to be from Hearthstone.
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A lot of them are ex-lead developers at Blizzard, i.e. they lead the development on some of Blizzardâs existing games, and then they left their teams and went to work on secret projects at Blizzard. Like Dustin Browder who was the top guy for both StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm. He worked on a secret StarCraft FPS game that ended up getting canceled.
It feels like a lot of these ex-developers are people that have gotten their projects scrapped, and then being left in no-manâs land with their old positions taken by new guys, theyâve quit the company. Itâs either that or accept a lower position on an existing project, like Jay Wilson did when he left the Diablo III team as Game Director and joined the WoW team as Lead Designer (and then quit entirely afterward).
Taking that step down the ladder is perhaps difficult for some, so they step out entirely instead.
On the flip-side, one major criticism of âold Blizzardâ was that they didnât present new and talented developers any room for advancement in the company, because all the top positions were held by the same old folks for ages. So they had horrible talent development.
Now some of all those old developers are leaving Blizzard thereâs opportunity for young and innovative developers to advance to higher positions.
And I think thatâs a good thing.
Great games tend to be made by fresh blood with new ideas, not old veterans who hold onto old learnings.
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Thats why we will play Legion 3.0 another 2 years? Coz we blizzard have fresh blood with new ideas? Oh wait, maybe WC3 reforged new idea too? Oh cmon, there is more and more market store managment rule the companies like blizzard, not devs and their great ideas to do great games. Creative studios are dead, only 1 last CD-project RED atm for all around the world.
Most indie companies are super creative. Iâm Danish and Iâll certainly highlight Playdead (Limbo, Inside) as an example.
Can Blizzard be creative in the same way? Sure.
Their juggernaut triple A games will be standard bread & butter, because thereâs too much money on the line to take big risks. Thatâs the way of triple A games, also for other companies.
But their smaller projects, like Hearthstone, is an excellent example of taking a small team and giving them free reigns to explore and reinvent an old genre â even if itâs mass appeal and family-friendly.
Rob Pardo who founded Bonfire Studios has used Hearthstone as the model for his company structure. Small team, multi-talented developers, high creative freedom, concentrated design, etcâŚ
Nah, while peoples paying for the same game with same ideas every one/two years, its not. Fifa, NBA, WoW, CoD, BF, tones of remastered old games and so on. Little effort with max profit.
As long as they listen to feedback all the way through, they got my vote.
Something that blizzard forgot. Tried to do in shadowlands. Left it half way and went back to their own âTrust me, Itâll workâ method, which never works and never worked.
Both yes and no. It died because it not only went super hardcore in a sudden difficulty spike, yes, but it also died because once you tried to get into it, you got steamrolled by the lag and poor controls.
Nowhere close to it. Iâve spoken to a few old WoW Class designers and theyâre all really unhappy with the current state of WoWâs class design.
Maybe itâs a âThey touched my baaabyyyy :â(â syndrome, but they reason it so well I donât think it can be.
Iâll never understand why he came back. He shouldâve gone with them.
I think what WoW and Blizzard have always done well is to make complicated games accessible to the masses, create amazing worlds, and offer long term support and development.
Seems smooth and running to me.
If youâre a millionaire and youâre bored you might be inclined to want to âfixâ your old company. Sort of like Steve Jobs and Apple, maybe.
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I donât consider WoW to be accessible right now. At all. It practically erects a wall that is nearly insurmountable. Even Preach, who made a video series about this 3 years ago, had problems getting into the game when making a new account.
Okay well⌠he arrived to make mobile games.
I think his heart was in the right place, but was his mind?