They ain’t getting a dollar or of me. Didn’t buy D4, what a toxic, problematic company. I miss the classic Blizzard I grew up with, but that comany, it’s talent and passion died in '08.
After everything that’s come out about their work culture and the naked cash grab micro transactions games they are making now, I’m sorta baffled by those still buying Blizz.
There’s been a few studios from former Blizzard employees. Just yesterday I got an update about Stormgate which is being made by Frost Giant Games. There’s also Dreamhaven, Gas Giant Games, and notorious studios.
I’ve always known blizzard to be like this, although I didn’t really game until around 2010.
The first thing that comes to mind was/is the World of Warcraft subscription cost that still doesn’t include all of the expansions. A base subscription is almost $200 CAD/year alone. They are also now selling mounts at $32 CAD each. Personally, especially if I was paying $200 a year, I wouldn’t want to be pushed to pay even more money for content.
Part of me kind of wishes that I could have seen the era you’re talking about.
It was great when they made Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. I played way too much Warcraft and Warcraft 2, and Starcraft and Diablo were “forbidden fruit” for me since my parents didn’t like M games.
World of Warcraft was the beginning of the end for the Blizzard I used to know. Starcraft 2 started throwing in MTX BS, Hearthstone went full force into MTX, and they just kept adding it to all of their games. If it was just World of Warcraft, I’d give them a pass, but they’ve shown a clear pattern of poor behavior.
They went from being probably my favorite studio (either them or LucasArts; honorable mention to Sierra and Westwood) to being one I actively avoid. Pretty much none of my favorite studios exist anymore, and most of those that do have either changed immensely or have been absorbed by a terrible parent company. The 90s was a magical time for video games imo, lots of great, smaller studios.
Warcraft 3 was great aswell. After completing the campaign, jumping on battle.net for custom games was the most fun i could have back then. Some incredible games on there. It was the bithplace of dota and was what popularised tower defence games thanks to things like pokemaul. There was a full dragonballz rpg with custom character models and it worked really well. So much quality on the custom game bit. And it was all free. (Aside from buying the base game)
World of warcraft though. I dont think i can agree with you. Paying subscriptions was not fun but that game used to be amazing. At the time it was the pinnacle. No mmorpg could compare and none were as popular. And it stayed popular for years. There are very few modern games with the staying power wow had. It was regularly updated, it reflected player feedback, their wants and needs in all its updates. It had real challenges, it spawned so many memes (granted they werent memes at the time)
I played it a lot for a few years. Until it started releasing expansions which cost even more money. Im paying monthly and so are millions of other players. Now you want to sell me an expansion and call it a full game. Burning crusade was ok, litch king was pushing it but beyond that it was basically heres a new place to explore and everything you have done up to this point is irrelevant as there are common green items that are better than you legendaries. Your max level max geared paladin is worth shit now and can be stomped by a level 61 in greens. Nah. No thanks. Then they got so far into these expansions they just reset the base game and made that 1 to 60 grind a cake walk. They even made it so you could skip it all. All the content they spent so much time on, that made the game popular is just a skippable footnote.
And now to top it all they are selling “wow classic” which is the original game with no patches and they have been slowly releasing those patches so the nostalgic amongst us can experience that og game all over again. They can point and say, “hey, i remember that. Cool.”
I probably would’ve liked Warcraft 3, but I dismissed it since it focused on heroes instead of the RTS feel they had with the first two.
And yeah, my wife loved WoW at a kid, but eventually it got to be too expensive for the time she had to spend with it (i.e. when she went to college). I personally never really liked MMOs so I didn’t play WOW (had friends that did though), but I did my time with RuneScape. I mostly played FPS and RTS games, and Blizzard games fit pretty well.
I think what happened is that WoW was so successful that Blizzard got addicted to making money instead of making good games. So over time, their focus on making their games more profitable made them less and less attractive to me. I think I played Hearthstone for two weeks until I realized how much of a money grab it is, and I just stopped carrying about their other games. They lost what made them special to me.
They ain’t getting a dollar or of me. Didn’t buy D4, what a toxic, problematic company. I miss the classic Blizzard I grew up with, but that comany, it’s talent and passion died in '08.
After everything that’s come out about their work culture and the naked cash grab micro transactions games they are making now, I’m sorta baffled by those still buying Blizz.
Did the blizzard people start a new company?
They must’ve gone on to something better.
There’s been a few studios from former Blizzard employees. Just yesterday I got an update about Stormgate which is being made by Frost Giant Games. There’s also Dreamhaven, Gas Giant Games, and notorious studios.
Nice! Thanks for the info
Many have just retired early. They made bank.
I’ve always known blizzard to be like this, although I didn’t really game until around 2010.
The first thing that comes to mind was/is the World of Warcraft subscription cost that still doesn’t include all of the expansions. A base subscription is almost $200 CAD/year alone. They are also now selling mounts at $32 CAD each. Personally, especially if I was paying $200 a year, I wouldn’t want to be pushed to pay even more money for content.
Part of me kind of wishes that I could have seen the era you’re talking about.
It was great when they made Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. I played way too much Warcraft and Warcraft 2, and Starcraft and Diablo were “forbidden fruit” for me since my parents didn’t like M games.
World of Warcraft was the beginning of the end for the Blizzard I used to know. Starcraft 2 started throwing in MTX BS, Hearthstone went full force into MTX, and they just kept adding it to all of their games. If it was just World of Warcraft, I’d give them a pass, but they’ve shown a clear pattern of poor behavior.
They went from being probably my favorite studio (either them or LucasArts; honorable mention to Sierra and Westwood) to being one I actively avoid. Pretty much none of my favorite studios exist anymore, and most of those that do have either changed immensely or have been absorbed by a terrible parent company. The 90s was a magical time for video games imo, lots of great, smaller studios.
Warcraft 3 was great aswell. After completing the campaign, jumping on battle.net for custom games was the most fun i could have back then. Some incredible games on there. It was the bithplace of dota and was what popularised tower defence games thanks to things like pokemaul. There was a full dragonballz rpg with custom character models and it worked really well. So much quality on the custom game bit. And it was all free. (Aside from buying the base game)
World of warcraft though. I dont think i can agree with you. Paying subscriptions was not fun but that game used to be amazing. At the time it was the pinnacle. No mmorpg could compare and none were as popular. And it stayed popular for years. There are very few modern games with the staying power wow had. It was regularly updated, it reflected player feedback, their wants and needs in all its updates. It had real challenges, it spawned so many memes (granted they werent memes at the time)
I played it a lot for a few years. Until it started releasing expansions which cost even more money. Im paying monthly and so are millions of other players. Now you want to sell me an expansion and call it a full game. Burning crusade was ok, litch king was pushing it but beyond that it was basically heres a new place to explore and everything you have done up to this point is irrelevant as there are common green items that are better than you legendaries. Your max level max geared paladin is worth shit now and can be stomped by a level 61 in greens. Nah. No thanks. Then they got so far into these expansions they just reset the base game and made that 1 to 60 grind a cake walk. They even made it so you could skip it all. All the content they spent so much time on, that made the game popular is just a skippable footnote.
And now to top it all they are selling “wow classic” which is the original game with no patches and they have been slowly releasing those patches so the nostalgic amongst us can experience that og game all over again. They can point and say, “hey, i remember that. Cool.”
Deplorable company.
I probably would’ve liked Warcraft 3, but I dismissed it since it focused on heroes instead of the RTS feel they had with the first two.
And yeah, my wife loved WoW at a kid, but eventually it got to be too expensive for the time she had to spend with it (i.e. when she went to college). I personally never really liked MMOs so I didn’t play WOW (had friends that did though), but I did my time with RuneScape. I mostly played FPS and RTS games, and Blizzard games fit pretty well.
I think what happened is that WoW was so successful that Blizzard got addicted to making money instead of making good games. So over time, their focus on making their games more profitable made them less and less attractive to me. I think I played Hearthstone for two weeks until I realized how much of a money grab it is, and I just stopped carrying about their other games. They lost what made them special to me.
Do you know the names of the people who made what you like? Maybe if you follow them and not the company brand you find what “died”.
Ghostcrawler is heading up a new MMO, probably a couple years out though
Not sure what Jeff Kaplan is up to, probably retired and I wouldn’t blame him