Looks much more like a mass style change - someone decided to change all instances of “all enemies caught within the blast/area/effect take…” to “damaging all enemies caught within the blast/area/effect for…” and while cutting & pasting to ten different spell effects, the editor didn’t notice the second clause.
to be fair Blizzard has put out at least one game or an expansion every year since 1994 until 2004, the year WoW appeared. hopefully they’ll regain their stride and churn out games yearly again.
here’s a fresh mini-rant - they removed the loss stat from Starcraft 2! i understand their goal of encouraging casuals and replicating the ‘levelling up’ experience in RPGs. however, to totally remove (as opposed to hiding it in the UI somewhere) access to the loss stat? er..
Here’s “what’s so great about Blizzard”:
Blizzard has tons of money. They had enough early successes and enough business savvy to be able to get the capital to play the “we’ll release it when it’s done” game. That’s not their virtue. Do you think other game companies DON’T care about their games, and intentionally release them in a buggy, less than polished state because they don’t really give a rat’s ass about the product they spent months if not years working on? Of course not. It’s that unlike Blizzard, which is effectively, at this point, running on infinite cash from World of Warcraft (and even before then had the capital to drag their feet nigh indefinitely), virtually every other game company has a finite budget, many of which verge on the shoestring, and frequently have publishers breathing down their necks about promised deadlines.
Nobody LIKES releasing unpolished, buggy games. But most companies can’t afford to hold their games back for years just because they’re not 100% happy with how they are working out. And frankly, I think that there are companies that could do a better job than Blizzard does with the amount of resources Blizzard has.
Now how did Blizzard get into this situation in the first place? Honestly, I’m not familiar enough with the company’s history to really make an informed decision, but it’s not like they’re the only company in the industry that was crewed by gamers passionate about making good games. In fact, back when Blizzard was still new to the field and before they had their first run-away money mill game (StarCraft, really.) I think you’d have found that companes that WEREN’T a bunch of gamers passionate about their games were in the very small minority, so that’s not it. So how did they do it? My guess is that they were in the right place at the right time. And now they’re pretty much in the right place all the time, so they can do pretty much whatever they want.
Blizzard and Valve are the two companies I can think of can do that. And considering the resources at their disposal, I don’t think they’re doing anything particularly special.
Yes, other gaming companies (it’s more pressure from the publisher than the developer) absolutely do place a higher priority on getting a game out on time than having it be good from the beginning. You see this over and over again for games that are broken ass upon release but they really want the profits to show up in the right quarter so they release it anyway.
Blizzard could cash in all the time with $40 expansions every other month like EQ, or release broken content just to have it around for the Christmas rush, or whatever - and they don’t, while most other publishers do. How is that not something they should be praised for?
Because you are conflating publishers and developers. Most DEVELOPERS would like to work on their games until they are DONE and glorious and shiny works of art just like Blizzard does, but they ALSO need to EAT, so when the money runs out, or the PUBLISHER says “Your game will ship by Christmas or it will not ship at all” they release it as a pile of crap because that’s better to them (some sales, at least) than not releasing (and therefore closing up shop entirely. Which still happens in a depressing number of cases.)
Blizzard is functionally EXEMPT from both the “publisher breathing down their neck” phenomenon and the “Sorry guys, but if we don’t ship now, no one gets paid next week” phenomenon because they have a Scrooge McDuck pile of money. So praising them for not falling prey to pressures that don’t exist for them is pretty lame.
Blizzard doesn’t avoid $40 cash in and broken Christmas releases because they’re somehow more virtuous than other developers. They avoid them because the pressures that drive other developers to do those things don’t exist for them.
If you want to talk about PUBLISHERS, then yeah, they’re all pretty much interested in making a quick buck, but when you get down to it, they’re not comparable to Blizzard either. Because they don’t MAKE GAMES. They pay other people to make games. Blizzard is a developer, and should be compared to other developers.
Well, it’s irrelevant. When you buy a blizzard game (they are their own publisher), you know they’ve worked the game into a polished, playable state. When you buy a non-blizzard game, very often you get a mess that needs 4 months of patches before it’s any good. Why should this not be counted as a positive towards Blizzard?
They could still cash in and release half-assed games for less dev cost if they wanted to, and they don’t.
And you’re getting cause and effect reversed here to some degree - the reason blizzard is in such a good financial position is that they have a history of releasing great products and people buy their games because of it.
There’s no way you can spin “when you buy a blizzard game, you know it’ll be a quality product” into not being a positive. EA and Activision (well, unfortunately now that’s Activison-Blizzard) have enough money that they never have to release broken games, but they do, because they prioritize short term results over quality and long term results. They deserved to be criticized for doing it, and blizzard deserves to be praised for not doing it.
You left out WoW: Burning Crusade, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King and WoW: Cataclysm.
Those were “expansions” but they significantly altered the game and added in as much new content as the first WoW had. You also don’t account for all the content brought to the games thru free patches. By my reckoning, the two companies output is very close.
Well said in both your posts, Senor.
But there’s no need to put them on a pedestal and talk about “Oh it’s because they’re gamers who love what they’re doing” either; That’s just unfair to all the other people in game development. Maybe they are and maybe they’re not, but that’s not why their games are highly polished.
I call them lucky, rather than good. They were in the right place at the right time with the right product (StarCraft) and that has made their lives EASY since then.
Do they make good games? Yeah, they do. Are they a magical company that does everything right from the pure virtue of their gaming passion? Uh. no.
Who’s saying they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts?
They’ve decided that releasing a quality product, even if it takes longer or costs them more, is worthwhile because it’ll ultimately pay off. I wish more companies had this philosophy instead of just trying to shove broken shit down our throats to meet the next quarterly earnings goal.
All of those big publishing companies (and most of them have their own dev studios too) except for Valve rush stuff out the door to meet their short term financial goals, regardless of how broken it is. They could be like blizzard, but they’ve decided the short term benefits to cashing in at the right time are better than the long term benefits of having customers trust you to make quality products. Blizzard IS unique - they could cash in on WoW by making half-ass expansions every other month or put out half-done games, just like everyone else, and they choose not to. That’s laudible.
You have some sort of insane grudge against them if you’re saying they’re “lucky” because they made high quality, wildly successful games loved by millions of people who allowed them be their own publisher and make the games they want to make, putting more time and effort into quality than is the industry standard. They should be praised for this and I wish the whole gaming industry worked like that.
I’m pretty sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Blizzard makes a good product, but they don’t make singular products. Their timing has been impeccable and as a result they are in an almost incomparable financial position. There are plenty of other successful and financially solid gaming companies but most of them have far more franchises and corporate masters they need to appease. Blizzard hitting the lottery with a couple of it’s first products allowed it to essentially be autonomous. This is as much a result of luck as it is skill. Like I said, their games aren’t so unique or special as to be entirely unaffected by the whims of the market. They’ve resisted being greedy, this is because of the corporate structure they have and the success that allowed it and because of their ideals. Airk is correct that this isn’t altruism but simple pragmatism. If Blizzard didn’t have the constant stream of revenue that WoW generates you can be sure they might have to compromise some of those ideals when it comes to releasing new products. That said, being somewhat lucky isn’t a negative. They made a few very good products that far exceeded any reasonable expectation and they were wise enough to not let that spoil them. Kudos indeed, but I’m not sure that makes them truly “special”.
If trying not to release half ass products and milk their customers for all they’re worth isn’t something to praise, then you wouldn’t think any less of them as a company if they released $40 expansions for WoW with just a little bit of content every 3 months?
Yes, they’re a big company, and yes, they have some freedom to do what they want. So does Activision and EA and THQ and ubisoft - yes, those are publishers, but they all own development studios, so they’re actually not all that dissimilar to blizzard in that way now. And none of them have the “we’ll release a good product when it’s done, not rush it out for quarterly” profits ideas. It’s not like Activision or EA is going to go broke if they don’t make that Q2 deadline - they just might worry their stock prices may not rise by as much as they hoped and management won’t get as big a bonus.
No idea how that’s not a plus for Blizzard over the rest. Even if they were lucky to get where they are, the point is that they are where they are, and they could exploit it for some short term screwing over the consumer for a few bucks like the rest of the industry does, but they don’t.
You keep banging at this. I don’t think anyone said they didn’t deserve praise. They are a very good company that generally does right by it’s customers. That’s what the word Kudos means. We’re just saying that the deification goes to far. They aren’t morally infallible and their success isn’t solely a result of any high minded ideal.
When Blizzard made it’s bones it was in a different position. Blizzard seemed like they were able to dictate terms to the publishers while in the case of EA and it’s developers it was EA who had the upperhand. Publicly held parent companies have quarterly reports and stockholders to answer to and presumably debt to deal with. With EA, they probably had a lot of debt because of all the acquisitions. Perhaps Vivendi wasn’t ever in a serious debt position and as a result was never pressured to lean on their developers. We’ll see if that changes with Activision or not. Either way, you can’t just say that Blizzard and EA are in the same position. Complex corporate structures are at play and as publicly held companies deadlines are critical pieces of earnings statements. If Blizzard didn’t rush out a game it’s largely because Vivendi allowed them to set their own timetable, not because they had some idealistic ethos that Bioware lacks.
If anything Blizzard is an argument for why publishers and developers shouldn’t be one and the same the way Ubisoft and EA generally are. Take Two is an example of publisher that seems to employ a more hands off policy towards it’s developers the way Vivendi seemed to operate. Long story short, the reason Blizzard was able to resist the pressures that other developers cede to probably has less to do with their ideals and more to do with leverage.
It is a plus. No one is saying it’s not. But you keep implying the everyone should be able to do what they did. That’s overly simplistic and probably unrealistic. I’m guessing that EA Los Angeles doesn’t want to trot out a unpolished MoH game but if EA says that it needs to be done it needs to be done. If EA promised their shareholders a big 2nd quarter on the back of a new MoH release you can bet that that game will be released it at all possible. Blizzard wasn’t forced to do that, they weren’t the boss but they had the leverage or their parent had the foresight to be patient. In any case, Blizzard had freedom that other studios lacked. That’s important and it goes beyond ideals.
What’s all this talk of altruism and idealistic ethos? I didn’t even mention that stuff.
From the consumer perspective, the thread is asking why people like blizzard over other companies. They can count on blizzard to provide quality products at the time of their release, which is spotty for most of the rest of the industry.
This is valid reason, by itself, regardless of whatever motivates blizzard, to like them more than other devs and publishers.
It’s not a necesary part of their argument, but I do happen to believe they have doing right by their customers as a primary consideration when that seems lacking in the rest of the industry. But even if you ignore that, there’s plenty of reasons to praise them for what they’ve actually done, and what they offer to the consumer.
Well, you called out Airk. He basically said that Blizzard was financially and practically capable of doing what most other game developers wish they could do. I suspect that this is accurate and true of the majority of developers. Blizzard has the money and power to be idealistic. Blizzard absolutely should be praised for this and people justly prefer their games. But, it’s not a result of them placing a higher value on their consumer than other developers. They just have freedom that other developers lack. When you say:
You imply that the rest of developers are indifferent at best to their customers. That’s not realistic. Every developer wants it’s customers to be wildly pleased with their product, but they want to pay their employees and not get fired by their publisher more. Developers who release subpar games are either less skilled than Blizzard or are on impractical deadlines set by bean counters and stockholders. They aren’t less interested in pleasing their customer.
I called out Airk because he essentially says this isn’t deserving of praise. But it is.
Regardless of what you view as altruism/profit/dev pressure/whatever, if you have 10 game devs lined up and asked people which people thought was great, Blizzard would get a greater share of the praise because their products are good, regardless of how we got there. They put out good products, in an industry where many or most of the players don’t. This, in itself, is a reasonable answer to the question “What’s so great about Blizzard?”
I guess there’s ambiguity introduced with the status of developers vs publishers. Blizzard is both a good publisher (why the fuck they merged with their antithesis, activision, I have no fucking idea) and a good developer. So part of what makes them praiseworthy is their actions as a developer.
But there are plenty of relationships in the gaming industry where the developer and publisher are the same organization or a dev can self-publish, and few if any have a consistent track record like blizzard.
He didn’t say anything like that though. He said they were rolling in money and that’s all that made them special. He never said they didn’t put out a excellent product that was worth buying, he just said that they aren’t fundamentally better people than those other developers.
That’s an answer to what’s great about Blizzard, sure. Airk was going a little deeper as “WHY they are great”. And I agree with him that it has a lot more to do with practicalities than with compassion for the gamer. This isn’t a criticism of Blizzard.
Blizzard has never been an independent entity. They are a subsidiary of Vivendi which was merged with Activision. Blizzard didn’t have a say in the matter. The risks of being publicly held.
I don’t think they have more compassion for the gamer. I do think they have more understanding of the game.
Before WoW came out, I remember reading an interviewer with their lead designer. The exact details have escaped me, but he said something along the lines of, “We looked at a lot of MMORPGs, and they were like an outdoor park, a place where you could meet with other people to have fun. We decided to make WoW like an amusement park, where there was always something around to do to have fun.” They tweaked the underlying metaphor of the game, in other words, in a way that made the experience a lot more enjoyable to a lot more people.
I think they do that a lot: they figure out what they need to do to add fun to the experience, and they do it. Lots of other developers try, but few are as good at it as Blizzard.