[llmthrow102]

They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons that don't actually look any better, added some realtime shadows that don't fit with the style of the game, and called it a "Warcraft 3 2.0".

Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.

I buy all games on GoG when I can, especially classic games, but new ones as well. It's so nice to just have a collection of DRM-free installers, and be able to support a company that does right by the classic games.

[smolder]

Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short term gain.

Maybe companies should consider limiting their growth to stay nimble enough to provide value and stay viable. Maybe they do more good by being good at what they do than by chasing peak profit and diminishing their brands. Either way, Bobby Kotick was a bad CEO.

[raxxorraxor]

Same experience as an employee really. Want to work for a healthy company? Join a private one. It is of course no guarantee and there are exceptions as well, but there certainly seems to be a trend.

[izzydata]

At least when it comes to artistic endeavors like video games it makes sense to be small. I find that the more you turn art into a massive assembly line the less passionate the product becomes. If the goal is quality art than massive growth is not the way.

Unfortunately the expectation for modern games is this near infinite scope which requires several years to complete and way too much money. If your game is required to be this large then you either need a huge team or decades of time from a small time.

So I believe that the larger the game the more likely it is going to be devoid of passion and artistic value. I'd prefer game studios to split up into many smaller studios and make more smaller games.

[0dayz]

Nope, it started waaay before that.

* The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public

* real id debacle

* Diablo 3

* shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3

* spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump

* x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled

* spent years trying to create a dedicated moba, and hots came out after the hype of the genre was gone

* Cancelling semi-experimental games (the Warcraft Point'n Click Adventure game, the Starcraft: Ghost game, and many others[1])

I'm sure there are more issues/fuck ups blizzard did, the point though is that the company couldn't adapt to the new norms of the industry (some are excusable due to the fuck you money wow gives) and thus became the black sheep.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4...

Certain games on that list tbf is way past 2008.

[donatj]

Don't forget their handling of Overwatch.

Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one.

Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions.

The day they launched Overwatch 2, they entirely shut down the Overwatch 1 servers. Something they had said earlier on that they were not going to do, before they later changed course. They took away the game I loved, the game I paid for, and replaced it with a junky free-to-play game dancing around in its skin like Edgar the Bug in Men in Black, all "Look at me, I'm still Overwatch, pinky promise", but anyone with a sense of taste can tell it really isn't. They ruined it.

Literally all my friends played Overwatch. My wife was in an Overwatch League. I don't know a single person who stuck with Overwatch 2 for more than a couple weeks. My wife's entire league just shut down.

I hear people play it but I sure don't know anyone. I would estimate mostly people who never played the original? Left such a sour taste in my mouth that I am hesitant to ever give Blizzard money again.

[wongarsu]

Don't forget they nearly killed Overwatch by barely supporting Overwatch 1 while they worked on Overwatch 2. But when they finally released Overwatch 2 there were barely any changes from Overwatch 1, except for the season pass system and a switch from 6v6 to 5v5. Apparently most of the development time was spent on single-player content that was first delayed and then cut entirely

[aniviacat]

The issues with Overwatch 2 were fixed. All heros are available for free; you can get the season passes for free (the free pass includes enough premium currency to buy the premium pass); you can get most skins for normal currency and you can get the mythic currency for the mythic skins by playing the battlepass.

There are still a few skins you can't realistically unlock without paying; but that doesn't ruin a game. Overwatch in its current state is great.

[xeonmc]

Your wife was in Overwatch League? Is she Geguri?

[valenceelectron]

They added insult to injury to the 2.0 upgrade by releasing promo material (supposedly screenshots) [0] that looked exactly like what fans wanted from them. Turned out, those were fake and they quickly removed most of them and what they actually did was a bad AI upscale instead.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/1gr3win/how_to_m... They had images like that on their website but removed them later.

[jmyeet]

All true. For anyone unfamiliar, WC3 Remastered also did two other things:

1. It changed the ToS so Blizzard owns the IP rights to any third-party maps, effectively killing this community. Why? Because of Dota 2. There was a customm mode called Defense of the Ancients ("Dota") that somebody took and basically created the MOBA genre. Blizzard decided to sue and lost. They tried to create their own (ie Heroes of the Storm) but the space came to be dominated by League of Legends. Blizzard didn't want a repeat of that. Ridiculous; and

2. WC3 Reforged ("Refunded" as it was commonly called on release) also made the original game worse even if you didn't have Reforged. The game downloaded a bunch of assets you didn't use. It broke compatibility with some maps. I think there were a bunch of other problems too.

More [1]. Some of these might've been fixed by later updates now.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_...

[hulitu]

> Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.

Oh, Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs.

I tried AoE 3 on Steam (demo). It was a total disaster. Downloading was slow and then the game: At the first start would not let me build barracks (no suitable place found).

At the second start it was hard to found the baracks again (all icons look the same - Windows style enshitification) but the peasants will not harvest berry bushes.(bugs) They made the UI much worse. The playground is round. The icons look the same so one has to look at tooltips to build a house. All in all a crappy experience. I guess i will stick with AoE 2.

[fifticon]

my child insists, reasonably, on playing minecraft, so we must endure the microsoft launcher ui stewardship for mc. what a hot mess of bloated bureaucracy-software-dungheap. It is as if even their installer has an installer and a loadscreen. Consider if you, gosh, want to continue PLAYING EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS LAST NIGHT. The launcher design response: ouh, i did NOT expect that! Please wait while we reauth and 2FA and sync your account and download and reinstall your game client.. wait a minute.. hmm, on second thought, Im not SURE we can just let you continue the game from "last night"..? oops, no wait.. WE CAN?! I swear there is more code in, and people assigned to, their crappy bloated launcher, than to the game itself. Ironically, their store features are so buggy I often dven cant manage to buy their DLC theft-as-servjce stuff.

[pjmlp]

> Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs.

In the past I would have complained, but as someone that has foolished invested into UWP and WinRT siren song, I can't but fully agree.

[Gud]

Frankly, as an avid AoE 2(now DE) player, I wish they hadn’t.

AoE2 is slowly losing its uniqueness with each update.

The new matchmaking sucks, can no longer select which map to play on ranked, pathing is broken in new ways.

Don’t get me wrong, the new civilisations are nice, just kind of hoped they wouldn’t have done a total revamp.

[patates]

It feels like the movement in the community is also slowing down. One of the most popular streamers T90 for example, has had less and less views through the last years, a reversal of a long trend upwards.

They also added easier ways to do things which were giving competitive edge to the players who could efficiently do them the hard-way, perhaps reducing the motivation to train further for the top players (why train to do hard tricks if they could be automated by the game later).

[unethical_ban]

DE?

I didn't know AoE2 was getting content updates or balancing. I thought it was the same game, locked in. I notice aoe4 has seasons and rebalancing... Not sure how to feel about it.

[portaouflop]

I used to be the biggest fanboy - buying everything they released without hesitation.

But their treatment of Warcraft III opened my eyes - the company I fell I love with that produced quality games no matter what does not exist anymore.

So long and thanks for all the murlocs…