How much Activision does it take to change a Blizzard?

It has a whole lot of words but doesn’t actually say much.

That’s what I thought. It masquerades as a deep dive but in reality it basically just says “lots of people are leaving Blizzard.”

Considering Blizzard’s best games were from a studio that wasn’t even Blizzard to begin with and hasn’t been around for well over a decade…

I guess I just never really cared about Blizzard South.

WoW remains an awesome game to this day if you sign up for each expansion, level up consuming all the new content one single time, then immediately quit.

The last crowd of “ex-blizzard” devs who formed their own studios didn’t turn out so well with Hellgate and all.

It didn’t, but Hellgate remains a game I really really enjoyed and wish there was a sequel to. I really wish it had another 2-3 months to bake before EA pulled it out of the oven.

I mean, Hellgate was like a thousand years ago and would have been awesome if if if if if if if if

Great promise, lousy execution, misleading pre-game promotion. The game that was released had a totally different tone than what was shown in the trailers, and that really irked me. Two to three months more were not going to save that game.

Could be, but it would have made the difference for me. I really enjoyed the hell (no pun intended) out of that game, the only thing that dragged it down for me were the bugs, missing/busted chat, and other issues like that that could have been addressed with a little more time.

My friends and I are still waiting for a FPS Diablo like that. Destiny, Borderlands, Warframe, etc. all have certain things going for them but none of them hit the mark like Hellgate did for us.

I do think there’s a “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” aspect with that society/that type of gamer. This is why buying power is something they’ll do shamelessly, whereas in Western culture, there have been games where folks have gotten griefed for buying DLC. (Fallout 76)

If they want to make money on D3, give me the option to buy some damn stash tabs instead of needing to grind out an achievement in a season.

I admit that I played it a lot also, mainly because I bought the hype and didn’t have anything else at the time to play. My complaints were the following:

  1. The tone was awful. The pre-game marketing showed a devastated cityscape with a grim, dour battle for human survival. What we got was something very different. With one exception the subway hubs were all bright and airy - no sense of an apocalypse going on outside - there was only one that was dark and grim looking, with sandbag defenses and guards all around. One part of the main quest was into the mind of someone (can’t remember now) and was full of lame juvenile attempts at humor. That wasn’t uncommon either. One female vendor greeted me with the following line - “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” So many people complained about that so it was taken out and new lines added. Another quest was to help a fellow hunter out romancing his girl friend.

  2. Reflecting it’s attempts to try to be an MMO, many quests were pretty lame, just kill and fetch. "Demon so and so has insulted character X, go collect 10 of demon type Y in revenge. Far, far too much content was go to A and collect B number of demon horns, etc.

  3. I don’t remember the main quest making much sense, it seemed truncated when I got to the end, it seemed like something was missing (like KOTOR 2).

All in all, I was very disappointed in what was delivered vs. what was promised.

Of course, there is a version on Steam if you really feel a need to scratch that itch :) And I too would like to see a sci-fi FPS Diablo clone.

More of the same reporting, basically.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-03/-blizzard-2-0-storms-in-to-make-the-games-blizzard-no-longer-wants-to

I’m not going to bother learning the names of all these studios yet. Let them put out good games first. From that article, I was surprised at the number of studios mentioned though.

The premise is basically correct, VC is looking to invest in gaming and Blizzard vets seem like good candidates. Combine that with Activision knuckling down and people are ready to strike out on their own.

Holy shit.

Yikes

Yeah that’s a real problem, right there.

Conceivably the state of CA would not file a lawsuit unless they investigated the allegations and Activision failed to respond appropriately.

In which case, double yikes.