Bethesda, BioWare and Blizzard all gone down the toilet
I guess the lesson here is to name your software company something that starts with a B so it will explode in popularity, you can sell it and run off into the sunset while the fans get to live on in a dystopian corporate hellscape.
My son owned the original and did not buy the reforged. He says the original is gone and he can’t play at all now. So unless he is mistaken you do have to buy reforged to even be able to play which makes some of the other things bliz is saying confusing. Hopefully it is a temporary thing and once they are done “updating all versions” he will get to play again.
You don’t have to and you can’t re-buy or reinstall anything. The pre-Reforged client is just replaced with an inferior one.
Blizzard made the game that killed Blizzard, effectively.
Basically Warcraft 3 created Defense of the Ancients by allowing modders to very easily make simple but meaningful gameplay changes with triggers and scripting conditions, because Blizzard always included map editors with their games, and in Warcraft 3 they threw in some scripting tools to help modders out, because it was still the good old days and nobody imagined the concept of DLC. The base units of DOTA are all ripped directly from characters in Warcraft 3. Modders changed their skin colors sometimes and renamed them to be like “ice princess” or whatever, but the root art assets and effort all came from Blizzard.
Somehow in ways that i still don’t quite understand they weren’t able to assert copyright over these modded assets and so DOTA was able to “escape” the clutches of Blizzard, units and art assets and all, to become its own thing. At the same time League of Legends popped up and basically CC’d DOTA, which had CC’d Warcraft 3. The rest is history.
When they announced Starcraft 2 they proclaimed there would be a “modding store” so that modders could submit maps and get paid for their mods. Clearly, Blizzard/Activision was trying to kill two birds with one stone there. Of course these mods were open ended, which meant they could use non-Blizzard generated assets. Lawyers must have within miliseconds of the announcement pointed out that it would require Blizzard to validate the copyright of every single non-Activision asset in every single mod posted. Without any fanfare and apparently forgotten by the gaming press, the modding store was shelved and never spoken of again.
Now Activision is terrified of another DOTA, so in the rerelease of War 3 they point out that any mods - gameplay or otherwise - are going to be entirely the intellectual property of ActivisionBlizzard. Better to kill a potential new DOTA than allow it to kill off Blizzard again.
The most popular versions of Dota that used Blizzard assets were never commercialized by their developers, they were intended to be maps hosted on Battle.net in accordance with WC3’s EULA.
When Valve made Dota 2, they did not use any Blizzard art assets or engine code. Blizzard nonetheless sued Valve over the ownership of the “DOTA” trademark, but they settled out of court.
No, obviously they didn’t use the actual art assets or code, but the likenesses and appearances of the units, which came directly from War3.
It’s a bit like an animation studio making painting Mickey Mouse blue and calling it Rickey Rouse.
I assume that Valve deliberately modified heroes’ appearances and names to the point that they would no longer infringe on the copyright for the Warcraft 3 units. Blizzard has never tried to sue them for copyright infringement.
demake
the more I read about this whole thing the angrier I get
and I love being angry
Is there anything common between the 2 versions like cross play maybe? Otherwise I came understand why they’d want to consolidate code from a 20 year old game with a new release and have to support a bunch of people who didn’t pay for it.
Don’t we have a gazillion clones of games out there. If it’s not a literal copy, who really cares? I mean copying has been around for a long long long long time. Hey let’s go check out DC and Marvel. We can match those characters up like Mirror Universes.
There is cross-play between the two versions.
Well that probably explains it. No good deed goes unpunished.
Starcraft remastered managed crossplay without fucking up though (iirc?), so, uh…
My understanding is that Starcraft: Remastered was developed for Battle.net 1.0, whereas Warcraft III: Reforged was developed for Battle.net 2.0. This meant they had to update the original Warcraft III to connect to the new server platform to enable cross-play, whereas the original Starcraft did not require such a substantial change.
That term has a specific meaning. It’s not this.
Hahahaha, oh you.
“Concerning Warcraft 3: Reforged, honestly, it’s been a bit of a hard week. Our community has come to expect really amazing things from us, and we’ve heard from them that we did not achieve that bar,” Brack said.
“But we stand behind our games, and have consistently shown that not only do we support them, but we continue to build on them even after launch. And we’re committed to doing that here as well. We’re going to continue to update the game, and we’re going to continue to update the community with our plans going forward.”
Is there some compelling reason that guy is still the President of Blizzard? Feels like the old blizzard ship has been spending more time on the reef than in the water under his stewardship. If I were on board I’d want a different captain the third time we crashed into an iceberg in a fiscal year.
As long as he wields that hair he is invincible. Only a Delilah can save the company.