“Blizzard Botched Warcraft III Remake After Internal Fights, Pressure Over Costs”
Not a great week for Blizzactivision.
Really odd was they had a blizzard sale a few weeks ago, and WC3 Reforged was about the only thing not on sale.
With the insane gobs of money Activision/Blizzard has its ridiculous they should ever need to rush a product or whine about it’s cost, especially with a remake. I have a feeling Starcraft 2 will continue to be the last Blizzard game I ever play.
“WC3: Reforged is Blizzard’s first bad game”
I’d argue it was Diablo 3, their first game built entirely around a shameless business model.
WoW came out before D3. :)
Plus the auction house was fascinating. I ended up getting D3 for ‘free’, more or less, due to selling a couple of good drops for actual real spend-anywhere cash. I don’t know if I miss it, exactly, and its hard to extricate it from the other problems D3 had at launch, but I don’t think it’s right to say either that D3 was a bad game (bad endgame, sure) nor that the AH was exclusively the cause of what problems it did have.
D3 wasn’t a bad game even at release. It was polished to a fine sheen and fun to play. It was, however, deeply flawed to its core because the gold auction house informed item drops and short circuited the core progression mechanic of an ARPG-- the best way to become powerful was to farm gold and buy stuff off the auction house, and since it was a shared market for each region with hundreds of thousands of players, it was an extremely efficient market with low prices for all but the very best items. This felt bad.
Despite all the doom predictions and such the real money AH had no appreciable impact at all. It’s the gold AH that killed it.
Focusing on the auction house’s effort to monetize a horribly broken loot system is one thing, but the real crime to me was how broken its end game was. Higher difficult levels were a joke, and I remember one of the devs saying they cranked it to where internal testing couldn’t beat it, then doubled the difficulty, because “our amazing players will find a way.” No one found a way.
It took a good year or so before D3 was a good game.
IMO, it took a year before D3 became a great game. A triumph. An all time legendary game, a worthy sequel to D2. That’s a high bar.
A little longer than a year. The PC version came out in May 2012. The excellent console version came to 360/PS3 in September 2013, helmed by Josh Mosqueira, who made the console version quite different. And then he became the director of the PC version, and a lot of those changes were brought over to the PC version slowly. The auction house didn’t shut down until June 2014 or something, and the addition of adventure mode wasn’t until 2014 either, most of those changes came with the release of Reaper of Souls expansion in March 2014.
“It took 1 year, 10 months, and 11 days for Diablo 3 to become a great game” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as smoothly, but sure.
They did actually find a way, though it certainly wasn’t what Blizzard expected and didn’t exactly make for a ‘good’ game. After awhile people just used e.g. the demon hunter’s invisibility stuff to run past everything and loot chests instead.
I just recently played through it and I can’t bring myself to agree to that high praise. It’s a good game, I certainly played it for years, but for me its shift away from the gothic tones of the first two dragged it down. I can still hear the music and other sounds from D2, the mood that game invoked, but for D3 there’s nothing like that there. Which is why my biggest hope for D4 is a return to D1/2’s ambiance. Sure, I want solid gameplay mechanics, character build options, and a great loot system, but if it fails to evoke a feeling similar to that of the first two games I’ll probably categorize it alongside D3.
So I picked this up to try out some Warcraft 3 for the first time in decades.
Setting aside all the drama and problem around it - what a wild game. I had forgotten how weird the balance between was. It’s like … dueling refrigerators. Everything is so clumsy and unwieldy.
And they spent so much money upgrading the graphics… to look exactly the same, or worse, than the original graphics? The music also seems somehow worse? So odd.