What went wrong?

Diablo 3 becoming online-only.
Starcraft 2 having zero lan.
The scrapping of titan.
Turning Wow, an mmorpg into an mmo.
wow throwing away old expansion content instead of keeping it relevant.
Hearthstone having a release cycle that is only feeding the nolifers.
Overwatch becoming multi-only.

diversity hires and the old guard retiring

I'm probably older than you, but okay. That shit was never fun.

If they get Dragons Dogma 2 right I could them see them cementing themselves as a top critically acclaimed AAA developer. They are on such a hot streak.

Activision, duh

Complacent boomers phoning it in for their 401K and their kids' college funds on the one hand, diversity hires on the other.

What went wrong was that WoW got too big. The game peaked during Wrath where they were pulling in around $180 million dollars a month from a single game. The company's ego inflated so big they thought they could do anything and not suffer for it. Blizzard has the mindset that they are right and the players don't know what they want other than to buy and consume Blizzard's products. Hearthstone proved to be a good cash cow and Overwatch blew up well when it hit. The only game they released that did poorly was HotS and it was a game released too late into an over-saturated market of MOBAs.

In their exaltation they saw themselves as infallible gods of gaming. Almost anything they did seemed to work but they ignored any criticism and started making countless bad choices.

Diablo Immortal was announced at a bad time and in a horrible way. BFA wasn't doing well. Overwatch was becoming forgotten fast. I'm not even sure if people play SC2 and Hearthstone anymore outside of streamers. Diablo hadn't seen anything new in years and they mentioned to expect something new at Blizzcon. Despite a poor effort to tell people not to be too excited, people were looking forward to a Diablo 4. I honestly don't know why, especially with their record with all of their games. But to see the only news about Diablo is a switch port and a phone game was a huge middle finger to the fans. More so that its just a reskinned Chinese phone game. They could have at least shown a fucking jpg of the gothic font of "Diablo 4."

What the fuck happened to the company that would spend years polishing a game before announcing anything about it? Why are they buying Chinese phone games and reskinning them as their own? As a fan of their products, I hope this really burns them. I want Blizzard to suffer hard. They need to know they fucked up an they need to feel it.

Even if. You can argue Blizzard split their fan base with WoW but it is their flagship title but still had a solid company when they released SC2.

How can I refute the "it's just cosmetic" argument?

this

/thread

shit went from being games to being products a long time ago

No kidding. If you had told me 5 years ago that Blizzard, Bioware and Bethesda were all going to shit their pants and have all their series die in fire but CAPCOM would go through a redemption arc with a Resident evil 2 remake and actual DMC5 + a Next gen Monster hunter playable on PS4? I'd have punched you in the fucking mouth.

Its not even that hard to fix for them, just make diablo 4 properly, make the next wow expansion good, release an expansion for overwatch, do a good job on wow classic.
They already have the IP's they just need to sit down and do stuff properly again.

unfortunately they are instead trying to release all their IPs onto mobile :/

The Lost Vikings

Seriously. Play this game and then come back and tell me Blizzard has not ALWAYS been a shit company with shit games.

They have NEVER been able to balance competitive modes.

If you had unlimited money and time to make a game, would you get anything done in a reasonable time? No. You would have bullshit meeting after meeting and suddenly 2 years would've passed with nothing but whiteboards and post its filled with scrapped ideas on the walls. After 6 years of nothing you become so disillusioned with your project ideas like 'let's have Deckard Cain killed by a saturday morning cartoon villain butterfly woman in a 30 second in game cutscene' actually sound good and you roll with it.

Activision
Diversity
e-sports
Phones

Blizzards current state is a relatively common thing, when you look at it from a historic perspective.

It is very much like the rise and fall of empires. They start with noble intentions, and interesting ideas, thus earning the good will of people, who in turn lift them to heights otherwise unattainable. What follows is a series of events that could be seen as a sort of expansion. Ideas are re-iterated. Newly found associates form bonds with the empire until it is at its absolute height. But like every greater formation of people in history, empires are brought down first and foremost by their own inflexibility. Remaining with old fashions for too long and refusing to adapt to new levels of technology or different forms of social commerce leaves empires often with nothing else but conservation of the given. Thus the interest fades and, depending on how violently the empire pushes its own relevance into the foreground, it may eventually earn the animosity of those that once supported it.

You can find several great examples for this in history, the most prominent one being the roman empire with its state's apparatus eventually being misused by a series of tyrannical rulers, building on the principles of a military state that was long gone at the time.

Equivalently Blizzard built on the MMORPG genre for too long, using a beloved idea they came up with almost 30 years ago. Now that ain't a roman empire, but it's a long time in the business world.
Essentially it is what is taking them down. They tried to stay relevant with Overwatch - the first new franchise in over 10 years - and are now falling out of favor with those that once supported them by "violently" trying to stay relevant with Diablo Immortal.

The ideas are old. People are no longer interested. And Blizzard got inflexible, always relying on old material.
It's a classic fall of an empire. They could stop it. But they probably won't. Not because they're unable, but unwilling.

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>No kidding. If you had told me 5 years ago that Blizzard, Bioware and Bethesda were all going to shit their pants and have all their series die in fire but CAPCOM would go through a redemption arc with a Resident evil 2 remake and actual DMC5 + a Next gen Monster hunter playable on PS4? I'd have punched you in the fucking mouth.

Since when is high Metacritic score indicative of quality? Blizzard, Bioware and Bethesda haven't been good since the early 2000's.

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I don't want to say this but I think nuCapcom is a company with a half measure philosopy. I replayed RE2make multiple times and I realized you can never get stuck, even on Hardcore. DA always helps you out and every boss fight has enough resources to let you beat the boss. Megaman 11 has the shop that trivializes the game if you use it since you can always farm for bolts. DMC5's demo showed overpowered moves like buffed Enemy step and slow gravity buildup. It's kinda reminding me of DmC's piss easy difficulty. Everything feels handed out without any challenge. They're quietly pandering to casuals as to not put people off. Feels like a half measure to me.

Shitty business management and predatory business practices. Treating your fanbase like braindead cattle probably didn't help either.

>They're quietly pandering to casuals as to not put people off. Feels like a half measure to me.
As opposed to what? Their past games? Classic RE for example, supposedly a survival horror series, lets you safely retreat to the inventory screen to spam healing herbs to your heart's content.

Also, to all the people complaining about how they dumbed down Monster Hunter to appeal to casuals, let me remind you of how previous MH games were designed:
>Dude let me just take 4 steps to the left and warp zones where I can disengage combat and heal and sharpen at my own pace lmao

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Going public

Ignoring this retard, it was Activision and Vivendi.

Nothing went wrong. Blizzard cares about Chinese players, being in good terms with the Chinese governments and switching to smartphones at the expense of desktop gaming. They've been doing great so far.
tldr

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wise words desu

Modern AAA vidya can't be hard anymore or else it won't reach the wide audience and won't sell

Activision bought it out

SC2 was (narratively) the mark of the end. The gameplay may have been solid but the writing team was shit. A sign of things to come.

they would have died before they even released warcraft if they didn't sell themselves.

There are a few things that went wrong. First things first, the company wasn't ready to handle a world wide sensation and had to grow quickly to handle WoW. This prevented the company growing in a healthy organic way.
The other reason is because the company got big enough where the average staff member couldn't argue against decisions since management had to deal with too many people.
The other reason is that the original talent either left or grew up into people with no time due to family obligations. The original dedicated gamers are dead and the company is instead left with people whose main inspiration is within the past.
The only thing blizzard have left is iteration, the only problem is that they have gone from a company that polishes great ideas into a company that polishes turds.

I won't call blizzard a bad company, but they have lost their original status into just being another company that releases games.

Classic RE didn't hold your hand every step of the way. Monster Hunter didn't need to gimp combat and getting resources because it became a open hub world. This is the next step to that philosophy.

That's wrong though. Dark Souls has been gaining alot of success. Every new entry is gaining more sales. For casuals that usually do one and done playthroughs, How well will they remember DMC5 if they just beat it easily? Will they even look forward to the next installment? Seems like a flawed design and business practice. Both of these games aren't even that hard after learning the mechanics so I don't know why DMC5 has to gimp it's difficulty.

>How well will they remember DMC5 if they just beat it easily?
What do you mean "IF"? DMC games don't even let you play on the higher difficultites unless you repeatedly beat the game on easier difficulty modes to unlock the higher ones, at which point most players have already tuned out. The series was always heavily aimed at being as accessible to casuals as possible.

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>Dark Souls
Not AAA

>Not AAA
By what metric? Souls games sell more copies than Bioware games for example, and those are considered AAA.

Burning Crusade was just as bad.

DMC always had a starting difficulty with a semi steep learning curve. Both the original release of DMC1 and DMC3 both had punishing damage from enemies and high health. Phantom and Cerberus were known filters until the rereleases. DMC4 broke this tradition but continuously enemy stepping and snatching was a gained skill, not something as easy as in the DMC5 demo. You would know that if you weren't such a zoomer.

commie game design

>solid company when they released SC2
Did you already forget the whole deal about releasing it as 3 separate $60 campaigns?

insatiable thirst for ever-expanding profits

your life

It wasnt as epic as Brood War. I liked Wings of Liberty but I never played any of the expansion packs for me it was Blizzards last hoorah. Im not digging the Warcraft 3 remaster when I still have no problem with still playing Frozen Throne.

World of Warcraft and Project Titan.

Specifically, World of Warcraft gave them a fuck ton of money so they were pretty much able to coast and not develop anything for almost a decade besides WOW, by the time WOTLK came out all the talent in the company moved to Project Titan, leaving the infamous team 2 to keep WOW alive.

Then after about 5 years of developing Project Titan it was shitcanned by kotick and all the talent was forced to work on projects they didn't want to, specifically D3 to get in on the microtransaction market.

This caused the mass exodus of the remaining talent of the company over the next 3 years, Metzen, Pardo, ect who have all retired, or started their own companies.

Pardo is the big one, since he was the lead designer for most of blizzard's most successful games, and it shows as he left WOW with TBC, and came back and launched Warlord of Draenor before quitting blizzard entirely.

Now the company is run by a bunch of team 2 people who pretty much can't develop a game if they wanted to.

>Rob Pardo
Funny how WOW was in its golden era before he quit with ulduar, and when he came back to to launch Warlords of Draenor, the game spiked back up to WOTLK sub numbers again, only to sharply drop off as soon as he quit.

>sjw
>LGBT
>twitter
>women
>reddit

You cant. Theres literally nothing wrong with optional cosmetics.

>Even with the content drought and half the dev team fired HotS is the only Blizzard game that doesn't suck right now

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Kotick is cashing out and torpedoing actiblizz for acquisition.
Mark my fucking words, within 5 years EA is going to be owning the lot and Kotick is going to be a billionaire.

>WOD
Then this happens to be the worst expansion to date. Confusing cause I thought MoP was the nail in the coffin but actually ended up being a decent expansion. Pretty sure pvp vendors still in MoP?
t. Vanilla player quit at the start of Cata came back for BfA
The absolute state of the game now is garbage

Cutting HOTS off the esports train is actually a good thing.

Esports is a cancer, it leads to no fun allowed hyper "balance" that isn't really balanced at all.

When HOTS was pushing for the esports scene they ruined a lot of the game's mechanics which lead to it becoming like LOL's retarded 'blink and you die' meta game.

WOD's launch was solid, it was the absolute lack of end game content to do that ruined it.

And that's Ion Hozzikostas' department

Well they still cut the dev-team with it. We still don't know the extent of this since they're still pushing out assets they were probably already almost finished. Who knows how much development will slow down now?

And I agree that Esports shouldn't have been pushed so hard, but when the cats already out of the box, and you THEN decide to cut it again and shows that you have no confidence in our game, and it turns the few pros you had away, which in turn take players with them. It feels like the suits at the top are setting the game up for failure before having an excuse to shut the game down by the end of the year.

Yeah, just look at that winglet Imperius as compared to Tyreal's glorious wings. They slightly fixed it but still look like shit, they forgot to fix the wings of his skins.

>finally release Imperius after killing the game
>make him a winglet

WHY

>WOD's launch was solid
t. wasnt there for WOD launch days
ah yes i forgot, beeing unable to play at all(queues in the 10k regions) or beeing bottlenecked by a single quest is good design nowdays

>WOD's launch was solid

>Massive queues in the thousands to get in
>When you get in there was no guarantee you'd stay connected for an hour
>People could wakeup, get in queue, go to work, come back, and still be in queue
>Players had to resort to entering low level dungeons to be constantly attacked by a mob so they never get logged out
>This went on for over a week

WoD launch was abysmal.

A decline is not the same as these companies actively setting their franchises up to die. Blizzard has effectively murdered everything they still had, sans maybe Hearthstone, for instance.

*dabs on women and minorities*

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Activision

I remember when they straight axed Titan because it wouldn't hit the Blizzard mark of quality. I wonder where that fucking philosophy went.

Everyone responsible for their good games left.

You're an idiot, Titan was axed because Activision didn't want another looter shooter to compete with Destiny.

Axing Titan was in name only. They took all the work and reused it for overwatch, so it was less scrapped and more “we need to shakeup the project organization and fuck some people over on credits”.

He quit before wod was released. I doubt he did much on it.

all the og gang left.

Warcraft made billions. They hired a bunch of people to keep development going, and never came up with a plan to wind down development, so now you’ve got zombie developers making a zombie game.

It’s the problem with making something too successful. You make something, expect to double your money on it. You make 10 times. You sell your stake in the company to some guy who thinks he can get 10 times return on your next project. Turns out catching lightning is hard. Guy gets pissed your next project only earned 5 times it budget. You fuck off because you already sold your shares and have limited personal stake in how well things go.

They don't like toxic people.

Only suits and programmers remained, all developers left.

It's still making tons of money. WoW isn't going to die.
It's the 7th game in terms of revenue on PC.
If you take in account the fact that it feels like it's developped by 10 people, the profits must be huge.

>"From a pure hardware side, we weren't prepared. From the standpoint of how fast people were getting to max level and are we going to have content in place for them; we weren't prepared. We never really experienced what it's like to be on a game that never ever ends," adds Pardo. "In a lot of ways everything starts the moment you launch, which none of us were really mentally or emotionally ready for the difference, because again a lot of us had shipped games and you go through that final moment where you launch this thing and it's finally out there. Honestly, the first two years of post-WoW development was really this perpetual state of 'Can we just catch up to the popularity of the game?'"

jesus fuck

And they kept saying we were not prepared...

They have always been shit, people forget that WoW used to be the equivlent of what Fortnite is today.
A super popular casual game with cartoony graphics mostly played by kids and young teengares.

Just like we look down on Fortnite players today we used to do the same with WoW, even

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>WoW used to be the equivlent of what Fortnite is today.

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This is true. It was the most normy thing (especially with that south park episode) back in the days.
Then it was LoL.

sorry to burst your bubble but if you're nostalgic for WoW today it's the very exact same thing as someone if someone is going to be nostalgic for Fortnite 5 years from now.

Playing WoW was even more of a normalfag thing than CoD and Halo.

youtube.com/watch?v=D1vF3-BsoxE

No, Halo was the Fortnite of that era.

If anything POE is the WOW of this era.

>game popular bad

WOW wasn't normie at all, halo and COD was normie shit.

PC gaming didn't become normie until league, minecraft, retro indieshit, and f2p cancer became a thing.

>What went wrong?
Activision was foolish enough to buy out Blizzard from Vivendi and left it to its own devices. The rest is a history of diversity hires and the typical liberal cancer of California.

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They didn't learn anything from the story they created.

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Mildly obese beareded hipsters that aren’t particularly good at anything elgettibg job positions. Those types that probably sit on faggot ass reddit acting like the giant pussies that they are.

>WOW was more normalfag then COD and Halo

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>WOW wasn't normie
yes it was, even my bully chad played it.

>I still have no problem with still playing Frozen Throne
the hope is that reforged will bring back the custom game glory days

Never releasing WarCraft IIII

>"No king rules forever, only death is eternal."

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>When Allen Adham left Blizzard, Rob Pardo had become the vice president of game design at Blizzard, tasked with overseeing several projects. When Wrath of the Lich King began development, Blizzard finally had enough lead designers that Pardo could move further into management and away from design. The brunt of day-to-day development for Wrath of the Lich King fell to game director Jeff Kaplan and lead designer Tom Chilton. Kaplan's title on Wrath of the Lich King was new in the company, though it was really just a new classification of the work lead designers were already doing within Blizzard.

>"It was really during Lich King that I was transitioning into more of a design guidance sort of role rather than day-to-day. Lich King really shipped under Jeff Kaplan as game director and that was first time we ever used that title in the company," says Pardo." In the Lich King, you're starting to look at modern day WoW development. Everything before then I think was catch up, catch up, figure out how this works, learn, learn, learn."

>In the Lich King, you're starting to look at modern day WoW development

Wrathbabbies blown the fuck out by pardo himself.

Retard.

The custom game glory days are already back on WC3 now that dota is a standalone game now.

WC3 reforged is only going to ruin it with bnet 2.0 integration, and will probably replace the glorious custom game list with the shitty lobby based system that makes SC2 custom games unplayable.

>anything that isn't realistic is cartoony
When will this meme end?

The artstyle is literally that of a cheap KR MMO.

>IIII
Based Activisionposter

>>sorry to burst your bubble

>"If you disregard factor A, B, C, D, E, and F and make a really superficial comparison, X and Y are LITERALLY, L-I-T-E-R-A-L-L-Y the same MIND=BLOWN"

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ok thanks for the clarification, i now believe that everything that isn't realistic is cartoony

This. Like Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park;
"...It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it you had--you, you patented it, and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox. And now you're selling it, you want to sell it!"

Marketing and investors becoming the driving factor.

>fortnite is popular
>wow was also popular
>therefore they are the same game
blizzdrones btfo, how will they ever recover?

They still haven't made my wife real.

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>Blizzfags are wojak posters
makes sense.

Both of them are/was super popular with kids, both of them are casualized compared to the other competitors in the same genre, both are marketed and catered towards the biggest mass(normalfags and kids).
Want me to go on?

they thought it would be a good idea merging with the hell hole that is activision

They had games before WoW that were definitely good. Starcraft, Warcraft 1, 2 and 3, Diablo 1 and 2, Lost Vikings. They definitely used to be good.

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their marketing strategy blew up in their face.
They have always relied heavily on emotional marketing and binding their fans not only to their games, but to their brand "Blizzard".
That 's why Blizzcon exists. To make happy memories with friends, all connected to the name "Blizzard". Blizzard fans have invested a lot of emotional capital in this company and have stayed loyal through some shitty times due to sunk cost fallacy. But now Blizzard has ignored them too much and even they are starting to turn against them. And all the emotional capital means the anger and intensity of the outcry against Blizzard is a lot bigger than if they just used "normal" marketing

Jeez user im just agreeing with your genius comparison, there is no need to convince me any further.

Great comeback, now I feel so stupid.

You forget how both games utilize mouse and keyboard, both games use WASD for movement and the mouse for camera control, both games are online games, both games are in third person, both games have sound, both games need to be installed on your hard drive, both games require breating to play, both games exist in this timeline, both games are games etc.
I don't see the point in arguing anything other than WoW LITERALLY being the Fortnite of Fortnite.

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Are you actually retarded?

Seriously, how the FUCK does one go from
>Warcraft III
>WoW Vanilla/TBC
>Diablo II
>Starcraft I

to
>BfA
>Hots
>Diablo III
>Starcraft II
>Overwatch

Has there ever been a bigger drop in quality? From 9/10 and 10/10 games to literal garbage.

>because wow was not a shitty korean grindfiesta p2w slave game with no endgame means its a worse shit

>WoW Vanilla/TBC
>10/10

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What endgame did WoW have? Raids like every single other MMO at the time?

>anime reaction pic

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>BIizzdrones hate anime
Color me surprised.

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>liking vanilla wow is blizzdrone tier

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>wojak reaction image

>liking wow

Reminder that people who like Mecha both belong on Yea Forums and also don't post ugly weebshit reactions

Fuck off

well designed and balanced dungeons and raids compared to other mmos.
classes were more balanced than any other mmo.
actual world pvp, 3 solid battlegrounds.
you didnt needed to pay money or leech or grind 20 hours a day to get to max level and to get decent equipment to do endgame content.

Blizzard has WOW which brings them a stable monthly funds,this makes them less interested in venturing into new IPs.
Same for Valve,really.

>Make a faction specific expansion
>Both sides still fight the same bosses in a raid based on a city invasion

>Old, talented Guard left or grew old and lost focus through the massive success
>Newcomers are not as talented and most of them are diversity hires and women that didn't actually earn their position
>Merge with the greedy jews at Activision
>Ultimately they can not/don't care to create new interesting storylines, game features and characters but rest on their past successes trying to make bank through greedy practices and feeling the need to inject IRL agendas to their games

Plus, MMOs are in decline compared to the past decade and are in dire need of re-inventing themselves. WoW has become archaic compared to modern games from many aspects.

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t. panda baby

DESU i would've believed the part about Bethesda

Let me guess, you didn't evne play a single other MMO than WoW at that time?

what kind of magic is keeping her coat skin tight right under her boobs?

>Games lead by David Brevik and Rob Pardo
vs
>Games lead by Jay Allen Brack, Jay Wilson, Jeff Kaplan

WotLK wasn't the peak, WotLK was already the death of the company. TBC was the last good product Blizzard released.

That and them having a majority of braindead cattle for fans don't help them either the way I see folks defend blizzard on forums for anything bad they do is disgusting no wonder Blizzard has no interest in improving themselves.

the fact that the picture was initially drawn nude

What was their last single player game again?

hows that an excuse for being lazy?

purge wojaktards off this website, please

call them shitsucking morons fine with subsidizing parasite's lives
that money ain't going to the devs and it overall makes your user experiance a tiny bit worse
so it's indefensible

World of Warcraft
that's what went wrong

WOTLK was the peak of subs, which flatlined at the beginning of the expansion.

I want to impregnate her

it brought in the least amount of players and stagnated, hardly a measure of quality. it was riding vanilla and tbc (and wc3)'s coat tails really hard

deal with it you fragile sissy
seems like it hits a nerve so I'll keep using it

character looks are part of the game, they make the game better if you have the ones you want, makes game more enjoyable
so them stripping out costumes from the core game just so they can sell you them is detrimental to your enjoyment