No looking for game feature after 4 freaking years. Activision has this in all of their competitive games on day one, so this is on Blizzard’s shoulders. And don’t get me started on Mei.
to be honest, the future doesn’t look bright anymore
Most games don’t live forever. Actually the normal state of affairs is for games to peak at launch and then decline over time.
WOW’s expansion may be disappointing, but for a game that launched in 2004 it’s still doing okay. Certainly better than Everquest (1999), Star Wars Galaxies (2003), City of Heroes (2004), D&D Online (2006), etc.
For game companies to grow they need to be launching new games regularly, whether it’s part of the same series or new IP entirely.
The big unknown with Blizzard is they say their games pipeline is the biggest it has ever been, but there’s just no visibility as a player as they haven’t announced anything yet (apart from Diablo Immortal). Given that’s the case I don’t think you’ll see any of the new games launch until 2020 at the earliest.
The thing is, though, the only announcements that anyone is excited about are the announcements that the games that are too old to run on modern computers are being remastered to run on modern computers.
Ya know, the games they made 10-20 years ago, that people actually liked. That’s not to say games Overwatch and HotS haven’t been popular or anything, but they’ve been popular for what, 3 years or so before peoples’ interest started to wane and they go off to other things.
Brood War (20 years old) still has a playerbase. D2 is still more beloved than D3 (if most of the media surrounding the game is to be believed). People were clamoring for W3 Reforged long before it was announced, and there will be a huge resurgence in W3 play once it’s out. These are 10-20 year old games and are more popular and long-lived than anything Blizzard has released since, with maybe the exception of WoW, but that player base spikes and then rapidly declines with each expansion.
I agree – but that’s also why I’m interested to see if they can recapture that in 2020+.
The person heading up all new projects now is Allen Adham, who was the original founder of Blizzard and was executive producer on Warcraft, Warcraft II, StarCraft, and Diablo, and he was the lead designer on World of Warcraft before he left in 2004. In other words he drove the explosion of great new games Blizzard had 15-20 years ago.
He returned to the company in late 2016 to head up all new projects. They’re now saying they have more projects than ever, and I figure given development time you probably won’t see them until 2020+… and who knows if they’ll be any good or if he’s any good or if he can really get them back on track but I’m intrigued by it all as it really seems like the pace of great new game development slowed after he left.
no its not activision. this game was doomed from the start cus they were late to the party. there were already 2 hugely popular quality mobas out years before hots came along. there was just no market for it.
No, Blizzard started to decline before Activision. They have largely mismanaged WoW, starting back with the BC where the power creep on items made the first green item from the very first quest stronger than any item available in vanilla. That has lead to a trend where now actually playing the game is optional, and all you need to do is run dungeons until you can pvp, then pvp until you can do raids, then raid. No exploring/questing required, if you did try to quest you would find you out level an area before you can finish a quest string. That is bad design and started before Activision was involved.
Also, most of the reason Blizzard is struggling to retain players across the board are because of gameplay design choices. Something it is doubtful Activision has any hand in. This is an internal Blizzard issue. From what I understand they collect vast amounts of data and metrics then make design choices from that. My best guess is even if the data and metrics are all correct, their interpretation of the information is not. They continue to make blunders, that I as the end user can see are terrible choices, yet despite it being blatantly obvious to me, the people making the choices seem to think they are headed in the right direction, and can’t seem to understand why they are not successful, blaming everything, except the real culprit, themselves.
its isnt so much that hots is dead, as blizzard as we have know it is dead. It has been taken over by corprate greed, its not that hots isnt making money, it isnt making enough money.The same will happen with wow. blizzard is dead and im going to go make a grave stone.
![:sob:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/sob.png?v=6" ":sob:")