If Blizzard had refused the offer. we’d stil have legendary games today. All the ground breaking minds that built the company from ground up all disbaned like a gquit. All we have is toxicity and nerfs.
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This is true.
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It has nothing to do with that, and more to do with the fact that developers and game designers today, are not even a fraction of talent that they were say 10 or so years ago. No creativity, only the ability to copy and destroy.
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Well, kind of. A lot of the talented developers left because they were losing creative freedom due to pleasing the shareholders at Activision. When Acti took over, it became about pleasing the pockets, not making quality content.
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You can’t really believe this. Especially since a good portion of them are the same people that were there 10 years ago.
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I’d be interested in something you could point to that would actually suggest this, in anything other than a subjective way (not trying to be argumentative, but curious as to why you think this, really).
After having played Classic, I don’t think it’s really as good as Retail. There are some things I definitely like better, and there are some things in the current expansion that I just hate. Classic was fun for a chance to explore character roots for me, but the end game is, well I don’t particularly enjoy it.
If gearing in Retail was a little better (subjective, sure - I just decided not to play with Azerite gear, corruptions, or leveling up items. That’s not a game I enjoy at all, so I’m spending most of my gaming time on APEX Legends, and not on WoW at all), I would be having fun in Arenas, M+, and Raids.
But anyway, what is it about Activision and Activision Blizzard particularly that you feel contributed in a negative way to the franchise as a whole?
I sort of feel like as time passes, and organizations age, people within them do as well, and things are bound to change. What do I know though?
Which ones are left? Only one I know of is Kaplan, and hes on the Overwatch team now.
There is something to be said for the stability of a larger corporate infrastructure. It insulates against downturns. It allows for more sharing of other resources (employees, servers, technologies, etc.). The cost is definitely the ability to design games that don’t bleed every last dollar out of your player base. So good design frequently takes a back seat to bottom line and short term profits.
Blizzard Entertainment didn’t really sell out to Activision. Blizzard’s Parent Company, Vivendi Games, merged with them. I am betting the original Blizzard Entertainment people cringed at the news.
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They sold out to Davidson & Associates.
“In early 1994, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associatesfor $6.75 million ($11.6 million today).”
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment
From the same reference, “Blizzard’s staff quadrupled from around 400 employees in 2004 to 1600 by 2006”
This could also be the culprit for whatever “issues” are being claimed with the direction WoW has taken.
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I’m not sure about the political aspect of it, just from what I’ve seen happen in game.
They started to dumb it down, a LOT. WOTLK was the first implementation of the pro-casual player. LFG allowed casuals to queue for dungeons anytime they wanted, whilst being guildless and never stepping foot in a raid. TBH i was one of those people. I played more than a casual, but I wasn’t the guild type and had no interest in raiding. I PvP’ed consistently and only queued for my daily dungeon.
Cataclysm came and completely remodeled azeroth. Questing was made easier and faster thanks to BoA’s. More flight paths added globally.
MoP is where the game REALLY went downhill due to activisions presence. They were trying to expand subscriber base by appeasing their buddies in China. We got an entire expansion based on Chinese lore. Talent points were revamped to be more or less meaningless with no critical thought involved. Classes were streamlined to all be more or less than same. Everyone could get a Legendary. This expansion focused heavily on drawing in casual players from the Chinese demograph. Without Activision, i really think we would’ve never gotten MoP or Cataclysm, anything close to it.
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He was referring to designers and developers in general, not just the ones at Blizzard.
you do know that activion merger happened years before MoP, do you?
You realize games are in development for years before release, don’t you?
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yeah, like 4?
I’m missing your point.
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you are missing a lot of points
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Blizzard merged, we start getting crap content years later. Thats the point. I think you missed it.
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I mean, you could maybe point the finger at Ghostcrawler, rather than corporate affairs. We do have some insight into that, and (at least in my case) very little, if any into how the change to Activision Blizzard affected management.
And the first raid tier, as well as instances were incredibly fun and challenging (imo). That was my favorite first tier expansion, but I did end up quitting after Firelands for RL reasons. However, Cataclysm was pretty great, imo (subjective, sure, and I know a lot of people hate on it).
A lot of people say MoP is their favorite expansion. I didn’t play it very much, and what I did play was Arenas, and fishing dailies for rep to get the strider mount. Still, it was a lot of fun, imo - though yes, some people seemed to really have issues with the Pandaren, and the theme of the expac. I didn’t, because I like that theme, and thought it fit fine.
idk that that’s true. I had thought it was sort of appealing to a younger audience with the Pandaren, whereas at the time, the current audience was starting to age, which (I think at least) was a new phenomenon in gaming, having a large playerbase that was in adulthood.
I don’t think Activision had anything to do with the design of Cataclysm.
It seems that the instance, leveling designers, etc. were a different team from say what Ghostcrawler was working on, which would have been things like dungeon finder, LFR, etc. and (seemingly) heavily influenced by interacting with users on the forums.
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well i think 90 % of classic player would agree. You know some of the new at the top are fully in on the new . Like how they talk about Candy crush being the best game ever made. Its a game a 3 years old could come up with.
The fact that the marketing are now the one making decision using the people who really wanna create awesome game that people will love.
Its all marketing now, they don’t give you any real answer the marketing decide what will sell the most. They also can put a trash product if they think that putting that would make more money than full product that people will play forever like WC3 reforge. I wish Bobby kothick would just build a casino because even if he is making toons of money. He is hated and he would not be if he was a casino owner.