How Warcraft has changed
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (54)
sorted by:
Here’s what made Blizzard so great. That sketch is from the Warcraft 2 manual and it was drawn by Chris Metzen, who also did (and still does) voices for Warcraft. Metzen was a D&D nerd who started at the bottom of the company and worked his way up to the top. His work was awesome, the games were awesome, and quality was rewarded.
If you take a look at recent Blizzard Q&As, developer interviewers etc., it’s clear that “fun games” or “awesome artwork” or irrelevant things like “quality” are no longer important.
What do they care about? ESG / diversity points to cover up previous bad press so as not to hurt the Activision stock price.
Microtransactioning everything.
Churning out products.
Old Blizzard spent years working on projects (Lord of the Clans, Ghost, Project Titan) and then cancelled them when they weren’t fun. Blizzard was infamous for releasing games WHEN they were ready.
Warcraft Warcraft 2 Starcraft Broodwars Diablo Diablo 2 World of Warcraft etc Even Overwatch!
Blizzard went an awful long time without a single miss. Sad, but now they couldn’t find a good game if it was a hole in the ground.
What’s their most popular product now—World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore mode???
Metzen was great when he was working everywhere but the story.
His story writing abilities were so bad that his entire Thrall character arc could be written by modern Blizzard today and it would fit perfectly well into their woke world.
Thrall was always a badly written character made entirely to sell Woke ideas ("we can butcher you for decades but if you are mean to us in return that's MORE EVIL!!") on how the Orcs were actually victims and could be redeemed, but his Green Jesus bit was insufferable.
everybody forgot what the orcs did. She showed up out of nowhere, poured out of a portal from draenor and murdered, raided, enslaved and pillaged their way across a peaceful kingdom before killing the king and sacking the capitol. Stormwind was rebuilt by the shattered refugee remnants of a once powerful kingdom that the orcs totally destroyed. But somehow the humans were EVIIIIIL for responding to this wanton unprovoked destruction with force lol.
The new horde totally is different from the old horde. They no longer support the wanton genocide of the past and are now morally good.
Never mind their capital city is Orgrimmar. It's like germany losing the war and saying they hate Nazism, so their new capital is Hitlerville.
Nevermind that their "peaceful, loving Leader" still screams "FOR DOOMHAMMER" constantly.
You know, the guy who literally conquered Stormwind and set in motion the entire destruction of the continent by driving the humans north where they would set the stage for both the Second and Third Wars.
Would be like people screaming about how great Lenin was in the faces of those who faced genocide and mass starvation under communism. Oh wait, the guys who write for Blizzard probably do that.
That's basically what bugged me about the Black Morasss Caverns of Time instance in Burning Crusade. Why do Alliance players want to ensure that Medivh can open the portal and bring the Orcs into the world again? Even if it changes the timeline, wouldn't it be a lot better to just help the Infinite Dragonflight shank Medivh rather than let half the continent get massacred for a decade or more?
The "official" line was "well, if the Orcs never invaded, then the human kingdoms would have fallen into civil war and the Legion would have won". But, I fail to see how a civil war would have done more damage than the Horde, Jaina could still have easily led humans over to Theramore when the Legion arrived, and without the Horde being in Kalimdor Cenarius and a bunch of Night Elves wouldn't have gotten killed by Grom.
There is something to be said about being autistically devoted to keeping the timeline stable. Once you start meddling, you never have a reason to stop. Every leader will be in your chambers begging you to go back and strangle their rivals in their cribs.
I can understand the logic, even if it probably could have worked out regardless you don't want to risk it or open that can of worms.
That's why Blizzard just recently wrote an entire quest to send you back in time and prevent Alexstraza from escaping early. You need her to spend a couple more years getting gang raped and harvested for babies to protect the timeline. And then go talk to her about it after you finish the quest.
That totally wasn't a fetish for someone in the company. Totally.
I really wanted to play Ghost.
blizz died when they went corporate... it meant bringing in the frat boy business majors and the HR women who then slapped down the frat boys and everyone within 10 miles. cue more woke retribution and diversity quotas, filling them in the only roles where there's no hard and fast consequences for failure... biz ops and game design.