In the context of the leaked Warcraft II remake, do you still trust Blizzard to produce good games?

Blaze (he/him)@lemmy.cafe to Patient Gamers@sh.itjust.works – 50 points –
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The Blizzard that made good games died many years ago.

It's like the ship of theseus, but shit. The shit of theseus.

The Diablo II remake was EXCELLENT

The rest of their games are trash now

No, I've been actively boycotting them for many years by now.

If you're still asking that question, you aren't paying attention. Overwatch 2, Diablo Immortal, Warcraft III: Reforged. Do you need 10 more years of shitty games to prove this to you?

There is no such thing as Blizzard. They were bought out by Activision, which was bought out by Microsoft.

From the comments, the remake of Diablo II was decent

Remake already means they failed.
All they did was get rid of the free at&t servers, upgrade a couple 2d sprites and put it in a launcher with a new price tag.

AFAIK it was done by Blizzard North, the same team that actually worked on D2 back then (when Blizzard was more like Blizzard). At least partly. Correct me if I'm wrong (I might easily be) but it is at least not a 100% match with regular Blizzard.

Developed by Vicarious Visions, a recent Activision Blizzard acquisition.

And I thought it was an excellent product (although I stopped playing before they started making larger changes in patches).

It's not the Blizzard that used to make games we loved anymore. It's just a name now, and behind that a corporation focused on maximum profit exclusively.

The Warcraft III Reforged shitshow was definitely something to behold

The most amazing part was the claim that the in-game soundtrack was reencoded as lossless audio.

I looked at the new audio as a spectrograph and compared it to the original MP3s. Not only were they the same level of compression as the originals, they were the same exact graphs. The same files, renamed from .mp3 to .flac.

That’s some proper gaslighting!

Well yeah - they recorded the MP3s as lossless audio, clearly

I don't really expect anything good coming from them. To me the likes of Blizzard, Ubi, Bioware, Bethesda, EA etc are shareholder-driven companies, that stopped innovating a long time ago and now only produce and regurgitate the absolute bare minimum slop.

I have been pleasantly surprised on occasion, like for ubi's Anno 1800, or blizzard's diablo 2 remake, but they're few and far between.

I've long stopped caring about them, really. From what I've heard, the Diablo 2 remaster was pretty good, so it's likely that Warcraft 2 might actually be a good remaster, too. It's not like they're promising a whole world of stuff like they did with Warcraft 3 Refunded.

Me? I ain't buying it. BRL buying power is shit 🇧🇷 🏴‍☠️

Broodwar remaster was also good. If they faithfully uprez the graphics, fix severe bugs, and do nothing else then there's hope. The 2D remasters have a good track record so far.

That said, had anyone played WC2 recently? It's pretty rough. It's fun for nostalgia sake and if you're into the lore of Warcraft or the history of RTS, but it doesn't hold up like Broodwar still does.

Yeah like what’s actually the point? WC2 is not a game that holds up today compared to where the genre has gone.

Boycotting Blizzard is all about their shitty behavior as a company since long before the games they made turned bad too.

Would be foolish not to go patient on it after Reforged. After D2R, I'm not completely writing it off, though.

I guess they could make good games, it's in their interest, I'm not going to give them money either way.

This will be the big test of if being brought out will help them.

They're sitting on such amazing IPs but have just fucked everything recently. Except diablo 2. That was great.

I live in hope as warcraft is still my absolute favourite game series.

I don’t think trust is at issue here. If the game sucks, don’t buy it! There’s millions of other games to play.

There is reason to hope Blizzard will turn around. Bobby Kotick is gone. Microsoft owns the company now. Say what you will about Windows but Microsoft tends to take pretty good care of the gaming franchises they own. I think a lot of AoE fans are pretty happy with how that’s going. I could be wrong though?

Are we talking about the same microsoft? Last i heard starfield kinda suck, redfall suck, studio got shutdown, tango rush pretty fine but studio got shutdown too.

I still have a lot of old blizzard games on floppy and played wow for years. Based on their behavior and treatment of both their workers and communities, they'll not see a cent from me again until they prove themselves in the long-term. I don't pirate so also no unofficial numbers from me, either

To me the big drop in noticable internal politics happened somewhere shortly before or around the Overwatch release.

The original design of that game as-released showed a lot of the old design paradigms of Blizzard. But then all post-release direction was the "new" Blizzard, focus on e-sports, numerical balance over gameplay feel, competition over social engagement. The game is an interesting showcase for the fall of Blizzard as a whole in a lot of ways.

I only cared about the Diablo franchise, which means I'm done with Blizzard now.

No, it's going to be shit. Might as well just play the GOG version version of Warcraft 2, it's pretty solid (albeit the UI/UX is somewhat old school).

Blizzard is doing pretty damn good with retail WoW if you're a casual player, and don't play any PvP.

Their games teams seem to be highly isolated from each other though, which is evidence by every other single game they currently maintain. Also that their employee's bonuses are segmented by how well their teams game performs.