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THE BAR posted:And Diablo 3's getting creamed by Path of Exile, a free-to-play game on Steam. PoE has a company working on it. A company of passionate people who actually play games like that at a competent level. If D3 received even 1/5th the care PoE did it would still be far more popular than it is. The two games occupy different spaces in a niche with not much competition. Blizzard's main problem seems to be inability to allocate resources effectively. A team of 5-8 could have kept D3 running and generated tons of sales. They implemented an MTX store and then never sold cosmetics in it. It's ridiculous how poorly they've managed most things given the resources they have. Khorne fucked around with this message at 19:42 on May 4, 2020 |
# ? May 4, 2020 19:34 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 19:10 |
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They made a mint, because they're Blizzard. They could release anything and people would buy it. But they failed to do anything interesting with D3 since RoS released in 2014, and PoE is simply being more productive with their title. How much money a thing has earned is a poor representation of a thing's worth, is what I'm trying to say. D3 has no relevancy in the gaming community at large, while PoE still produces content for people to enjoy. I'm not even super big on PoE, but I just hate to see a title get dropped like this.
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# ? May 4, 2020 19:39 |
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Yes it sucks that D3 got punted but by every metric is was a massive success and no comparison of modern developments can erase the tsunami of money it made. PoE could keep going for the next decade and disregard Blizzard's mobile game and D4 releases and it would still be dreaming of reaching D3's popularity and impact.
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# ? May 4, 2020 19:45 |
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THE BAR posted:They made a mint, because they're Blizzard. They could release anything and people would buy it. Khorne fucked around with this message at 19:52 on May 4, 2020 |
# ? May 4, 2020 19:47 |
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THE BAR posted:They made a mint, because they're Blizzard. They could release anything and people would buy it. Well yeah, because d3 made its money and they're done. Nobody is disputing that PoE is a lot more active, it's just nobody really finds that impressive because you're comparing the number of people watching a movie still in theaters to one the released to DVD 6 years ago.
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# ? May 4, 2020 19:48 |
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I think they finally re-enabled offline singleplayer, at least. So there's that. Or rather, single-player without having to do it as a multiplayer lobby.
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# ? May 4, 2020 20:16 |
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danjal posted:Have they gone and fixed any of the issues with the re-release? Reforged multiplayer is significantly improved with the color adjustment but it's still hard to tell what's what and there's NO OFFICIAL LADDER LOL BlazetheInferno posted:I think they finally re-enabled offline singleplayer, at least. So there's that. Or rather, single-player without having to do it as a multiplayer lobby. I found a funny bug yesterday. I created a custom game under single player mode then tried adding my friend so we could play a warmup against computers. The option is there to add friends but it just sent him immediate "failed to join game" messages over and over. Had to go to custom games through the regular menu and that worked just fine.
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# ? May 4, 2020 20:20 |
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Blizzard could poo poo in a box and make bank. Diablo 3 was so much worse than the previous entries.
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# ? May 4, 2020 20:48 |
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Disargeria posted:Yes it sucks that D3 got punted but by every metric is was a massive success and no comparison of modern developments can erase the tsunami of money it made. PoE could keep going for the next decade and disregard Blizzard's mobile game and D4 releases and it would still be dreaming of reaching D3's popularity and impact. d3 was a success insofar as it was a cashin-in on one of the most succesful IPs of all time in gaming. It also destroyed the careers of the people who oversaw the project because it flopped on release so badly that it hemmorhaged like 90% of it's players within a month or two and exposed blizz to a ton of legal liability if they didn't close the money laundering rmah. Yeah the sales were a success, but people don't get literally run out of the games industry for successful games releases. At that point, they could've released a box full of manure for $50 that said diablo 3 on it and sold just as many copies. It's more the impact of Diablo 2 that they'd have to compete with and are aspiring to. I don't think anyone in gaming wants to emulate D3. Even though the final state that they got the game into is fun, it's an immensely shallow game that's pretty much good to play for a weekend or two once a season. The endgame is just a literally unending grind of the same 2 activities over and over and over and over. Hope you like doing bounties and rifts/grifts until your eyes bleed. There's a reason why the leaderboards have been 90% bot accounts for most of the last few years. Groovelord Neato posted:Blizzard could poo poo in a box and make bank. Diablo 3 was so much worse than the previous entries. I have no idea who first said it, but I love that this has been the go-to way for years now for describing the state of the Diablo IP at the time D3 was in production Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:38 on May 5, 2020 |
# ? May 4, 2020 22:18 |
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PaybackJack posted:Blizzard looks pretty good stock wise. Going by the stock it would be pretty safe to say that all the controversy surrounding the release of the game caused no effect. Not that it should really. Anyone investing in Blizzard is waiting for that Diablo 4 money to start rolling in. I'd say that's going to be the thing that really makes or breaks the company at this point. Overwatch 2 has a ton of competition, as does Hearthstone now. Diablo and Starcraft are their only big franchises left and I think unless they make a Starcraft non-rts then Starcraft won't be doing much either. WoW is still going along but I think Shadowlands will only bring in so much. All I'm hearing is time for SC ghost and Lord of the Clans to shine
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# ? May 5, 2020 03:43 |
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Also diablo 4 isn't making or breaking the company because activision currently makes an absolute fortune off of candy crush, fifa in game sales, and cod in game sales and some cash from hearthstone, too. Their reputation will be completely poo poo if they gently caress up D4, though that's just a small step up from 'almost totally poo poo' where it is currently.
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# ? May 5, 2020 04:41 |
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Also diablo 4 isn't making or breaking the company because activision currently makes an absolute fortune off of candy crush, fifa in game sales, and cod in game sales and some cash from hearthstone, too. I should have been more clear when I said make or break. Blizzard won't ever "die" until Hearthstone and WoW drop to numbers where they won't see large returns from new releases. Creatively D4 is the last hope for the company in terms of creating a good product that doesn't destroy consumer confidence in the studio. And even then Activision won't suffer the hit, Blizzard as a studio will just get stripped down to its bare minimum while Activision itself finds a new company to gobble up and beat to death and beyond.
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# ? May 5, 2020 08:47 |
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PaybackJack posted:I should have been more clear when I said make or break. Blizzard won't ever "die" until Hearthstone and WoW drop to numbers where they won't see large returns from new releases. Creatively D4 is the last hope for the company in terms of creating a good product that doesn't destroy consumer confidence in the studio. And even then Activision won't suffer the hit, Blizzard as a studio will just get stripped down to its bare minimum while Activision itself finds a new company to gobble up and beat to death and beyond. Idk, what you're describing happened several years ago and it's why everything blizzard does is at an absolutely glacial pace and why almost nothing ever actually gets finished. They did several huge layoff waves of all their senior people who they've tried to replace with much cheaper grads with no experience; they also eliminated almost all of the profit sharing incentives they had which were a big part of what was motivating employees (and also what made people overlook their otherwise decidely below-market salaries). We're already years into the decline. I mean they haven't released a game since 2016, they were gutted as a company years ago.
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# ? May 5, 2020 09:09 |
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While it's hard to really trust the quarterly reports, my understanding is that Hearthstone still makes a fuckton of money for Activision. It's cheap-ish to run, they've streamlined content creation for it so that artists are churning out card art by the truckloads, they've switched to a far more conservative way of pushing out expansions and the captive audience of players that are left generally don't seem to care how bad the HS team (what's left of it) is at balancing the game. Not Candy Crush or Call of Duty levels of money but it's not in any danger.
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# ? May 5, 2020 10:20 |
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ErrEff posted:Even crazier: Blizzard had already done the work to update many of the WC3 models back in 2015 and they fit way better into Reforged than the cinematic monstrosities that came later. It was released as a data mod for SC2. Who knows if this was for a previous remake that got aborted, I guess we'll never know, but at least they released this stuff. God, I had totally forgotten about these. You're right that it makes the insistence on redesigning everything into "cinematic quality" even worse - it's so totally unnecessary when just upscaling and updating the original designs looks so much better.
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# ? May 5, 2020 13:14 |
I only passively lurk this thread but I saw it mentioned a few pages back that there was no thread for the new edition of Age of Empires 2, so I took it upon myself to create one if anyone wants to add me and play a few games.
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# ? May 5, 2020 23:34 |
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PaybackJack posted:Blizzard looks pretty good stock wise. Going by the stock it would be pretty safe to say that all the controversy surrounding the release of the game caused no effect. Not that it should really. Anyone investing in Blizzard is waiting for that Diablo 4 money to start rolling in. I'd say that's going to be the thing that really makes or breaks the company at this point. Overwatch 2 has a ton of competition, as does Hearthstone now. Diablo and Starcraft are their only big franchises left and I think unless they make a Starcraft non-rts then Starcraft won't be doing much either. WoW is still going along but I think Shadowlands will only bring in so much. Being willing to defend current Diablo 3 in the sense it was improved to a point of at least creating a niche for itself, I think Diablo 4 will probably be a disaster. Its 'darker' art style looks like modern Blizzard attempting what they don't quite have the right art team to pull off, the little I've seen of the UI looks worse than Diablo 3, the more 'open world' nature reminds me of the Mass Effect: Andromeda disaster and the notion nobody should worry because their team is 'independent' of the reforged disaster is just too reminiscent of wishful thinking by Blizzard clingers-on. Yeah I'd be very surprised if D4 ends up being a serious competitor to Torchlight or Path of Exile. Reforged, mismanagement of WoW, plus terrible reports about Blizzard Activision should be indications they've gone far downhill. And don't forget it was pre-activision Blizzard that allowed the Jay Wilson cult boondoggle to gravely wound D3. I would not buy Blizzard stock. I get the sense most people buying it don't understand the culture there, and probably think Blizzard is just another EA. They might be profitable for a while, but it would be folly to have long-term confidence. I like Blizzard games, played nearly all of them, and when I heard the company trending in the wrong direction after 2013, at first I wanted to mostly dismiss it, that it wouldn't matter much or might reverse. But the trend is unambiguous and unignorable now, and seems driven by the same corporatist mismanagement that has hurt other studios. Once a games company loses its vision and becomes only about profit, often the only way it can be reformed and corrected is if the shareholders force it, which usually only happens once their profits are badly hurt. By the time this happens though, their IP and reputation are already ruined. This might be different if the largest shareholders were more activist and knew more about the gaming industry, because they might intervene sooner, but I've never seen it play out that way. The real hope is for other companies to pick up innovation in the genres pre Activision-Blizzard left off. Former employees, purged by corporate mismanagement or fleeing a grueling existence, might start their own studios and go on to innovate. It's happened many times before.
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# ? May 7, 2020 05:38 |
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Don't forget their amazing reveal "trailer" where they showed off stationary models with a camera floating back and forth with noticeable stutter.
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# ? May 7, 2020 09:12 |
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Poil posted:Don't forget their amazing reveal "trailer" where they showed off stationary models with a camera floating back and forth with noticeable stutter. It's maddening. Khorne fucked around with this message at 13:53 on May 7, 2020 |
# ? May 7, 2020 13:50 |
There's a whole finance sub forum, with stock trading threads and all. FWIW, they just did earnings, crushed it, Reforged was given credit for adding content and $ to the warcraft franchise, raw sales, boosted subs, and in-game purchases (via new content available). I loving hate how lovely the WC3 reforged bullshit that we got is, but on the business side, it was a success. I don't even really need a ladder now, just some control over which server you play on. The lag issues have gotten unplayable, but I doubt the game gets much more.
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# ? May 8, 2020 02:38 |
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they're making money off of a few IPs (eg fifa, candy crush, COD, and wow/hearthstone/ow in game purchases), reforged was pocket change. And it's an earnings report, blizz always says that every product is gangbusters even as they're actively imploding. I'm actually surprised that they spun wc3 as a success E: just got around to reading the whole thing and lol they gave zero specifics for how much money reforged actually made, they just lumped it in with the wow revenue so we will never know. Not another word about it otherwise, either. Gonna crosspost this into death watch so ima dig into this beyond just the wc3 focus. quoting my super obvious prediction from before the call: Herstory Begins Now posted:they mostly just conceal playercounts or give single line summaries of 'after the update, players increased' that don't actually communicate any info and 2) blizz's lasting legacy as a powerhouse of games-making, which wall street still believes 100% to be the case even if no one outside of wall street believes that poo poo anymore and 3) analysts predicting that with everyone at home, it's a good time to buy games company stock. I actually remain consistently surprised how utterly mainstream the total collapse in faith in blizzard has become. Called it: <Now, turning to Blizzard. MAUs were 32 million in Q1 with each of Blizzard's key franchises experiencing a month-on-month increase in reach in March.> That was the entirety of their reporting on the specific performance of blizzard franchises. Hearthstone they had to say 'improving metrics over time' which is a way of saying 'they're bad, but they're getting less bad.' Wow and OW were both 'increased engagement after patches' 'we attribute that largely to covid keeping people at home' Immortal is apparently in the wings, no word on D4 production (surprisingly, actually, that really should've been in there---I wonder what's going on with it?). quote:They aren't touching starcraft. Several of the top execs literally hate starcraft for some reason and want it dead and gone (not hyperbole) and they just finished dumping their entire starcraft esports involvement when they laid off everyone involved. Literally not one word about starcraft, hots or additionally, any esports activity other than cod/owl leagues. Nothing about reforged beyond two single line information-free summaries. Blizzard activity in general only got a handful of sentences throughout the entire thing, which with how non-productive blizz is and how much disarray they're in, isn't surprising, but it's still striking. Nothing about ow the game other than 'increased engagement in march [after lockdown]' and they described owl as having transitioned smoothly to online play. So yeah, shares will be good cuz activision and king are killing it with cod/candy crush. Blizz is 'when people are forced to stay at home out of fear of death, slightly more people chose to play our games' Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 03:19 on May 8, 2020 |
# ? May 8, 2020 02:50 |
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Amnomia posted:video game 3 remade is bad lol
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# ? May 8, 2020 03:11 |
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If Blizzard's standards were up to their previous releases, people would risk going out into the plague to play their games (if digital distribution were not still a thing).
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# ? May 8, 2020 03:32 |
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ya it's true
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# ? May 10, 2020 01:13 |
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Very thoughtful of them to keep the bug where replays double display your own chat messages e: also you can't reverse playback or skip backwards. You have to reload the replay The Wiggly Wizard fucked around with this message at 01:14 on May 20, 2020 |
# ? May 18, 2020 22:09 |
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Speaking as a long-time self-admitted huge Blizzard Fanboy that actively goes out of his way to avoid looking at the downsides of things I'm interested in: It's really upsetting to see Blizzard talking about stuff like Custom Campaigns as if they're exciting new features they're still working on, rather than stuff they're trying to return to us after they took them away. I hate how much it reeks of executive meddling and mandates screwing over one of Blizzard's most treasured classic games, to the point of feeling actively malicious by said executives. I feel really bad for the people actually working on it. They probably hate what's been done to the game as much as we do, but have to pretend they're so proud of it because PR and Executives.
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# ? May 20, 2020 00:20 |
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quote:Hail, Warcraft III: Reforged players!
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# ? May 20, 2020 21:38 |
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tl;dr for bad game please?
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# ? May 20, 2020 21:53 |
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Zug Zug
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# ? May 20, 2020 21:58 |
lol, the lack of a ladder is actually an improvement. no fixes to the lag/server stuff. ah well. It was fun for a couple months, wasn't really expecting much more.
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# ? May 20, 2020 22:08 |
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RTS (Real-Time Strategy game)
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# ? May 20, 2020 23:36 |
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Command and conquer remaster out soon.
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# ? May 21, 2020 02:04 |
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“Each of our balance patches will aim to ensure competitive integrity at the professional level” hmm yes tell me more about the pro scene in 2020 for an early 2000s game
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# ? May 21, 2020 02:19 |
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If they actually start rebalancing the game I might get interested enough to make this Warcraft III: Repurchased.
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# ? May 21, 2020 02:42 |
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The only balance change will be to nerf towers specifically to spite the highperch crew.
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# ? May 21, 2020 12:19 |
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That sure is a lot of words to say "We know we still haven't delivered the stuff we promised for launch, sorry".
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# ? May 21, 2020 12:42 |
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And they left out the sorry part.
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# ? May 21, 2020 14:14 |
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lol, "For the first time, the system will allow Random Teams to be paired against Arranged Teams". In other words, we decided to give arranged teams free wins because we're lazy and no one is playing this trash version of the game.
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# ? May 21, 2020 20:52 |
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SirSamVimes posted:The only balance change will be to nerf towers specifically to spite the highperch crew. i would cry towa antics are literally the only enjoyment i get from this loving game anymore
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# ? May 21, 2020 22:08 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 19:10 |
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My install has gone from sepia-tone to full color and it is causing my 2019 gaming laptop to chug on the menu screen (it runs Diablo 3 on full settings). The gameplay is as smooth as the day it was released, thank god, but the menu is acting like every last cell of a map is filled with spastically-animating units.
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# ? May 21, 2020 22:10 |