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Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

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Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#71

Post by pjmlp »

Dalewyn wrote: post #59
pjmlp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs. In the past I would have complained, but as someone that has foolished invested into UWP and WinRT siren song, I can't but fully agree.

Never bet against Win32.

Kind of yes, the bigger problem is that Azure and XBox are now the money makers, so even Win32 isn't being updated that much since Windows XP, note that most Win32 APIs are now available via COM, and that is what UWP/WinRT offered, COM vNext, instead they messed up, and now we're back into COM classic with crappy tooling, even though it is the main API delivery mechanism.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#72

Post by lrem »

proc0 wrote: post #8

Well I bought WC2 already and have the files. That's the best part of GOG, you can just make your own backup. I think with hard copies going away, the ability to make backups of what you buy should be protected by law, at least for software that is no longer supported (of course one side effect is that all games become services, but there have been single player games recently that prove it's still a good business mo…

For a very long time “hard copies” were just a physical precache of the download. What you actually paid for was the online store code inside the box. I’ve stopped buying boxes after the second one like this.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#73

Post by im3w1l »

cocacola1 wrote: post #28
maeil wrote: post #9

Interesting how GOG is willing to take such a hard stand of this and fight Blizzard on it, when they immediately pulled the Taiwanese horror game Devotion for political reasons [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/17/taiwanese-horr...

> But shortly after release, Chinese players found a poster hanging in the apartment that serves as the games’ setting that said “Xi Jinping Winnie-the-Pooh moron”. > Almost 10,000 negative reviews soon flooded the game’s review page. The developer, Red Candle Games, posted an apology saying it was “purely an accident” that the poster was left in the game. 10,000 negative reviews is wild for something so banal. I can…

There are over a billion chinese people. 10,000 negative reviews means that ~0.001% of them felt strongly enough to leave a bad review in protest.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#74

Post by donatj »

llmthrow102 wrote: post #14

They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons t…

Don't forget their handling of Overwatch.

Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one.

Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions.

The day they launched Overwatch 2, they entirely shut down the Overwatch 1 servers. Something they had said earlier on that they were not going to do, before they later changed course. They took away the game I loved, the game I paid for, and replaced it with a junky free-to-play game dancing around in its skin like Edgar the Bug in Men in Black, all "Look at me, I'm still Overwatch, pinky promise", but anyone with a sense of taste can tell it really isn't. They ruined it.

Literally all my friends played Overwatch. My wife was in an Overwatch League. I don't know a single person who stuck with Overwatch 2 for more than a couple weeks. My wife's entire league just shut down.

I hear people play it but I sure don't know anyone. I would estimate mostly people who never played the original? Left such a sour taste in my mouth that I am hesitant to ever give Blizzard money again.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#75

Post by realusername »

0dayz wrote: post #48
smolder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short t…

Nope, it started waaay before that. * The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public * real id debacle * Diablo 3 * shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3 * spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump * x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled * spent years trying to create…

I kind of forgot but it's true that Starcraft 2 used to be a joke in itself somewhat similar to Duke Nukem Forever at its time.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#76

Post by EugeneOZ »

946789987649 wrote: post #51
brobdingnagians wrote: post #36

It used to be exciting when a Blizzard release was coming out. Now it's just scary and a bit depressing when they announce something. I was excited all the way up through Overwatch 1, then the WC3 remaster and Overwatch 2 were awful. If they only messed up new releases it wouldnt be so bad; it's the incessant fiddling and worsening of what was good. Even of games that weren't meant to be "live service" games. I alrea…

Even World of Warcraft which used to be seamless in terms of issues, has had increasingly more and more obvious bugs. A sad state from the "Blizzard polish" of yesteryear.

Try playing WoW with a new account. The initial mission has incredibly ugly graphics (much worse than the main game), a flat progress bar during loading (literally just a simple blue rectangle - no borders, gradients, or shadows, just something that a basic box(x, y, x1, y1) function would draw), and a yellow rectangle instead of a rope connecting your hero to a flying vehicle. It’s not a 3D bar, just a 2D yellow rectangle that looks like a censorship block on the screen, and you’re supposed to imagine it’s a rope hanging from a helicopter-like vehicle.

I understand it’s an old game, but these parts seem like pure laziness. I’m sure this laziness costs them a lot of players who leave the initial mission in disgust and never get to see the beautiful parts of WoW.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#77

Post by Gud »

llmthrow102 wrote: post #14

They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons t…

Frankly, as an avid AoE 2(now DE) player, I wish they hadn’t.

AoE2 is slowly losing its uniqueness with each update.

The new matchmaking sucks, can no longer select which map to play on ranked, pathing is broken in new ways.

Don’t get me wrong, the new civilisations are nice, just kind of hoped they wouldn’t have done a total revamp.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#78

Post by xeonmc »

donatj wrote: post #74
llmthrow102 wrote: post #14

They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons t…

Don't forget their handling of Overwatch. Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one. Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions. The day they launched Overwatch…

Your wife was in Overwatch League? Is she Geguri?

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#79

Post by burmanm »

946789987649 wrote: post #51
brobdingnagians wrote: post #36

It used to be exciting when a Blizzard release was coming out. Now it's just scary and a bit depressing when they announce something. I was excited all the way up through Overwatch 1, then the WC3 remaster and Overwatch 2 were awful. If they only messed up new releases it wouldnt be so bad; it's the incessant fiddling and worsening of what was good. Even of games that weren't meant to be "live service" games. I alrea…

Even World of Warcraft which used to be seamless in terms of issues, has had increasingly more and more obvious bugs. A sad state from the "Blizzard polish" of yesteryear.

World of Warcraft has never been without issues. When it launched it was full of bugs, servers kept crashing (but they did refund a lot of gametime back then) and so on.

And every expansion was just a nightmare start, without being able to get to the new zone, servers again crashing.

You just have golden memories of a state that never happened. Game wise, WoW has gone forward a lot since DF (the disaster of SL taught them something) and is actually in a lot better state than before. Sure, it has bugs, but it's also a massive game. And they do keep fixing a lot of bugs with quite good response time these days instead of what it used to be.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#80

Post by donatj »

xeonmc wrote: post #78
donatj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget their handling of Overwatch. Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one. Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions. The day they launched Overwatch…

Your wife was in Overwatch League? Is she Geguri?

No lol. Not "The" Overwatch League. I should have maybe chosen my words more wisely, though I'm pretty sure they referred to themselves as a "league" though. My wife is asleep, otherwise I would ask her the correct terminology.

Basically she was on a non-professional all woman team for almost six years that would go head-to-head with other teams in scheduled tournaments. Her team even managed to get one-on-one coaching from some guy on the actual official "Overwatch League".

They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant.

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