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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

#91

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

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…

“Do you guys not have phones?”

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

#92

Post by aniviacat »

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…

The issues with Overwatch 2 were fixed. All heros are available for free; you can get the season passes for free (the free pass includes enough premium currency to buy the premium pass); you can get most skins for normal currency and you can get the mythic currency for the mythic skins by playing the battlepass.

There are still a few skins you can't realistically unlock without paying; but that doesn't ruin a game. Overwatch in its current state is great.

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #56
cocacola1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 10,000 negative reviews is wild for something so banal. I can't imagine defending a politician over what might be the mildest insult ever conceived. Imagine the poster unironically showed Trump dressed up to resemble Abraham Lincoln, and praised him as the great leader of USA. Or some such. Imagine what would happen in the reviews then.

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by Ragnarork »

donatj wrote: post #80
xeonmc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coachi…

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

This is so sad to read. :(

Grassroot competition like that is the basis on which esports scene thrives...

Blizzard really wrote down the manual of everything you shouldn't do to make a game into an "esport", from the competition structure and insane costs (remember the initial slots for a league that hadn't had its first season yet was between $2 and $15 millions...), to the game balance which led to one meta destroying interest completely for way too long, making an entire role useless in the process, and the list continues.

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

#95

Post by vanderZwan »

mdtrooper wrote: post #3

Well, I remember the "Cease and desist" to FreeCraft project in 2003 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratagus

On the other hand, the project still exists and the engine has been modded to play these games, although apparently Warcraft 1 in particular is still a buggy mess:

https://stratagus.com/

... but perhaps more people will try to help out fixing those bugs, purely out of spite.

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

#96

Post by Fokamul »

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…

* Releasing Diablo II Resurrected and striping multiplayer option to host own server, because some modder, made a patch to play with old D2 Lod version on modded server in Alpha version. Years later they patched stripped multiplayer back and now modders are working on D2R multiplayer modded servers, Blizzard people are so smart...

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

#97

Post by wongarsu »

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…

Don't forget they nearly killed Overwatch by barely supporting Overwatch 1 while they worked on Overwatch 2. But when they finally released Overwatch 2 there were barely any changes from Overwatch 1, except for the season pass system and a switch from 6v6 to 5v5. Apparently most of the development time was spent on single-player content that was first delayed and then cut entirely

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

#98

Post by xandrius »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #76
946789987649 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rec…

Same applies to many MMOs, even GW2 and FFXIV are terrible at the beginning, compared the current content.

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

#99

Post by depr »

yreg wrote: post #86
bilekas wrote: post #52

Blizzard seem to be burning a lot of bridges and goodwill they've built up over the years. It's incredible what GoG is trying to do, for a profit of course but all the same. The idea of not being able to purchase older titles in a legitimate way only encourages piracy, yet if it will squeeze an extra few pennies out for shareholders, it seems like the right move. The games industry really seems to be turning into the…

How does pulling old games from stores squeeze an extra few pennies out?

There are remastered versions of those games that Blizzard wants to sell instead.

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

#100

Post by andrepd »

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…

Review bombing is almost zero cost and standard practice nowadays every time some Internet hivemind decides they hate a game. 10,000 is actually not that much.
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