Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by 946789987649 » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 12:17 PM UTC

burmanm wrote: post #79

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.

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…

Bugs and infrastructure are two different things. Yes when a game first launches it will potentially be quite buggy, but every expansion until recently has been impressively slick.

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

#122

Post by apetresc » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 12:38 PM UTC

depr wrote: post #99

yreg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it's not just that - Blizzard is actively selling the non-remastered original versions (running on DOSBox exactly like the GoG ones) directly from the Battle.net launcher now too. They've essentially in-housed the exact same product that they originally commissioned for GoG.

It may or may not be a jerk move, business-wise (I have no idea what their original agreement with GoG was when they launched it there), but from a purely preservationist point of view, nothing has yet been lost as a result of this.

(And while it's tempting to say that in the long run GoG would have been better stewards of the old builds than Blizzard, and that would certainly be true for 99% of publishers out there, keep in mind that Blizzard has successfully kept up servers and downloads for games going back to the mid-90s up to the present day. Blizzard takes preservation much more seriously than almost anyone else.)

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

#123

Post by worthless-trash » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 12:46 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #97

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…

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

This point really hits home.

Blizzard basically ignored Overwatch 1 (except for lootboxes) for the last half of its life.

Players would have paid for maps, paid for expansions, paid for spectating the overwatch league, paid for spectating their favorite yt personalities commentary, but nope, they promised some fever dream single player which went nowhere.

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

#124

Post by raxxorraxor » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

smolder wrote: post #31

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…

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…

Same experience as an employee really. Want to work for a healthy company? Join a private one. It is of course no guarantee and there are exceptions as well, but there certainly seems to be a trend.

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

#125

Post by jmyeet » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

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…

All true. For anyone unfamiliar, WC3 Remastered also did two other things:

1. It changed the ToS so Blizzard owns the IP rights to any third-party maps, effectively killing this community. Why? Because of Dota 2. There was a customm mode called Defense of the Ancients ("Dota") that somebody took and basically created the MOBA genre. Blizzard decided to sue and lost. They tried to create their own (ie Heroes of the Storm) but the space came to be dominated by League of Legends. Blizzard didn't want a repeat of that. Ridiculous; and

2. WC3 Reforged ("Refunded" as it was commonly called on release) also made the original game worse even if you didn't have Reforged. The game downloaded a bunch of assets you didn't use. It broke compatibility with some maps. I think there were a bunch of other problems too.

More [1]. Some of these might've been fixed by later updates now.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_...

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

#126

Post by KeplerBoy » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

propoganda wrote: post #32

Still have the original war2bne disk. The change from war2 to war3 was, back then anyway, monumental. We couldn’t wait. All sorts of rumours but more than that - realities. Great things have come out of war3 of course, but damn did we jump on it with the gleam in our eye. Blizzard is no longer the company that we once knew, and what was once clear is now a distant shadow.

Really sad that nothing in the genre has changed since war3.

People still play DotA forks and successors, but the RTS genre kind of ended with wc3.

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

#127

Post by stavrus » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

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…

This just reads as a random mishmash of missteps the company has taken over its 33 years of existence (remember, it's older than Amazon or Google) rather than a proper critique of when it arguably lost its shine in the public's eyes. The company still generates a ton of money, continues to set records for day 1 sales of its games, and owns extremely valuable IP in the gaming industry, so you can't really say it hasn't adapted well to the current industry norms. At times, it practically sets them. It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different.

Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.

Polygon [1] covered the Starcraft: Ghost game. Long story short, it got canned because it was in development hell for too long. Originally under development by a studio in the Bay area, there apparently wasn't a dedicated Blizzard producer to the game for the longest time, and the idea of what it should be kept changing as new games came out and HQ wanted them to copy those ideas. At some point, Blizzard shifted development to a different studio just miles away from them because they wanted multiplayer, but the same issues persisted. And then they released WoW, which consumed all of their attention. With the release of the gen 7 consoles around the corner, requiring further investment, they made the sensible choice to shelve it so they could focus their time and money on their new cash-printing machine instead.

Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2016/7/5/11819438/starcraft-ghost-wh...

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

#128

Post by Majromax » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:27 PM UTC

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 hate to just drop a book recommendation, but Jason Schreier's Play Nice covers the history of Blizzard in comprehensive detail.

The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes:

* World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and

* "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management.

My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.

Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.

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

#129

Post by dr-detroit » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

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…

[dead]

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

#130

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

Etherlord87 wrote: post #104

0dayz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Starcraft 2 murdered RTS genre, it was and is so good, that nothing comes close. I have no idea why you put it on the list. Activision Blizzard was 2008. Shutting Blizzard North was 2005. So indeed it seems it was rotting before official Vivaldi-Activision merger. I think, just like with Starcraft, you misread the situation with "hype of the genre was gone" about moba. I think Blizzard was very good at creating extre…

That's bullshit, the greatest thing about SC2 was its marketing (including e-sports money). Ok, also the first campaign is great and the polish is, as always, top tier.

But RTS was only in a slump in the sense that the apex of the popularity of that genre was around the turn of the millennium (which probably was unavoidable).

And only a few years before SC2 released we've got the likes of Dawn of War 1 and Supreme Commander 1, and, last but not least : the amateur-made Spring(-Recoil) games, which put almost every other RTS game to shame, so advanced they were in comparison (and, sadly, still are, when you look at today's player's first impressions of BAR, despite it mostly only having improved in the graphics and performance department, as the 'R' suggests).

Compared to Spring games, Starcraft 2 looked like a very solid and polished, but also very safe and almost obsolete game.