Game company alignment chart

[DakAttack]

Re: Game company alignment chart

Blizzard has the reputation of a company that doesn't rush the development process of completely mediocre games, yet can never manage to get things right the first time around if ever.

[Icemage]

Re: Game company alignment chart

Blizzard has the reputation of a company that doesn't rush the development process of completely mediocre games, yet can never manage to get things right the first time around if ever.

Warcraft II and Diablo II weren't mediocre (but they did need a ton of patching to get better).

Starcraft 1 was pretty great right out of the box.

Everything since then, though? Yeah.


Icemage

[Malacite]

Re: Game company alignment chart

What's wrong with Wings of Liberty & Heart of the Swarm, exactly?

And whether you like WoW or not (I don't) it's been wildly successful. Also, what about Lost Vikings

[cidbahamut]

Re: Game company alignment chart

I'm pretty sure Lost Vikings pre-dates Starcraft.

[Malacite]

Re: Game company alignment chart

It was their very first game IIRC

[Icemage]

Re: Game company alignment chart

What's wrong with Wings of Liberty & Heart of the Swarm, exactly?

Selling pieces of a game and calling them full games and unbalancing the online commmunity play as a result? No (edit: well, ok, you CAN but you have to wait 5 minutes for it to time out...) offline play? Poor endgame balancing between factions?

And whether you like WoW or not (I don't) it's been wildly successful. Also, what about Lost Vikings

WoW is a hype-train. It's not successful because it's actually a good game, it merely succeeds at not being bad, which is not the same thing.


Icemage

[Malacite]

Re: Game company alignment chart

Not gonna contend that point about WoW, but SC2 does allow offline play, provided you have a registered bnet account (which is required to play all their games now anyway). It's not that horrible, honestly.

And the decision to split the games was a very smart one as it's meant we get 3 fully fleshed out campaigns, rather than a single cramped campaign like they did with the original game & BW, cramming in just a handful of missions for each race.

As for balance, that's an eternal debate really. For the most part the game's stable now, with a few hiccups in some matchups; TvT is basically reaper hell right now, PvT is a one-sided slaughter if the game goes into the late game (Terran's T3 sucks and the devs continue to ignore the entirety of the terran forums because they balance the game solely around the Code S players) and ZvP is a bit of a mess with skytoss being somewhat problematic but I think Zerg players are adapting to it now.

ZvZ's a total muta-fest as well but that's really not that hard to fix, just... idk, sometimes the devs just seem lazy. It's not like the win rates are massively skewed or anything, just there are imbalances here and there that Blizzard is taking their sweet time to fix - probably because it's very easy to horrible break the other matchups with the smallest of tweaks.

EDIT: Having played a LOT of RTS games since I was a kid, I can honestly sympathise with them (even if I get on their asses from time to time about seemingly retarded decisions, like axing the Warhound because too many people cried it was OP and rather than trying to balance it they just killed it outright)


People whine about balance in MMOs, and it's not easy (especially with pet classes) but RTS are far, far worse in my honest opinion; they're extremely delicate and what may seem like an inconsequential change could have massive repercussions.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Game company alignment chart

WoW is a hype-train. It's not successful because it's actually a good game, it merely succeeds at not being bad, which is not the same thing.


Icemage

I'm pretty sure WoW's success is largely a case of being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

[Malacite]

Re: Game company alignment chart

I'm pretty sure WoW's success is largely a case of being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

I honestly liken it to the Wii - it was a one-time thing that took the world by storm and will likely never be repeated.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Game company alignment chart

Valve for Lawful Neutral; Atlus for Neutral Good?

Valve is fine where they are. I'd put Atlus in the Chaotic Good with Rockstar. Their internal games can offend and they're fairly strong quality games, but the way they cause controversy is below the radar of Fox News and CNN. They're pretty much the only publisher I know of that can put a massive, blistered, razor-toothed vagina on the stomach of an obese angel and still get a T-rating. Its all M-ratings once the giant green tentacled phallus goes for a chariot ride and the goddess Diana prances around in her armor with boob-padding and boob-laden helmet.

They love turning religious material on its ear, particularly if Kaneko is directing. Deals with the devil are the more standard fare, but in Digital Devil Saga its all centered on Hinduism and Buddhism ... and cannibalism. Basically, you can literally eat a sacred cow and get an EXP bonus for doing so. I'm sure that goes over well in India.

[Aeni]

Re: Game company alignment chart

The chart is clearly flawed. Blizzivision are now the same company, as I recall.

Blizzard and Activision run separate operations, but share resources where it concerns support and extraneous business costs (e.g., packaging, PR, HR, etc) That's what I've known from a friend who works at Blizzard ...