*Deep breath in*
Inkidu said:
Blizzard is possibly the worst thing for the video game industry today, and I sincerely wish it would fall under new management or go out of business.
Top Spin Tennis 5, Dante's Inferno "Sin To Win", Madden constantly releasing new engines instead of releasing DLC roster updates, Sims 3 consisting entirely of the content from Sims 2 with updated graphics, Zynga's borderline fraudulent business practice, Evony Online's infamous "Hey look tits" advertisements, mutltiplayer-reliant games, $50 map packs, increasingly restrictive DRM from Ubisoft, reviewers getting fired for low scores, rampant homophobia and racism on XBox voice chat.
And you're stating that a company that you openly admit has a very high level of design fidelity is the worst thing that the video game industry faces.
Reason one: They've not produced anything new since 2001, and I'm being generous.
From 2001 to current, Nintendo has published - roughly - 250 games. Now Nintendo is fairly successful and 250 games is quite a bit, so I'm going to put this forward as a decent sample size. Of these 250 games, 12 have been new IP: Pikmin, Eternal Darkness, Animal Crossing, Geist, Advance Wars, Nintendogs, Another Code, Elite Beat Agents, 4 other 'unique' but unsuccessful and generic titles (Odama, Chibi-Robo, FlingSmash, Drill Dozer), plus a bunch of generic / non-IP games (I'm not counting things like Wii Sports or the Sudoku collection released for the DS). Charitably, this is 13 unique IPs. 13 / 250, and Nintendo is GIGANTIC in comparison to Blizzard - yes, it didn't develop these, but look at the numbers: one in roughly 20 releases was a new IP. To compare, Blizzard has - since 1991 - developed 14 games and 8 expansions for those games, in a total of 7 different IPs, plus one licensed
Superman game on the SNES. At its worst, this means out of 23 games, seven of them are new IP. Not counting expansions, this makes about half of their games original IP. If you value a publisher by new IP, Blizzard is FAR and away better than, for instance, Game Freak (12 pokemon titles, plus the aforementioned Drill Dozer since 2001).
The point is Blizzard is trying desperately to stay where it can make the most money for the minimum amount of creativity.
Creativity! There's a word. I think you're confusing creativity with creation. Here's a thought: according to the creators, Quake and Quake II take place in entirely separate continuities. Do they count as unique IP, or the same since they use the same name? How about the Final Fantasy games? The first TEN Final Fantasy titles all use the same gameplay for combat, differing only slightly in how magic is acquired and used, but they all take place in entirely unique universes. Do they count as different IP, or are they all the same? Now, lets look at Warcraft and its sequels. They take place in the same universe and with the same continuity, but each continues and develops the story of their respective universes. Does this not count as creativity because the story universe remains the same?
Refining is all well and good, but honestly if every game was like Blizzard I sincerely doubt we'd have 3-D gaming, I doubt we would have 2.5-D gaming either.
If you're talking about the 3DS, I can present a good twenty examples of excellent games that don't use 3D display. If you're talking about 3d environments, well, Warcraft actually IS an example of very early, primitive 3d gameplay - you have units on the ground and in the air, some of which can and some of which can't interact with each other. It's not visually 3d, of course not, but in terms of the in-game space that the creatures and creations occupy, at the very least is has some sense of the three dimensions.
Sure Blizzard's business model is pure gold. They rake in what has to be millions on a bad year. However, in innovation, in pushing the envelope, and in general Blizzard might as well be trying to fight off guns with swords.
Phasing, introduced to World of Warcraft in the last expansion, allows landscapes and locations to effectively change and develop over time in a persistent world game. This had, literally, never been done before. RealID, the WoW mobile banking, the Terran's mobile structures in the Starcraft series (something I'd never seen before). I'm also fairly certain that they were the first to introduce the idea of instanced encounters with WoW.
Sure it works for a little while in real life (and works really well in Final Fantasy) but eventually the guy who jumps on this newfangled gun is going to walk away a winner. Just ask Japan, Montezuma, and a whole slew of other people.
...wait, what? The Aztecs defeat at the hands of Hernan Cortez was not a result of guns. Good lord, not guns. Guns back then were almost utter garbage - it was the spanish steel sabers capable of cleaving heads open and standard Aztec battle strategy that was more focused on taking prisoners rather than killing that allowed for the catastrophic fall of the Aztec empire. Similarly, the political situation in Japan during the Meiji restoration is hardly as simple as "Swords vs. Guns", and the underlying philosophies behind why each group chose to use that particular weapon was much more important than the weapon itself. Your analogy is terrible.
Blizzard on the other hand jams its fingers in its ears and says, "We don't need you we just need the Skinner Box!"
If any of you are wondering there is a "Extra Credits" that deals with this issue. Look it up if you're interested. Blizzard's unwillingness to change is also shown in their inability to embrace other platforms.
Kay. There's some operant conditioning in the loot drops that Diablo and World of Warcraft use. You do know that they've actually tried to move away from this in WoW by introducing several ways to get gear at a static, absolute rates rather than via random reinforcement, right? You know that they're continually introducing new challenges to tweak that 'Mastery' thing that they talk about at the end of that same episode of Extra Credits, right? You know that they've also started trying to move further towards a distinct storyline, as also mentioned at the end of that episode? In general, they're trying to move further away from the RNG.
I will cite Mr. MovieBob's "The Big Picture" episode "The P.C. Gamer is Dead--Long Live the P.C. Gamer" as supporting opinion.
He says "Web based diversions like MMOs and whatever Zynga's latest contribution is have a bright future yet." WoW is an MMO and the majority of Blizzard's other games are RTS games - which, I would point out, have yet to see a truly successful release on a console. So actually no, MovieBob doesn't really support your opinion.
No one is perfect, but do you really think their new M.M.O.R.P.G. is going to vary greatly from W.O.W. in anything mechanical. I doubt it. Doing that would be killing the golden goose 101.
I honestly couldn't tell you. I can say that I certainly don't think that this new MMO will have warriors with a rage bar and rogues that stack combo points, if that's what you're asking. As far as more bare-bones mechanics like damage-over-time effects (which i would add is present in Team Fortress 2, even), yes, I do think they're probably going to contain some of those.
I'll let you guys in on a little secret. Leonardo da Vinci never finished the "Mona Lisa". Some of you might be aware of this fact, it's there for the people who aren't. Well let's see: A man left an unpolished, unfinished piece of art to the world and to this day people of all ages and origins flock to France to see it. I like my care and polish as much as the next guy, but at some point I'm going to get bored of the same game no matter how carefully planned and flawless it appears to be.
Here's another secret: Blizzard hasn't finished World of Warcraft. They continue to add to it, update it, change things, fix problems, alter the mechanics, change the design, and sometimes even re-evaluate the entirety of what they had previously created (you know, like what the main point of Cataclysm was). And you know what? People of all ages and origins flock to their computers to play it. As good as it may be now, they're still working to try and improve that - and if you're saying that's somehow a bad thing, we come from entirely different worlds.
However, do you think any other company could go thirteen years without release in new game and still stay in the black?
Blizzard has released several new games since 1998. Diablo II, Warcraft III, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft, and several expansions for each. Considering the average development time for games in this day and age, one development studio pushing out 4 full games and 5 expansions over the course of 13 years really isn't too bad. I'm guessing that you misspoke, however, and what you really mean is new IP. Gamefreak has gone since 1998 almost entirely on Pokemon, Infinity Ward is going on 8 years of CoD sequels with no end in sight and a bright future ahead of them (barring a lawsuit that has nothing to do with the design of the games), id Software lived exclusively on Doom and Quake from 1993 to 2009 (though it did publish the Hexen games for Raven Software), Retro Studios (responsible for Metroid Prime, Prime 2, Prime 3, and DKC Returns) was started in 1998 and by all accounts is doing quite well rehashing old IP, and to draw a broader comparison to Blizzard which has published in 3 separate IPs in the past 13 years, we have Lionhead (Black & White, Fable, The Movies, since 2001), Insomniac (Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, since 1998), Maxis has developed nothing but The Sims and Sim City since 1999, and Rockstar, a collection of ten separate development studios, has four series and three stand-alone games between them. Oh, and lets not forget that Metroid: Other M was Team Ninja's first break from the Dead of Alive / Ninja Gaiden series since the studio was created in 1995.
You didn't think very hard, did you?
It's not a question of whether or not I like Blizzard games, it's not a question of are Blizzard's games good or bad. It's a question of what is Blizzard doing to move the industry forward, and I feel the answer is, nothing.
Perfecting an art can be just as important as advancing it, especially with a medium as young as gaming is. Even aside from this, your basic thesis - that Blizzard is a negative force because they are not creating new IP, which means they are not innovating - is flawed. New IP does not necessarily mean new innovations (eg: Doom -> Quake was new IP, but mechanically there was very little new to the game mechanically), you (as well as I) lack an adequate technical knowledge to know whether Blizzard is making advances at a software level (an advance in how 3d models or environments are rendered can have just as much as an impact as a new gameplay idea), and not all innovation will necessarily move the industry forward (see also: Virtual Boy).
