Poll: Is Blizzard an overrated game developer?

[Urgol]

Hmm, you should check up the history of Blizzard and/or Games workshop. As a matter of fact Blizzard wished to name the first warcraft warhammer and wanted to buy the rights to create a warhammer 40k game but Games workshop didnt want to trust an outside developer with these projects. A decision that probably will haunt them forever!

Anyway, I would have to say yes.
Blizzard is on of the most solid game developer out there but when people start to buy the games just because it got the companys name tag on it, without checking out the actual content, you know it's overrated.

 

[Calax]

Warcraft and Starcraft gave birth to half the RTS genre by themselves

Warcraft and Starcraft may be excellent examples of the genre, but they are not original. They took and modified ideas from all the other lores and games of the day to create them. They may have been copied since, but their games are themselves copies.

On the Dungeon Crawler side of things, NONE of that stuff would have happened without diablo paving the way.

As above. Diablo is simply an excellent example of the genre, it did not do anything that wasn't done before, simply did what it did well.

WoW has IMHO been somewhat of a downfall of Blizzard

10 million subscribers and 2/3 of the global MMO market...if that is their downfall I'd hate to see what happens if they succeed :-\

You missed my point, Yes they borrowed for Warcraft and Starcraft (Games workshop was probably pretty angry at themselves for letting the deal fall through with Blizzard), Diablo I'm not entirely sure of, mainly because it came out back before I turned 10.

My point about WoW being their downfall TO A DEGREE was because before wow they had treated their lore as best they could and didn't usually go back and change things that seemed set in stone. With WoW and it's commercialization you find that all of a sudden, events that were hinted at were perpetrated by the Biggest Mary Sue in the entire history of literature (Rhonin), and in order to fit with WoW's needs they manipulated the entire backstory for Warcraft that they wrote out, all of a sudden, the small remenants of a race known as the Dranei in War3 became the mutated spawn of a race that wasn't even ON draenor until recently, Characters back stories have been twisted to fit the needs of the game. While I'm willing to put up with this to a point, they've fundamentally changed several of their characters to fit them into the game.

To me this showed that they weren't so worried about their universe anymore than they were worried about lining their pockets. From the looks of it however it seems like they're more tightly controlling the lore for the other two universes that they have under development. Probably because they don't have to feed 12 million people (most of which never even heard of Warcraft until WoW popped up) content on a consistent basis.

 

[God's Clown]

Yes and No in my opinion. If you take them from purely a development perspective, they are really really good. They release their games almost complete, nearly glitch-less. That is one thing a lot of developers fail to do.

If you base it off of a game standpoint, that is really up to each person. Personally I find starcraft overrated, yet I say this because I suck at RTS and hate basically the whole genre. At the same time, Diablo 2 was some of the most fun I have ever had while gaming.

World of Warcraft is a different subject in and of itself. It is the most successful MMO to date, yet at the same time, it ruined the Warcraft lore. Don't get me wrong, I love raiding in WoW, but I am also a person whom cares a lot about lore, so the fact 25 "random" heroes kill Illidan pisses me off.

I am not surprised that this pole is really close. Blizzard does a LOT of things right, but at the same time they do a LOT of things wrong. Truly, a great company.

 

[n01d34]

I don't believe they're overrated. They have made some very polished good games like Warcraft Starcraft and Diablo ect which for their time did move the industry forward.

But it's been a while and since most gamers have a 'what have you done for me lately' attitude it's no wonder so many people think they are overrated. Their last new IP I can remember was Starcraft over ten years ago.