What Blizzard does well

[Dramatic Flare]

As someone else on a different website mentioned (or perhaps way back when on this one), Blizzard is the business side of gaming. They take an idea, find all the good selling points of the idea, make a game using only the good selling points (And nothing experimental) and then turn it out to the masses like premium cocaine.
Which is why Blizzard is successful.

 

[101194]

Blizzards have one thing that no other game develping company has...
Fucking Intellegance


WoW:
"Dude In our new game won't people just pirate a copy and play it for free that would cost us alot of money!"
"Who gives a fuck if they steel it or pirate it you have to pay to play bro and make it good enough that they need to play!"

Warcraft III/Startcraft:
"How are we going to keep this game running arn't people going to get bored with all this RTS gameplay? It would take loads of money to keep shutting games out for people to play!"
"Why don't we just make a Software so that people can make there own games Its cheaper and it will make the game funner!"

Diablo III:
"How are we going to keep people from Hacking and Making Items in Diablo it would take forever for us to catch these people and ban there accounts and whos going to do that?"
"Just create a software so that people can have there hacked shit and if there chars to powerfull it will get banded automaticly."


Pretty much somes up my views on this topic

 

[theultimateend]

I can't stand the fact that the first starcraft had one expansion.

Now ...

NOW ...

THE SECOND ONE HAS TWO! OMG!

It is time for me to ***** and moan! It was unfair already that I had to wait to enjoy kerrigan in her fool brood setup the first time around.

NOW THEY DARE MAKE ME GO THROUGH TWO EXPANSIONS WITH NO CERTAIN PRICE THAT WILL LIKELY MAKE ME SO HAPPY THAT I'LL GO BACK IN TIME AND SLAP MY OLDER SELF FOR BEING A *****.

- - -

Okay now that I got that little 'me acting like all the people whining about Starcraft II' bit out of the way.

I think the only thing Blizzard has done to greatly upset me is merge with Activision/Vivendi. That and I wasn't a fan of Warcraft III but that might be just because I played Warcraft II too much.

 

[Romicron]

Leaving enough holes in their map editing code, allowing users to hack away at it and as a result we're left with, in my opinion, the most diverse and replayable game experience: The Starcraft UMS Library.

I still play starcraft UMS maps. Damn.

 

[Dommyboy]

Like hell Starcraft is balanced... I have no idea what magical mystical game you played but it sure as hell aint SC.

Starcraft is actually very well balanced. Only 'noobs' seem to say it's unbalanced.

 

[matrix3509]

Starcraft is actually only balanced in the hands of human players of equal skill level. The AI however is completely biased toward the Protoss race. I can prove it to you:

Go into Starcraft and set six players as computers, two Terran, two Zerg, and two Protoss. Add to that a human observer player so you can watch. Now start the map. You can go off and do something else while you wait for the game to finish. When the game is done, go back and look at the results. IIRC almost 95% of time, the Protoss will win. There was a link I visited sometime ago that did this same thing 1000 times over to build of a good data set. I tried it too with about 50 games over time. The other 5% of the time, the Zerg won. Never did the Terrans win. It was strange to me because Terran was my favorite race. I could win all the time with Terran.

Its really easy to see the flaws in the AI now and exploit them, but for its time, the AI was super advanced.

 

[Fightgarr]

Why do you people always forget the Diablo series? That was also a great game and all the classes felt even and unique, except Diablo 1 but let's twiddle our thumbs and let it rot in the corner where it belongs...

Diablo 1 was my favorite of the series. For many reasons. The only one I really need to mention though is saving in single player. The sole removal of that quality from Diablo II plummeted it from pretty good game to alright game that I will never want to play for more than a week.

 

[Romicron]

Starcraft is actually only balanced in the hands of human players of equal skill level. The AI however is completely biased toward the Protoss race. I can prove it to you:

Go into Starcraft and set six players as computers, two Terran, two Zerg, and two Protoss. Add to that a human observer player so you can watch. Now start the map. You can go off and do something else while you wait for the game to finish. When the game is done, go back and look at the results. IIRC almost 95% of time, the Protoss will win. There was a link I visited sometime ago that did this same thing 1000 times over to build of a good data set. I tried it too with about 50 games over time. The other 5% of the time, the Zerg won. Never did the Terrans win. It was strange to me because Terran was my favorite race. I could win all the time with Terran.

Its really easy to see the flaws in the AI now and exploit them, but for its time, the AI was super advanced.

Did you ever do an experiment with 2v2v2 TZ, ZP, TP? That would have had interesting results...

 

[Fightgarr]

Why do you people always forget the Diablo series? That was also a great game and all the classes felt even and unique, except Diablo 1 but let's twiddle our thumbs and let it rot in the corner where it belongs...

Diablo 1 was my favorite of the series. For many reasons. The only one I really need to mention though is saving in single player. The sole removal of that quality from Diablo II plummeted it from pretty good game to alright game that I will never want to play for more than a week.

Well, let's just agree to disagree about that.

Anyway, I was talking about "unique" characters when I originally said that (although I still say Diablo 2 is better by an order of magnitude). I hated, and still hate, how everyone can use everything else. I think Blizzard is going in the right direction by seperating the character classes more clearly.

See here's where our opinions separate again. The part that I liked about Diablo was that character class meant jack shit. It determined you initial stats/equipment and and your appearance. I liked that if I was doing badly in combat and preferred spellcasting I could just boost my magic, get a few decent spells and blast away without having to worry about making a new character. The character classes were cool and all, but I just preferred ambiguity.

Oh well, we're different people.

 

[hearty0]

Starcraft is actually only balanced in the hands of human players of equal skill level. The AI however is completely biased toward the Protoss race. I can prove it to you:

Go into Starcraft and set six players as computers, two Terran, two Zerg, and two Protoss. Add to that a human observer player so you can watch. Now start the map. You can go off and do something else while you wait for the game to finish. When the game is done, go back and look at the results. IIRC almost 95% of time, the Protoss will win. There was a link I visited sometime ago that did this same thing 1000 times over to build of a good data set. I tried it too with about 50 games over time. The other 5% of the time, the Zerg won. Never did the Terrans win. It was strange to me because Terran was my favorite race. I could win all the time with Terran.

Its really easy to see the flaws in the AI now and exploit them, but for its time, the AI was super advanced.

Did you ever do an experiment with 2v2v2 TZ, ZP, TP? That would have had interesting results...

Hmm...
If I had to class each race with one attribute I'd say that Terrans would have agility(due to their mobile buildings), zerg would have speed(due to their massive swarming power), and the protoss would have to have strength(because of their strong shields). Following this the teams would be agility+speed VS speed+strength VS agility+Strength. IMO speed and strength would win(The zerg continuously pummel the opponents keeping them weak while the protoss prepare their forces). Feel free to state who you think would win.

 

[Crystal Cuckoo]

Making money.

 

[data_not_found]

Games that are addicting. Except WoW. I never understood the appeal of playing. It's good for playing raids, but otherwise it's just grind and boredom. No, I'll stick with games that don't charge money for boredom.

 

[Romicron]

Starcraft is actually only balanced in the hands of human players of equal skill level. The AI however is completely biased toward the Protoss race. I can prove it to you:

Go into Starcraft and set six players as computers, two Terran, two Zerg, and two Protoss. Add to that a human observer player so you can watch. Now start the map. You can go off and do something else while you wait for the game to finish. When the game is done, go back and look at the results. IIRC almost 95% of time, the Protoss will win. There was a link I visited sometime ago that did this same thing 1000 times over to build of a good data set. I tried it too with about 50 games over time. The other 5% of the time, the Zerg won. Never did the Terrans win. It was strange to me because Terran was my favorite race. I could win all the time with Terran.

Its really easy to see the flaws in the AI now and exploit them, but for its time, the AI was super advanced.

Did you ever do an experiment with 2v2v2 TZ, ZP, TP? That would have had interesting results...

Hmm...
If I had to class each race with one attribute I'd say that Terrans would have agility(due to their mobile buildings), zerg would have speed(due to their massive swarming power), and the protoss would have to have strength(because of their strong shields). Following this the teams would be agility+speed VS speed+strength VS agility+Strength. IMO speed and strength would win(The zerg continuously pummel the opponents keeping them weak while the protoss prepare their forces). Feel free to state who you think would win.

You make valid general points, but sometimes unit specifics will override. For example, Terran and Protoss players can't build production buildings in Zerg allied basis for support.

I prefer Terran/Zerg for several reasons:

- Medics (going to BW here) can heal all zerg ground troops, but only select protoss forces (zealots/templar)
- Valkyries / Devourers are a killer anti-air combo. Each acid spore adds 1 damage to each individual rocket of the attack (of which there are 8).
- Infested Command Centers, although if you're using these in a game you're fooling around and have already won.

 

[Calax]

I think that the reason the AI wins with the protoss is because they have the toughest tier 1 unit in the game, and the computers are notorious about not putting in defenses worth crap.

 

[Jursa]

Blizzard is a company that uses 3 franchises and polishes them to a mirror shine... It's probably one of the top few game companies that became a multibillion dollar company by 3 games and their sequels...

 

[Not Good]

The only thing I see Blizzard doing well is holding on to their copyrights.

 

[Meado]

People can badmouth WoW all they like, but there's a reason it's got 11million users. Diablo is a classic series now, SC is legendary, and WC is amazing.
So what does Blizzard do well? Games.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

Blizzard is pretty good. I like Diablo myself. But WoW is just too exspenive. I'm shocked that peope can afford to play that. Don't they care about stuff? Like booze?

honnestly 15 bucks a month for the ammount of content and hours of game play you will get, is worth it, just imagine people pay 5 bucks a month for Rune Scape

wait you mean people pay for Runescape now? Has it improved in any way in the last 8 years for it to even warrant payment?

Not really no, took out the pvp, added an auction house and added "high def" graphics which look no different by the way, so no its still complete crap but i stilled played it for 5 years of my life.

We all lost time on that game, but it was fun while it lasted, the pricks attempting to lure you out into the wilderness to kill you and take your goods was entertaining, that was probably why they took PvP out.

Nope, it said in the forum that they thought the whole concept of kill and looting was a bad influence to the kids and might make them do bad things later on.

Sorry yes that's what I meant (not word for word of course), I just worded it incorrectly, but in my defence I had AF training and the super bowl yesterday, and the location difference meant it didn't end until half 3, so I was pretty wiped out, but felt the need to post before I went to bed.

I'm pretty indifferent on that really, I can see where they are coming from on that but I don't know... I think PvP was pretty entertaining though.

 

[Nazulu]

I say it's because Blizzard has made many great games but I wouldn't say they experiment that much!

I am not fully convinced SC is entirely balanced, the Terran Warfactory produces the best units in the game and the upgrades are cheap.

 

[Corpse XxX]

Blizzard is pretty good. I like Diablo myself. But WoW is just too exspenive. I'm shocked that peope can afford to play that. Don't they care about stuff? Like booze?

They don't need booze, they have WoW to dull the pain of their meager existences

Second both of these great minds.. lol
BTW: I hate WoW, but love booze!