Blizzard = Apple of Game Developing

cthulhuiscool

cthulhuiscool

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After the recent Diablo 3 fiasco, of which I'm sure you're all at least somewhat aware, I came to an interesting conclusion: blizzard is the apple of gaming. Both companies started smaller with kind of an "indie" appeal. As they get bigger they start innovating more, they make high quality products but also charge a premium to only their product (blizzard always elected to charge 60$ for their games). Also, both companies have a history of wanting to control their products more than typical. Blizzard was one of the first to lock multiplayer with serials, then further opted to add drm, intentionally reduced mod support, single use serials, and always online drm (the cause of the recent issues); despite all of these issues and inconveniences many people are willing to buy their products (at a higher price) just because they like it, the friendly user interface, and the brand's pedigree so much.
What do you guys think, am I onto something or just talking out of my ass?
 
Sounds about right.

Though it's more like post-Blizzard North.

It's also worth noting that Diablo 3 even goes beyond "always on" DRM and into "many of the game assets are server-side".
 
While I agree that forcing single player games to be online is bad move and ultimately won't protect against piracy and thus will result in merely pissing off paying customers , I think calling them the "Apple" of gaming is both a bit truthful but mostly inaccurate.

There are plenty of Blizzard games that have come out and launched without the issues D3 has been experiencing. These issues are being addressed and in a few months time will be forgotten since the gaming public has the short term memory span of a fruit salad.

I think people are mad that the day 1 launch didn't go well and that Blizzard's boneheaded choice to force single player gamers to be online is showing its downside of forced DRM. The thing that will be remembered is that Pirates didn't shit on Blizzard's parade for the D3 launch it was Blizzard that unzipped its own pants and laid out its own problem and can't blame anyone but themselves.
 
Uhh when has Blizz reduced mod support? If anything, SC2 is exponentially more mod friendly than SC1 ever was.
 
cthulhuiscool said:
. Both companies started smaller with kind of an "indie" appeal. As they get bigger they start innovating more, they make high quality products but also charge a premium to only their product (blizzard always elected to charge 60$ for their games).
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Warcraft 1 was $80 when it was first released.
 
MavericK96 said:
"many of the game assets are server-side".
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i may not agree with the rest of your post, but i do absolutely understand it.

what i quoted though, NEEDED to happen.

one night playing diablo 2 my buddy made friends talking to a duper and showed up to a game and gave me 800 stones of jordan.

my main magic find character ran around with 2 oculus RINGS. bloodtree stump (supposed to be a unique weapon) was made into an armor. glitched, duped items were the currency of that game.

if the game assets are controlled on their servers and my magic finding loot isn't wasted because legit gear sucks, then i'm okay with the rest of the DRM and always online stuff.
 
Dome said:
i may not agree with the rest of your post, but i do absolutely understand it.

what i quoted though, NEEDED to happen.

one night playing diablo 2 my buddy made friends talking to a duper and showed up to a game and gave me 800 stones of jordan.

my main magic find character ran around with 2 oculus RINGS. bloodtree stump (supposed to be a unique weapon) was made into an armor. glitched, duped items were the currency of that game.

if the game assets are controlled on their servers and my magic finding loot isn't wasted because legit gear sucks, then i'm okay with the rest of the DRM and always online stuff.
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It did not NEED to happen. They could have implemented offline characters separately from online.

I agree that it needed to happen for MP but for SP there is no excuse.
 
see my issue with the SP being hosted locally is that people could use that to more easily make dupes and glitched items. like they could figure out ways to beat the currently implemented checks for those things and then bring them to the MP. maybe not.

i sympathize with single player complaints, but again, obviously, i'm not as concerned by them.
 
I may be the only one with nostalgia goggles on but Diablo III doesn't look like the old Diablos aesthetically. It seems overly cartoonie like wow and I just can't get into it. I hate hate hate the art style of WOW. The older Diablos seemed much more mature and gorier.
 
As annoyed as I feel about having to log in to a single player game, I don't have issue with them having assets server-side. Like it or not, this is the route they took to ensure items weren't duped.
 
piscian18 said:
I may be the only one with nostalgia goggles on but Diablo III doesn't look like the old Diablos aesthetically. It seems overly cartoonie like wow and I just can't get into it. I hate hate hate the art style of WOW. The older Diablos seemed much more mature and gorier.
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You aren't the only one.
 
piscian18 said:
I may be the only one with nostalgia goggles on but Diablo III doesn't look like the old Diablos aesthetically. It seems overly cartoonie like wow and I just can't get into it. I hate hate hate the art style of WOW. The older Diablos seemed much more mature and gorier.
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I agree to an extent. The feel is cartoonie, but the gameplay is very much diablo a lot of the time. But I don't know how they're going to randomize some of the dungeons. Like in ACT 3 going across the bridge.

People forget that blizzard does a lot of things well, unfortunately calculating server load is not one of them. For instance I couldn't get into Titan quest because the controls/fluidity was so bad. Diablo 3 is a different story other then lag which I think will go away your movements are really fluid.
 
piscian18 said:
I may be the only one with nostalgia goggles on but Diablo III doesn't look like the old Diablos aesthetically. It seems overly cartoonie like wow and I just can't get into it. I hate hate hate the art style of WOW. The older Diablos seemed much more mature and gorier.
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IMO, it's harder to make a game seem darker when you're working with a set amount of polygons vice 2d. Shading can be more dramatic and uniform with 2d. Real-time lighting undoes things IMO. My real problem is the muddiness of the textures. Cmon Blizz... We're talking about single-screen only locked in isometric view (at 1080p no less in my particular case) and you can't even make things nice and sharp?

I must say overall graphically I'm not at all impressed. StarCraft II looked and looks so much better. Perhaps they're going to patch in better graphics at some point? Why not, they're doing that with everything else.
 
If Blizzard is Apple, then who is Microsoft? I think Blizzard would be more like a Microsoft that nobody has been able to Apple.

Oh great, you just made me verbalize Apple. Can you just shoot me now?
 
Pretty spot on analogy there, and their fan base is just about as bad. I've never in all my years of gaming seen a company screw up a game so badly, and see the number of people so enthusiastically make excuses for it the way they have for D3. This was mentioned in another thread, but had this been any other dev, there would have been an internet shitstorm the likes of which we've never seen. But, since it blizzard, people are cool with always on DRM, dumbed down gameplay, mediocre graphics, and a completely botched launch. Maybe next, they can release a D3s with slightly improved graphics for another $60.
 
Microsoft = Electronics Arts. Everyone fucking hates them, but they control too much to die out.

I feel that Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 were well worth the $60 I paid for them. I'm just a bit upset about how lazy they got with WoW.
 
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please not even close apple does there best to rip you off, just look at there over priced stuff

blizzard, on the other hand gives us so much for our money how many years did they support starcraft, d2, and warcraft 3 via updates, battle net, etc and i know they will do the same for sc2, and d3. yes i am a blizzard fan boy, they are one of the few game devs that i think respect there fans. these days not to many of them out there like that left. i would say EA is a much better fit to compare to apple
 
Savi said:
yes i am a blizzard fan boy
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Thanks for clarifying that, wouldn't have guessed

Anyway I never once said blizzard makes bad products or that their games aren't "worth the money." To the contrary, I think it, like apple, they just very solid products BUT because of the qualities of those games people overlook a LOT of bs they otherwise wouldn't have. Let's be honest NO other developer would get away with removing lan support, always online drm, or singleplayer content hosted online which is held at the mercy of the server's function without HUGE outrage. People are just willing to overlook crap to be part of the blizzard club, just like people will overlook lots of crap to be an "apple person."
 
So if lets say blizzard servers blew up,the millions of people who bought diablo 3 woulnd't be abble to play anymore,and they would all be ok with this?
 
I agree with this. Blizzard much like Apple made amazing products. Now they made overly simplified crap for the mass market. Unlike Apple though I believe Blizz has become far more capable of ensuring their product stays overly simplistic unlike Apple who was sued... I believe a hefty class action will be brewing in Blizzards future if the always online mode continues.
 
Savi said:
please not even close apple does there best to rip you off, just look at there over priced stuff

blizzard, on the other hand gives us so much for our money how many years did they support starcraft, d2, and warcraft 3 via updates, battle net, etc and i know they will do the same for sc2, and d3. yes i am a blizzard fan boy, they are one of the few game devs that i think respect there fans. these days not to many of them out there like that left. i would say EA is a much better fit to compare to apple
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to be fair, apple supported the Iphone 3GS far far longer than was necessary, Samsung dropped support for the GS1 the year after it came out :(
 
mrtheshaggy said:
Microsoft = Electronics Arts. Everyone fucking hates them, but they control too much to die out.

I feel that Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 were well worth the $60 I paid for them. I'm just a bit upset about how lazy they got with WoW.
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Absolutely incorrect, IMO. If anything EA is more like Apple than Blizzard. Apple: "Oh, you can listen to music on our device, but you need to use iTunes to do it." EA: "Oh, you can play our games, but you need to use Origin to do it."
 
I don't get the valve hate...are they saving you too much money and time with $5 games?
 
mrtheshaggy said:
I don't get the valve hate...are they saving you too much money and time with $5 games?
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^^ This. I've been able to pick up so many games I've wanted to play for $5 or $10 tops, and some even less than $5. Even better, they're all organized in one place, I can install them whenever I want and they don't take up space in the room or desk. Now I just wish I had the time to put a dent into my backlog :rolleyes:
 
Other way around, Apple is the Blizzard of the electronics world. Believe it or not Apple wan't ever cool to own until the iPod released. Blizzard was Blizzard before Apple became the Apple it is today.

I can recall going to midnight launches for Warcraft 2 in like 1995.

gokuz said:
So if lets say blizzard servers blew up,the millions of people who bought diablo 3 woulnd't be abble to play anymore,and they would all be ok with this?
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Would never happen because of massive redundancy in place, and several data centers all active/active around the country/world. Blizzards infrastructure is built to sustain the highest levels of outages and roll over w/o issue. I see what you're trying to get at, but its a 'never going to ever remotely happen' situation. Whats more likely though is what happened at launch, severe database-like issues which require downing everything that is connected to those data clusters.
 
theNoid said:
Would never happen because of massive redundancy in place, and several data centers all active/active around the country/world. Blizzards infrastructure is built to sustain the highest levels of outages and roll over w/o issue. I see what you're trying to get at, but its a 'never going to ever remotely happen' situation. Whats more likely though is what happened at launch, severe database-like issues which require downing everything that is connected to those data clusters.
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Except the servers were down for a long period when the game first came out. I don't think there's as massive a redundancy in place as it would seem.

Though I agree that it's unlikely for the servers to go down entirely any time soon.
 
piscian18 said:
I may be the only one with nostalgia goggles on but Diablo III doesn't look like the old Diablos aesthetically. It seems overly cartoonie like wow and I just can't get into it. I hate hate hate the art style of WOW. The older Diablos seemed much more mature and gorier.
Click to expand...

Radical said:
You aren't the only one.
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You guys might like this

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038740683&postcount=7

And you can do the same thing dark3d does messing with settings in DirectX

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/to...EQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEuGyFnK-qjpxuAfyO3PbskMuVBYg
 
The premise of this thread is comparing apples to oranges. Pun not intended. Apple is for high quality people. That's why there is so much hate for it. People who will pay more for an attractive prestige item for their houses and businesses. Blizzard games are designed for hardcore game-addicted winners. They charge a premium the way a crack dealer charges a "premium" for repeat business.
 
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