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$1B Overwatch Revenue drives Activision-Blizzard to Record Q1 2017 Results
- Thread starter Zarathustra[H]
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Napoleon
[H]ard|Gawd
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of course I use this as an excuse to buy a new high refresh 1440p monitor and soon a GTX 10-series card, but my CPU is old, so there's that
Fuzzy Logik
[H]ard|Gawd
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Zero love for Blizzard. They have gone completely commercial, its no longer about making games but making profit. I understand that's how multi-billion dollar, hell all businesses work and strives towards, profit... but it's still sad when your decisions are based purely off profit in lieu of story and mechanics. They make shit games now and no longer support Mac on their latest stuff, i.e., Overwatch. It's fine, I quit gaming anyway, weight lifting so I can game in real.
Fuzzy Logik
[H]ard|Gawd
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Yes, that's a great thing and they used to make Mac clients, it's just not as profitable to support a system that makes it such a pain in the ass. I guess I can't really blame Blizzard for that.
Napoleon
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Try GeForce now ?
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Zarathustra[H]
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Who said there's a problem? People can like different things, no problem there.
As for your list, let's see...
- Quake: It was fun back in the day, but only because better games hadn't been created yet. Going back and playing it, the run and gun style is mind-numbingly boring to me.
- Unreal Tournament: I never played it back in the day. I tried it years later, but couldn't get into it. More of that unrealistic twitchy fast stuff that's not for me.
- Doom: See Quake
- Tribes: I've never played it, but judging by style, it is completely uninteresting to me.
- Goldeneye: I played this in college. Some kid brought some Nintendo system (Game Cube? I haven't owned a console since I got bored of my 8bit Nintendo in ~1990) with them up. It wasn't a bad game, IMHO, but the fact that it was split screen, and not mouse and keyboard killed it for me. I had no interest in playing it.
- Half-Life: I consider this one of the all time great games that forever changed and improved gaming on the PC. Playing it today it is a bit dated, both in graphics and story, but it was so unlike anything that came before it and it was awesome. A pseudo believable world.
- Call of Duty: It's Counter-Strike, but after counter-strike was interesting, and way way worse.
- Counter-Strike: Also one of the all time greats. From 1999 to ~2005 I must have played almost 10,000 hours of it (but we'll never know, because most of it was pre-Steam. It had guns modeled after real weapons, tried to model in spread and recoil into the firing patterns, and required a certain element of strategy. It was one of the first games with great team-play. I loved that game. That being said, I've experience better more realistic games since, and going back is just not happening. It feels silly by comparison to modern, great semi-realistic war games.
- Titanfall: I haven't even heard of this one.
- TF2: Cartoons with hats.
OutOfPhase
Supreme [H]ardness
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I'd argue Doom actually does hold up today. I never thought Quake was that great, but Doom changed me. I still have the floppies!
Napoleon
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oh, I will defend the unrealistic games to the end! I also spent 6 plus years of competitive CS and other half life mods, realism is boring. Unreal was dope, facing worlds, brings me back! Just a lot of nostalgia here, but I still prefer better and addictive gameplay to realism any day
Lot of people like to bash on Blizzard and say they are unoriginal blah blah blah... well duh. Just about everyone and everything on this planet is unoriginal.
In a lot of ways, I think people view Blizzard like they do Apple. Unlike Apple, Blizzard doesn't make the claim that its the first in anything or doing anything original. In fact they have even stated multiple times over the years that they prefer to look at what other people are doing, and if they like it, they try to do it better. It's usually blizzard fanboys or haters that make the claims. But if you are old and been playing games way to long like me, then you will instantly see how heavily influenced Blizzard games are. If you haven't noticed it yet, Warcraft Games were heavily influenced by the tabletop Warhammer, wouldn't be surprised if their original developers and artists all played it.
Strategic Simulations, that name should send a spark of nostalgia through some people. They mainly did DnD games, but they dabbled into different genres with it as well. The original Neverwinter Nights was the first graphical MMO (had to have AoL, oh yeah!) and Stronghold in 1993 was the first 3x RTS according wikipedia, so take it as you will. I think Dune 2 came out the same year, which was full blown RTS (never played 2, but first Dune was in 1992 more of an adventure game with some elements of strategy). Depending on how you want to define the term "Real Time Strategy" Battletech: Crescent Hawks Revenge was a Real Time Strategy game, the game could be paused, sped up or slowed down but all the action happend simultaneous. It lacked the base building and large scale warfare we have come to expect from the RTS title. So even the "first" RTS game was predated by other games which had the "real-time" element. Kinda like human evolution, Homo Erectus wasn't the missing link, it was simply part of the link.
Many of blizzard's games never see the light of day, and their assets get reused in another form elsewhere. https://www.polygon.com/2014/9/23/6833039/blizzard-canceled-unreleased-games those are some of the ones that are known of, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't more. They don't release anything until they think its ready, or still relevant to their original goal. The quality they poor into their games shows, their games have very few critical bugs, and they run great on consumer PCs (notice I did not say Gaming PCs, they target the masses).
That aside, im now going to bash on Blizzard. Diablo 3 sucked, and was a huge let down. The community pleaded not to make this game online because of concerns about play-ability for those without or with limited internet access, and because for the most part it can be a single player game. Blizzard did it anyways and the game was unplayable by people I think the first week or two. The Auction house was forced down your throat, they even admitted to designing the game around players gearing up using the normal Auction House function and lowered the drops rates on many items so players would use it as tool to gear up. Once the RMAH went live all the good items went over there or if they were on the Gold AH the prices were ludicrous. Although it was removed from the game some years ago, the damage has still been done to me and the scar is still there... To be fair, Blizzard had a huge in-house drama fest over D3 and the AH stuff, and the base game was pretty good, so I just attribute D3's crappiness to its evil half that shall not be named. Bobby Kotick is the anti-christ... which is probably why he is an amazing CEO. He just needs to keep his hands away from game development side is all.
Sorry for the wall, seems like I was in touch with my inner Trump.
In a lot of ways, I think people view Blizzard like they do Apple. Unlike Apple, Blizzard doesn't make the claim that its the first in anything or doing anything original. In fact they have even stated multiple times over the years that they prefer to look at what other people are doing, and if they like it, they try to do it better. It's usually blizzard fanboys or haters that make the claims. But if you are old and been playing games way to long like me, then you will instantly see how heavily influenced Blizzard games are. If you haven't noticed it yet, Warcraft Games were heavily influenced by the tabletop Warhammer, wouldn't be surprised if their original developers and artists all played it.
Strategic Simulations, that name should send a spark of nostalgia through some people. They mainly did DnD games, but they dabbled into different genres with it as well. The original Neverwinter Nights was the first graphical MMO (had to have AoL, oh yeah!) and Stronghold in 1993 was the first 3x RTS according wikipedia, so take it as you will. I think Dune 2 came out the same year, which was full blown RTS (never played 2, but first Dune was in 1992 more of an adventure game with some elements of strategy). Depending on how you want to define the term "Real Time Strategy" Battletech: Crescent Hawks Revenge was a Real Time Strategy game, the game could be paused, sped up or slowed down but all the action happend simultaneous. It lacked the base building and large scale warfare we have come to expect from the RTS title. So even the "first" RTS game was predated by other games which had the "real-time" element. Kinda like human evolution, Homo Erectus wasn't the missing link, it was simply part of the link.
Many of blizzard's games never see the light of day, and their assets get reused in another form elsewhere. https://www.polygon.com/2014/9/23/6833039/blizzard-canceled-unreleased-games those are some of the ones that are known of, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't more. They don't release anything until they think its ready, or still relevant to their original goal. The quality they poor into their games shows, their games have very few critical bugs, and they run great on consumer PCs (notice I did not say Gaming PCs, they target the masses).
That aside, im now going to bash on Blizzard. Diablo 3 sucked, and was a huge let down. The community pleaded not to make this game online because of concerns about play-ability for those without or with limited internet access, and because for the most part it can be a single player game. Blizzard did it anyways and the game was unplayable by people I think the first week or two. The Auction house was forced down your throat, they even admitted to designing the game around players gearing up using the normal Auction House function and lowered the drops rates on many items so players would use it as tool to gear up. Once the RMAH went live all the good items went over there or if they were on the Gold AH the prices were ludicrous. Although it was removed from the game some years ago, the damage has still been done to me and the scar is still there...
To be fair, Blizzard had a huge in-house drama fest over D3 and the AH stuff, and the base game was pretty good, so I just attribute D3's crappiness to its evil half that shall not be named. Bobby Kotick is the anti-christ... which is probably why he is an amazing CEO. He just needs to keep his hands away from game development side is all.Sorry for the wall, seems like I was in touch with my inner Trump.
IMO Blizzard is like Pop Music. Safe stuff with all the edges taken off. Kind of Bland, but with a potential large audience.
What Blizzard does is spend a LOT of time, streamlining and balancing game-play, and aim low for HW requirements.
Because their stuff runs on more HW, they have a big potential audience (They are the opposite of: "Will it run Crysis X?").
Because of streamlined play, they are often easier to pick up and play, so have wider audience appeal.
Because of Balance, they can become big in online gaming (Starcraft).
I haven't been interested in anything from Blizzard in ages.
When Starcraft was getting big, I was playing Total Annihilation, which I though looked 10x better visually, and supported resolution up to 2560x1600...
What Blizzard does is spend a LOT of time, streamlining and balancing game-play, and aim low for HW requirements.
Because their stuff runs on more HW, they have a big potential audience (They are the opposite of: "Will it run Crysis X?").
Because of streamlined play, they are often easier to pick up and play, so have wider audience appeal.
Because of Balance, they can become big in online gaming (Starcraft).
I haven't been interested in anything from Blizzard in ages.
When Starcraft was getting big, I was playing Total Annihilation, which I though looked 10x better visually, and supported resolution up to 2560x1600...