Blizzard is often revered as one of those few studios, like Valve, that operate on "when it's done" time - game releases happen when they're ready, not when some publishing house requires it. As a result they have been monumentally successful.
It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up, studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.
It's an incredible marketing message that may or may not be in line with what actually goes on internally.
Is it believable that they have more freedom to scrap, or extend projects? Certainly. But are there are also external forces to development that include things such as deadlines, and other timings? I would imagine so.
It's easy for us to think of companies as an unchanging abstraction, but in reality a company changes very much based on who is behind it. Blizzard in its heyday is not the Blizzard today. I feel like the company has lost some of its magic, and it's not even quite sure why.
The talent is very different since the industry has matured. Their projects are run by people from industry that have been able to deliver before (C&C:SC2, DoW:D3). I can understand the desire for a certain predictability when you are spending 100M+ on a title. But at the same time, the reality is that these people spent many years delivering mediocre titles. Contrast this approach with Valve, which routinely picks up brilliant, but risky, talent and IP. Today, they have picked up DOTA, possibly one of the biggest games of this decade, which has slipped either by ignorance or incompetence through Blizzard's fingers.
Blizzard has every right to rehash their older games. But in 15 years, we see sidegrades instead of evolution. Perhaps they are using 1997 as a reference point. When you release a product with the barebones featureset of BNET2, it would have been passable in 1997, but 2012 is different. The landscape has completely changed. Blizzard is no longer one of the few providers of a functional multiplayer experience - you can get any game you can think of in your browser, desktop, or console. They are no longer a big fish in a small pond, but just one fish in a large ocean. By their actions, I'm not sure they truly understand how dangerous their position is. It's understandable to miss the change in the environment, after all it has been slow, and masked by tremendous successes with WoW.
But the times have changed, and on their current path, they will miss the boat the next time someone eats their lunch.
To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.
That's exactly what I mean by slip through their fingers. It would be like Valve not picking CS. With Blizzard's considerable resources and, as they claim, freedom, they should have gone after hiring Icefrog and getting DOTA. If it's not in their DNA to make such a play work, well I think that factors into the larger point of them living in another age.
I want to also clarify that a lot of this rant is in the context of them trying to build out stuff like the UMS maps store for SC2 (or even putting in development time on their version of DOTA). To me, these are a fool's errand; pursuing them demonstrates that Blizzard doesn't understand _why_ UMS was so successful on their platform 15 years ago, and how the landscape has changed such that it no longer makes sense.
UMS was still successful 9 years ago, when the original DotA (not Allstars) first appeared. And it wasn't until 2005-6 that Allstars really took off, so that's only 6-7 years ago that there was still a vibrant UMS scene for WC3.
SC2 could've had a successful modding scene as well; Blizzard just doesn't understand what modders want or how to build tools for them. SC2's editor and the Galaxy scripting language were both underwhelming in their own right and significantly less powerful than the community-developed tools available for WC3. As a result, the competent WC3 modders abandoned Blizzard en masse.
Blizzard Allstars is also a fantastic idea and exactly the right move from a strategic standpoint. Unfortunately, Blizzard has absolutely bungled the execution. They should have had it ready to release with SC2, long before LoL had really caught on or DotA 2 was a thing. Instead it's been more than two years, and there's still no release date for it or HotS.
Lots of people agree that SC2's editor was good enough to do a lot of neat things. Someone made a 3rd person, mmo/arena type game. There was some issues with the fact that sc2 netcode is no good for mmo/shooters, but I think the true killer was the fact that it was impossible to get your map to become popular if you weren't already popular. The popular maps stayed popular because they were always on the front page.
This is completely different from wc3's system where whatever games were hosted by people showed up, so you would have to wait to find a game you wanted, but it also provided new maps much more exposure.
It doesn't matter that you can do neat things when the workflows are hideously overwrought, though[1]. As if Blizzard's insistence on GUI-ifying everything weren't bad enough, they then proceeded to add a ridiculous Data Editor that only partially exposes objects to code and doesn't allow you to do much programmatically. As a result, you end up having to cobble effects together through a combination of kludgy GUI editing and hackish[2] scripts. Examples:
The middle one is a particularly good example because you can't dynamically set the miss chance. Or rather you can, but that change will affect all units, so in practical terms you can't do it that way. Instead you have a single 1% miss buff and layer it on until you hit your target value. The problem there, of course, is that each 1% suffers from diminishing returns, so you end up having to use a logarithmic approximation instead. By contrast, completely dynamic evasion in WC3 was a breeze.
Anyway, even when Andromeda[3] was actively being worked on SC2 modding was barely tolerable. But you're also right about the mechanisms for advertising maps to players: They suck.
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1. People were making third- and first-person mods in the WC3 days too, by the way.
2. Hackish because, by design, there are many things you simply cannot do with scripting.
Absolutely. Having previously grabbed Counter-Strike (Half-life mod) and Team Fortress (Quake mod), and treating them nicely, most definitely should garner a good reputation.
Has there been any information as to why those were so screwed up, compared to other blizzard titles? Blizzard used to be on my "buy everything they make you can trust it to be good" list but Starcraft II knocked them off that and Diablo 3 made me rather dislike them.
I know the Diablo 3 performance issues weren't picked up in the open beta stresstest - because I played that and the performance was good enough to make be buy the game after being hesitent to buy an online-only ARPG when I live in Australia.
What really shocked me in Diablo3 were some really simple programming mistakes that never should have passed Q&A or even be implemented in the first place.
Like one where you could change your local computer time and affect the auction house online to cancel your account at will and get the money bidden on these items.
They either had to finish the product on a tight schedule and did not focus on core aspects of the game or they had no real talent on the project. But this has probably something to do with the day Vivendi took over and they had to deliver ROI at any cost.
WoW is still a first class game but we will see if they are able to convert enough of their player base to Titan. But it looks like the brand name is starting to lose value.
Do you really consider SC2 a screwup? Remember, SC1 was far from perfect as well when it came out. The only blizzard game that was perfect right from release IMO was warcraft 3. SC2 might not be their best, but it is still a really great game. So I can't really follow that SC2 bashing.
Can't talk about Diablo3 though, that series never interested me.
SC2 wasn't terrible. I think a lot of people were angry (and still are) about the state of custom games, which were a lot of fun for a lot of people. The implementation in pre-Arcade-patch SC2 was so bad that only ~15 maps were ever played. Post-Arcade is better but still misses the mark in several key areas.
I think it shows that (a) the staff is being manipulated by upper management, who doesn't understand what made Blizzard games good in the past or (b) the turnover has been so high in this industry that the designers and developers themselves don't know what made these games great.
It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up, studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.