has any company lucked out with a game more than blizzard and starcraft?
while the game itself is great it seems like there were way too many unintentional gameplay elements that led to diverse mechanics and high skill ceiling. not to mention the way it took off in korea.
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Once would be luck. Their dev teams have had enough successes in their belts that I'm willing to give them the benefit of my dollars. But no more pre-orders after that last debacle.
they're total shit since at least WotLK
Warcraft 3 as well as starcraft had a pretty solid scene for custom maps. Giving the tools to create maps to the players allowed for the game to become even more than Blizzard realized it could be. They genuinely constructed good multiplayer games that had good single player campaigns to boot.
It's the kind of game you won't see made these days.
I wouldn't say it's luck necessarily. If you don't forcibly design the game to work in some particular way, all kinds of emergent behaviours are all but guaranteed to be present. Same deal with unit balance: if you just design cool thematic units that are very powerful in at least one respect instead of forcefully developing a rock-paper-scissors hard counter system (as seen with SC2 armour types for example), they only need to be somewhat sensibly balanced as opposed to even trivial differences making or breaking the unit, especially when mechanical skill is such a major factor that math doesn't even necessarily enter the equation (if your dragoons are stuck at the ramp, it doesn't matter if they theoretically counter marines or whatever).
>there were way too many unintentional gameplay elements
Melee
Take out all the glitches and exploits and it would be a dead game.
This, Starcraft wouldn't be nowhere near as popular as it was without custom map support.
It wouldn't even be an e-sport, since Starcraft balance depends a lot on a properly designed map (a lesson that Blizzard took too far in SC2, last time I checked).
Besides, Brood War has been balanced a lot, indirectly through maps. Since the units and races in general have such pronounced strengths (through virtue of being designed with rule of cool, not "balance", in mind), you can address the balance issues A LOT with clever map-making tricks. For example, Carriers can get totally outrageous if the map has a lot of cliffs for them to exploit - SC2 design paradigm would never allow an unit to be so "OP", and a lot more thought than that probably has gone to some details (for example, some maps had several destructible objects stacked on top of each other and allegedly the reason for that is to give units with AoE an advantage in clearing them while reducing the comparative effectiveness of cracklings and such like).
I think Gunz is the greatest example of where a game became good due to unforseen mechanics.
The whole game was basically based on animation canceling, which they changed in the second one.
the main reason BW ended up being such a good competitive game is because of the custom maps designed to balance it
balancing maps in an rts is one of the hardest things
sure there was a great game to build on, but the maps are why it has had staying power
I played a lot of gunz, and I found it playable and fun without "k style" animation canceling. All that k style did was turn it into a lot of fucking work and a total mess, as well as divided an already cancerous community.
>entire broodwar story is kerrigan fucks everything up whilst everyone except Darun is a mouthbreathing retard letting her do whatever she wants / trusting her despite her being the literal childspawn of the overmind
>people talking about how amazing the story is
wew laddy
>has any company lucked out with a game more than blizzard and starcraft?
Starcraft wasn't really that big a hit for them.
They lucked out with WoW, really.
Sure, Korean played it a lot but on pirated copies on Korean servers.
Tribes devs with the skiing bug shaping the game.
Nah thats not true.
Glitches were barely used. The only glitches that were actually used is the ones regarding carrier.
Nope. My sleep schedule is fucked so I've been catching sc2 GDL games and it made me want to get the game. Currently playing through the campaign of legacy of the void. The writing is so fucking bad, and the characters are literally cardboard archetypes. I suspected it would be like this going in, but I didnt know it would be so cucky. They literally have a "protoss are the ubermensch" character that artanis (the protagonist/hero) talks to and every conversation is an obvious liberal soapbox.
>Starcraft wasn't really that big a hit for them.
Someone who doesn't know what they are talking about eh?
Wow,warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and Starcraft:BW are some of the biggest successes in the gaming industry.
Anons already mentioned things like custom maps and unintentional design elements, but BW only picked up as an e-sport because South Korea was undergoing a recession at the time so people couldn't afford PCs. They stayed at PC cafes and got in touch with BW, which they learned and enjoyed and evolved into what it became. Honestly BW is a perfect example of how you should treat an e-sport, and encouraging it organically, not forcing it on players.
The overall writing is fine except the dialogue. The narrative in general is bad and the .
>some people think that starcraft is better than warcraft
direction also sucks *
wtf
>Wow,warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and Starcraft:BW are some of the biggest successes in the gaming industry.
So are AoE1, AoE2, Red Alert 1, Red Alert 2,...
Brood War wasn't anything special.
It never even won a GOTY back when GOTYs actually had a meaning.
It made money and BTFO'd WC2 but got BTFO'd in turn by Ensemble's AoE2 as well as Blizzard North's Diablo 2 in sales and reception because the PC market was booming back then.
They're too big now.
A successful video game company 15 years ago is now a multi-billion dollar business tycoon. They can't afford to make anything that isn't uber profitable.
Hehehhe
>Brood War wasn't anything special.
Except it became a national sport for Korea and decades later it is still having televised tournaments for it.
Those games you listed have been forgotten by now. BW stood the test of time.
In Korea
Name any game that has ever had that amount of success.
The original claim was that starcraft wasn't that big a hit when it has literally done something no other game has ever done.
Not only did it kickstart E-sports as we know it, a whole country was a fan of it.
WoW writers got their hands into Starcraft 2. That's why.
literal anime shit
wow writers and directors got their hands on diablo 3 aswell... also overwatch for that matter.
more like they upped their cocaine dosage
i once fapped to the brood war box
It's actually the opposite. Metzen got booted off to Waifuwatch, and the Diablo team is working on WoW now.
>space tentacle gives power
>become phoenix
why
thx blizzard for literally creating cancer
If most genres are dead at this point it's because of them.
she has to remain a sex object
lel
>unintentional gameplay elements
>diverse mechanics
>high skill ceiling
You just describe the one game more miraculous than Brood War
*teleports behind you*
No, all games from that era were like that. You'll notice that sequels to these games try to include the unintentional gameplay mechanics as intentional, but the games fail because the devs have no idea what makes the games popular.
The original team was made up of old-school nerds, kids that just got out of college and were literally hungry for success, and cool guys that fried their brains just enough to have cool ideas, but not enough to go to deep into crazytown.
The problem with modern day Blizzard is that you can't really scale up a business without diluting the worker pool with "normals". Normals are not bad workers by default, but they don't have the particular brand of insanity and work ethic that the older employees do.
Remember that story about the guy that was coding Starcraft while his wife was giving birth?
>and the Diablo team is working on WoW now.
I dunno if it's a glitch or not but muta stacks were probably not intentional
it was. You couldn't stack them "properly" if you only had Mutas selected. You had to put an Overlord into their Control Group, then they would all stack up.
Nobody knew why, but it worked.
Nope Metzen worked on Diablo 3.
He was in the panels 2011 and 2012 for diablo 3 lore.
stop lurkers
Blizzard had a good thing going. Then they made WoW and decided it would be best to only have that dev team do everything else. Completely fucking retarded.
I'm pretty sure the dev team that made wow good stopped after tbc to work on a secret project called titan that was never released. Now we have metzen fucking everything up.
>Letting her do whatever she wants
>UED Campaign is literally stealing control over the zerg
>Protoss Campaign is about not dying to a bunch of fucking Cerebrates
>Implying anyone could actually stop her in the Zerg campaign
i think there's also a relatively recent spider mine glitch that gets used. that might just be more movement exploits though which are kind of different.
>He's in HotS now
>Looks to still have John De Lancie
>Entire playstyle is about throwing people around and slapping their shit in
>Literally has a late-game ability that lets him teleport for the cost of all but 1 HP
Fucking Alarak.
Didn't Kerrigan specifically bullshit her way to victory for like the first 2/3 of broodwar? She came to the other races crying about how strong a new overmind would be and how it would destroy everyone but really it was just a bid for power to control the swarm in the overmind's absence. after it was destroyed in the first one and to keep that power by having everyone take out the new overmind for her so she could consolidate control over the swarm.
To be fair the Protoss did fuck up a bit with the whole Raszagal thing.
No that wasn't a glitch, the guy was allying his opponent then unallying. This is banned now.
>secret project called titan that was never released.
That's overwatch
overwatch was partially made from the scraps left over from titan, but project titan was officially cancelled
Nope titan was outright cancelled. Some of the assets were scrapped together for overwatch though. It was suppose to be an MMO.
Overwatch was obviously what titan ultimately turned into.
Rob Pardo must be shitting his pants with frustration over the fact that Titan never became what it was meant to be.
It was supposed to be an MMO with RTS + FPS + RPG in one game.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Starcraft + overwatch + wow/diablo in one single mmo.
It would have been the end all be all video game of all time. But nope the casualization plague took over (nu-blizzard/post-activision).
All of the leaked details of the game even had detailed out tracers abilities and Torbjörn's character and everything.
the story is not perfect, but all the campaigns in sc2 and wc3 are really enjoyable to play through
They have not delivered one project worthy of their potential after WoW.
SC2 took long and probably cost a lot, but compared to how much they invested back into SC1, compared to what they had back then..., yeah, not so much.
>Let that sink in for a moment.
Smells like the package full of bullshit that hello games tried to sell as carefully matured cheese recently.
>tfw we will never get an actual good sequel to SC1
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>AoE 2
>forgotten
I never understood this shit. We are told that Zerg and Protoss are supposed to merge to form a xel'naga and yet artanis is there just looking
literally explain this shit
The writing maybe would be fine for it's own IP, except they increasingly introduced new supernatural elements that had a larger and larger effect on the plot than before. In SC1, while there are supernatural elements like the khala it was never really the driving factor of the plot like in SC2.
SC1 has psychic abilities to take the role of magic and fill in the lore gaps to how some of the units and alien societies work, SC2 has ancient prophecies (complete with relatively crude stone carvings for a race that can create sentient life forms), gods, and whatever the fuck happened in the LotV epilogue. Also, the characters, especially ones like Alarak give me this "wannabe hollywood" feeling
>Overmind was good all along even though Zeratul linked minds with it and said nothing about this
>Kerrigan wasn't evil, she was just possessed by Zergbits, even though she confirms she is in full control of her actions in Brood War
>Kerrigan is good guy who compromises her own plans to save lives, even though uninfested Kerrigan helped Mengsk murder billions of people with psi-amplifiers
>Kerrigan is no longer manipulative, just a generic villain with no stake in anything
>Raynor and Kerrigan's love story is the most important thing in whole universe, even though it was literally like three flirty banter pieces in the first game
>Tassadar is still alive lol
>Zerg aren't parasite worms from a volcanic planet, they are spiky things from a jungle planet
>UED never returns despite still being interested in Koprulu sector
>Nova is squeezed in everywhere because fans sure loved her in that game that never came out
>Nobody is bad guy, they're all being manipulated by Amon
>Duran has Dragonball Z laser fight with Star Kerrigan
>ANCIENT EVIL PROPHECIES
What the fuck happened to you Blizzard
>but all the campaigns in sc2
>really enjoyable to play through
No
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has any esport even come close to this?
Alarak was the only memorable character in LotV, and only because the others were so unremarkable and devoid of actual personality that he stood out
Okay so you kinda ruined your own hype by playing SC2 i get it. But to say that SC didn't have as big elements as SC2 is plain wrong.
Everything that happens in SC2 are directly caused by things in SC.
Just look up who Duran is in SC:BW.
That should explain that the story of SC2 was written way before they even started working on SC2.
But to be honest the idea of lovecraftian space creatures being the end all be all beings of the universe is pretty fucking cool. The execution just left a lot to be desired.
>Tassadar is still alive
No it was just an illusion made by Xelnagas.
The plot was entirely legit cancer though
What has our culture become
>>Raynor and Kerrigan's love story is the most important thing in whole universe, even though it was literally like three flirty banter pieces in the first game
Someone hasn't read the books (Which are canon before you say anything)
>>Tassadar is still alive lol
:^)
Still agree on the rest of what you posted tho
Nova was one of the few good points about the SC2 story since everything else was so fucked up
I am really interested in the UED though, realistically they'd have to be significantly more advanced than the Terrans given that I imagine they have way more time and resources, I guess that would create a lot of issues though
Kerrigan was never in full control.
It was just another layer of control to make her think that.
Amon was truely controlling everything behind the scenes through the massive terran cult, the Khala infested protos and through the overmind with the zerg.
Amon had his tentacle dicks inside all of the major factions because he was trying to res-erect himself.
voting for him as the worst writer in the history of vidya
The maps help but blizard DID spend a long time patching the game to be more balanced. Doesn't matter how well made the maps are when zerg mutalisk stack rush was literally unbeatable when it first came out.
I'd say the bigger example of luck is warcraft 3 aka the marvel vs capcom of RTS where they just put a million units with wacky abilities into one game and somehow it worked
>To play through
yes
>For the rest (story, narrative, etc.)
no
Most of them have actually left, there isn't many of the old school devs left there anymore. Dave Kosak and neo-blizzard run the show now which is why things have been going to shit.