What happened to Blizzard?

I've been playing through Warcraft 3 for the first time and i'm blown away by the difference between WC3 and WOW. How could they go from writing such an engaging and interesting story to writing pure shit like the storyline for the new raid? The Rexxar campaign in FT is probably the best thing i've ever had the pleasure of playing on battle.net. Why is it so hard for Blizz to engage their audience nowadays?

Also does Starcraft 3 get as good as WC3 is eventually? It seems kind of dull and sterile compared to WC3 so far.

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Activision happened.

same problem as bioware, the people that cared left

Both right

activision has no influence over blizzard business decisions besides giving them collegial advice.
Blizzard is the senior partner in their fusion, and their contract clearly spelled out seperate company leaderships.
Whatever is wrong with blizzard is blizzards fault, even if they are partnered up with virtual cancer.

teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/128252-a-short-history-of-activision-blizzard-or-how

Nu-males and memes XD took over.

Also Warcraft audience these days are mostly 14-17 year old kids.

chris metzen wrote the story for wc3 and most of wow

>Also Warcraft audience these days are mostly 14-17 year old kids.

No it's not. It's people in their late 20's and 30's.

ISNHU PORAH!

t nu-male

WoW is nothing more than a team of monkeys that must fill a design quota for each week, lead them well and with a strong concept and you could make something decent. The leadership fell apart in late Wrath but has been abysmal since WoD.

yeah and george lucas directed both the prequels and the original star wars trilogy, the difference in both cases being that early on their were people to tell them whether their ideas were stupid or not instead of being sycophantic enablers

>Also does Starcraft 3 get as good as WC3 is eventually? It seems kind of dull and sterile compared to WC3 so far.

If you mean SC2, nah not really. It's still definitely worth playing the SC2 campaigns through if you enjoyed WC3, but don't expect it to be nearly as good story-wise.

It is fucking tragic honestly. Before WoD the wow storyline was probably redeemable. It's entirely beyond saving now.

>Themes of WC3

Desparation - Human
Betrayal - Undead
Brotherhood - Orcs
Sacrifice - Night Elves

>Themes of Retail WoW
U R EPIK HERO GO KILL THIS GOD FOR 5 ITEM LEVEL UPGRADE XD

This.

What the fuck are you Talking about. Lorewise warcraft 3 was as shitty as the rest.

*Grabs you by the throat*
Fuck off!

Nah your just a numale fa_m

Just fucking face it. It was good coz you were 13 back then. Or you are now.

WoW is what happens when fans becomes developers/designers/writers.

WoW is a fanfiction of Warcraft. All the moderately decent developers have long left.

That was way way after WoW was released.

Well vanilla WoW had just as good writing for the quests. The Defias Brotherhood was great and the whole Black Dragon infiltration plot is a really satisfying plot line for a ground-level Warcraft adventurer, the game was full of stuff like that storywise. I agree that stuff like Legion's storyline is a fucking odd mess, I just got through Argus and am gearing up for the new raid, and that whole plot line ran remarkably hollow, doesn't really feel like there's much meaning behind us attacking the Legion homeworld. I'm reading the quest text and watching the cutscenes but it feels oddly routine, maybe I'm just used to it.
Anyways yeah WC3's storytelling was phenomenal, the stuff we get now doesn't feel the same. It started to get worse in BC when they retconned The Light and basically made up a half-assed storyline to make illidan a raid boss instead of doing anything relevant. Warlords of Draenor really set a new standard for 'just make up whatever', even Pandaria felt more relevant than it. It's just a mess, hard to feel grounded anymore.

Can't help you there, I've always found WC3's writing to be retarded.

this. At the time vanilla felt weird because of the return to the Eastern Kingdoms and the several new elements introduced, but it was good actually

Well, it’s been like 15 years now. Nobody works at the same job for their entire life anymore.

the original dev team of wc3 and wow have moved on. now, blizz just focuses on appealing to the lowest common denominator. the problem is that their targeted audience doesn't have a high attention span and just eat up w/e blizz shits out. blizz doesn't get the necessary feedback to improve or they just don't know how.

what happened with the WC3 universe was "scope creep"

happens when writers aren't that good and can't keep conflicts on a smaller scale interesting. in WC1/2 you just have a war between orcs and humans, but then with WC3 (which was still good) all these undefeatable cosmic god armies and things were introduced and the scale became waaay too huge to really care about. they calmed down a bit with vanilla WoW but with the latest expansions (especially the one coming out) the scope is just too big. the biggest problem is the burning legion and sargeras.

what is there to care about with the politics between azeroth races when there's an evil god bigger than the fucking planet coming to destroy it? the threat is just too big to solve cleverly or interestingly and your brain realizes before you do that only an asspull of the greatest magnitude could solve things at this point.

that's my problem with it, at least.

Then how come all the shitty decisions COINCIDENTALLY started happening right after the merger in 2007?
>WoW starts getting "features" like paid server transfers, name changing, etc.
>Starcraft 2 is turned into a "trilogy", with each race's campaign being a seperate release
>Diablo 3's artstyle is turned into top-down WoW in the middle of production and right before the game's announcement
>Wrath of the Lich King ends up being a blatantly rushed expansion pack with a lot of cut content and the first raid tier being recycled content

And that was just after a year

>Also does Starcraft 3 get as good as WC3 is eventually? It seems kind of dull and sterile compared to WC3 so far.

To know how SC3 will be, just look at the writing of SC2 as a whole, including the Nova missions.
Will they go back to how they make stories like in Brrodwar? Unlikely

man, the story of the Nova missions was so predictable and boring

Too many cooks spoil a broth

Not to mention, it was split into 3 different release

>Wrath of the Lich King ends up being a blatantly rushed expansion pack with a lot of cut content
?
I'm interested now, what was the cut content in WotLK?

there was a planned Azjol-nerub zone, which was split into two instances and part of a raid

Blizzard fucked the setting by making the ENTIRE world immediately known and playable in wow.

Any writer knows that you can never reveal the limits of your world unless you are planning to be done with it forever.
There must always be parts of the setting that are only known as "here be dragons" so that you can keep revealing them as time goes on. Otherwise you cram yourself into a limited and constrained space that you must constantly keep building on top of until it becomes a cluttered abomination.

Being unable to expand Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms led to desperate bullshit like entire island chains appearing out of nowhere and alternate dimensions.

also the Argent Tournament was supposed to be in Crystalsong Forest, not Icecrown.

WC3 is just an RTS with a silly story to merge maps together into a campaign. I'm not saying WoW is better , but you have got to raise your standards a bit and remove those nostalgia googles.

Metzen got married with kids and so wanted more family friendly writing.

Mounted combat
Azjol'nerub zone
Gun'drak raid (remember the gigantic snake in the background?)
Crystalsong forest zone was going to be a real zone with hubs and questlines instead of a background for Dalaran.
Azshara battleground
Dance studios or someshit

The old gods were also initially supposed to play a much bigger part in the expansion.

>The old gods were also initially supposed to play a much bigger part in the expansion.
come on now Yogg-Saron was everywhere

That's sad, I would have loved a zone like that

and Georges Lucas wrote and shot eps 1 to 6.

I'm just wondering if they gonna make WOW forever or they would make WC4..

Baffles me that people still say Blizzard this, Blizzard that. The company known as Blizzard died in 2008 when they merged with Activision and became Activision Blizzard. The sooner people accept that, the better off they will be. Now that I've rambled on like an old fuck I never thought I'd be, I wonder how the more visible figures of the company (such as Kaplan) would feel if the fans started referring to them as Activision Blizzard instead of Blizzard? At this point they seem to count on people trusting the Blizzard name and I get the feeling that if the majority of fans started calling them Activision Blizzard, it would ruffle their feathers. Consider how hurt they get when Overwatch fans question their ability to balance the game.

No king rules forever, my son.

>Mounted combat
ToTC and Occulus. You still want your mounted combat, faggot?
>Azjol'nerub zone
Indeed, very sad
>Gun'drak raid
Still sad but it's trolls, not bothered by it
>Crystalsong forest zone was going to be a real zone with hubs and questlines instead of a background for Dalaran
Blizzard's servers couldn't handle the strain of Dalaran hub + original TotC location and accompanying quests.
>Azshara battleground
This was planned since Classic.
>Dance studios or someshit
Yeah but we did get the barber shop.

What is this, damage control? Fact is they said they were going to a lot of stuff and then most of it didn't happen, and some of it that did wasn't good at all. WotLK is still a great expansion but they didn't end up doing all they said they would.

I want to roll Horde for Vanilla Classic but I will always remember shit like Ony quest or Defias chain.

Does Horde have any cool quest chains like that?

the attunment for Onyxia's lair is a Rexxar quest, and you have more lore for killing Rend Blackhand, but there are fewer memorable quests I think

here's the map for Azjol'Nerub.

Was really sad that their resources ran out and they couldn't have an actual raid with Anub'arak as the final boss instead of what we got with TotC. Worst raid in the entire expansion.

Why play soyboy mmos when you can play the Chad choice FFXIV?

Its not too late to save yourself, come home white man.

>warcraft 3
>engaging story

???

XIV is literally the soyboy MMO of choice. It's more infested by trannies than any other MMO.

>WC3 story
>Click buildings to make dudes that fight other dudes

Not even defending WoW's awful story but at least talk about the actual plot of the game and not just the mechanics

Lmao you can play literal furries in WoW and it's also made by the same faggots that made Overcuck. Atleast ffxiv is made by the Japanese that don't give a shit about gender politics. Now go drink your fucking soy milk you little bitch.

Everything about totc was a failure. The event was placed in Icecrown, we were celebrating with zombies at our doors. The fucking daily quests that required you to use those awfully boring vehicle controls.
I guess at least it wasn't dragon soul

Aerial dogfights in wintergrasp

Are you merely pretending?

ToTC was fantastic maybe you shittera should have learned how to play.

I'd rather play with furries than trannies. Trannies manage to create more drama than actual women in MMOs.

>Crystalsong forest zone was going to be a real zone with hubs and questlines instead of a background for Dalaran.
Crystalsong as a proper zone was scrapped because Dalaran caused massive lag in the zone so they just decided against it.
Has nothing to do with being rushed.

I never understood the hype behind dance studio

No

Korea
Esports
Games as a service
Whales
Jews

Something like that. Their games had a soul.

At least they used to be good. Not everyone can say that.

Metzen's involvement lessened with both WoW and SC2 and it shows. He wanted Raynor to be a full on drunk in the story, and for him to make costly mistakes, but the team ultimately vetoed that as they felt too much power was being taken away from the player. I can't recall the article I read this in, but I think it's a big reason why there was such a detachment from the previous established tones and atmosphere.
It's also the nature of a MMORPG, a theme park one at that. You have to keep introducing more and more baddies, and more and more raids to satisfy the players, and it leads to cheapening known characters for the sake of having a villain or spawning new ones that you haven't ever heard before (Void Lords?).

Blaming it all on Metzen has always been a mistake, I feel.

I wonder if he was the one who came up with (redeeming) Kerigan and ruining Jimmy's character

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