Thread 724775796

In your opinion, when did the era of "classic Blizzard" (W3 Blizzard) end?

WarCraft III was already past their prime.

>>724776023
C'mon, it's one of my childhood games.

>when did the era of "classic Blizzard" (W3 Blizzard) end?
With Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne.
Right before WoW released a huge number of OG devs left Blizzard to work on other games (many of which flopped, but still). It was actually a huge topic on /v/ for years after it happened, mostly when people wanted to shit on WotLK, but of course every fucking archive apparently lost all their records up to like 2018, let alone 2008-2010.
So yeah, that. It solidified the direction of WoW and ensured all the other departments would be handled by retards that couldn't be reigned in. This eventually hit WoW too but really fucked over SC2/D3 first because they assumed they were rockstar devs who shat diamonds rather than one cat among many that had to be herded. Since then it's taken repeated failures and age to humble (or retire) said faggots and as we see the replacements aren't amazing either. It's what happens when you have a studio full of amazing talent that does nothing to actually cultivate new, amazing talent.

>>724775796 (OP)
When they dropped Vivendi and merged with Activision

Warcraft 3 (+expansion) was the last real Blizzard game. World of Warcraft and beyond is where it became nuBlizzard.

>>724775796 (OP)
2005 or so

>>724776259
I think WoW was still good and is a good MMO experience.
Until the burning crusade, the beginning of the end. Dogshit expansion and WotLK killed any potential it had left.

I still enjoyed Pandaria a lot, but it's such a fundamnetally different game by that point and it was a fluke if Cata and WoD are anything to go by.

September 20, 2002 when StarCraft Ghost was announced as a console exclusive. I remember every PC Games magazine going apeshit about the "betrayal of their traditional fanbase"

>>724776259
I never played WoW actually. It was a big deal and I was reading about it in game magazines, but we didnt even have internet when it came out.

And when we did, I played Lineage 2 on a free server.

>>724775796 (OP)
They made games outside of Diablo, Diablo 2, and Diablo 4?

>>724776630
yes, Dota

>>724776023
>>724776259
>>724776307
You are all deeply eastern european.

>>724776828
*Central European

Vanilla WoW was the their last hurrah. TBC was crap and it sealed their fate, as most of the old talent had left by that point.

Classic Blizzard is 90s. WC1&2, SC, Diablo. Prime Blizzard is early 00s. D2, WC3, WoW.

I'll go full on unpopular opinion and say Blizzard was still pretty fucking awesome all the way through Hearthstone, HotS, SC2, and Overwatch.

There was a point when they stopped making new shit because it was awesome and profit incentive and market research seemed to dominate their moves. It was a rapid trifecta of the Diablo mobile announcement to boos, cancelling of HotS updates because it wasn't e-sports gold, and the absolute abomination that is Warcraft 3: Reforged that finally lost me.

>>724775796 (OP)
When the hired the faggots responsible for shitting up Everquest's endgame.

>>724777590
The launch of WoW was a more faggoty and casualized EQ. It was always the tard MMO. EQ didn't go to shit until they added instances (which is something they walked back with EQOA, oddly). WoW launched with them and very little contested content.

>>724778461
And they were hired before WoW launched. FoH and the other endgame guilds at the time were directly responsible for the path EQ, WoW, and all their clones took.
EQ's endgame was shit as of Velious.

>>724775796 (OP)
WC3 of course. WoW was the starting point of their doomfall. And while I love WoW, but it success not only let blizzard be lazy and uncreative for years, but also many other developers started developing their own shitty MMO RPG instead of real games.

can you blizzdrones go a single day without "muh old days"? you're like a fucking beaten wife. your company is now a subsidiary of MICROSOFT ACTIVISION, let go and move on

>>724779692
C'mon, W3 is one of my childhood games.

>>724779483
I enjoyed Luclin, but PoP was where I tuned out, even though I secretly wanted to get froggy in LoY.
I feel like EQOA brought back the hardcoreness of the endgame despite the technical limitations as well as the tiny hotbars.
EQ2 was neat until I went to prison (TSO was the current expansion, and shard zones were sex), and now it's a F2P shadow of itself.

>>724775796 (OP)
After Frozen Throne. Wow was such trash

>>724775796 (OP)
>all the contrarians cutting it off at W3
>ignoring the cultural juggernaut that was WoW
this is why you will never reproduce

>>724779852
Never played it.

>>724779852
It was babby's first MMO. It wasn't even a good example of the genre, but it attracted the blizzdrones that played Warcraft and Starcraft.

>>724775796 (OP)
MoP

>>724775796 (OP)
when they cancelled Ghost

>>724780239
>It was babby's first MMO
It's spelt baby. ESL?

>>724782524
>Searching for posts that contain ‘"babby's first"’. Returning only first 3000 of 27165 results found.
How new are you?

上げ

>>724775796 (OP)
It wasn't an instant death, everyone is going to argue where it was Frozen Throne, vanilla WoW, BC, Diblo3, the Activision invasion, OW, whatever
But I can tell you for sure where the last light was and where old blizzard died for good, Heroes of the Storm
Through sheer accident they ended up with enough based devs on their fucking moba of all things, since they pushed old guard like Samwise in there, who knew how to cater to nostalgia fags and actually still design shit. Blizzards fucking dota clone they made because they got mad they lost actual dota was what ended up carrying the last old Blizz soul
Just compare HotS's warcraft map to anything in Reforged, it's clear as fuck
Then HotS stopped getting real updates because it wasn't making that esports money, lol rip

>>724787002
>who knew how to cater to nostalgia fags and actually still design shit.
if this was true hots wouldnt have been fucking dead on arrival
hots was not popular, because it was bad.

>>724776259
What happened was an internal struggle over the development of WoW, with most of the OG devs wanting a sandboxy adventure MMO and the Everquest devs and "influential Everquest players" (IE Tigole, the literal poopsocker) wanting to turn it in to a poopsocking Everquest clone. The Everquest freaks won on most points and a lot of Blizzard's actual developers left when it became apparent what a giant cash cow WoW would be and that its design would inform Blizzard's policies on all future projects going forward.

>>724779692
man that gook in the front has some of the most obvious rice-paddy farming turned prostitute genes ive ever seen in my life

when she tugs you off in the asian massage parlor you probably hear *gong* HYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO as you pay tip

WarCraft 3 sucked.
No, I haven't played it.
It simply started that soulless low poly crap. That's how I know.

>>724775796 (OP)
>when did the era of "classic Blizzard" (W3 Blizzard) end?
Legion was distinctly "not" blizzard because a lot of the old guard had left by that point, it felt like it was a game designed by people who worked on other mmos, especially the pvp part. BFA was sort of "Warcraft" but only because it dealt with old warcraft lore, the pvp was better and less of a clusterfuck.
Don't get this wrong, the game in Legion and BFA was still good, it just wasn't Blizzard™ good.
I read these threads out of curiosity and some people say that when WoW Classic was done, they kicked out a lot of people who made it. Back then TBC didn't feel that much different from Classic but that's probably because i was too young to fully take it in. Wrath was the same. The game started to feel alien in Shadowlands, it felt like it was written by women for women. I stopped playing in Shadowlands and haven't since, mainly because i'm busy with chinese gacha now.

>>724775796 (OP)
the cancellation of the thrall adventure game was the earliest sign that something was wrong

>>724775796 (OP)
Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction was the end of classic Blizzard, to me.

it was a death by a thousand cuts

Ghost got canceled, TBC forever wrecked WoW lore while vanilla didn't do much damage beyond killing KT, but one could see that vanilla WoW sowed the seeds that would be later reaped that would forever change the culture of the company. The Activision merger was the absolute point-of-no-return though.

>>724775796 (OP)
WarCraft 3 has too much in common with the MMO era

>>724775796 (OP)
It's pretty easy, when Blizzard died and was replaced by Activision Blizzard in 2008.
>Diablo 3 development altered from the 2008 presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q17FDfU7-ds
>Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty already in polish phase, but Activision orders the campaign to be split into 3 separate games
https://www.shacknews.com/article/55267/starcraft-2-now-a-trilogy

2008, the year of Activision taking over from Vivendi and renaming the company was also the point of no return.

>>724775796 (OP)
I think it was all fine until like WotLK. The expansion was still fine, but you could see the rot start. Diablo 3 was the biggest wake up "what the fuck" moment, and even if they made it an ok game in the end with the expansion, Blizzard wasn't supposed to have "just ok" games.

When they got bought out by Activision in 2008. That's when most of their franchises died.

>>724777214
>TBC was crap
let me guess, because "le flying" right

>>724778461
>very little contested content.
because, as it turns out, content that only 1% of the playerbase can do, is horrible game design.

The correct answer is the Activision merger.

>>724775796 (OP)

Immediately after Brood Wars.

>>724789478
Yeah, the first two raid tiers of WOTLK were the last gasp of old-blizzard before they got smothered to death by Activision. You could see the influence immediately when ToC released and it invalidated all previous raid tiers, starting the trend of "every new raid release is a complete gear reset with huge catch-up mechanics to skip previous content", plus shit like cross-realm automatic dungeon grouping and in-game store to buy pets and mounts.

>>724789428
>Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty already in polish phase, but Activision orders the campaign to be split into 3 separate games
I'm not saying this is the moment it failed (I'm on the side of WoW development and launch being the start of the downhill trend), but the moment they split Starcraft 2 into 3 games is the moment I cancelled my subscription. I never gave a single cent to Blizzard afterward.

>>724775796 (OP)
>With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created

Unironically read Play Nice. I know Jason Schreier is a woke retard generally and this board loves to hate his shit takes, but the book is really good. Bobby Kotick is behind a lot of problems.

>>724790023
>The Activision merger was the absolute point-of-no-return though.
I remember when the story hit, I posted it on the WoW offtopic forum and the people there said it was a nothingburger.
Sweet vindication.

>>724790345
I remember all the shills and bootlickers saying that the activision merger won't have any effect because "blizz said activision isn't affecting their development"

and then WoW got RDF and the sparklepony mount

>>724789428
>Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty already in polish phase, but Activision orders the campaign to be split into 3 separate games
IMO this wasn't the biggest issue. There's no way splitting it into three games was what gave it such a shitty story, but it was probably better for gameplay.

>>724789997
The ilvl inflation because of heroic raids was the biggest problem. 10 and 25 split already accelerated that, adding a difficulty setting just made ilvl and stats increase exponentially. Combine that with new 5mans dropping gear on par with old raids, and other catch-up mechanics, and you enter the territory of only the current patch mattering (outside of the legendary mace and maybe a couple trinkets that were harder to powercreep)

>>724775796 (OP)
when the good devs left to create guild wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTZjRXm-5dU&list=PL8147C2DF414F3728&index=1

>>724790345
meant for
>>724789134
derp

Didn't Blizzard North basically get disintegrated by the Vivendi buyout, with all their execs leaving.

>>724775796 (OP)
WoW vanilla was the last good game. In the first expansion The Burning Crusade they were reviving important story dead characters, changing lore, just to reuse em, selling store items, and much more marketing devious strats, its a clear division in the company

>>724791227
>they changed things so it's le bad
>they sold optional cosmetic items so it's le bad

Anything before world of warcraft

>>724790456
>the sparklepony mount
That had its own subset of bootlickers saying it was okay because "it's just a cosmetic item you don't have to buy it", ignoring the fact that up until that point, most "cool looking" mounts all came from raid drops or rare spawns and were actually hard to get, but now any retard can just plunk $25 into the game for a fancy mount....ruining any appeal it might have because there's 50 of them in every city all the time.
and now look at the game: constant deluge of pets and mounts and cosmetics sold for real money, in a game that already requires a monthly sub to play

>>724791530
yes

>>724776023
fpbp.

How did we go from based characters to modern day crap like this?

>>724792612
companies are ships of Theseus

>>724793093
explain

>>724793137
>The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object (in the most common stating of the paradox, a ship) is the same object after having all of its original components replaced with other ones over time, usually one by one.

>>724793239
Ah. Then my answer to that is that it definitely isn't the same.

I miss boobs and warcraft

>>724793353
>For the Alliance
Didn't this faggot abandon the kingdom cause he was sad or some shit?

>>724793764
he was the equivalent of Garrosh but for the Alliance. BUt modern writers took him and made him "repent and apologize" for everything he did. That patch basically put a dagger in the already dead corpse of the lore.

>>724777225
>Hearthstone, HotS, SC2, and Overwatch
Of these 4 only HotS is a good, sovlful game made with actual care and love, and it still can't hold a candle to anything from pre-Activision era.

>>724794410
yep

>>724789787
>le flying
>le pvp minigame
>le raped "everyone gets killed for loot" lore
>le resilience
>le dailies over dailies with dailies and a dailies sauce
>le welfare epics
>le badges gear
>le blue gear is trash
>le previous content gets completely invalidated in the new update
>le neutral cities
le?

>>724775796 (OP)
>In your opinion, when did the era of "classic Blizzard" (W3 Blizzard) end?
Diablo 3 release

>>724795094
>le blue gear is trash

But I still remember gear power still being preserved in TBC. I was still using a gear from vanilla.

>>724795094
>>le flying
changed very little, vanilla already had flight paths in every zone
>>le pvp minigame
?
vanilla's PvP system was ass, it rewarded time investment instead of actual skill and only a handful of people could actually get rank 14 because of how the system worked
>>le raped "everyone gets killed for loot" lore
"I don't like it so it's bad"
>>le resilience
so that pvp isn't a game of everyone getting 2shot by crits
>>le dailies over dailies with dailies and a dailies sauce
that nobody is forcing you to do
dailies only exist as an alternate means of gold farming
I did zero (0) dailies all throughout TBC classic
>>le welfare epics
you mean like from molten core and zg and aq20 and even the ones that dropped in 5mans? yeah, vanilla had a lot of welfare epics
>>le badges gear
because god forbid we give people a reason to still run 5mans after outgearing them, or provide a means of bad RNG protection for raids
>>le blue gear is trash
you mean just like in vanilla were most blue gear is trash compared to epics? yeah
>>le previous content gets completely invalidated in the new update
except it doesn't, you're thinking of WOTLK.
>>le neutral cities
you mean like all those neutral cities vanilla had? yeah

only good blizzard game was wc3

>>724795094
God shattrath was such a dogshit city hub.

>>724795707
Also Diablo and Diablo 2, but that wasn't Blizzard, but Blizzard North (not actually Blizzard)

>>724795404
The least dishonest chatgpt respoonser. Every point is a dishonest lie, so I'm just gonna pick a single random lie to prove you're a dishonest liar.
>except it doesn't
Sunwell

>>724795835
Elaborate on how Sunwell invalidated all previous content.
>magister's terrace
you're not gonna be doing sunwell in kara epics, retard

>>724795174
Maybe if you had endgame raids. I think I only ever walked into BWL once, most of my gear was UBRS, AQ gear, or level 60 fivemans like dire maul, and I was definitely replacing things with greens from Broken Peninsula. There might've been a couple trinkets that were outliers.
TBC did still have some raid progression though, you mostly had to do Mag > SSC/TK > BT. Every raid release being a gear reset checkpoint started in WotLK.

>>724775796 (OP)
when they got rid of Blizzard North

>vanilla purist gets proven wrong
>"n-n-n-no you're a chat bot!"
>proceeds to make another horribly incorrect argument and doesn't reply when proven wrong again
Always the same with these spergs.

>>724775796 (OP)
SC2 blundered release management
Wow TBC

I don’t feel that the company has done anything good since then though they have influenced the industry to the detriment of consumers

>>724795707
how can you like wc3 and not like starcraft or warcraft 2?

>>724799328
should hold true to StarCraft 2, too. Other than story, I don't know how you can dislike these similar things.

>>724793863
>Trollbane
>Loves greenskins now
This fucking game bro

>>724800452
california is truly a special place

After WoW released, slow decay, the lich king expansion was the swansong

Activision was the death of Blizzard without a single fucking doubt

>>724793137
all the people that made the RTS games - hell, even early WoW - are long gone
the "Blizzard" of today has nothing to with the "Blizzard" that made those games. it's essentially a completely new entity with a stolen name, now made up by a completely different selection of code monkeys, DEI hires, activision plants, and other worthless bloat that enshittifies a company

>>724802950
explains why people are complaining on the forums and no dev is listening. They literally dont care about WoW. They just want to puppet the brand for their idealogies.

>>724803106
forum subhumans were never worth responding to
see: the bus shock incident

>>724775796 (OP)
When Trial of the Grand Crusader launched

>>724800959
Don't forget that fat nerdy fuck who simped for Sylvanas and then wrote himself into the game as an important questgiver / lore character related to her.

>>724806381
its really bad

>>724807318
>hmm this is a fantasy race of savages
>THEY MUST BE AN ALLEGORY FOR BLACK PEOPLE
>hmm this is a fantasy race of greedy, shady people
>THEY MUST BE AN ALLEGORY FOR JEWS
but yeah it's totally everyone else that is the real racists, right

>>724799328
SC lacks the custom maps WC3 had. And it plays very differently compared to WC3

This is the exact moment it ended.

>>724807460
Trolls were obviously niggers though, they even had the nigger speech

>>724810118
When I came back for legion (most of cataclysm, MoP, WoD) I was exceedingly disappointed that people were flat out bragging about owning this and absolutely no one, ever, referred to it as That Retarded Horse.