Episode 239: A Blizzard of Enthusiasm

[Rob Zacny]

Rob, Fraser Brown, and TJ Hafer have come away from Blizzcon feeling like Blizzard is more of a strategy studio than it's been in years.

 

Listen

[RTS Novice]

I had the podcast playing in the background while working on something, wasn't paying much attention, then I heard "spewed",  "ganked" , and "filthy" in the space of a minute. Ha! Going to have to revisit that.

[hexgrid]

Crate & Crowbar's theory of why Blizzard All-Stars was renamed was that it was inevitably going to be abbreviated to "BALLS".

[Mygaffer]

Diablo III on PC has NOT been cracked. Now did they gain sales from that? If so enough to offset lost sales from people like me who decided not buy it for that reason? I doubt it had a large impact on sales one way or the other.

 

As far as Lords Management's being easier to have fun without a lot of practice I think that is nonsense. I had a terrible experience playing DOTA 2, as I was losing and losing. I think Rob may just be getting the impression that it is easier to get into because matchmaking is much better than older RTS games. Finally I did have one game where I did very well, but even that I did not enjoy all that much. I haven't played again since.

[ShadowTiger]

I used to be really big into custom maps for blizzard games but the issues with the launch of SC2 caused me to feel like its a waste of time. Another big issue is that making something in Starcraft 2 inherently takes 10 times as along as making something in Warcraft 3. If you want to do something complex it needs a team of developers or a huge time investment. I haven't looked at it recently, but someone would need to make tools that streamline the process.

Diablo 3 was a big disappointment. I can believe they have the gall to say the auction house was a mistake but online only wasn't a mistake. I remember reading that 80% of people played Diablo 2 single player only. I played it both offline and online with some friends, but with friends you don't have to worry about hacking/cheating, so that argument is BS. Also, about 60% of the enjoyment I got out of Diablo 2 was from using the item editor to make my own items and run around in hell with "8 player" difficulty and whack people with my weapon of 100% chance to cast level 40 meteor on strike. I didn't play too much with mods but the LotR mod for Diablo 2 was really cool because it re-arranged the acts and changed most skills and items.

Similarly in Borderlands, which sold just fine without online only DRM, I had a bunch of fun with item editors and even exchanged illegal items with friends because it is an awesome way to spice up the max level end game. Unfortunatly they patched the game to prevent you from mixing different gun parts which was very disappointing. (I had a sniper rifle that shot 14 bullets by mixing in a revolver part, as well as an alien gun that shot a giant ball of energy for 2000 points of damage by mixing in a rocket part). I really hate it when game developers take away toys from players in order to "secure the online environment." Again, people are mostly playing these games offline, its a very simple math equation to figure out which audience to cater towards.

 

I am really looking forward to Warcraft 4 anyways, and Lords Managements are not really my thing.

Did anyone play the original DotA back before Frozen Throne came out? The reason why DotA became popular was because it was one of the few maps that had custom hero skills before Frozen Throne enabled that natively. Basically you had to extract out the game data from the map file, edit it, and then re-import it. The game has really changed greatly since then but its cool knowing that I was there for the beginning (where I still had the same conclusion: Meh).

[hexgrid]

I'm one of the people Blizzard lost with Warcraft 3; I bought the giant silly box with artbook at midnight on launch day, took it home, and wandered a wonderful path of discovery from initial uncertainty to the gradual realization that I hated it.  I only played single-player, which probably didn't help.

 

It was some combination of the awful story (though honestly after StarCraft I don't know what I expected), the paint-by-numbers missions, the "it's an rpg with a level cap of 1" silliness, and the APM-focused game mechanics. Combined with the realization that I was playing off-brand Warhammer written by people who managed to miss both the humor and the deep creepiness of the Warhammer universe (one might well ask what's left with the humor and the creepiness missing, and the answer is "not much of value"), and I was done.

 

I think in retrospect there was also an element of disappointment from the direction of change; I had StarCraft, but it came out in the 90s and was an artifact of its time. I'd played other far more interesting RTS games subsequently, and was looking forward to what Blizzard was going to do to update the formula.  The answer seemed to be "split the difference between WarCraft 2 and Diablo", which I reacted to about as well as I'd react if WarCraft 4 came out stacked full of freemium "features". If I wanted a fantasy action RPG, I'd play one with direct control and no level cap, like Record of Lodoss War or the like.

 

So, I'd long forgotten WarCraft 3 by the time DOTA came out, and I largely missed the boat on DOTA and its clones.

 

I've occasionally thought about getting StarCraft 2, but never hard enough to drop the cash on it; the combination of not-on-Steam and what I've heard about the single player campaign has been enough to keep it from getting far up my priority list.  There are too many other interesting games out there.

[ShadowTiger]

@hexgrid, I actually agree for the most part. I never really enjoyed most of the base building RTS games that much.

However, I have sunk hundreds of hours into Starcraft and Warcraft 3 based on the editor. Custom maps are so much fun, both to play and make! There is so much variety, chances are you will find several game types you really enjoy.

[sclpls]

I played a bunch of Blizzard RTSs back in the day, but pretty much as soon as the genre was made up of more than like one or two titles I left Blizzard behind. I never really felt like their designs were that amazing, and I often regarded the critical acclaim they received as weird and cult-like. I'm also not convinced that this studio is ready to get back to their strategy roots, as was asserted on this episode (and from my perspective it sure sounds like you guys got hoodwinked by the spectacle of Blizzcon!). That being said, I am weirdly interested in HotS. I am definitely the sort of person intrigued by the idea of a Lords Management that's strategically interesting without necessarily placing the same kind of demand on a player that a DOTA or a LoL might. I also find that there are Starcraft characters added to the mix to be really appealing. Not because I have any attachment to the characters, but just because I appreciate the absurdity this will generate, and it is a breath of fresh air from ultra conservative traditional fantasy fare that characterizes the genre. My guess is as good as anyone else's about how likely Blizzard is to succeed at creating a more inclusive Lords Management, but I sure do hope they succeed.

 

In other news, I still find this forum's autocorrect to be obnoxious.

[Valorian Endymion]

I believe the greatest barrier to Warcraft IV it the fact that given that WoW is a on going story, there is the question where in the timeline they would put War IV - they can´t put ahead, since it would limit future expansions for wow and maybe even given spoilers. Past, either before WoW or Warcraft I-III is a option and maybe  is a bit more easy to fit in, but somehow you know how the game would end, after all it can´t change how WoW or what happened between each Warcraft (if memory didn´t fail me or I did read some wrong material, another problem is that in universe, the time between each Warcraft was very short, something like a very few years, less that a generation).

Sometime, I wonder the if relationship between WoW and Warcraft isn´t similar to what happend with the Ultima (rpg) and Ultima (online) where the online version was the only one which survived of the original franchise.

[Arathain]

I'm really delighted BlizzCon left so many skeptical folk feeling good about where Blizzard are going. They're such a good company when they're on form. Blizzard games have always been wonderfully varied and well realised. 

 

I'm surprised to discover that the more I hear about Heroes of the Stone or Hearth of the Swarm or Heart of the Stone or whatever it's called, the more excited I am about it. I played League of Legends for a few months in its earlier days and had some fun with it, but I found that having to commit to the number and length of matches necessary no longer fit into my life. Shorter matches? Smaller knowledge requirement? Greater variety? Familiar characters? Silliness? Sounds kind of great. 

 

I'll definitely give Heathstone a go, too.

[tomchick]

It's nice to see that Rob Zacny has let go of his mad dream to rebrand Lords Managements "lordly management sims", or whatever that godawful moniker was.

 

    -Tom

[Gormongous]

I will always hope that Blizzard captures me like they last did with Warcraft III, which I played exclusively and intensively for eighteen months, but their ongoing attitude surrounding Diablo III speaks more to me than anything at BlizzCon ever could. I mean, someone mentioned it in the thread for another episode, but did you see the interview that RPS did with the lead designer at BlizzCon?

 

RPS: What if people don’t want to commit to a community? What if they just want to play the game?

 

Martens: We didn’t make that game. That’s the straight-up answer. We did not make that game, and we’re not going to turn this game into that game. We have the online mode because we learned a lot over the many, many years that Diablo II was in development.

 

That was the wrong choice to allow people to play offline, and we still stand by that. And we think Internet access is widespread. If someone has no Internet access, then yeah, Diablo III is not the game for them.

 

[PR motions that time is up]

 

Until things like the above aren't being said at all, Blizzard remains firmly a "wait-and-see" company for me, alongside other former greats like Creative Assembly and Bioware.

[Twig]

To be honest I think that's a fair thing for Blizzard to say. It's also completely fair to have your attitude.

 

Also to be honest that stuff never bothered me (even though gun to my head I'd say I dislike it greatly, on principle). What bothered me was everything they're claiming will be fixed with the expansion. Sooooo I guess that's a thing.

[Roderick]

If a person held a gun to my head, I would give them any opinion they wanted about Blizzard and their corporate strategy. It is no chip off my block.

[Twig]

We all have our limits, man. It's okay.

[osmosisch]

I also find that there are Starcraft characters added to the mix to be really appealing. Not because I have any attachment to the characters, but just because I appreciate the absurdity this will generate, and it is a breath of fresh air from ultra conservative traditional fantasy fare that characterizes the genre.

For what it's worth, League of Legends already does this.

I'm also one of the people that fell off the blizzard wagon post-WC3. WoW's online-only stuff was acceptable for obvious reasons but them trying to fold it into SC2/D3 made me not want their games.

WC3 is also where they really started huffing their own farts plot-wise, which has been getting progressively worse.

[hexgrid]

WC3 is also where they really started huffing their own farts plot-wise, which has been getting progressively worse.

 

The writing in their earlier games is pretty dire too.  Take StarCraft, for example.  The plot "twists" were telegraphed so loudly and so far in advance that you pretty much knew how the game was going to end before you were half way through.  The character writing was *awful* and given little to no thought.

 

As an example, let's take the point where Kerrigan (I think that was her name?) and Raynor first meet.  He's apparently a cop from a backwater planet, and she's a powerful psychic and combat veteran who has been hanging around with space marines who aren't exactly portrayed as masters of etiquette or gentlemanly manners.  Just about the first thing that happens between Raynor and Kerrigan is the exchange where she reads his mind and declares in a shocked/irritated voice that he's a pig.  This is the only time you hear her say something like this, so it's not like she's making an issue of things every time someone mentally undresses her; either Raynor is so over-the-top perverted that his inner thoughts managed to shock someone who should have been beyond shocking (since, really, her skills and position should have been roughly the equivalent of being immersed for years in stileproject.com or whatever today's equivalent is), or... the writers just didn't think about it, and thought it would be funny if the hayseed made the prissy psycher freak out with his mind sex.

 

It's that kind of thing that bugs me with Blizzard's writing, at least what I've seen of it. The characters are all paper-thin context-free archetypes with exactly one twist. Kerrigan is the kidnapped princess BUT she becomes the evil queen. Raynor is the noble prince/hero BUT he will do deals to accomplish goals.  Emperor Betrayyou or whatever his name was is the Disney (or Bond) villain who will bring about his own doom eventually and will reflexively betray anyone he can even if it's not in his interests to do so, BUT will be randomly helpful once in a while when it moves the plot along.  Fenix (again with the telegraphing) is the noble warrior felled in battle who returns with renewed strength and will fall at the last hurdle to establish the stakes of the climax BUT he wants you to know he wears his baseball cap sideways.

 

Interaction between the characters is the kind of writing I'd expect out of a 14 year old.  It reminds me of this:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eISIpBNSA6Q#t=22

 

(If you've never watched Prisoners of Gravity, by the way, it was an excellent series; it's dated at this point, but it was a really good show covering a lot of speculative fiction subject matter and had a *lot* of good interviews...)

 

It's also Blizzard (in Warcraft 2) that gave us this:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Hc_MiZlz6gE#t=24

 

Aside from being flat-out stupid, it's a classic case of stuff you can't do in the game happening in a cutscene:

 

- human knight sneaks up on orc -- there's no sneaking or line of sight in warcraft 2

- human knight gets one-shot kill by attacking from behind -- again, nope, not in wc2

- human knight captures catapult -- another thing you couldn't do in wc2

- captured catapult shoots down blimp in a single shot -- catapults in wc2 couldn't attack air units, and IIRC didn't do quite enough damage to single-hit kill anything

 

It doesn't seem like the problem is money.  I think it's a Dunning-Kruger thing; they don't have the writing chops to realize how awful their stories are.

[hexgrid]

All of the above said, though, if Blizzard put out something single-player and properly strategic I'd be on it pretty fast.  Say, something on the scale of (and similar in design to, but hopefully less broken than) Star Wars Rebellion (or Supremacy, apparently, depending on where you live).

 

I may find the StarCraft universe spectacularly uncompelling, but when a grand strategy game set in space gives me the "come hither" look, I have no defenses.

[Arathain]

I will always hope that Blizzard captures me like they last did with Warcraft III, which I played exclusively and intensively for eighteen months, but their ongoing attitude surrounding Diablo III speaks more to me than anything at BlizzCon ever could. I mean, someone mentioned it in the thread for another episode, but did you see the interview that RPS did with the lead designer at BlizzCon?

I know it has been Blizzard's constant line that the game is designed to be played co-op online, and I get why they stick to it, but it still seems very hollow. While I can appreciate the very skilled work that allows such fast and fluid drop-in/drop-out multiplayer, the fact is that the game itself strikes me as very comfortably single player. The class design allows any character to easily build to be fully independent. There are very few skills for any class that directly affect other player-characters. WoW is a great example of a primarily multiplayer game that can be played solo (but you'll miss out on lots of content). Diablo 3 is a single player game in which you can do everything solo, but you can bring other people along if you like.

 

I give Blizzard credit for removing the Auction House and rethinking the way loot is dropped, although I think the rampant inflation forced their hand somewhat. I get that a major reversal of an avowed intent is a major shift for a big, public company. It goes some way to making up for previous errors. There's a little distance still to travel before I really trust them again, say, with a pre-order.

 

On Blizzard stories: I enjoy them. They are grand scale depth-less romps featuring archetypes rather than fully fleshed out characters. There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. For any games with a grand story-line in which the story is not the focus of the mechanics (say, RTSs, or ARPGs) the story should do three things: provide adequate motivation for whatever I'm doing; provide cool moments, and stay out of my way if I decide I don't care. Blizzard give me all three of these things.

 

Kerrigan being swarmed by the Zerg as the Terrans are pulling out? Cool. Her reappearance as the Queen of Blades from the cocoon you've been protecting? Neat. Opening the tomb in Diablo 2 to find the angel Tyrael chained where Baal used to be? Nice. Arthas taking Frostmourne and just walking off into the snow, only to return and kill his father? Chilling. Kael'Thas, desperate to feed the addiction of himself and his people, cast out by the Alliance and forced to take up with the demonic Illidan? Fun. Diablo 3? OK, that was really bad. I couldn't hit the skip button fast enough.

 

The superb cut-scenes really help. No-one does cut-scenes like Blizzard. Only Square-Enix at their best really come close. I know it's pulp, but there's nothing wrong with a nice spot of brain candy that stays out of the way of the game bit. 

[hexgrid]

Kerrigan being swarmed by the Zerg as the Terrans are pulling out? Cool.

 

I'm going to have to disagree on this one.  When I played that mission the first time, I screwed up and accidentally killed some zerg too early and lost the mission (combination of a science vessel's line of sight and a deployed siege tank, IIRC).  When I played it the second time, I was pretty sure they were going to pull stupid shit on me; whenever they tell you to protect another faction, you can be reasonably certain it will turn on you late in the mission.

 

So, I built up a huge force, managed to capture almost all of the protoss base, and set up a secondary base where they had been without quite wiping them out.  I think they had a drone and a pylon left.  Then I built up a *massive* force, since I figured I was going to have to deal with a big zerg rush.  So, my deployment:

 

- Kerrigan, whom I figured needed to survive, in the secondary base, with 12 battlecruisers and a shuttle floating over her head, and missile towers and siege tanks everywhere, as well as bunkers full of marines at the top of all of the ramps

 

- the original base had 12 battlecruisers and tons of siege tanks and missile towers surrounding all of the zerg positions, just far enough away to avoid clearing the fog, along with four bunkers full of marines at every ramp

 

I killed the final protoss, the fog came off the zerg and they started rushing. About two seconds later, my battlegroup was in their base, and there was nothing but red goo and my forces.

 

"Huh", I thought.  "That was easier than I was expecting."

 

At which point one of my marines started screaming about being overrun, and Kerrigan, who was miles away and surrounded by a dozen space-worthy battlecruisers *and* an empty troop shuttle started complaining she'd been abandoned and was being overrun by zerg.  Meanwhile, my troops are milling about with nothing to do except scrape the zerg off their boots, and Kerrigan is doing whatever passed for her "bored" idle animation.

 

But somehow magically she got captured by invisible plot fairies so the story could continue.

[Arathain]

Yeah, that one was an interesting failure if you were too good and broke through what was expected of you. A finer example of ludonarrative dissonance there never was. Still, if you suck like I do (or like I sure as heck did back in the day) it had the effect it was supposed to have. 

[hexgrid]

Yeah, that one was an interesting failure if you were too good and broke through what was expected of you. A finer example of ludonarrative dissonance there never was. Still, if you suck like I do (or like I sure as heck did back in the day) it had the effect it was supposed to have. 

 

Part of the problem I had with that one is that it should have been fixable.  Surely the engine was capable of spawning an endless stream of zerg if necessary, or they could simply have made sure that everything in the base had 50x hit points.  I *know* their engine could manage that; the editor that came with it let you.  I remember on a lark throwing together a terminator marines vs. effectively endless swarm map by jacking the damage and health on some marines through the roof and then dropping 7 allied zerg AI factions on the map and giving each of them maxed-out crystal and gas sources.

[Arathain]

Yeah, it was an oversight. I think it's worth remembering that Blizzard were breaking some ground in terms of matching story with mission in an RTS. Scripted missions like that one were managed much more gracefully than Westwood or anyone else at the time. I have no doubt they learned some things from that mission alone that have carried through to other Blizzard games.

[hexgrid]

Yeah, it was an oversight. I think it's worth remembering that Blizzard were breaking some ground in terms of matching story with mission in an RTS. Scripted missions like that one were managed much more gracefully than Westwood or anyone else at the time. I have no doubt they learned some things from that mission alone that have carried through to other Blizzard games.

 

I suppose that's true, and it does partly explain the ham-handedness of it all. It was pretty obvious at the time that they blew it on QA as well, IIRC; amongst other things, I seem to recall the units described in the manual having only a passing resemblance to the units in the game. In particular I remember looking for some upgrade for the terran fighter that was in the manual but got cut from the game, and came back as part of another unit in Brood Wars.

 

I suppose the lesson there was "don't write the manual until the beta is done".

[Arathain]

On the other hand (because I am Contrarian Man in this thread, for some reason) the manual was beautiful and rich with detailed descriptions of everything, and I remember it bringing me some joy as a young person. I'll take an awesome albeit slightly inaccurate manual over a post-beta glorified reference sheet.

 

Ah, manuals. Let us all take a moment to remember how great they could be. We will miss them.