People like to talk about WC3 reforged, diablo immortal or the current state of WoW when they talk about the fall of Activision Blizzard, but isn't the real momennt when they went into freefall Heart of the Swarm?
Is it the biggest failure of video game development in history?
>create one of the most successful games >split into 3 releases so you get a chance to improve it as you go >build foundations of a fun narrative to wrap it around >coincide with the rise of streaming and take it over in a big way earning free endless marketing >become the absolute, undisputed king of the hill in esports and synonymous with the very term just as its becoming huge >release 2nd iteration of the game >within like a year of release playerbase nearly extinguished >esports dead and gone forever >narrative completely fucked up by incompetent writing beyond repair >game is killed so hard when the 3rd iteration is actually good and fixes all its problems it remains dead somehow
Just gonna put some reminders out for those who forgot >almost everyone loved the WoL campaign >there's an asspull at the end where the queen of blades you swore to kill is de-zergified and saved >whatever it's a hard pill to swallow but the campaign was fun >start HotS campaign >within a few missions the hard to swallow moment is completely meanningless because she just reverses ALL you did in that campaign you loved >they don't even bother to make a new model or something so there's SOME reason for it >some bullshit about freeing herself >this is a literal plothole since the tassadar xelnaga thing from the previous campaign already said she was designed by the overmind to be free >for the majority of the campaign there's almost no reason to be doing anything you do
Aaron Murphy
Kerrigan should have remained an evil bitch.
Brody Rogers
there are lots of individual moments that marked the "freefall" point that varies based on the proclivities of the poster for me, wotlk launching unfinished and the way its content rolled out was a big indicator for many people i knew, they'd lost interest with the way TBC was handled some people will point to WoW itself, etc etc Everyone's gonna assume the death knell was the thing that appealed to them least
Carter Diaz
And for those who forgot just how incompetent Activision was at the time which can NEVER be topped: >esports is peaked and the game is enjoyable to watch >main complaint is it's not as fast/dynamic as brood war >decide to "fix" this by creating a defensive unit that never runs out of resources which can also be used for offense to also never run out of resources >immediately any competitive play slows down to more than a crawl with 4 hour matches >refuse to remove this unit despite it literally killing your entire streaming/esports scene day after day, week after week, month after month I honestly struggle to come to terms with the fact Activision let some unit kill the game that owned esports lmao
Luke Lee
That isn’t World of Warcraft, if we’re talking about the beginning of the end. If you want to give them leniency of creativity/soul/whatever, Wings of Liberty, then.
I miss them so much.
Jason Nguyen
WoL was sovl
Jeremiah Richardson
When I went to zerus the first time I played it I was thinking "oh fuck yeh they're gonna pull a highlander and we're gonna kill zerg and take their power throughout the campaign"
Then the retarded chrysalis again...
Owen Miller
the first one WoL wasn't quite what was promised, it was impossible to play first/third person RPGs online with others
When they announced the split into 3 there was an implication promises would come true within the next expansions though
Jack Bell
this was just predacated on how they programmed keys to register, every key press got sent to a server before registering or whatever, they never had it any other way. the only thing you can do is play third/first person rpgs offline in singleplayer, you don't even have LAN. SC2 was the beginning of the end.
Nolan Long
I mean yeh, there were obvious issues with WoL that was what I was getting at. They just didn't fix a single one and made them worse in HotS.
Carson Campbell
I bought WoL and skipped the other 2. Don't really have much to say, but I mostly enjoyed WoL.
Thomas Morales
dear god no. wol was already a flaming pile of poo, even if it was not the biggest one.
Adam Sullivan
>Anyone else remember this?
The idea that she was making a sacrifice she didn't want to make by becoming primal zerg was interesting, but everything other than that was such a disaster. And they even managed to make that dumb. Christ. "I am the lady of flesh and queen of blades and apparently I can't put on pants and some fake skin to re-assure my crazed capture fuck dolly when I rescue him."
Still kinda want to see what Nova Covert Ops was about, but I can't even pirate that.
Benjamin Peterson
WoL was already setting up for a terrible story >zeratul and the prophecy >oh look it's tassadar but not really >overmind was the good guy all along >kerrigan is the chosen one heart of the swarm was shit but wings of liberty forced it to be shit
Hunter Davis
>Still kinda want to see what Nova Covert Ops was about, but I can't even pirate that. Not half bad desu
Elijah Baker
Because of her lovingly rendered arse, or gameplay?
Jaxson Gomez
>but isn't the real momennt when they went into freefall Heart of the Swarm? no, Wings of Liberty or Diablo 3 at the latest, whichever came first.
Jaxson Evans
to this day I still don't know what kind of message Blizzard was trying to send with Kerrigan's arc. "It's ok to kill billions of people as long as you have a human bf at the end and become a space god?" it's so bizarre metzen was hitting the pipe hard when he wrote this nonsense
Jaxon Robinson
Esports are bad and anything that kills them should be applauded.
Jose Cook
Maybe he should have locked himself up with michael kirkbride. Mushroom rape gods might have been more interesting than multiple rounds of DBZ beamspam maps.
