Blizzard... what happened?

[Nam]

Blizzcon news.

In short. Very lame and greedy.

Whatever happened to just... buying ONE game... and paying for it ONCE? Weren't those the good old days?

BlizzCon: StarCraft 2 To Release As Trilogy Of Games

BlizzCon: StarCraft 2 To Release As Trilogy Of Games In a surprising announcement made during the currently-ongoing BlizzCon event in Anaheim, California, Blizzard announced that it plans to release its upcoming RTS sequel StarCraft II as a trilogy of games, each focusing on one of the franchise's playable races.

The first of the three releases will focus on game's Terran faction, and will be subtitled Terrans: Wings of Liberty. The second and third, which executive VP of game design Rob Pardo likened to expansion packs, will be respectively entitled Zerg: Heart of the Swarm and Protoss: Legacy of the Void. An overarching storyline will spread across the titles.

Pardo revealed the strategy during BlizzCon's opening ceremonies, according to reports by Shacknews and Joystiq. He explained that using a standard development mentality would have resulted either in a necessary reduction of content or a prohibitively long development cycle.

Multiplayer, a crucial component of the original StarCraft (and the basis of a national competitive gaming market in Korea), will apparently be handled more traditionally.

Pardo said that while the second and third releases "will be like expansion packs," the company doesn't plan to skimp on the content. We really want them to feel like standalone products," he said.

Since 1995's WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness, Blizzard has released one expansion pack each for its real-time strategy games.

Blizzard has yet to reveal a release projection for any of its StarCraft II titles.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20603

Blizzard on Battle.net Subscription, Diablo 3 Modding
by Nick Breckon Oct 10, 2008 7:58pm CST tags: Diablo 3
Diablo III director Jay Wilson said today that the company does not have a great desire to charge a subscription fee for the upcoming revision of its multiplayer client Battle.net. However, the developer did note that Blizzard will likely monetize unknown features of the game.

"We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to."

Wilson noted that whatever the content would be, it would have an appropriate value to users.

Fans of map hacking and other Diablo II modifications have little to look forward to with the sequel, as Wilson shot down any talk of mod support.

"We don't have a lot of plans to do that. It would make our lives so much harder" he said, adding that despite the fact that he and many other designers got their start in modding, the team takes a strong stance on what they call the "hacking" of their games.

Wilson also used the panel to reemphasize the trading aspect of Diablo III, saying that no items outside of specific quest rewards will be bound to players.
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?story=55271

[Gory]

Meh, I'm just going to copy and paste a post I made about this on another forum:

I've noticed a trend in the video game industry as of late of milking the consumers of every penny they have. For a long time I've viewed downloadable content and subscription fee based models in a negative light. Episodic content can be okay for certain games (see Sam and Max) but frustrating for others (see Half Life 2) All of these share a common thread. They maximize profit while minimizing effort and to a greater extent innovation.

And then comes Starcraft II: "One game for the price of three!"

Half Life 2: Episode 1 already looked outdated when it was released in 2006. Episode 2 looked comparably worse, especially because I was playing it around the same time I was playing Crysis. I can't imagine how crappy (relatively) Episode 3 is going to look.

With Blizzard's track record of releasing video games we'll be wrapping up the Protoss "episode" of Starcraft II by 2020.

For comparison, we'll be on Call of Duty 17 at that point.



...Or something.


--------------

This whole thing really bothers me. It particularly bothers me because I know I'll buy Starcraft II regardless of the business model Blizzard slaps on it. I know that I'm not alone on that one either.

I somehow get the sinking feeling that this is one of the casualties of the Activision merger.

[Alex Chow]

I hope the multiplayer will be polished from the first game onwards, with new additions later on, and that each campaign will be bloody amazing.

Blizzard was always known for expansions. The expansions are essentially necessary since they've always included a buttload of content. I still trust Blizzard to deliver quality expansion packs for the Starcraft 2 trilogy. Hey, two expansions over one isn't such a big problem. I did it for Neverwinter Nights.

Again, if the campaigns prove to be absolutely amazing and as long as three of Starcraft 1's campaigns, I'm all for it. If they turn out to be half-assed, then there might be issues. The only doubt I have is, as Gory said, if the expansions take too long to make, I'll start to cut myself in anticipation for the next game.

[ChaoticKnight]

I don't understand their reasoning on Diablo 3. We saw this for Oblivion and Hellgate London, both games had "monetary content", and the content for Hellgate was introduced anyway to nonpaying customers and no one I know, out of the dozens of people who got Oblivion, bought knights of the nine or shivering isles. They just got the mods for the game.

I understand it might be different seeing as how popular the Diablo games are, but they should learn from these other games how unsuccessful the content was.

And seriously, ""We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to." YEAH RIGHT they've made more money then they will EVER need with WoW.

.... But I still love them... T_T

[Matsign]

They don't about their fans, but they know you care about their games, and exploit you.

[Hyskoa]

.....

[Lad]

I blame the merger for the whole "We have to" mentality.

I also remember some forum posts back when D3 was first announced and their was talk if it was going to be free on Bnet like always, or a pay to play sort of thing. Well, stupid people were saying that they WANT to pay to play online. :wtf:

[Duq]

I dont think its right to judge the Starcraft 2 expansion pack thing yet. If all 3 packs offer a solid 20-25 hours experience, then I dont see a problem. Creating a good original immersive story takes alot of time, and is maybe one of the most intense and largest parts of production. And something that is not done in games alot.

If Blizzard delivers a well-produced and amazing story/experience spanning 50+ hours then I'm happy, and dont mind buying 3 games. Its still cheaper then watching a movie in a theatre. But again, I would only be happy if the quality of SC2 in this area is the same as something you can expect in the theatre.

ps: graphics is the last thing I would look at when checking out expansions for excisting games. I'm going to get HL2:ep3 because I want to know what happend on that ship, not because I want to see some amazing new shaders do fancy stuff.

[Farsh]

^Do you really buy that?

[ChaoticKnight]

I dont think its right to judge the Starcraft 2 expansion pack thing yet. If all 3 packs offer a solid 20-25 hours experience, then I dont see a problem. Creating a good original immersive story takes alot of time, and is maybe one of the most intense and largest parts of production. And something that is not done in games alot.

If Blizzard delivers a well-produced and amazing story/experience spanning 50+ hours then I'm happy, and dont mind buying 3 games. Its still cheaper then watching a movie in a theatre. But again, I would only be happy if the quality of SC2 in this area is the same as something you can expect in the theatre.

ps: graphics is the last thing I would look at when checking out expansions for excisting games. I'm going to get HL2:ep3 because I want to know what happend on that ship, not because I want to see some amazing new shaders do fancy stuff.

70+ hours of a top down RTS single player game would get old REALLY quickly. At least for me personally.
What I'm really afraid of is that they'll only allow certain small multiplayer elements with each new release, so you'll never be able to play with everyone online till you buy all 3.

[Red Fleet]

Nobody is going to force you to buy the expansion packs people. I plan on just buying starcraft 2, because all I ever played on the first starcraft was multiplayer and skirmish anyways. I'll just read the story on wikipedia or something, and watch the cinematics on youtube.
And the shivering isles was worth the extra money.

[Duq]

^Do you really buy that?
Blizzard is not the first company to go down this road. Every game so far that experimented with this kind of segmented story I greatly enjoyed because it gave the creators more room to show me the subtleties of the games universe and its story.

The concept is rather simple. Will you let players wait for years and give them a huge ass story thats almost impossible to digest in one go. Or get the engine finished and deliver the story in amazingly well produced small digestable parts.

Blizzard is not making excuses to make more money. The arguments they present are arguments based upon alot of panel discussions held during the gamedev cons over the last 2 years.

70+ hours of a top down RTS single player game would get old REALLY quickly. At least for me personally.
It would, and 70 would be a bit extreme. But you are not playing it in one go. You need to see its like reading a book, finishing the first part, and then waiting a year for the second part. Most people dont mind waiting with some of the better movie trilogies, or with good selling book series. If this would actually mean that Blizzard would make an awesome rich storyline, then whats so bad about it. Also, because they divide it in parts, it also means they have to make a very good story, or noone will care enough for the follow ups.


What I'm really afraid of is that they'll only allow certain small multiplayer elements with each new release, so you'll never be able to play with everyone online till you buy all 3.
Well they did a nice enough job with the Dawn of War series. You didnt need to buy every expansion to play online. The only thing that you missed out on where the extra armies, but every owner of one of titles got all the new units, etc. I wouldnt be surprised if Blizzard used a similiar scheme.

Still keep in mind that the press release so far stated nothing about any influences on the multiplayer part.

[Straight Edge Ryan]

Im weary of trilogy styled games. Mostly because they often promise 1)shorter games for 2) lower prices with 3)shorter wait in between releases. Most companies get the first 2 down, it's just the last one they mess up on

There are times where I think "you know, if they had just waited and skipped out on the episodic content, I'd probably be playing HL3 right now"