28 March 2010
Starcraft 2
01/04/10 12:45
Today I learned some news that is pretty old by now, but I am not a huge starcraft fanboy. Yesterday I saw news about some corporate restructuring of Activision/Blizzard. Blizzard is one of my favorite game developers. I grew up playing almost all of their games. But after digging some more on this new restructuring I found that Blizzard has split Starcraft 2 into three separate games. To this I am absolutely disgusted. I have tried to put my mind around this situation and think of why this would happen, here is what I came up with:
The most obvious reasoning is money. Primarily is because Bob Kotick needs more money to wipe his ass. Not only has the profit taken higher priority than game development on Starcraft 2, but also on another game series I loved, Call of Duty. I am defendant of the series as being great games up to Call of Duty 2. Everything that was put onto the shelves after that point was a garbage game. Nothing was really there that was an attention grabber. And now with the split up of the Starcraft 2 game I have almost completely lost interest in the series. I have read that they plan to put 30 missions in each game wish is comparable to the first in mission number, but not in content.
In the original starcraft game, you had three campaigns: Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. Each was about 10 missions long and had really good storyline. The best part about the storyline here is that all three stories were interconnected. They all fit together and were happening simultaniously. This put the player into an environment that allowed them to really see deep into the ongoing conflict.
With what is proposed in the Starcraft 2 series of games is that there will be three games, each with probably 30ish missions each. After knowing that, I really don't care anymore. It would not matter to me if there was 100 rich plot driven missions per game. Why is this being done? Money. Blizzard has spent this long trying to hammer out one game, who actually thinks they could make this into a solid game for a couple of years while they make the next game in the series? This is completely redicious. Almost on the same level as saying,
we are going to make Diablo 3, but you will have to buy the version that has the character class you want to play as.
Unfortunately my disgust at this does not end there. No LAN play. Why? Because they want people on battle net. Why do they want people on battle net? Because of the paid ads on battle net. A massive number of people still play Starcraft 1 on LAN because it defined RTS LAN games. Starcraft pretty much was the game to play.
I am angry that a game I loved has been stripped down and basically sold as parts because the big boss does not understand what a good game is.
The most obvious reasoning is money. Primarily is because Bob Kotick needs more money to wipe his ass. Not only has the profit taken higher priority than game development on Starcraft 2, but also on another game series I loved, Call of Duty. I am defendant of the series as being great games up to Call of Duty 2. Everything that was put onto the shelves after that point was a garbage game. Nothing was really there that was an attention grabber. And now with the split up of the Starcraft 2 game I have almost completely lost interest in the series. I have read that they plan to put 30 missions in each game wish is comparable to the first in mission number, but not in content.
In the original starcraft game, you had three campaigns: Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. Each was about 10 missions long and had really good storyline. The best part about the storyline here is that all three stories were interconnected. They all fit together and were happening simultaniously. This put the player into an environment that allowed them to really see deep into the ongoing conflict.
With what is proposed in the Starcraft 2 series of games is that there will be three games, each with probably 30ish missions each. After knowing that, I really don't care anymore. It would not matter to me if there was 100 rich plot driven missions per game. Why is this being done? Money. Blizzard has spent this long trying to hammer out one game, who actually thinks they could make this into a solid game for a couple of years while they make the next game in the series? This is completely redicious. Almost on the same level as saying,
we are going to make Diablo 3, but you will have to buy the version that has the character class you want to play as.
Unfortunately my disgust at this does not end there. No LAN play. Why? Because they want people on battle net. Why do they want people on battle net? Because of the paid ads on battle net. A massive number of people still play Starcraft 1 on LAN because it defined RTS LAN games. Starcraft pretty much was the game to play.
I am angry that a game I loved has been stripped down and basically sold as parts because the big boss does not understand what a good game is.