With the recent announcement of Diablo III finally in the works from Blizzard, I have to take some time and scoff at people who think that they'll actually be playing the game within the next decade.Anyone really excited about a Blizzard announcement should take some time and really think about how much time passes between a Blizzard announced "Release Date" and an actual Blizzard release date.
You know what would have been a really fun game to play? StarCraft: Ghost.
On the XBOX.
In 2002.
Maybe if they wouldn't have pussy-footed around and made sweet-ass opening cinematics, they would have spent more time on actually finishing the damn game.
The fact that StarCraft: Ghost was never released pissed me off to such an extent that I refuse to get excited at any Blizzard announcement ever again.
It's one thing if a game developer wants to delay a game awhile in order to refine it to ensure it runs properly.
It's another thing altogether to get us all excited and then NEVER RELEASE THE GAME.
I laugh at people who think that Blizzard's going to release something on time. Especially with 3-4 games in the works right now (StarCraft II, Diablo III, some World of WarCraft thing, StarCraft Ghost?) don't expect to see anything anytime soon.
2 comments:
Hi Taylor,
How are you today? Good, that's great! Hey, I just figured first off I'd point out that Starcraft: Ghost didn't look nearly as good as any game blizzard has actually released, and that it most likely would have been a smudge on their otherwise immaculate record of game creation... Want proof? Just look at almost any similarly ambitious first person shooter/third person shooter with creative superpowers from that generation of consoles, and see that it sucks... Go on, try to find a good one... Find one? No? Didn't think so.
Not even Blizzard could have made that game good on a console, and the sad truth is that they realized it too late.
Second off, I think that Starcraft: Ghost is the exception to the rule in this case. Generally speaking Blizzard doesn't "suck at getting things done on time" since they never rarely set release dates until well after a game is announced. It just seems like they suck at getting them done because they tend to, in short order:
-announce a game
-show badass cinematic footage of it
-show off an incredibly polished, done-looking gameplay video
-NOT ANNOUNCE A RELEASE DATE OR EVEN A TIMEFRAME OF RELEASE
and then take their sweet sweet time with a game before releasing it, making sure that the game is as 'done' as any PC game ever is before it's released. The trick is where they never actually tell you when to expect it, but it looked so done that you expected it to come out like the next day.
Thirdly, you mention that Blizzard has several games in the works now, and imply that this will make it so that the games take even longer than other Blizzard games to complete. This is incorrect mostly because of the recent Activision-Blizzard merger. Essentially, a shit-ton of employees just got dropped off at Blizzard's doorstep courtesy of Activision, and they're putting them to work. Hopefully, this will result in more Blizzard games of the same quality as we've come to expect. More likely, however, we can expect Blizzard's website to look like this within 2 years.
I hope you have found this comment insightful and enjoyable.
Your friend,
Anonymous
Hey Anonymous, thanks for the comment.
Does bullet time count as a "creative superpower?" Because if it does, then I win your first point with Max Payne and its sequel. Max Payne was an ambitious third person shooter from that generation and it was absolutely excellent.
And what is this "creative superpower" requirement? Wasn't the main character going to be a Ghost, with superpowers such as.. cloaking? Pretty sure Halo, the first game to even come out on the Xbox had cloaking.
As for your second point, even Blizzard disagrees with you. See here in their faqs (the second question):
http://www.blizzard.com/us/inblizz/genfaq.html
As for your third point, we'll just have to wait and see. With Disney's swallowing up of Pixar a few years ago, lots of turmoil erupted and the inevitable flourishing never came about. Who knows, maybe this situation will be a lot different, but as for right now I do not expect Blizzard to grow much larger than their core is right now.
Thanks, and I hope you keep coming back!
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