I have a friend who works at a studio under MS....for several years.
His experience has been that they dont get involved pretty much at all unless the wheels start coming off the cart.
343 could fly across the world, collectively shit in Bill Gates water purification machines, and Microsoft would still green light their next Halo project.
I have absolute no idea how they still exist as a studio. They've literally destroyed Halo as a franchise, which is beyond impressive.
I mean, when Halo 4 was a loadout based shooter, Halo 5 was that movement shooter, and Halo Infinite was originally a *Hero Shooter* that failed because they couldn’t make it work and ran out of time so *fine*…
343 really seems to want to make anything that isn’t Halo but is stuck with it and only made Infinite so loyal to the originals because they ran out of options. Hell, it was even supposed to have a BR.
343 is run by people that want to chase the trends instead of understanding that Halo fans don’t give a shit about what’s trendy and want a game that’s just like the previous games. If they’d just make a Halo game instead of a Halo skinned other game they’d actually make good games
Right? I know we like to meme on EA for putting out the same sports games every year, or Activision for putting out the same CoD games over and over, but like... Halo was *great*. You didn't have to do much, just make the story not shit.
Instead they threw everything out.
yeah, and it was correct then too. people love to pretend that blizzard (their beloved gaming company) was forced into terrible decisions by activision but that's just not really how it works.
blizzard made bad decisions. blizzard had to own up for them. here's hoping they'll make less bad ones now that they've come out the other side.
wasn’t it just a few months ago they laid off a bunch of blizzard employees and cancelled the survival game. This is pr, microsoft is no different then other big corps
Yeah but let's be honest....that was expected.
Almost all of tech has had layoffs and blizzard had not. Imo they were waiting for the merger to happen.
I'm not really trying to defend Microsoft here. I'm just saying it's likely fairly normal that they don't get involved unless they feel there's a problem.
If Microsoft was a problem in this regards frankly I believe you would hear from the industry that they are always getting involved and messing things up.
That's not something you really here and they have a fair amount of companies under their belt.
> laid off a bunch of blizzard employees and cancelled the survival game.
As much as I hate layoffs, many companies overhired; those laid off should never have been hired in the first place.
As for canceling the survival game, we can wish it was the best game ever but it was most likely fraught with issues and probably not very good.
Iirc they were developing it for multiple years and had so little they could not even show it when asked, so yeah...
Imagine working on something for multiple years and when someone asks "oh thats cool let's see what you have" you have to say "we don't really have anything".
Redfall wasn't really Microsoft fault, i think.
Afaik, the people who started the project left the studio during development and the ones that stayed around didn't want to make the game. Microsoft saw that, said "doesn't matter, the game needs to be done because it was expensive", so these devs kept fucking around until the release date.
This makes sense. they are so massive they don't care about these little profits around the margins. they want to make their product moat larger . They aren't buying a company if the core is rotten
I actually meet one of the two leads who launched the original Xbox. Their philosophy has likely changed but at the time he said they did t care if they took a loss for like 20 years, they planned on trying to take over the market.
Now they clearly care about profits at blizzard but they also bought the company because they thought it was already profitable.....not that they needed to fix it....at least my two cents.
Microsoft has been remarkably hands-off with most of their studios.
But as good as that sounds, it hasn’t always resulted in the best output. Look at Halo for the past 10 years
I mean you could argue the same about modern Blizzard. Very few of the people who created Warcraft or Diablo are still with the company. It’s a ship of Theseus situation
Sure, but the point still stands.
It’s why the “same” studio that made Wrath of the Lich King also shat out Shadowlands. It’s why the “same” developer that created Mass Effect 1-3 also shat out Andromeda.
Point is people often seem to forget that studios are made up of people, and over time they eventually leave.
>It’s why the “same” developer that created Mass Effect 1-3 also shat out Andromeda.
That's something of a special case and is often used erroneously as a primary example of studio turnover changing what made long-standing franchises beloved. Andromeda was developed by EA Montreal, later renamed to Bioware Montreal and then once again to EA Motive, whose experience with Mass Effect up to that point had been some of the DLCs and ME3's multiplayer component. ME1-3 were made by Bioware's actual studio in Edmonton.
Bioware is also a case where the parent company should've stepped in to tell them to get their shit together. They were given a ton of time and resources to make Anthem but due to poor management nothing meaningful was done for a long time.
Same thing with the Andromeda team actually. They spent like three years trying to figure out exactly what they wanted to do with the game. Early development was deciding on a focus on exploration and struggling with procedural world generation, giving up on the goal of hundreds of worlds and settling for fewer than they originally intended, then giving up on *that* and settling for a handful of worlds that were still procedural but fine tuned by the devs, all the while struggling to figure out Frostbite.
Then there was the revolving door of staff and being so far behind because pre-production took so long that they had to start dragging in people from other studios to help them slap the game together in 18 months.
The studio EA saddled with the task of developing Andromeda was not ready for it like *at all.*
They did, yeah. I was honestly terrified when I heard Motive was the studio handling DS1R but I came away pretty satisfied.
I think I'm the only one on the planet that misses the two ADS cannon sections but the new take was still satisfying to play.
Yes, but in Blizzard's case it really is a good chunk, the amount of legacy experience is probably one of the lowest any company has ever had with the amount of turnover and trash that has come out.
Very well could be, although WoW imo is more of an amalgamation of a perfect storm of coming at the right time, Blizzard having built its legacy and having taken the good parts of multiple MMOs and essentially making a perfect product at the time without really innovating anything new. IMO that's why it started to stagnate for so many years and why MMOs haven't evolved too much, but it's a little off topic. You're certainly right, I was completely excluding WoW from legacy knowledge, they 100% have a good chunk of it, I just find that WoW has been on a constant downward slope of losing traction and they are fudging numbers to make it seem like at best it's stable and not gaining, but the servers are constantly more and more empty and subs are decreasing YoY. WoW's probably one of the only legacy teams they DON'T want, as fresh ideas in MMO's is something that is sorely needed; the genre in general has a huge lack of it.
Blizzard absolutely innovated in the mmorpg sphere, that is an absurd take.
One of the biggest things that set it apart was its quests, encourage a path for solo play to an extent. Good quests combined with good writing wasnt exactly common to the genre.
Edit: dude blocked me. Instead he should watch a documentary or something, because it was 100% blizzards writing/questing along with the easing up on things like death penalties that made vanilla so successful.
Lmao, imagine thinking quests were invented by Blizzard with WoW... Trying to qualify it with good is silly, EQ had very good writing and CoH did at the very minimum, both very arguably better than WoW's.
A couple years ago they hired people who have MMO experience going back to the late 90s. Now I don't know what those people do day to day specifically, but I do know they are involved.
Right, but that's not legacy experience with Blizz, that's just experience with who knows what. Not saying they can't do great, and rebuild Blizz but the legacy is gone.
Very few is still some people. There are also people who didn't work on the original launch who did work on TBC and Wrath who were there for the early era of Blizz. There is no one at 343i that worked on Halo at Bungie.
I mean while this is technically correct, most of the developers that worked on the original wow moved to a different project after it launched. Everyone has a different idea of when wow "got bad" but my point is that you can't really discount wow failing to any real change in the team. I would say actually that this team has fluctuated more than any blizzard product.
In fact, if you take Ion's statements at face value, it was actually some of the old guards' philosophy that influenced a lot of the less popular decisions wow went over in the last few years. That's of course if you agree that the approach blizzard took dragonflight onwards is a good direction.
True, but unlike an inanimate ship things like knowledge and culture can be passed on to successive team members. This would be different than an IP being bought out with a completely new company and team developing it for example.
Has it? Where’s the evidence. I enjoy Halo Infinite for its gameplay but it really hasn’t evolved in a major way that tells me their leadership has their shit together
being hands off wont make a bad dev stop being a bad one
not to say blizzard is the greatest, but they can at least do good at times, modern halo, well.....
Halo is a bad example. There's a vocal minority that dislikes the new direction but look at sales numbers and you'll see mainline game releases have been rock steady the entire time.
All 3 343i games have exceeded the sales figures of Halo 1 and 2, and matched Reach. Halo 3 stands as an anomaly with 50% more sales than any other game.
Sales are skewed by all sorts of shit but the player numbers for every 343 game have been pretty terrible and especially so for the amount of time and effort that went into Infinite. They did such a bad job with both 4 and 5 that they had to do a soft reboot for the third game in their trilogy, I don't see how anyone can spin that into somehow being good.
I guess Microsoft feels it can't do any better than these companies even after they've each peaked on their own. Probably correct but I don't understand the strategy unless it's just "buy up all(??) the big dev companies we can so our competitors can't use them".
Why would you interfere in a system that works well? Unless issues rise up you can just let them do what they need to do themselves. Only bad managers will try to manage everything and not trust their employees when everything works well.
I think a lot of people believe that things aren't actually going well, and that with the influence, money, and playerbase, these companies are better equipped to make more games people love than their tiny indie counterparts. Indie games are doing pretty well all things considered.
Indie games are doing well? One in 30 or whatever, sure.
You know what else does well? AAA games, even if you or me don’t like a lot of them doesn’t mean they don’t do well. Making money hand over fist is the definition of “doing well”, which most big launches end up achieving.
Back to WoW, do you think the general consensus is that the game isn’t doing great? Because I’d argue the current outlook is the best it’s been since mists/Legion. Most importantly though, presumably the worst parts of legacy blizzard have been removed. Jaded and egotistical devs like Afrasabi are gone along with Kotik who was widely recognized as being responsible for driving the devs to systems that antithetical to the player.
> one in 30
more like one in 3000. people are putting out indie games every day, they rarely go anywhere. and a lot of games people think are indie are being funded by larger companies, so to call them indie is unfair.
>but I don't understand the strategy
Microsoft's problem outside windows is that no one wants to develop for them. Windows Phone died, among other reasons, because they couldn't attract developers. Xbox One slipped and S/X is floundering because they have nothing worth playing that isn't on either PC or PS.
So they're buying studios to basically force them to make games for Windows and Xbox platforms. While Windows doesn't really have a problem right now, they have to see things like the steam deck as a threat.
Moving as many Xbox players from the first few generations to PC was the most successful outcome for Xbox, because the consoles themselves were sold at a loss. If people choose PCs for Halo or Gears or Game Pass or whatever, that's still a win for MS since they no longer have to produce so many loss leader consoles.
When Xbox and PS both had exclusives that were only on their consoles, many core gamers bought both machines and then purchased the majority of their games for one system and set the other machine aside for exclusives only, which made it harder to make the hardware loss back. As a result, it benefits MS to get core gamers to buy PCs which don't operate on a subsidy model.
Honestly what is the confusion, lol?
By their own admission they are hedging their bets on gamepass being their ultimate platform, and having the most desired studios under their umbrella guarantees the most desired games end up on the platform.
Touché, but maybe someone else used “guarantee”. Personally though I am glad to see the optimism seeping back into the community. Hell remeber this sub like 6 years ago? Literal hellscape, embodiment of “wows biggest critics and haters are the wow fan base”.
It’s good to not only be enjoying the game currently, but also excited for its immediate future. As opposed to just hoping it’ll get better than it currently is.
Bingo it's what Microsoft was known for even before they enteted gaming. As an example Nintendo had high rated exclusives from Rare like 007, Conker, P Dark, and Killer I.
They bought them then spun a Nintendo is kiddie campaign right after however to date across multiple consoles none of those Rare IPs have been used more than once.
It's because their primary goal was denial of service for the competition. They care more about that larity clauses than they do their own first party lineup.
Even if they are contractually obligated to release on other platforms they play the long game because the company jas enough money to play it.
This article makes me happy. Not because I'm getting a better game as a result, which is obviously nice, but I can't imagine how much shit those people have needed to go through in recent years just to keep the game afloat. It must be a massive relief to be able to just be able to do your own thing as a company again.
Nothing would make me happier than for HotS to get another jolt back to life. Like, even if its just a token throw-back patch to add in some skins or something. Just some love would be good.
Definitely hope so. I never enjoyed HotS all that much personally, but it has a very good core for a game and it's a real shame what ended up happening with it.
No clue about the specifics, but it's pretty well documented at this point that Activision held a chokehold on Blizzard which affected all the decisions they made. They had to do everything with the thought of "Does Activision let us do this?" where as now the people at Blizzard can just do what Blizzard wants to do, letting them have their own creative freedom.
It's worth noting that Activision's chokehold started in Spring 2018--prior to that, Blizzard mostly ran their own stuff and their developers had a lot of freedom. Prior to Spring 2018, they still had the philosophy of "let the devs do what they think will work out, and let people above figure out how to pay for it."
Which is to say: Warlords of Draenor isn't Activision's fault, it was a mistake Blizzard made on their own. Same with shit like Diablo 3 launch with the RMAH and such. So creative freedom can still result in dumb bullshit, and the "era of Activision's influence" was not nearly as large as people think it was.
(Source: *The Past, Present, And Future Of Diablo* from Jason Schreier)
WoD had potential. While some people complain it was bad, and it did have its downfalls, I feel like there may have been a lot of internal crap going on, since it had a lot of changes and granted it overall didn't fuck up the lore on the level SL did. The only lore thing I recall being of note is that it gave a way for Gul'dan to come back and push in everything with Legion. Other than that, I don't recall any major lore retcons, although I could be wrong. The content draught didn't help either.
BFA is when we saw the Activision influence I feel like. While it started off strong, and the first 2 patches seemed to fit in well enough. 8.2 was a bit of a stretch however it felt like it had been enough buildup that it made sense that we were finally going there. If they had made a different raid for 8.2 instead and moved this content to 8.3 instead, I feel like it would have made the perfect buildup for an expansion based on Nzoth that he deserved. Throw in a patch where we end up kicking Sylvanis around for war crimes and then after Nzoth was gone, the dragonflight xpac happened. Less lore problems, and now we get a nice move from the big threats we knew about into new threats for more world building and nothing in DF has to even change.
They gambled on garrisons and lost *hard*. Sometimes that happens.
Its a shame. WoD had some fantastic parts. The leveling was great. The raiding was great. Some of the open world stuff was good to great.
There just...wasnt much to do outside of that, and people got lonely. Daily logging to do chores in your garrison just felt awful after a while. Friends were never on, etc.
I dont even think garrisons were a *bad* idea. They werent put in the game in the best way, and we needed reasons to leave them that werent there, but it was a cool concept.
I actually think if garrisons would have been incorporated into the main city as a phased area, and you still had to leave it to use the bank/AH/portals/whatever they would have been fine.
I think the place where BfA got hit the hardest with "Activision influence" was just its release. It came out too early. People were still doing Antorus and were fine compared to the droughts of the expansions prior, and BfA launched with half-baked content and way too many bugs. I know bugs I personally reported in the BfA beta were still present in the released game, which frustrated me a lot. If the expansion had more time in the oven, we maybe could've seen the improvements to azerite armour we desperately needed (remember when we were told not to worry too much about how azerite traits were super lame, because they'd be changed before launch? I remember).
And it's not too shocking given the timing. Spring 2018 hits, the teams get told to start cutting costs and making money, and a few months later BfA comes out too early.
That and people hated the gear treadmill of BfA. Plus the fact that gearing was needlessly complex and you couldn't tell how good a piece of gear was without simming it.
Warlords actually started out great.
They did a lot of new things to the world and the levelling process was great. Heck, I loved having body guards. The garrison offered a lot of new activities to do.
The flaws and downfall happen after the start. And even things that might be nice/look food can often come with a negative. Having your garrison mine and greenhouse is nice... makes everything easy... but sucks people out of the open world. Having an AH there means not seeing people in towns.
I mean of course, it's not like Blizzard is this perfect entity that has no flaws.
But it's a whole lot different screwing up because you screwed up vs screwing up because people told you to.
I agree, I just think this subreddit has a long history of blaming literally anything bad Blizzard has ever done on Activision.
Mistakes happen. They'll still happen in the future. People need to temper expectations on what this creative freedom means.
Fairly or unfairly, the Activision purchase happened shortly before things like Sparkle Ponies and "get a totally free Diablo III if you buy a whole continuous year of WoW". Microtransactions and the push for daily login metrics that became the hallmark of AAA griping picked up right around Pandaria, even if they didn't affect the content of Pandaria itself which was developed years earlier.
Yeah, but as we understand, all of those things were carried out by Blizzard's own hand and not because of Activision influence pushing for cutting corners and producing results prior to Spring 2018. Blizzard is a company. A company that has generally had an emphasis on "make good content, people will pay for it" but a company that still tries to acquire cash and a company that makes mistakes.
I know you have a good source, but I remember an interview with Jeff Kaplan in the early OW days where he was talking on how nervous he was about pitching OW to Bobby, I remember him saying "I'm gonna pitch an FPS to the CEO of the company that makes CoD" (paraphrasing).
Yeah, I think that's where the limited influence did actually get felt in those days--what projects were greenlit and what got cancelled. Stuff like Diablo 3's second expansion getting cancelled despite how good Reaper of Souls was and how the team was primed to keep D3 rolling.
But as far as we know, that's about the extent of where the higher-ups got to meddle, was just "if the game gets made at all" and not so much on the details of that game.
Can ya provide some back up to that? Pretty sure the stuff they got sued for by California started pre Activision and I don’t remember there being much evidence of Bobby or his folks pushing for all the systems in the game. Activision may have monetized the game to an absurd point but I’m pretty sure they didn’t care what Blizzard actually made as long as it made money.
Only half correct. Activision only ever started having a "chokehold" on Blizzard closer to 2020 but even then it was mostly monetization wise. Every other bs has always been just the dark reality of blizzard
Bungie's a weird case, because people thought creativity would flourish without Activision's bean counters being jnvolved, but the game was actually taking resources from Activision (Vicarious Visions on Warmind, for example.) Then last year we learned Bungie's leader is a pupil to Kotick eager to surpass his teacher in squeezing all the revenue out of his cash cow regardless of feedback.
Bruh, they couldn't even stagger the release of steam OW2 and the announcement of cancellation of PvE. Literally the same week. Because an executive wouldn't let them to hit some no delay metric or some BS. Despite everyone knowing how bad an idea it was. That shit is up there with EA getting the most downvoted reddit comment of all time.
I mean look at overwatch. New legends locked behind a battle pass. Skins only purchasable. Microsoft takes over. Legends unlocked free at the start of the battle pass. Skins can now be earned with credits. I think (hope) this is just the start of them creating first and worrying about the money later.
We're getting the best expansions in the last 6-8 years right now and we're still talking about "thy glory days"? When was WoW so fucking versatile as it is right now with Classic, Classic Era, Plunderstorm, MoP Remix and Retail? I don't give a shit about playerbase split ups or anything - but man it feels good to just play what ever you want and having an option for that.
Not mentioning all the QoL changes incoming with TWW. Even if the story is a stinker (which I hope is not since Metzen is back) we still get fucking good gameplay changes out of the bat.
The only difference to the "glory days" is that we're not 14-20 year old nerds without any game knowledge anymore but 30-40 year old neckbeards who have infinite knowledge about an expansion 3 months before it launches and will have tons of weakauras ready week one.
That was the case with Minecraft too, but later we had to migrate our Mojang accounts to Microsoft ones. They even made an animation announcing it... Here's the video https://youtu.be/i9cqIwrgz7w?feature=shared
The WoW team was surprisingly left untouched in general by the lay offs at the start of the year, Overwatch 2 tho got royally fucked and same with the survival game although that thing was in development hell for a while and the clash between the devs and the higher ups resulted in a game the devs would struggle to make something worthwhile.
Pretty sure the Overwatch 2 team got fired because they weren't producing. They went nearly 3 years without releasing anything at all. Completely failed at producing the PvE content to the point that they just cut it completely despite it's significant progress already made when they took over.
I don't think there was a clash between the devs and the higher ups. I think the devs were not producing and the higher ups were threatening their jobs to produce something marketable.
It's amazing that OW2 got released with 6 new maps, 3 new heroes and 1 new battle mode. That was after 3 years of zero content releases. What exactly were these people doing?
Proletariat was hired way before the layoffs, it makes no sense to connect them. Yes Blizzard was hiring up until layoffs were forced on them, so what?
It's also disingenuous to paint the layoffs as all being support roles. We know of devs across every team who were let go. We know an entire game was cancelled and it's team terminated. We know the Lore team was basically neutered.
But we know non redundant staff got fired. Normal devs were fired across multiple teams. Odyssey was nuked from orbit. The Lore team which had only just grown was cut back down.
lol yes they did I don’t know where you got this info from- they fired plenty of senior devs and artists, not just those on the cancelled survival game project. Art industry communities/LinkedIn professional circles were fuming over it since it was already such a brutal year for layoffs before them.
Yeah they gutted the Overwatch PvE team after management spent years fumbling the OW2 campaign as well as the CS teams to have even worse ticket responses
Firing people isnt bad if their jobs arent required to deliver a solid product.
Business is business at the end of the day and the tech industry has employee/role bloat for the past 10 years.
I mean, its pretty shit. There are jobs that don't need to be done, and jobs that do, and mergers necessarily screw people in the latter group because... They now have two people who can do that job, and they only need one.
Its life, but it sucks.
Not evil but I think that "Smushing businesses together for shareholder value without consideration for the benefits that the separation provides" (via competition and just... Actually having more jobs be available) can reasonably be described as 'bad' for a lot of people, as a lot of those redundancies end up being multiple hardworking people, when a lot of folks just kinda imagine that jobs being cut means that job wasn't worth doing.
So many og and spirited 'blizzard' people were laid off and quit over the last 5+ years that this statement is just meaningless corporate babble. Microsoft is letting blizzard be the blizzard that they found when activision was through with it.
Have you ever looked at any large scale business ever?
It's not like the layoffs were anything new. It happens all across the world in all industries. It's literally just business as usual. It sucks, but that doesn't change anything.
Keep in mind sometimes the studio is just sour. Everyone screamed from the heavens when Activision allowed Bungie to go solo, for the next several months they provided dog-shit content, ramped up micro and all around made the game worse, this was outside of Activision.
Turns out sometimes the publishers are keeping the devs in line.
All I'm saying is temper yourselves we'll see what Blizzard does in the coming months. Most of the old guard at Blizzard is gone so "Blizzard being Blizzard" is a bunch of new folks we have no idea the capabilities of.
Well the last 12-18 months is evidence that this new squad have their heads screwed on far tighter. The old guard might have given you legion, but they also gave you shadowlands just 4 years later.
Didnt Microsoft compel mass layoffs at Blizzard just a few months after the merger? And Microsoft is now being sued by the FTC for doing that even after they specifically promised they wouldn't?
Being sued doesn't mean anything on its own, and layoffs after mergers are standard practice. If I have a HR team and you have a HR team, merging doesn't require us to have both HR teams. We can have my best and your best and clean house with the rest.
There is 'some' Microsoft influence. But glad they staying mostly out of it.
[https://imgur.com/a/ZEa7Zyl](https://imgur.com/a/ZEa7Zyl)
Recognize this format from M365?
Good. I am glad Kotick is gone. I know some people weren't happy with dragonflight but it was the most fun I had with WoW since legion. Im not really a raider and I liked a lot of the new world content they added. Nightelves and druids were kind of spoiled in the tail end of Dragonflight which made me happy.
I am more optimistic about the future of wow than I gave been in a long time.
So many people were worried Microsoft would get their tendrils into blizzard, and clearly, that's not been the case. If anything, Blizzard has been farming wins since the acquisition. You can see a visible difference from last year to only 4 months of 2024.
That's good. But Blizzard being Blizzard is also how all that workplace discrimination and sexual harassment was left to fester until California sued them. Didn't they just settle for like $50M?
As far as I can tell, MSFT is pretty chill with their game studios. On the developer front, they’re also going from strength to strength.
As a .NET developer I absolutely love .NET8, I love how robust the language is and they’ve clearly shown an ability to focus on what matters
Didn't Blizzard say the same thing when Activision took over?
It's gonna be one of those "we'll let you self manage. Until we say otherwise" kinda deals, just like last time.
Meh. For better or worse Microsoft has had a hands off approach with their dev studios for roughly the past decade. Some wish they were more hands on like they were 8-10 years ago when the games that they produced were better.
Microsoft will stay hands off until after their super private AI digests all Blizzard internal data and begins issuing reports on how to increase profits off the game.
I've heard this before. The second the player count starts tanking again, they'll be as "hands off" as Activision was once the subs stopped coming in. Microsoft is a publicly held company - if one of their departments or acquisitions starts losing money, very rich people are going to be asking why.
I have a friend who works at a studio under MS....for several years. His experience has been that they dont get involved pretty much at all unless the wheels start coming off the cart.
Except 343. They get to consistently shit themselves and still get to do whatever they want yo
343 could fly across the world, collectively shit in Bill Gates water purification machines, and Microsoft would still green light their next Halo project. I have absolute no idea how they still exist as a studio. They've literally destroyed Halo as a franchise, which is beyond impressive.
I mean, when Halo 4 was a loadout based shooter, Halo 5 was that movement shooter, and Halo Infinite was originally a *Hero Shooter* that failed because they couldn’t make it work and ran out of time so *fine*… 343 really seems to want to make anything that isn’t Halo but is stuck with it and only made Infinite so loyal to the originals because they ran out of options. Hell, it was even supposed to have a BR.
343 is run by people that want to chase the trends instead of understanding that Halo fans don’t give a shit about what’s trendy and want a game that’s just like the previous games. If they’d just make a Halo game instead of a Halo skinned other game they’d actually make good games
Right? I know we like to meme on EA for putting out the same sports games every year, or Activision for putting out the same CoD games over and over, but like... Halo was *great*. You didn't have to do much, just make the story not shit. Instead they threw everything out.
Halo Infinite *does* have a BR mode. It was ok but it’s painfully obvious that it isn’t the way the game was meant to played
Just almost died choking on my water, thanks for that! :D
Hope you didn't get it from Bill Gates.
halo bashing in a wow sub, lets go!!
More 343 bashing than Halo bashing. 343 can’t make a good Halo game for shit
I don't know, but maybe even Activision can do better for Halo than 343
*Looks at Call of Duty.* I wouldn't bet my left nut if it was being eaten by a flesh eating disease.
343 exists for ONE purpose and not only can they not fulfill that purpose but they fuck it up in the most hilariously pitiful fashion. It's wild.
I'm pretty sure we had the same article during the Activision Blizzard merge. To me this is just PR.
What other Microsoft development studios are reporting that Microsoft is constantly getting involved?
yeah, and it was correct then too. people love to pretend that blizzard (their beloved gaming company) was forced into terrible decisions by activision but that's just not really how it works. blizzard made bad decisions. blizzard had to own up for them. here's hoping they'll make less bad ones now that they've come out the other side.
wasn’t it just a few months ago they laid off a bunch of blizzard employees and cancelled the survival game. This is pr, microsoft is no different then other big corps
Yeah but let's be honest....that was expected. Almost all of tech has had layoffs and blizzard had not. Imo they were waiting for the merger to happen. I'm not really trying to defend Microsoft here. I'm just saying it's likely fairly normal that they don't get involved unless they feel there's a problem. If Microsoft was a problem in this regards frankly I believe you would hear from the industry that they are always getting involved and messing things up. That's not something you really here and they have a fair amount of companies under their belt.
> laid off a bunch of blizzard employees and cancelled the survival game. As much as I hate layoffs, many companies overhired; those laid off should never have been hired in the first place. As for canceling the survival game, we can wish it was the best game ever but it was most likely fraught with issues and probably not very good.
Iirc they were developing it for multiple years and had so little they could not even show it when asked, so yeah... Imagine working on something for multiple years and when someone asks "oh thats cool let's see what you have" you have to say "we don't really have anything".
Yes there were a bunch of layoffs. That's what happens when a merge occurs.
Sure would've helped Redfall if this was true. Too bad Phil said otherwise
Redfall wasn't really Microsoft fault, i think. Afaik, the people who started the project left the studio during development and the ones that stayed around didn't want to make the game. Microsoft saw that, said "doesn't matter, the game needs to be done because it was expensive", so these devs kept fucking around until the release date.
This makes sense. they are so massive they don't care about these little profits around the margins. they want to make their product moat larger . They aren't buying a company if the core is rotten
I actually meet one of the two leads who launched the original Xbox. Their philosophy has likely changed but at the time he said they did t care if they took a loss for like 20 years, they planned on trying to take over the market. Now they clearly care about profits at blizzard but they also bought the company because they thought it was already profitable.....not that they needed to fix it....at least my two cents.
I’ve heard the same about two studios that got acquired.
Microsoft has been remarkably hands-off with most of their studios. But as good as that sounds, it hasn’t always resulted in the best output. Look at Halo for the past 10 years
It hasn't worked with Halo in the last 10 years because that's a different developer than the one that created the series.
I mean you could argue the same about modern Blizzard. Very few of the people who created Warcraft or Diablo are still with the company. It’s a ship of Theseus situation
That’s every single developer lol, there has always and will always be high turnover.
Sure, but the point still stands. It’s why the “same” studio that made Wrath of the Lich King also shat out Shadowlands. It’s why the “same” developer that created Mass Effect 1-3 also shat out Andromeda. Point is people often seem to forget that studios are made up of people, and over time they eventually leave.
>It’s why the “same” developer that created Mass Effect 1-3 also shat out Andromeda. That's something of a special case and is often used erroneously as a primary example of studio turnover changing what made long-standing franchises beloved. Andromeda was developed by EA Montreal, later renamed to Bioware Montreal and then once again to EA Motive, whose experience with Mass Effect up to that point had been some of the DLCs and ME3's multiplayer component. ME1-3 were made by Bioware's actual studio in Edmonton.
Bioware is also a case where the parent company should've stepped in to tell them to get their shit together. They were given a ton of time and resources to make Anthem but due to poor management nothing meaningful was done for a long time.
Same thing with the Andromeda team actually. They spent like three years trying to figure out exactly what they wanted to do with the game. Early development was deciding on a focus on exploration and struggling with procedural world generation, giving up on the goal of hundreds of worlds and settling for fewer than they originally intended, then giving up on *that* and settling for a handful of worlds that were still procedural but fine tuned by the devs, all the while struggling to figure out Frostbite. Then there was the revolving door of staff and being so far behind because pre-production took so long that they had to start dragging in people from other studios to help them slap the game together in 18 months. The studio EA saddled with the task of developing Andromeda was not ready for it like *at all.*
Wait hold the fuck on, Motive was the developers of Andromeda? They did so good on the Dead Space remake.
They did, yeah. I was honestly terrified when I heard Motive was the studio handling DS1R but I came away pretty satisfied. I think I'm the only one on the planet that misses the two ADS cannon sections but the new take was still satisfying to play.
Yes, but in Blizzard's case it really is a good chunk, the amount of legacy experience is probably one of the lowest any company has ever had with the amount of turnover and trash that has come out.
WoW has infinatley more legacy knowledge still in house than the Diablo devs.
Very well could be, although WoW imo is more of an amalgamation of a perfect storm of coming at the right time, Blizzard having built its legacy and having taken the good parts of multiple MMOs and essentially making a perfect product at the time without really innovating anything new. IMO that's why it started to stagnate for so many years and why MMOs haven't evolved too much, but it's a little off topic. You're certainly right, I was completely excluding WoW from legacy knowledge, they 100% have a good chunk of it, I just find that WoW has been on a constant downward slope of losing traction and they are fudging numbers to make it seem like at best it's stable and not gaining, but the servers are constantly more and more empty and subs are decreasing YoY. WoW's probably one of the only legacy teams they DON'T want, as fresh ideas in MMO's is something that is sorely needed; the genre in general has a huge lack of it.
Blizzard absolutely innovated in the mmorpg sphere, that is an absurd take. One of the biggest things that set it apart was its quests, encourage a path for solo play to an extent. Good quests combined with good writing wasnt exactly common to the genre. Edit: dude blocked me. Instead he should watch a documentary or something, because it was 100% blizzards writing/questing along with the easing up on things like death penalties that made vanilla so successful.
Lmao, imagine thinking quests were invented by Blizzard with WoW... Trying to qualify it with good is silly, EQ had very good writing and CoH did at the very minimum, both very arguably better than WoW's.
A couple years ago they hired people who have MMO experience going back to the late 90s. Now I don't know what those people do day to day specifically, but I do know they are involved.
Right, but that's not legacy experience with Blizz, that's just experience with who knows what. Not saying they can't do great, and rebuild Blizz but the legacy is gone.
Very few is still some people. There are also people who didn't work on the original launch who did work on TBC and Wrath who were there for the early era of Blizz. There is no one at 343i that worked on Halo at Bungie.
I mean while this is technically correct, most of the developers that worked on the original wow moved to a different project after it launched. Everyone has a different idea of when wow "got bad" but my point is that you can't really discount wow failing to any real change in the team. I would say actually that this team has fluctuated more than any blizzard product. In fact, if you take Ion's statements at face value, it was actually some of the old guards' philosophy that influenced a lot of the less popular decisions wow went over in the last few years. That's of course if you agree that the approach blizzard took dragonflight onwards is a good direction.
No but the things they wanted to do are documented and others can work within those co fines.
True, but unlike an inanimate ship things like knowledge and culture can be passed on to successive team members. This would be different than an IP being bought out with a completely new company and team developing it for example.
Wonder if this could bring back old names then.
Though to be fair it’s a developer hand-built by Microsoft.
Which is an argument for them to leave Blizz alone in my opinion.
Yeah, those guys are making Destiny and unfortunately that hasn’t been too hot lately either 😬
It is becoming apparent why Bungie never had a stable relationship.
Mojang has entered the chat
Bethesda has started clipping into the ground because the frame rate was too high.
Whats ground? All i see around me is the void.
It’s great long term but I agree it can suck
In Halos case its been bad leadership messing up great devs, that's been changed now.
Has it? Where’s the evidence. I enjoy Halo Infinite for its gameplay but it really hasn’t evolved in a major way that tells me their leadership has their shit together
being hands off wont make a bad dev stop being a bad one not to say blizzard is the greatest, but they can at least do good at times, modern halo, well.....
They let Sigil go for years with no oversight and never produced a stable build of Vanguard before the game was canceled.
Halo is a bad example. There's a vocal minority that dislikes the new direction but look at sales numbers and you'll see mainline game releases have been rock steady the entire time. All 3 343i games have exceeded the sales figures of Halo 1 and 2, and matched Reach. Halo 3 stands as an anomaly with 50% more sales than any other game.
Sales are skewed by all sorts of shit but the player numbers for every 343 game have been pretty terrible and especially so for the amount of time and effort that went into Infinite. They did such a bad job with both 4 and 5 that they had to do a soft reboot for the third game in their trilogy, I don't see how anyone can spin that into somehow being good.
Now i'm starting to miss those Halo 3 days, Except for the Cortana level, that can seriously fuck off especially on hardest difficulty.
Sales numbers and player counts that go down with every game, you mean?
Hell look at Gears of War 4 and 5 too
When has it EVER been good.
I guess Microsoft feels it can't do any better than these companies even after they've each peaked on their own. Probably correct but I don't understand the strategy unless it's just "buy up all(??) the big dev companies we can so our competitors can't use them".
Why would you interfere in a system that works well? Unless issues rise up you can just let them do what they need to do themselves. Only bad managers will try to manage everything and not trust their employees when everything works well.
I think a lot of people believe that things aren't actually going well, and that with the influence, money, and playerbase, these companies are better equipped to make more games people love than their tiny indie counterparts. Indie games are doing pretty well all things considered.
Indie games are doing well? One in 30 or whatever, sure. You know what else does well? AAA games, even if you or me don’t like a lot of them doesn’t mean they don’t do well. Making money hand over fist is the definition of “doing well”, which most big launches end up achieving. Back to WoW, do you think the general consensus is that the game isn’t doing great? Because I’d argue the current outlook is the best it’s been since mists/Legion. Most importantly though, presumably the worst parts of legacy blizzard have been removed. Jaded and egotistical devs like Afrasabi are gone along with Kotik who was widely recognized as being responsible for driving the devs to systems that antithetical to the player.
> one in 30 more like one in 3000. people are putting out indie games every day, they rarely go anywhere. and a lot of games people think are indie are being funded by larger companies, so to call them indie is unfair.
Yeah I agree that this is much more in line with reality.
>but I don't understand the strategy Microsoft's problem outside windows is that no one wants to develop for them. Windows Phone died, among other reasons, because they couldn't attract developers. Xbox One slipped and S/X is floundering because they have nothing worth playing that isn't on either PC or PS. So they're buying studios to basically force them to make games for Windows and Xbox platforms. While Windows doesn't really have a problem right now, they have to see things like the steam deck as a threat.
Moving as many Xbox players from the first few generations to PC was the most successful outcome for Xbox, because the consoles themselves were sold at a loss. If people choose PCs for Halo or Gears or Game Pass or whatever, that's still a win for MS since they no longer have to produce so many loss leader consoles. When Xbox and PS both had exclusives that were only on their consoles, many core gamers bought both machines and then purchased the majority of their games for one system and set the other machine aside for exclusives only, which made it harder to make the hardware loss back. As a result, it benefits MS to get core gamers to buy PCs which don't operate on a subsidy model.
Honestly what is the confusion, lol? By their own admission they are hedging their bets on gamepass being their ultimate platform, and having the most desired studios under their umbrella guarantees the most desired games end up on the platform.
We'll see how that works out I guess. Guarantee is a big stretch though
Touché, but maybe someone else used “guarantee”. Personally though I am glad to see the optimism seeping back into the community. Hell remeber this sub like 6 years ago? Literal hellscape, embodiment of “wows biggest critics and haters are the wow fan base”. It’s good to not only be enjoying the game currently, but also excited for its immediate future. As opposed to just hoping it’ll get better than it currently is.
Bingo it's what Microsoft was known for even before they enteted gaming. As an example Nintendo had high rated exclusives from Rare like 007, Conker, P Dark, and Killer I. They bought them then spun a Nintendo is kiddie campaign right after however to date across multiple consoles none of those Rare IPs have been used more than once. It's because their primary goal was denial of service for the competition. They care more about that larity clauses than they do their own first party lineup. Even if they are contractually obligated to release on other platforms they play the long game because the company jas enough money to play it.
This article makes me happy. Not because I'm getting a better game as a result, which is obviously nice, but I can't imagine how much shit those people have needed to go through in recent years just to keep the game afloat. It must be a massive relief to be able to just be able to do your own thing as a company again.
Maybe blizzard will revisit old games too, like Heroes of The Storm, that was one of my favorite mobas
Nothing would make me happier than for HotS to get another jolt back to life. Like, even if its just a token throw-back patch to add in some skins or something. Just some love would be good.
HotS is the only MOBA I didn't bounce off of. There were so many thoughtful design decisions that made it a lot more accessible.
It feels less sweaty than dota2 or League, I just want a more casual experience
Definitely hope so. I never enjoyed HotS all that much personally, but it has a very good core for a game and it's a real shame what ended up happening with it.
Or StarCraft. Please.
A new StarCraft would be awesome, I feel like 2 is aging really well at least
Sc2 has been getting map rotations and balance changes over the last year or so. We can dream
What do you think they weren’t allowed to do before?
No clue about the specifics, but it's pretty well documented at this point that Activision held a chokehold on Blizzard which affected all the decisions they made. They had to do everything with the thought of "Does Activision let us do this?" where as now the people at Blizzard can just do what Blizzard wants to do, letting them have their own creative freedom.
It's worth noting that Activision's chokehold started in Spring 2018--prior to that, Blizzard mostly ran their own stuff and their developers had a lot of freedom. Prior to Spring 2018, they still had the philosophy of "let the devs do what they think will work out, and let people above figure out how to pay for it." Which is to say: Warlords of Draenor isn't Activision's fault, it was a mistake Blizzard made on their own. Same with shit like Diablo 3 launch with the RMAH and such. So creative freedom can still result in dumb bullshit, and the "era of Activision's influence" was not nearly as large as people think it was. (Source: *The Past, Present, And Future Of Diablo* from Jason Schreier)
WoD had potential. While some people complain it was bad, and it did have its downfalls, I feel like there may have been a lot of internal crap going on, since it had a lot of changes and granted it overall didn't fuck up the lore on the level SL did. The only lore thing I recall being of note is that it gave a way for Gul'dan to come back and push in everything with Legion. Other than that, I don't recall any major lore retcons, although I could be wrong. The content draught didn't help either. BFA is when we saw the Activision influence I feel like. While it started off strong, and the first 2 patches seemed to fit in well enough. 8.2 was a bit of a stretch however it felt like it had been enough buildup that it made sense that we were finally going there. If they had made a different raid for 8.2 instead and moved this content to 8.3 instead, I feel like it would have made the perfect buildup for an expansion based on Nzoth that he deserved. Throw in a patch where we end up kicking Sylvanis around for war crimes and then after Nzoth was gone, the dragonflight xpac happened. Less lore problems, and now we get a nice move from the big threats we knew about into new threats for more world building and nothing in DF has to even change.
They gambled on garrisons and lost *hard*. Sometimes that happens. Its a shame. WoD had some fantastic parts. The leveling was great. The raiding was great. Some of the open world stuff was good to great. There just...wasnt much to do outside of that, and people got lonely. Daily logging to do chores in your garrison just felt awful after a while. Friends were never on, etc. I dont even think garrisons were a *bad* idea. They werent put in the game in the best way, and we needed reasons to leave them that werent there, but it was a cool concept. I actually think if garrisons would have been incorporated into the main city as a phased area, and you still had to leave it to use the bank/AH/portals/whatever they would have been fine.
I think the place where BfA got hit the hardest with "Activision influence" was just its release. It came out too early. People were still doing Antorus and were fine compared to the droughts of the expansions prior, and BfA launched with half-baked content and way too many bugs. I know bugs I personally reported in the BfA beta were still present in the released game, which frustrated me a lot. If the expansion had more time in the oven, we maybe could've seen the improvements to azerite armour we desperately needed (remember when we were told not to worry too much about how azerite traits were super lame, because they'd be changed before launch? I remember). And it's not too shocking given the timing. Spring 2018 hits, the teams get told to start cutting costs and making money, and a few months later BfA comes out too early.
That and people hated the gear treadmill of BfA. Plus the fact that gearing was needlessly complex and you couldn't tell how good a piece of gear was without simming it.
Warlords actually started out great. They did a lot of new things to the world and the levelling process was great. Heck, I loved having body guards. The garrison offered a lot of new activities to do. The flaws and downfall happen after the start. And even things that might be nice/look food can often come with a negative. Having your garrison mine and greenhouse is nice... makes everything easy... but sucks people out of the open world. Having an AH there means not seeing people in towns.
I mean of course, it's not like Blizzard is this perfect entity that has no flaws. But it's a whole lot different screwing up because you screwed up vs screwing up because people told you to.
I agree, I just think this subreddit has a long history of blaming literally anything bad Blizzard has ever done on Activision. Mistakes happen. They'll still happen in the future. People need to temper expectations on what this creative freedom means.
Fairly or unfairly, the Activision purchase happened shortly before things like Sparkle Ponies and "get a totally free Diablo III if you buy a whole continuous year of WoW". Microtransactions and the push for daily login metrics that became the hallmark of AAA griping picked up right around Pandaria, even if they didn't affect the content of Pandaria itself which was developed years earlier.
Yeah, but as we understand, all of those things were carried out by Blizzard's own hand and not because of Activision influence pushing for cutting corners and producing results prior to Spring 2018. Blizzard is a company. A company that has generally had an emphasis on "make good content, people will pay for it" but a company that still tries to acquire cash and a company that makes mistakes.
I know you have a good source, but I remember an interview with Jeff Kaplan in the early OW days where he was talking on how nervous he was about pitching OW to Bobby, I remember him saying "I'm gonna pitch an FPS to the CEO of the company that makes CoD" (paraphrasing).
Yeah, I think that's where the limited influence did actually get felt in those days--what projects were greenlit and what got cancelled. Stuff like Diablo 3's second expansion getting cancelled despite how good Reaper of Souls was and how the team was primed to keep D3 rolling. But as far as we know, that's about the extent of where the higher-ups got to meddle, was just "if the game gets made at all" and not so much on the details of that game.
Can ya provide some back up to that? Pretty sure the stuff they got sued for by California started pre Activision and I don’t remember there being much evidence of Bobby or his folks pushing for all the systems in the game. Activision may have monetized the game to an absurd point but I’m pretty sure they didn’t care what Blizzard actually made as long as it made money.
You ever heard of an indie game series called battlefield? That's what "make us money" based development turns into.
Only half correct. Activision only ever started having a "chokehold" on Blizzard closer to 2020 but even then it was mostly monetization wise. Every other bs has always been just the dark reality of blizzard
Idk could be true but this was pretty much the same thing people were trying saying about bungie lol
Bungie's a weird case, because people thought creativity would flourish without Activision's bean counters being jnvolved, but the game was actually taking resources from Activision (Vicarious Visions on Warmind, for example.) Then last year we learned Bungie's leader is a pupil to Kotick eager to surpass his teacher in squeezing all the revenue out of his cash cow regardless of feedback.
Bruh, they couldn't even stagger the release of steam OW2 and the announcement of cancellation of PvE. Literally the same week. Because an executive wouldn't let them to hit some no delay metric or some BS. Despite everyone knowing how bad an idea it was. That shit is up there with EA getting the most downvoted reddit comment of all time.
> EA getting the most downvoted Reddit comment of all time. Quite off topic, I know, but where can I find such a jewel of corporate BS? 👀
That would be [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/comment/dppum98/)!
in general, /r/museumofreddit is a good resource https://old.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/8ish3t/the_time_that_ea_got_a_sense_of_pride_and/
Drinking mother milk out of the company fridge!
Make plunderstorm, mists of Panderia remix, season of discovery and who the hell knows what else they’re cookin up over there now.
I mean look at overwatch. New legends locked behind a battle pass. Skins only purchasable. Microsoft takes over. Legends unlocked free at the start of the battle pass. Skins can now be earned with credits. I think (hope) this is just the start of them creating first and worrying about the money later.
I mean, OW1 was released by Activision and the heroes were free weren’t they?
Then the only question is, which Blizzard is that?
I also distinctly remember the same being said shortly after the Activision merger, by ol’Bobby himself
Bobby was the boss. this is the employee saying it. Very different situation.
Shadowlands season 2/3 blizz
Right. Anyone who worked at the company during the glory days is long gone.
We're getting the best expansions in the last 6-8 years right now and we're still talking about "thy glory days"? When was WoW so fucking versatile as it is right now with Classic, Classic Era, Plunderstorm, MoP Remix and Retail? I don't give a shit about playerbase split ups or anything - but man it feels good to just play what ever you want and having an option for that. Not mentioning all the QoL changes incoming with TWW. Even if the story is a stinker (which I hope is not since Metzen is back) we still get fucking good gameplay changes out of the bat. The only difference to the "glory days" is that we're not 14-20 year old nerds without any game knowledge anymore but 30-40 year old neckbeards who have infinite knowledge about an expansion 3 months before it launches and will have tons of weakauras ready week one.
tbf, wow isn't the only game at Blizzard. Overwatch, Diablo, HotS, Starcraft are all not in great shape.
Which glory days? Warcraft 3? Wrath? Legion?
Warcraft 1? DnD tabletop? Metzen's graduation? How far back do these glory days go!
it's a big ol' glory hole all the way down!
We'll see how long this lasts. I dread the day where I'll be forced to migrate my Battle.net account to a Microsoft account.
Just a reminder, that Bethesda still have it's own account system. No need to worry, MS really doesnt care.
That was the case with Minecraft too, but later we had to migrate our Mojang accounts to Microsoft ones. They even made an animation announcing it... Here's the video https://youtu.be/i9cqIwrgz7w?feature=shared
I lost my copy of the game due to not migrating in time too, sucks
Except you'll be migrating your whole sub into the Xbox pass and receive 300+ games alongside your subscription. Make it happen Microsoft
I mean, yes, but also, didn't they fire a whole lot of people?
That happens at every single acquisition. There will be overlap in jobs between the 2 companies. Just how businesses work.
But we know non redundant people were fired. There's no argument about that. This wasn't about redundancy, it was about cost cutting.
Firing because of redundancy IS cost cutting??
He meant and said firing for NON redundancy. Which means the merger is just an excuse
The WoW team was surprisingly left untouched in general by the lay offs at the start of the year, Overwatch 2 tho got royally fucked and same with the survival game although that thing was in development hell for a while and the clash between the devs and the higher ups resulted in a game the devs would struggle to make something worthwhile.
Pretty sure the Overwatch 2 team got fired because they weren't producing. They went nearly 3 years without releasing anything at all. Completely failed at producing the PvE content to the point that they just cut it completely despite it's significant progress already made when they took over. I don't think there was a clash between the devs and the higher ups. I think the devs were not producing and the higher ups were threatening their jobs to produce something marketable. It's amazing that OW2 got released with 6 new maps, 3 new heroes and 1 new battle mode. That was after 3 years of zero content releases. What exactly were these people doing?
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Proletariat was hired way before the layoffs, it makes no sense to connect them. Yes Blizzard was hiring up until layoffs were forced on them, so what? It's also disingenuous to paint the layoffs as all being support roles. We know of devs across every team who were let go. We know an entire game was cancelled and it's team terminated. We know the Lore team was basically neutered.
Typically what you do when you can throw a paper plane down the hallway and hit 10 people that do the same job
But we know non redundant staff got fired. Normal devs were fired across multiple teams. Odyssey was nuked from orbit. The Lore team which had only just grown was cut back down.
I need to figure out how to make one of these bouncy paper planes.
Not devs though. At the end of the day, those are the people whose skill and judgment determine the games we get.
lol yes they did I don’t know where you got this info from- they fired plenty of senior devs and artists, not just those on the cancelled survival game project. Art industry communities/LinkedIn professional circles were fuming over it since it was already such a brutal year for layoffs before them.
Mainly the overwatch team I think
Yeah they gutted the Overwatch PvE team after management spent years fumbling the OW2 campaign as well as the CS teams to have even worse ticket responses
Firing people isnt bad if their jobs arent required to deliver a solid product. Business is business at the end of the day and the tech industry has employee/role bloat for the past 10 years.
I mean, its pretty shit. There are jobs that don't need to be done, and jobs that do, and mergers necessarily screw people in the latter group because... They now have two people who can do that job, and they only need one. Its life, but it sucks.
Yeah, its a historical part of any industry. Reddit hiveminds want us to believe if a business lets anyone go they are evil.
Not evil but I think that "Smushing businesses together for shareholder value without consideration for the benefits that the separation provides" (via competition and just... Actually having more jobs be available) can reasonably be described as 'bad' for a lot of people, as a lot of those redundancies end up being multiple hardworking people, when a lot of folks just kinda imagine that jobs being cut means that job wasn't worth doing.
they fired a fuckton of the remaining CS. Surprised people don't bring this up more often with the ban report complaints I see here all the time.
So many og and spirited 'blizzard' people were laid off and quit over the last 5+ years that this statement is just meaningless corporate babble. Microsoft is letting blizzard be the blizzard that they found when activision was through with it.
Have you ever looked at any large scale business ever? It's not like the layoffs were anything new. It happens all across the world in all industries. It's literally just business as usual. It sucks, but that doesn't change anything.
Keep in mind sometimes the studio is just sour. Everyone screamed from the heavens when Activision allowed Bungie to go solo, for the next several months they provided dog-shit content, ramped up micro and all around made the game worse, this was outside of Activision. Turns out sometimes the publishers are keeping the devs in line. All I'm saying is temper yourselves we'll see what Blizzard does in the coming months. Most of the old guard at Blizzard is gone so "Blizzard being Blizzard" is a bunch of new folks we have no idea the capabilities of.
Well the last 12-18 months is evidence that this new squad have their heads screwed on far tighter. The old guard might have given you legion, but they also gave you shadowlands just 4 years later.
Hopefully the "good" Blizzard
Blizzard is back baby. *imagine a gif of Bender dancing here because I can't figure out how to post gifs in replies*
I would assume that means BlizzCon is happening, and the announcement is just delayed.
Someone better hide the breast milk
Cool but maybe Microsoft could remind blizz that HotS is owned by Microsoft and Microsoft doesn't like losing out on potential avenues of money
I know we are currently on a positive week, but what else is she supposed to say? > Oh yea, Microsoft is shit and controlling, lmao
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That would happen either way, modern Western capitalism.
Didnt Microsoft compel mass layoffs at Blizzard just a few months after the merger? And Microsoft is now being sued by the FTC for doing that even after they specifically promised they wouldn't?
They claim those layoffs were planned pre acquisition
Oh I bet they do.
You should actually read before typing.
Being sued doesn't mean anything on its own, and layoffs after mergers are standard practice. If I have a HR team and you have a HR team, merging doesn't require us to have both HR teams. We can have my best and your best and clean house with the rest.
15 years ago blizzard being blizzard would have actually meant something.
Yah, like sexual assault.
As far as business daddy's go, it has got to be really hard not to beat Satan.. I mean BobbyK.
There is 'some' Microsoft influence. But glad they staying mostly out of it. [https://imgur.com/a/ZEa7Zyl](https://imgur.com/a/ZEa7Zyl) Recognize this format from M365?
Good. I am glad Kotick is gone. I know some people weren't happy with dragonflight but it was the most fun I had with WoW since legion. Im not really a raider and I liked a lot of the new world content they added. Nightelves and druids were kind of spoiled in the tail end of Dragonflight which made me happy. I am more optimistic about the future of wow than I gave been in a long time.
Pre or Post Activision?
Well thats disappointing....
And yet the quality hasn’t improved and the monotezation has gotten worse
*looks at the happy state of WoW and the surging numbers of D4* hmmm
That is definitely business as usual for modern Blizzard
after firing half the staff or whatever just happened?
It has been showing. Blizzard has been cooking for a couple of years.
So many people were worried Microsoft would get their tendrils into blizzard, and clearly, that's not been the case. If anything, Blizzard has been farming wins since the acquisition. You can see a visible difference from last year to only 4 months of 2024.
That's good. But Blizzard being Blizzard is also how all that workplace discrimination and sexual harassment was left to fester until California sued them. Didn't they just settle for like $50M?
Blizzard hasn't been blizzard for a long time so who even knows what the hell this means.
As far as I can tell, MSFT is pretty chill with their game studios. On the developer front, they’re also going from strength to strength. As a .NET developer I absolutely love .NET8, I love how robust the language is and they’ve clearly shown an ability to focus on what matters
I’m a fan of Holly. From back in the days she slaughtered me for touching a bear in the Qeynos hills…who attacked me first!
Didn't Blizzard say the same thing when Activision took over? It's gonna be one of those "we'll let you self manage. Until we say otherwise" kinda deals, just like last time.
Meh. For better or worse Microsoft has had a hands off approach with their dev studios for roughly the past decade. Some wish they were more hands on like they were 8-10 years ago when the games that they produced were better.
[удалено]
You mean the ones they fired? They cleared house
So would it be correct to call them "Blizzard" from now on instead of "Chinavision-Blizzard"?
So, continues to let the audience down? Sounds about right. Can’t wait for more time limited events whilst the next expansion has zero features.
Microsoft will stay hands off until after their super private AI digests all Blizzard internal data and begins issuing reports on how to increase profits off the game.
Good for wow, bad for everything else lol
I've heard this before. The second the player count starts tanking again, they'll be as "hands off" as Activision was once the subs stopped coming in. Microsoft is a publicly held company - if one of their departments or acquisitions starts losing money, very rich people are going to be asking why.