Mike Morhaime Interview

[DemolitionSquid]

D2 is objectively the worst Blizzard game released.

Whoa. D2 may have had rough spots but its a fantastic game.

Now Warcraft, there's a shitstorm.

[newcomplex]

Whoa. D2 may have had rough spots but its a fantastic game.

Now Warcraft, there's a shitstorm.

I hope you don't mean Warcraft 3. Best single player....

ever.

[DemolitionSquid]

I hope you don't mean Warcraft 3. Best single player....

ever.

I lothe WarCraft in every incarnation.

[hyde]

Blizzard North was shut down because they missed production deadlines for a year straight, then they released a buggy unfinished game that had half its promised features missing that they ran out of money to implement. D2 is objectively the worst Blizzard game released. Which is saying a lot on the quality of other Blizzard games of course.

Yeah they missed the deadlines, because they kept wanting a revamp on the game. I think they wanted to go in a different direction on Diablo. Judging by the screens and videos of Diablo3 , it looks like Diablo2 on HD graphics.
Objectively the worst Blizzard game? Ermm.....

Nobody was fired, developers left on there own accord because they wanted more creative freedom. Previously they were an independent studio before being bought by Blizzard, and I guess after being bought a lot of developers wanted to work on there own again.

Don't spin my words.
I said Bill Roper and etc left. When they shut down the studio, they fired the overlapping positions but with nice fuzzy words on their PR statement.

That's business but considering Blizzard North helped create Blizzard to what it is today (They did invent Battle.net, didn't they?) , I expected a bit more than just canning them.

I can't any of them who left were particularly successful, half of them going to Flagship Games (lol) and the other half making a studio that went bankrupt before it even unveiled what it was working on.

Yeah, I have to agree with you on this. Bill Roper is a bit of a hack.

I know we're on a video game forum, so people are expected to be a bit liberal lol, but whats up with assuming everybody who makes more money then you do is evil?

Nice spin, so suddenly people who make more money than me is evil?
Ok, you got me. I'm actually a 21st century modern marxist who dwells in his basement posting literature on SCL. I'm gonna raise a rag tag group of working class programmers and storm the Blizzard Campus armed soley with Apple II computers to hack their securities and liberate chat channels for all!


If you knew the context, I was just saying Mike Morhaime could also be a bastard like Bobby Kotick. Come on "Oh StarCraft 2 is my favourite franchise"
That's why they completly stopped production on StarCraft 2 to focus on the prodigal child/cash cow of Blizzard, World of WarCraft.

I don't want to think of myself as an expert on who or what is evil, but I've worked a year in the corporate environment in a large oil company. The only difference between them and Kotick/Morhaime is that their products are video games. You don't think they go on golf trips, sip vodka, eat oysters and discuss how to further monetize their products?
15$ Map packs (MW2) ? 25$ Mounts (WoW) ? Premium Maps on SC2?
My beef is that they continue to act like your friendly neighborhood game developer, this is no different than BP or Chevron making their ads on how green/fuzzy wuzzy their companies are.

Come on, 5-6 years in development and they've just barely finished the SC2 Terran campaign with a half assed B.net 2.0.
Just going around these forums and Battle.net forums, anyone can gather that SC2 hasn't lived up to it's anticipated hype.

[Wankey]

I hope you don't mean Warcraft 3. Best single player....

ever.

Best single player ever? LOL

[Wankey]

Come on, 5-6 years in development and they've just barely finished the SC2 Terran campaign with a half assed B.net 2.0.
Just going around these forums and Battle.net forums, anyone can gather that SC2 hasn't lived up to it's anticipated hype.

You haven't played the Terran campaign, and from what I'm hearing it's vastly superior. The entire campaign of SC1 was 30~ missions, there are going to be 27 missions in SC2 with 30 minutes of CGI

That's as huge, if not bigger than SC1 since CGI now takes millions of dollars to make and games no longer cost pennies and nickles. To make a unit probably costs them around 60,000USD (the time it takes to pay the artist, the time for the modeller to model and animations, then texturing, then sound design) and considering they model and remodel over and over you can't even begin to imagine the amount of time and effort they've spent into the game.

You talk as if games are cheap, and that they should do whatever they an to make them good and not bother about making money.

WoW allowed them to make SC2, if wouldn't have been able to sit on it for such a long time, have it grind through the process for such a long time if they didn't have a massive cash flow.

Comparing Blizzard to Activision is like comparing Apple to Microsoft. You're completely bonkers to do so. They've released how many games in the last year? None? The games they released back in 2003, heck 1999 are still being played today. What does that say?

They're obviously going to focus on World of Warcraft first, which brings them in nearly 100 million dollars a MONTH in revenue.

Battle.net 2.0 isnt such a flop that you think it is, and it's stupid how people are complaining about b.net2.0

What's going to happen is Blizzard will cater to the pro scene far better than anyone can imagine they have, introducing pro editions to enable lan like latency, global.. etc

I couldn't care less about LAN or global play. I just want to play with my friends, whom all have facebook and easily put on my friends list. I want to get into games with my friends, and the party system works very well.

The small problems such as custom games, chat channels, are going to be patched.

The fact of the matter is, nothing can't be done with B.net 2.0 right now.

Starcraft 2 will be a service, much like WoW has been. There will be countless patches and fixes for things to come.

So stop whining and just enjoy it.

[newcomplex]

Best single player ever? LOL

I could write a essay detailing the narrative techniques mixed with just the right amounts of kistch and immanence combined congruently onto a storyline without overnarration paced to very well designed and creative missions should warrant it a place among the best single player experiences in gaming, right there alongside Fallout, Thief, Deus Ex and HL 2.

But I dun feel like it.

SC2 looks promising, but they have a lot of pitfalls to overcome. One fear I have is it'll be too character driven without the gameplay structure to make character driven narrative meaningful. SC2 needs to tell its story through interaction and plot conventions, not an individual, and its current mission format is slightly worrying.

The new added features of customizable armies and upgrades have to do a lot of heavy lifting if they want to fill the gap that hero driven exploration added to Wc3 single player experience.

Yeah they missed the deadlines, because they kept wanting a revamp on the game. I think they wanted to go in a different direction on Diablo. Judging by the screens and videos of Diablo3 , it looks like Diablo2 on HD graphics.
Objectively the worst Blizzard game? Ermm.....

Diablo 2s main criticisms were its graphics were out of date and didn't improve from its predecessor.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/diabl...%3Bread-review

However, in exchange for the additional complexity and size, you'll have to tolerate low-resolution graphics and a few more gameplay problems than you might have come to expect from Blizzard games.

D3s main criticisms is its graphical style divulges too much from its predecessor making excessive use of cartoonish exaggeration and bloom lighting.

Nice spin, so suddenly people who make more money than me is evil?
Ok, you got me. I'm actually a 21st century modern marxist who dwells in his basement posting literature on SCL. I'm gonna raise a rag tag group of working class programmers and storm the Blizzard Campus armed soley with Apple II computers to hack their securities and liberate chat channels for all!

woah. I wasn't really trying to be argumentative with that.

Actually I was kind of thinking about Squids comment when I said that.


I'm sure Morhaime could be evil and money grubbing, but I <3 him cuz he plays Bass. I play Bass too11!11.

So stop whining and just enjoy it.

Unlike whenever you whine Wankey he actually has legit concerns :/.

[Norfindel]

Whoa. D2 may have had rough spots but its a fantastic game.

Now Warcraft, there's a shitstorm.

Actually, it was horrible. It was just a senseless clickfest, that couldn't even save the game state when you went out of the game, so when you played back, it will populate everything with random monsters.

[TheEconomist]

StarCraft
Diablo
WarCraft
RPM/Rock'N'Roll Racing
Lost Vikings
Blackthorne

I think that's all the IP's Blizzard has made.

Of those, only the top 3 matter. Still, I think I heard him or Chris Metzen say it was their absolute favorite before... Maybe it was Micky Neilson? Either way, StarCraft is loved

[Maul]

"Star War: Galaxies" came out about a year and three months before "World of Warcraft."

But who's counting? :P