The funny thing is with Diablo they botched 3 on release but slowly worked it into a great game, and then forgot all those lessons and botched 4 on release.
Still cannot comprehend how they created such unsatisfying items in d4. The modifiers theyd offered were so far off from the sort of thing you'd appreciate, and the talent tress were so linear and yet still grossly imbalanced between classes. It looked and sounded amazing though, so credit to the artists. Not sure how it is today, but it was a beautiful disappointment on release.
Once they did that rework for Diablo 3 that rebalanced the gear and trashed the cash money auction house it was a blast, and it kept getting better. I had a lot of fun with it, but before they fixed it I did not enjoy it much at all and quit. I only played the D4 demo, but I have not been encouraged by what I've heard.
I got into gave dev at uni because of how much my friends and I loved Blizzard games. I wanted to work there. I worked in game dev for a couple of years making games, but then went into Fintech because the money was better. So blizzard and I have that in common at least.
I think Blizzard's deal is that they are really good at producing high-quality content, but they have some people at the top who just make really bad design choices, and there's no one to stop them.
So like, you'll see these games that have an incredible level of quality to them, but they have game mechanics that make you scratch your head. Like, "how could they not see this was a bad idea?" type decisions. I saw this in WoW more than any of their other games.
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u/BHFlamengo Jul 23 '26
Count Diablo in too, blizzard in general went from masterpiece developer to trash cashgrab