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- Hacker News
- I was wondering how Blizzard's best creative minds would ruin an RTS and make it live service...by 2OEH8eoCRo0
- It's not a live service: https://wccftech.com/blizzard-starcraft-shooter-rejects-live...by eigenspace
- AFAIK the majority of people responsible for their legacy RTS games have left, so I figure they feel less capable of even trying.by chao-
- Starcraft 2 is the only game I still play from time to time. Yes, you can probably make more money making a shooter, but there is a reason Starcraft is such a cultural phenomenon.
It just makes me sad that every decision nowadays is driven by profit and there is just very little courage left to do something else.
by bkolobara - I watched the live reveal and thought it looked cool. I played a lot of the RTS growing up and remember being hyped for Ghost, so seeing an FPS in the Starcraft universe is interesting. More interesting to me than another RTS, which I personally would not play (just not an interesting genre to me anymore).by nozzlegear
- 4 years out, and only a cinematic trailer. It's a lot to take on faith at this point, though I do hope its goodby swiftcoder
- by whicks
- The strongest pitch at BlizzCon was WoW Forever, I think.
It's finally cementing Classic as a format with its own set of disciplines, and I believe it'll draw a lot of players back from Turtle, Ascension, etc. which have seen interest in recent years.
I'd love to see Blizzard work with the community projects [0][1][2] that underpin most private servers to release first-party (or "blessed by Blizzard" third-party) engine tooling (the way they used to with games like StarCraft and Warcraft) for WoW as a whole.
Doing that would be a lot easier than continuing this cycle of having to revamp things every few years to keep pace with what their arch enemy (the private server community) is doing.
Some players would argue that private servers are where the most interesting ideas for the WoW franchise are coming from, and that Blizzard haven't made experiences that are compelling enough to justify paying their subscription to play on official servers for a long time. WoW Forever is probably changing that for a lot of people, obviously, but for how long?
Consider, also, solo creators [3] who want to work on passion projects (with no intent to hurt Blizzard's bottom line by running a public server and "stealing" their players with their own intellectual property.) Why should they have no support whatsoever from Blizzard to create new games/experiences within WoW?
It's worth remembering that entirely new genres of games emerged from the communities of earlier Blizzard titles, like tower defences and MOBAs. And they turned out to be famously missed opportunities for Blizzard. Why haven't they learned this lesson yet?
1: https://github.com/TrinityCore
by skibz - Are we finally going to get StartCraft: Ghost ?by strbean
- ikr, that's the first thought I had too. Looking forward to Warcraft Adventures next. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_t...by ModernMech
- Impressive. They managed to turn the hype video in a more depressing parody of Starship Troopers.by brightball
- All I could think about watching the trailer was that this must be a game based on Starship Troopers.by torh
- Blizzard IP started off from failing to acquire a license with Games Workshop, and did infringement-avoiding changes to release their own games. StarCraft is a subset of Warhammer 40k, which is an expansion of influences from Starship Troopers.
Edit: The IP story seems unsubstantiated (albeit likely), but regardless the similarities between terrans/empire, zerg/tyranid, protoss/tau, etc are certainly there.
by croon - "Set to launch 2030"
Why even bother to announce this now? I only see downsides in mentioning something that far out.
by eykanal - This is pretty typical for a new blizzard game. For example Diablo 3 and 4 were both announced 4 years prior to release. Not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s not unusual.by ryan_n
- Meanwhile Nintendo announced Ocarina of Time remake out Novemberby __s
- Maybe to protect the project from internal politics?by ralfd
- Games get announced so far out now so that studios can make a judgement call, based on public reception, on whether or not to cancel the development.by xboxnolifes
- “First time?” Buster Scruggs meme
- > a target release date of 2030
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for a StarCraft shooter despite it not being StarCraft at all (I enjoy the universe). I wanted StarCraft: Ghost back in the day, and this feels like a taste of that dream.
That said, targeting a release of 2030 is wild to me. Look at the Astra game dev hype that's hitting twitter right now. Yes it's all filtered to the best possible examples / yes people are not one shotting these things, but still it's very clear that LLMs are beginning to be very capable at game dev in a way that doesn't look/feel like ass.
LLMs are going to become more capable over time. I think most of us can agree that eventually they'll be competitive with AAA developers given enough GPU cycles. I would argue that given rate of improvement, we're looking at that point coming in the next year or two.
To emphasize this point, a year ago GPT-5 got released. This was the type of game it would make: https://youtu.be/yTHo7tMborY?t=324
This is the type of game Astra is making: https://youtu.be/GuO_Eo34C8E?t=348
It's just starting to be capable of making assets in blender / unreal. Given this rate of advancement, what is the state going to be like 4 years from now? It really feels a bit like the "travelling to distant stars" problem, where at some point it's faster to wait for better engines than to leave now. I worry that by the time this gets released, the market is going to be flooded with fully custom AAA games that are hyperniche. 4 years out is a long, long time to wait, and it's a longer time to bet on success / market dynamics.
by jjcm - Apparently 6 years is not an uncommon development cycle for AAA right now. For a random example, Ghost of Yotei which is also an open world game, was in development for 4 years. That game is a sequel too, and I think Sucker Punch is probably less dysfunctional than Blizzard at the moment. Still it might have been premature to announce it at this stage.
- I just started playing with building a game in Godot with Fable 5.1 last weekend and the pace is crazy. Obviously there's a world of difference between what looks playable on my machine and what a AAA studio with the best human artists and developers can put out, and I appreciate that they still exist and put in the first class effort, but... yeah. A 3-year timeline while this is going on seems out of touch with what's going on in the world.by svachalek
- I'm not a gamedev so I might be wrong, but my friend showed me in 2020 a quick 30 minute tutorial in unity. In this time he made a basic 3d shooter game. The first video is the type of game a teenager would have made 20 years ago and the second one is of course a lot more impressive, but I believe the game engine is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.
- I just read the book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier (without having played any of their game or being aware that BlizzCon is around the corner). It seems they'll repeat their own mistakes.
I am getting more and more pessimistic about these studios and their AAA works. Every game is now a gamble with multi year effort with hundreds if not thousands of staff behind it. If a game doesn't sell, and that happens more than once, layoffs are coming. And for Blizzard specifically, it'd better be an online game that's going to be a multi billion dollar cash cow they can keep milking for years. If not, they would not work on the game in the first place.
Of course they have released many great games, but as the history has proven, you can't just keep coming up with new games that are original, fun if not addictive and also make money, especially with the fierce competition today.
Which makes me think I should spend more money/time on indie games than the action/adventure game from big studios that are increasingly repetitive and boring. We need more, smaller studios to give us something new.
by fg137 - Incredible to see how disconnected Blizzard is from its customers. One more shooter, when we wanted the next RTS.by jceg
- RTS isn't a popular genre anymore. Big studios don't care anymore about RTS. I think the last RTS from a big studio/publisher was the Age of Empire definitive editions ? 6 years ago...
- In the very same conference they announced WoW Forever. So whatever it is, it's not necessarily systemic, because they seemed to have nailed that audience.by aliasxneo
- What evidence do you have that this is the general sentiment among 'customers' rather than your own? Genuinely asking, I too would have preferred an RTS but my sense is the player base for RTS is much smaller than a shooter.by jleehn
- You are wrong. People that remember the cancelled StarCraft Ghost are excited for this.by klipklop
- "That's what you say, but really you want a monetized phone game you can play while in the bathroom." - marketing and product planningby m463