Shakeup at Blizzard!

[Walkiry]

1) Good riddance to bad rubbish, welcome in some new blood to manage the North team or
2) This is the beginning of the end for North
3) Things will still run status quo since these four didn't have tremendous impact

What is going to happen is that whoever takes charge of it will start a new project, Diablo 3, which will either:

1) Never be finished, team goes under (not necessarily the company).
2) Be released in a horrible, horrible way.
3) Not be finished on time before something major in the company that kills the project.

Call me an optimistic if you want. It's not only about who is leaving, it's also that it seems they leave for some things they didn't like about where Vivendi is going. I guess it was something like "either you rectify this, or we go", and off they went.

[Haider]

Wasn't it Roper who discussed this topic with Sirian here? Whoever it was, I found the arguments quite reasonable (althrough I also would have prefered a "non-hostile-game" option).

[pakman]

Honestly, I could really care less...really. Diablo is over, face it, has been for a long time. The only worthwhile game that they made was SC and WC, and I never even really cared for the WC series. It might give other game companies a chance to compete and even come out with better games...who knows...but I have a meeting right now, so I will elaborate later if I get time.

[Kevin]

The wording on it, especially the start of it with the "At the same time". It could have been something like 'Blizzard will still continue to still move forward, we have always been successful due to our strong teamwork, and we still have strong groups in place to continue producing some of the best games in the world.'

That says the same thing without pointing out 'individuals' and 'small groups of people'.

I agree I may be reading more into it, but first impression and re-readings for me picked up a negative connotation aimed at the departing individuals.

[kandrathe]

I disagree. I would change some things (as would most), but I still think the basic gaming concept is sound.

[LiquidDamage]

Wasn't it Roper who discussed this topic with Sirian here? Whoever it was, I found the arguments quite reasonable (althrough I also would have prefered a "non-hostile-game" option).

I am not 100% positive, but I don't think it was Roper.

Anyway, the "arguments" I remember him offering were along the lines of "we like to kill people some times, and it's a hoot", "the game is better for it because it keeps you on your toes", and the infamous "we know what's best for you" bit. None of those arguments are reasonable, IMHO. The second one might be if the system wasn't so insanely skewed towards PKs: PK builds have a massive advantage over monster-killing builds. As things are, "on your toes" means "prepared to be forced to quit your game on a moment's notice", which is just annoying.

Does anyone happen to have an archived copy of that thread?

P.S. Found Sirian's site, it was Max Schaefer. Sirian has what he claims to be the entirety of the argument posted at http://sirian.warpcore.org/diablo2/protest-2.html. I am currently reading it, I seem to remember it being pretty long.

One amusing point of Max's is absolutely ridiculous:

2) In Diablo 1, the cheating and hacking rendered PKing a disproportionately annoying addition to the game, for example the Town-Kill or the Auto-Kill. This is not the case in D2, where the avoidance of PKs is a relatively trivial matter.

Haha, no cheats or hacks in D2 to help PKs, eh?

[Solostaran]

Exactly what is Blizzard North? For a long time I just thought there was one big Blizzard which made all of StarCraft, WarCraft, and the like. Then I learned (from seeing the intro to Diablo II, I think...) that there was a division of Blizzard called Blizzard North. But, when I go to http://www.blizzard.com it just says Blizzard Entertainment everywhere and there is no distinction.

So my real question I suppose would be: Is there a Blizzard South or is Blizzard North just another name for Blizzard? I have heard about a Blizzard South, but never about anything they have created.

This question stems from my worry about what will happen to World of WarCraft. Per my research I have read that Blizzard North isn't really involved too much with WoW (who is then?). Also, I have read that, seeing as the Schaefers, Roper, and the other guy where part of the original Blizzard North, they weren't even around for the beginings of WarCraft and thus their leaving, while sad and unencouraging, won't likely leave the company (and their games) in disarray.

Just looking for a little clearing up I suppose!

[Occhidiangela]

Those were the guys who first built the initial core of Diablo, and then became Blizzard North when Blizzard took them in.

The departure of Roper, Brevik, and the Schaeffer brothers means that there will be no Diablo 3. Period. The core folks who brought Diablo and Diablo II to the world will be elsewhere.

This means that Blizzard will become WoW, Warcraft, and Starcraft series. Diablo II will, after patch 1.10, as I see it, go into maintenance only. I predict that over time the operations at Blizzard North will migrate down to Irvine and Blizzard will be a one house shop. (Consolidation is in vogue these days, I hear.)

Bnet will continue.

Diablo III will never happen. That, I suspect, is what went on behind closed doors with the folks at Vivendi: a decision to cut the Diablo franchise loose rather than put the money needed into making Diablo III a quality product.

[Solostaran]

Funny how what you said Occhi is exactly what I have read, but yet, for some reason, it finally clicked when I read your post. It is too bad the chances of a Diablo III seem to be so slim now, but I suppose this kind of stuff happens. It is the business world after all.

One thing I keep thinking of is -- with all the talk of the four resignees creating a new company -- I don't really want to wait around for them to come out with a new game. It is definetly just my impatience speaking, but I am not going to let myself get excited for a new game only to be hit with a release date set in 2006.

For now I shall concern myself with Blizzard and see what happens.

[LiquidDamage]

The departure of Roper, Brevik, and the Schaeffer brothers means that there will be no Diablo 3.  Period.  The core folks who brought Diablo and Diablo II to the world will be elsewhere.

That made me sad at first, but then I read the following in the WoW FAQ:

We know that the player vs. player (PvP) option is very important to many gamers. Therefore, we plan to incorporate a form of player conflict into the World of Warcraft. However, players who do not wish to be participate in PvP combat will not be required to do so. The PvP system will be incorporated in a consensual way that will be fun for those who wish to take part in this form of combat.

Then, I realized that I don't need a Diablo 3. Isn't it funny how this is worded? Considering all the other Diablo-related questions in the FAQ, I swear it is like they are saying, "No, we aren't going to push that D2 hostility crap on you".

[Occhidiangela]

I figured that there would not be room at Blizzard for two RPG's.

What more is there to do with Diablo? More eye candy? Look at what happened to MoO 3.

With WoW taking the Blizzard MMORPG slot, Diablo 3 becomes a second tier project that simply will not attract enough money to reach the quality standard that I am sure the gentlemen behind it would desire. As I see it, they are being forced into planned parenthood: they have their three kids, and now their Diablo tubes were going to get tied.

Faced with that, why stick around?

[Taem]

Although highly unlikely, it would be nice to see the four deserters of Blizzard North re-join with their old mates at Arena.net and purchase the license to create Diablo 3 from Blizzard and make it. Actually, I guess this would never happen, but just a passing thought I'd like to share.

[WarLocke]

I figured that there would not be room at Blizzard for two RPG's.

Sadly, IMO this is exactly what the Diablo series needed.

The two iterations we've had so far (not counting expansions) have pretty much mined out the "Action RPG" (snigger) paradigm. I can't see any changes possible that would breathe life into it (small tweaks, sure, but nothing revolutionary or even evolutionary).

A (true) Diablo RPG would be something akin to sex, IMO. They already have a richly detailed backstory, and a game set in the aftermath of the World Stone's destruction (with so many options, as have been pointed out here before) wedded with a quality engine on par with, say, the SPECIAL/Fallout engine would sell immensely -- you'd have at least two relatively large groups (Diablo and Fallout fans) you could pretty much count on buying it.

Ah well, I guess my dreams of perfect games will never come to pass. I still think that a Deus Ex-like Shadowrun game would be the pinnacle of gaming for decades.

- WL

[pakman]

Shadowrun is fun. I love it, and D&D and L5R and Seven Seas....

[Indefatigable]

Yeah, I think the Action RPG genre is basically dead. Diablo II will probably be the epitome for a long time.

HomeLanFed interviewed Roper just hours before his departure was announced and everything still seemed fine. They quickly got a follow up interview to discuss his departure. If you ask me, what happened was that Bill and the Blizz North people got some very bad news from Vivendi concerning how much say they would have in their creations. If you read any of the Blizzard History articles that appeared at their 10 year anniversary, you'd know that Blizzard has always stayed away from heavy corporate involvement. That's why we only see their logo in their games, and not 2 or 3 more in addition. I think Vivendi, or possibly whoever Vivendi is selling their game division to wants more coporate involvment (EA doesn't sound so far-fetched now eh...), and when Roper and Co. got word of it, decided there was too much trouble ahead to stay. What does everyone else think?

[channel1]

There are a couple of things that this event brings to mind.

First, importantly, is the question of when the decision will be made to set a date for End Of Life (EOL) for the Diablo products.

There was a time when software never had an EOL. I can easily scrounge up the stuff to build a 386, and happily install MS-DOS 6.22 on it. It will run ten-year-old software just fine. But, newer software does things that require ongoing support. Win95 hit EOL some time ago, and Microsoft has basically set the EOL for Win98. The support that will be discontinued is drivers for new hardware, patches for new online security issues, and fixes for existing bugs.

Trend PC-Cillin 98 is past EOL, and if I recall correctly, the EOL date for PC-Cillin 2000 was yesterday (30-June).

BattleNet games have an ongoing support cost. Advertising on Bnet may offset some of the expenses, but that does not address the problem of users playing a game that has been bought and paid for, instead of buying a new game. With this in mind, it is almost certain that they will discontinue Bnet support for the Diablo products eventually, and more importantly, prevent alternative private Realms for D2 to be created. It is not enough to pull the plug on Bnet support, they want you to buy a new game.

Diablo (1) isn't much of a drain on Bnet resources, since it only requires a match-making service. Diablo 2/X is a different story, since it requires a full-time server to operate Realm games. Bnet advertising would help offset the cost of operation somewhat, and there is another advantage to maintaining Realms at no cost to the users. It keeps them off EverQuest, and the other pay-per-use games. It's like the loss-leader strategy in retail. Get the customer into your place of business, so you can expose them to your other products, and at the same time screw over your competition.

That is only going to last for so long, however. I'm sure that Roper, Brevik, and the Schaeffer brothers wanted to maintain the free BattleNet indefinitely. With them gone, I expect that the Diablo/2 Realms will only last as long as sales of the game continue to cover the costs. After that, TCP/IP play (Open) will fulfill the promise of "Compete FREE on the Internet" on the package.

Secondly, I have a dream (I had to get that in- yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the first time King gave that speech, in Detroit :). I would really like to see one, final, integrated release of Diablo.

What I mean is a Diablo where you start out in Tristam, and go through the game like the original. Defeating Diablo opens up the Hellfire areas, and finishing that moves to the first part of new content: the destruction of Tristam.

Once your character decides to escape the doomed Tristam (an ever increasing flood of badness will assure this inevitable result), he moves on to the D2 portion of the game. An interesting detail here would be that a newly created character starts out in Tristam, and must complete that part of the game to get into the D2 areas. That would make the creation of "mule" characters interesting. :) Once in the D2 area, a character could not go back to the old, intact Tristam.

Once the D2X part of the game is completed, the next "difficulty" becomes available. But, instead of simply having a re-hash of the same stuff, with stronger monsters, the storyline would actually be a "Nightmare". The nastiest stuff a mortal could imagine will exist in the world, treachery by the NPCs who were your allies, and maybe replace the Fallen in Act 1 with Diablo clones. A REAL Nightmare. :)

Finally, the empty Quest rewards should be filled. The main one that I'm thinking of is the Cube Quest. Passing a Cube to a newbie character is too much of a twink, and having the same cube throughout your character development is unsatisfying. A character that gets a cube without doing the quest in Normal should only have a 1x1 storage in the cube. Completing the task would increase the Cube for that character to the normal 3x4 size. The Nightmare Quest reward would increase the cube size to 4x4, making new recipes possible. Finally, the Hell Cube would be 4x5. In other words, it would actually be worthwhile to do the quest.

I do think that a "Complete Diablo" would give the game another kick in sales. I know that I would buy it.

-rcv-

[Occhidiangela]

I don't see it happening, particularly not with the exodus we just saw.

'New' is what makes new money.

[CelticHound]

I don't see it happening, particularly not with the exodus we just saw.

'New' is what makes new money.

Well, maybe...

On the other hand.

http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/06/25/

:P

-- CH

"And how are the movies sequels this summer?"

"Great! Man, there's nothing I hate more than paying five bucks and having to deal with some new plot."

[bschultz]

what exactly does he mean by not having a direct pipeline? "We really felt that for ourselves and for the people we worked with that we wanted a more direct pipeline"

does that mean that they were being told that they could not do something that they wanted to do by vevindi?

"However, Roper said that it was made clear to him and the Blizzard North co-founders that such an opportunity would not be made available to them by Blizzard’s current owner Vivendi Universal Games so they all decided to take their leave of the company."

[channel1]

Maybe it was a case of "What goes around, comes around".

Roper: When is our contract update 1.10 coming out?

Vivendi: The 1.10 patch of your contract is currently being run through our QA testing procedure. Although we do not have a release date set for this patch, we are working hard to get it out as soon as possible.

Roper: Can you give us an estimate on when the contract patch will come out?

Vivendi: Estimates are usually wrong so no, we're not giving one at this time. If we knew an exact time, the patch would be already done. We release patches when they are done so it's not done yet.

Roper: Enough of this crap! We're outtahere!