I wish them the best of luck. Exciting things happening outside of Blizzard and it's sad to see.
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Former Starcraft 2 devs create new RTS studio Frost Giant
- Thread starter SmartWaffles
- Start date
- News
Just for the record people have been breaking off from Blizzard for awhile now.
Don't forget FireFall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefall_(video_game)
Regardless, totally hyped for this and hope Frost Giant produces something that twitch will broadcast for years to come.
Good luck Blizzard people.
I also might add that
Don't forget FireFall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefall_(video_game)
Regardless, totally hyped for this and hope Frost Giant produces something that twitch will broadcast for years to come.
Good luck Blizzard people.
I also might add that
is a good marketing term.
It was but people really overreact to it as if the story being bad is a thing that could ruin the best RTS campaigns ever made in mission, unit and enemy variety.
Success is relative. It's a profitable project, but there's a reason Blizzard is out of the RTS game, and this time it isn't politics.
SC2 was supposed to be the torchbearer for esports, but it ended up being the start of Blizzard's decline.
Where am I making anything up? I sat in the front row as I watched Riot eat into Blizzard's market share. Hell, half the stuff I said is coming straight from the mouths of esports guys currently at Blizzard.
Yeah, people acting like SCII was some wild off-the-charts success are making things up.
Blizzard deliberately sabotaging their custom maps scene - the biggest driver of Brood Wars' incredible longevity - because they were salty about DotA is the biggest story nobody talks about of that decade. And it's kind of mind-boggling that they've doubled down on that and removed custom maps altogether from their subsequent games like Overwatch.
Yeah but that's because of things Blizzard has little sway over like MOBAs which has nothing to do with Starcraft. The point is that Starcraft 2 was by no measurable metric a failure. Genres evolve and split and MOBAs are having their time in the mainstream. Same as 3D platfomers in the late 90s.
By what metric? Because we've been over this and no one has been able to present it.
Overwatch has custom maps though. They weren't there at launch but it does have it.
Rob Pardo was a big part of that. His ego could never get over Dota overtaking his own design. He blocked Blizzard from being first to market with their own MOBA, and actively worked against HotS as well. The guy's an industry legend, but he was also the chief saboteur.
Thing is, games don't magically become popular overnight, or even on their own merits. SC2 lost to LOL not because LOL (and MOBAs in general) was the better product, but because Riot ran circles around Blizzard when it came to live ops and esports. Riot pioneered the developer-driven esports model, and that was a huge contributor to its growth, especially in Blizzard's "home turf" of South Korea. MOBAs are in general more accessible than RTS games, and that's certainly a massive contribution to its popularity that can't be overstated, but they're still among the most inaccessible. It was savvy business sense that won them the battle in the end--and why no other MOBAs other than Dota have found true success since.
So your definition of failure was that the esports scene isn't as big as one of the biggest games in the world? Because that's and absurd metric.
No. And let's not twist my words here--I never said SC2 was a failure. I said that it failed expectations. Starcraft 2 was handed the privileges of a massive budget, the market leader in esports share, a huge install base, and more--and squandered it all with bad decisions. The amount of effort they put into this game just for it to lose out to a scrappy startup in Riot within 2 years of release was humiliating and exposed the rotten politics and hubris at Blizzard. And in its wake, the industry is afraid to build another RTS.
Well yes it's hard to come up with metrics when for some strange, unfathomable reason Blizzard is extremely cagey with statistics. But it's pretty easy for somebody who was around back then to see that SCII is wildly less relevant than Brood Wars was. Hell in the only place where Starcraft is still a relevant esport, Korea, Brood Wars is the more popular of the two.
Regarding Overwatch, not according to Blizzard. They have those lame custom games and that weird workshop thing (five years after release lmao) but no actual way of building custom maps.
From a pure player perspective Blizzard hubris is definitely a thing that I've felt for all Blizzard games I played after WoW(SC2 up to HotS, WoW up to WotLK, Hearhstone up the expansion with Brann it was explorer themed, Diablo 3 base game). There is just no way to describe the repeated ignoring of community grievances where problems remain unsolved for months only to then finally do the thing people have been suggesting 8 months ago. Like if it's not hubris then the bureaucratic red tape must be so immensely crazy.
Like when there are balance problems in Dota 2 the team actually manages to fix them within the month and changes can come as quick as 1 week apart.
And the balance issues that often affect Dota 2 at the launch of new big patches I consider far more complex than face hunter in hearthstone, the reign of swarmhost/broodlord in SC2, paladins being generally garbage in vanilla wow, diablo 3 having a completely broken inferno difficulty. Especially because in a lot of these cases Blizzard has just been implementing things the community has already asked for only after months of waiting. Living through these same issues from game to game and seeing how other devs handle it so much better definitely soured my longterm on blizz games and well can't say it hasn't worked in my favor with how stuff like reforged worked out.
I don't think I've ever seen the dota 2 reddit ever talk about specific changes to balance for problems in the same way the Blizzard community does. Pro streamers sometimes make an offhand comment about if something is egregiously strong but in general I think there is a huge sentiment of trust for anything concerning problems of balance.
The WoW youtube scene this year from what I glimpsed has been just shitting on Shadowlands balance in comparison. So it seems a bit like same old blizzard from my view to an extent.
Like when there are balance problems in Dota 2 the team actually manages to fix them within the month and changes can come as quick as 1 week apart.
And the balance issues that often affect Dota 2 at the launch of new big patches I consider far more complex than face hunter in hearthstone, the reign of swarmhost/broodlord in SC2, paladins being generally garbage in vanilla wow, diablo 3 having a completely broken inferno difficulty. Especially because in a lot of these cases Blizzard has just been implementing things the community has already asked for only after months of waiting. Living through these same issues from game to game and seeing how other devs handle it so much better definitely soured my longterm on blizz games and well can't say it hasn't worked in my favor with how stuff like reforged worked out.
I don't think I've ever seen the dota 2 reddit ever talk about specific changes to balance for problems in the same way the Blizzard community does. Pro streamers sometimes make an offhand comment about if something is egregiously strong but in general I think there is a huge sentiment of trust for anything concerning problems of balance.
The WoW youtube scene this year from what I glimpsed has been just shitting on Shadowlands balance in comparison. So it seems a bit like same old blizzard from my view to an extent.
It did make me quit playing halfway through Heart of the Swarm after binging through SC, BW and Wings of Liberty on Hard, so in a way, yeah. It WAS that bad. And I say this as someone who bought WoL on launch day.
So yeah, not more than SC and WC combined, but it's still more popular than SC by itself. Other than Steam, there's the Windows Store (Game Pass). There's also Voobly, GameRanger and direct IP games, all three of which were the most popular platforms before AoE2HD released, and even for a while after that.
Coop being the most popular gamemode is a given. I already said in my first post that commanders were the only success of SC2.
Early 2010 was Justin.tv and I already acknowledged it. By the time own3d and Twitch started gaining popularity, other games were already on the rise. To say that SC2 carried all that is hyperbole, even though it obviously had a big part in it.
With zero support, AoC was wildly successful on platforms like Voobly (even after AoE2HD released) and many IRC networks also had insanely huge channels for direct IP games.
I'm not talking about "half the stuff I said", I'm referring to you framing it as if SC2 not beIng no.1 was because it was a 'mediocre' game that failed. MOBAs are way more accessible and is played in teams, SC2 is arguably the most competetive 1v1 game there is. Blizzard could have not done fuck all, but nothing could change the fact that MOBAs was taking over the legacy left by StarCraft.
It has nothing to do with StarCrat II, or the quality of it, both as an experience and as a comptetetive scene.
I'm tired of seeing people blame the decline of RTSs on SC2, as if it was some kind of faliure and a bad game, just because it didnt become the biggest esport or whatever. Fact is, most people just don't want to lose alone or face the steep learning curve. That playerbase is never going to be the biggest there is, just look at fighting games.
If you think MOBAs would have killed RTS games regardless of the business decisions that were made by both Riot and Blizzard, then I have an Overwatch team to sell you.
Imagine trying to argue that League of Legends, an incredibly inaccessible game on the grand scale of games, somehow became a worldwide record-setting phenomenon by the merit of its gameplay alone.
Overwatch is also a game played in teams, that is the point. 'Incredibly inaccessible' is not at all how I would describe LoL next to SC2. A high skill-cealing doesnt prevent you from having fun with your friends, if it is accessable enough. Most PC players can control a character on screen, or is 'grand scale of games' Solitiare and Minesweeper?
And eeh, most 'world-wide phenomenoms' get there because of their gameplay alone, or did Rocket League become a hit because of its massive marketing budget? I bet Minecrafts coroprate backing must've made a huge impact during it's early days. Man, I wonder what would've happened if Counter-Strike didn't have the suits telling them what to do during development back in the 90s.
Yeah, gameplay alone doesnt get you anywhere, that's why a stupid WC3 custom map would never get popular.
You are so incredibly out of touch it's honestly difficult to have this conversation with you. I've said my piece, if you want to hold onto your dogma here that's on you.
But lol @ the idea that the years we spent at Riot diagnosing problems with the onboarding process, crafting a messaging strategy to counter the Dota trolls, building a best-in-class user experience, and investing millions of dollars and dozens of personnel into a homegrown esports team, and becoming one of the first companies to self-publish in several worldwide territories, did absolutely nothing because thank god our gameplay did all the work 🙄
Is this post for real? For anyone born in the last 20 years Starcraft 2 is the only RTS
It's pretty hard to take you seriously talking about how hard Riot owned SC2 if you apparently worked at riot. Lol.
It was 6 years ago. But nah, discount me if you want. The facts are out there.
Only if the executives plan is for some 10 year+ esports behemoth. What's wrong with just making a fun RTS that people can enjoy without the pressure of making it the 'next big thing' and budget accordingly.
I mean, there has been virtually no stronger tribalism in PC gaming than the <--Dota <--> Riot <--> SC --> hate-rangle, as evidence by some of your use of language even now (dota trolls?) and it's OK to be proud of your work at RIOT in making league a behemoth, but surely you can see your internal bias towards something you helped make in your posting, much like I see my internal bias towards IKEA furniture I have assembled
I mean i don't think anyone questions the fact that riot did an incredible job with LoL and essentially ate blizzards lunch but your history clearly clouds your judgement on this topic and it shows.
"Dota trolls" are a very specific breed of people I had to deal with (e.g. "League takes no skill"), so no, it's not pejorative language--it's literally what they were--Dota players who didn't play LOL, but antagonized the LOL community. I helped draft the strategic messaging for LOL, as I had an extensive Dota background prior to joining Riot, and a big part of that outreach was dealing with Dota trolls. If you were part of the MOBA scene back around 2009-2012, you'd know exactly the type of people I'm talking about.
I'm just providing my point of view as an insider, and as someone who was part of that history. I've provided a pretty comprehensive explanation for why SC2 underperformed its expectations, leading to ActiBlizz not wanting to pursue another RTS project. Apparently the most cogent theory this thread can come up with otherwise is "Bobby Kotick doesn't think it'll make enough money", so if y'all want to dismiss my experiences, go on ahead and keep thinking whatever you want to think.
Riot did for all intents and purposes own Starcraft 2. Either that or Blizzard really sucks at supporting an eSports scene, wasted budgets, got mediocre viewership on streams, and generally lost the mindshare and pie of the eSports scene on their own.
OP
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I think the guy saying that MOBAs would have taken over RTS regardless of SC2'S quality speaks truth. If it wouldn't have been RIOT it would have been someone else. The reason I think so is that this phenomenon already existed before LoL was a thing. In the wc3 days DOTA was viewed very differently than now. It was viewed as the less skilled, less demanding game for those who wouldn't cut it in wc3 ladder. You suck at micro? Go play that noobier UMS game with no micro involved. However it also quickly gained and IMO surpassed ladder's popularity with the rise of TDA and such. So the writing on the wall was already there.
Yeah, pretty much. SC2 was a great game in a dying genre, at least at the AAA production level. Was on the team making C&C: Generals 2 (aka Command & Conquer after a pivot) for two years at EA and while that project had a number of challenges, it certainly didn't help that the business viability of a traditional RTS pretty much evaporated around us during its development. If Blizzard, having spent 6+ years developing a sequel to the most acclaimed, and (one of the) most successful RTS games of all time couldn't succeed (relative to its budget), there was little hope for others.
I wish the team at Frost Giant the best. I love RTS games and would love to see someone take a big swing at the genre again.
I'm sorry, but being an 'insider' doesn't validate your shitty takes. You come across as someone that doesn't play these games yourself, neglecting the importance of core gameplay and describing LoL, a one character point-and-click game that runs on a toaster, as 'incredibly inaccessable'.
If the gameplay loop is good enough, players will jump through hoops and stick with outright broken games, because the core is all that really matters. User experience fluff does not make success, it maintains momentum. And can't you really see the difference in appeal and accessability in a team based game compared to a 1v1 game. Its apples to oranges. StarCraft never stood a chance of becoming the biggest game, but that does not make it responsible for killing off the viability of the genre, nor does it make it a bad game, or in your words 'not worthy of carrying the torch for RTS games'.
You are trying to make this into something that it is not, it all comes down to how different the appeal of these games are. Blizzard could've done more, but tennis will never be bigger than football, no matter how much money you throw at it or how much time you spend 'diagnosing problems'.
You can beleive whatever you want, but please keep it to yourself instead of making up a narrative and presenting it as facts.
And ofcourse you'd say it's difficult to have this conversation when you get called out on your bs. I find it ironic you'd say I'm out of touch.
Good luck to them! StarCraft 2 was, for me, the last grand RTS game (besides the shitty story). I hope they can find a way to reinvent or modernize the genre and create something fun, it's been ages since I last played a good RTS (probably LotV). Also, I really don't care who or what "killed" RTS, I just want them back because they're a lot of fun, but keep arguing :)
So the situation at Blizzard must be a lot worse than before with this talented people leaving and starting their own companies.