As much as I want to think change will happen, it's much more likely this will be a few weeks of PR and ultimately nothing will change.
For something to change people have to vote with their wallets. In this context that means cancelling subscriptions or dropping games they are already playing in favor for ones by competitors with better integrity, and I don't see that happening.
Diablo players could go to Path of Exile, its closest competitor, but that game is massively invested into China as well and partially owned by Tencent.
Warcraft RTS players represent a small market right now with almost no microtransactions or ongoing revenue.
WoW players have alternatives, but not many I am aware of that aren't heavily Chinese based as the MMORPG category is dominated by Chinese companies like Perfect World.
Starcraft players don't have a lot of alternatives as SC has dominated the esports and highly polished RTS category for over 5 years with the same game. The closest competitor would be Age of Empires or Warhammer, I'm not sure how much influence China has over them, but they are different types of RTS games.
Heroes of the Storm players can go to Dota or LoL. LoL being owned by China and Dota being owned by Valve with strong Chinese market involvement.
A common albeit reductive meme around the entire controversy is that Blizzard games were already declining in popularity (especially Starcraft and HotS) so it's easy to boycott them.
Path of Exile is an interesting case as I know a lot of Diablo players went there since Diablo III is effectively on life support (including myself), but the resurfacing of the Tencent ownership news is causing ethical complications: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/df5zx7/anyone_...
I think the good will that Blizzard earned with their early games has been eroding for a long time. They did, legitimately, used to have enormous community good will. I can think of two ways that's eroded:
(1) Blizzard's early games earned huge amounts of goodwill by enabling players to mod them. The map editor of Warcraft and the UI mod-ability of WoW let people build entire communities around modded content (DotA, for example!). To my knowledge games after Starcraft II have largely lacked anything resembling this kind of functionality (please correct me if I'm wrong). Hearthstone, HotS, Diablo 3, and Overwatch all have 100% of their content locked down from the top down. I don't think the contribution of mods to the longevity of Blizzard's early titles can be overstated, and I'm confused why they haven't kept up that spirit.
(2) Blizzard has had a long string of eyebrow-raising failures to foster the competitive gaming scene, which they've been tone-deaf on since at least Starcraft II. They pulled the cord entirely on HotS after getting the game into great shape, the kept the Overwatch meta unbelievably stale for years, the Hearthstone Grandmaster League has been a joke on multiple fronts (in addition to an objectively stupid format decision for the first season, they insist on reserving seats in their flagship tournament for popular streamers rather than top players, resulting in some just... awful games). In general they try to retain far too much control and stifle anything they feel inconveniences them.
Add to that (3) a string of jaw-droppingly bad community management moves ("you think you want that"... Diablo for mobile...) and (4) Activision looming like an insect and (5) lots of Bizarre changes to games to appease Blizzard China
I don't know, I used to perceive Blizzard as a good steward for games. Now I don't think the game makers have that degree of control over the company's decisions, or their priorities have changed.
So it doesn't surprise me that people were as quick to kick them to the curb as they were. It would have 10 years ago, but not today.
You're right, the goodwill has been eroding for this lifelong fan. I adored Starcraft: Brood War, it was great to play online even over dial-up and relatively well balanced (though looking back I think that was mostly by accident) and as you say it had a great mod scene when you wanted to take a break from serious competition.
I didn't particularly like the shift to heroes, creeps, and semi-3D in Warcraft 3, but that's a personal opinion.
Then they hit me with Diablo 3 -> Starcraft 2 -> Hearthstone. Diablo 3's faults are well documented, it's apparently in a good place now but that ship has sailed for me. Starcraft 2 just didn't feel good to play for me. The snappy control and clean sprites of SC:BW was replaced with muddy 3D visuals and slow turning 3D models. And Hearthstone was fun, but they dialed up the RNG to entice casual players and make streams exciting. It got annoying to keep rolling the dice - both when opening packs and in the game (Dr Boom anyone?).
It took a while but eventually I realised their spark and magic was gone. They're just another AAA developer that I mostly ignore now.
I experienced the loss of that "spark and magic" in games twice in my lifetime.
The first time with Japanese console games, sometime during the PlayStation/2 era. There was something of a golden age on the way to mastery of 2D in the 1990's. I'm talking about the craftsmanship, the attention to minute details, the cognitive approach in designing difficulty and progression and outright "fun" games playing on our senses etc. The ingenuosity of some RPG systems, etc.
All that gradually took a back-seat as 3D was emphasizing visuals and "shiny" replaced "smart", "realistic" replaced "immersive".
The second time was with Blizzard, in very comparable ways — when you go back to the basics, how characters move and behave, how actually fun it is to press a button over and over, etc. Things that make some games absolutely stellar and others garbage and you just can't know until you try your hands on it for some time.
Needless to say I don't bother with most AAA today. (not that I game a lot if at all)
Yes the shift to 3D was absolutely a mixed bag. It is simply so much more work to make a 3D world, from level design to art. It enables some genres and games to exist (something like Monster Hunter: World just wouldn't be the same, and while Dark Souls is similar to Zelda and Metroid it also gains a lot from 3D) but it just diverts so many resources.
A common complaint about the open world trend is that environments feel bland, sparse, and copy-pasted. There is a lack of that hand-crafted attention to detail you mention when compared to something like Hollow Knight with beautiful backgrounds and precise control.
Oh totally agreed on the diversion of resources, and even before the machine (skills hired, teams divisions etc).
However open worlds, imho, pose challenges but not to the extent that it explains or excuses the lack of 'basic' low-level (physiological almost) engagement. It's a different problem I think, e.g. consider the 'blandness' of a typical NES or early PC world, and yet how engaging some titles managed to be. That's what I'm talking about. Sure, visuals help immersion (so a great open world may help, a bland one may deter), but this is at another, higher level than controls.
For instance, even in 3D, I remember having more fun "farming" in old-school ugly MMOs — up to and including WoW 1.x — than in later very "rich" worlds. The problem is so basic: for instance, visual feedback not perfectly timed to provoke "satisfaction" or a "reward" feeling, but rather feels frustrating and/or working against me (the worst feeling ever in a game, when the part that's yours — e.g. feedback, hitpoints — seems rigged or not fair or simply deceitful / obfuscated).
I remember reading Square Enix devs for FFXIV that "yes, boss X is essentially 'cheating' but that's because hollywood experience! better this way!"... — err, no, sorry, not ever was a game better because your opponent is visibly unfair — hasn't anyone learned from Metal Gear. This was the day I knew I just couldn't keep playing the game, it would never be satisfying to me because of its design philosophy.
As a friend in game dev at Capcom explained to me once, player controls is a very tedious work of finding the "ideal" timing windows and key combinations / orders that just make it "fun", subjectively. It's a lot of back-and-forth between code and testing some alpha — hundreds of times over a typical day. It's almost biological in nature, like good music. And stupid loads of time + great tooling are paramount to do this job well — one reason PlayStation SDKs are so appreciated in the industry ever since day 1, 1994; a polar opposite to Nintendo's for instance (I hear they got better, but look no further to explain 'lack of third-party support' on many of their platforms).
Controls may be "precise" but above all need to be predictable, learnable — like Sonic has always been 'sloppy', unlike Mario, but this ties in well with his speed (hence inertia) and persona (go-getter), and it's a small learning curve for players, but one that sets 'experienced' players appart. A great "sloppy" implementation, nonetheless precise mathematically.
I definitely have to check out Hollow Knight, though!
Sorry for a long piece, it's one of my 'truths' in game 'quality'. Note that this is all good advice to design UI in general for any kind of software — especially the timing of action, feedback, effect on events. There's a way — through testing — to make it all just 'flow' 'naturally' and with a weirdly 'satisfying' feeling.
Yes game feel is hard to quantify sometimes. There have been games that on paper I should adore, but in practice I struggled to enjoy. Bastion and Hyper Light Drifter are two - beautiful presentation, but the controls and gameplay feel just didn't click for me personally.
I play FFXIV and I'm not sure what the quote is referring to but in general I think it has a very good feel. They made a conscious choice to decouple animations from hits, meaning they can go nuts with extensive and flashy animations but your job is to just not be in the ground AOE marker when it vanishes - if you didn't get out in time you are hit, regardless of how long the following animation takes or whether you've walked a few steps since. This has a learning curve and confuses new players so should be explained better, but it makes for snappier gameplay and tighter movement patterns at the higher skill levels once you get it. Top raids are very much a dance of positioning, movement, and maximising uptime, which I enjoy a lot.
To the contrary (referring to ugly old MMOs) I also enjoyed FFXI and that was anything but quick and precise, the battle log itself was delayed and sluggish and abilities only came out every few minutes if you weren't a caster. I'm not sure what it was, but I think it was that feeling of overcoming a challenge in a group (or the challenge of just finding a group!) and the ability to break the rules by beating enemies with 2 skilled people instead of a full group. I revisited it recently and still mostly enjoyed it, so it's not just a case of it being the best we could do back then.
I'll add that personally I've lost a lot of respect for them over the bnetd fiasco/lawsuit, Starcraft II shipping with no local multiplayer, and their long-running legal crusade against private World of Warcraft servers.
I forgot about the absence of LAN in Starcraft II, which was utterly mind-blowing (good luck hosting a serious tournament). It's almost as if they built a business department to kill the company from the inside.
And there have been many issues with this over the lifespan of SC2. In the early days it was insanely common to see semi finals or grand finals with dropped games to the point the screen that appears when a connection issue would occur became a meme.
After around 2014 all the major tournaments had "partnered" with Blizzard in one way or another and an on-premise server is now used with a whole cloak-and-dagger system of ensuring the software on it never makes it out to the public. You have to pay Blizzard to operate the server on premise by their staff, essentially the same people who already have access to the Battle.net servers themselves.
And then in the end the game became free to play in 2017 anyhow.
Grinding Gear Games (GGG), the makers of Path of Exile have recently been purchased by Tencent, with an 80% stake. This ownership will increase to 100% in the next couple of years. If you want to boycott pro-China companies, PoE and GGG aren't a good choice!
Torchlight, another popular alternative ARPG, is also owned by Runic Games which was purchased by Perfect World, which is owned and operated out of China.
On the contrary, wow classic was setting twitch records just a month ago. Obviously that spike in popularity will not be sustained, but still worth noting and shows the size of Blizzard as a brand.
Tencent also owns Riot Games and a portion of Reddit. Tik Tok, etc... We are talking one massive boycot, here. Besides Reddit (of which a boycott doesn't make much sense without an alternative), I don't use any service which I know Tencent has stake in.
If you haven't checked out Spiderweb Software games it's worth at least a glance. The graphics aren't really anything but serviceable, but the stories have tons of depth and replayability.
Keep in mind its Activision-Blizzard, not just Blizzard.
Even if you boycotted all Blizzard products, the call of duty series and candy crush would take the hit. Also, I don't think it would work period; if Blizzard made this a hill to die on, it's because the Chinese market must be growing and higher profit than the west.
The fun part about this is that it is publicly disclosed information. Blizzard revenue for Q1 & Q2 2019 were 88% in Americas and EMEA, with 12% in Asia Pacific. The percents are unchanged from 2018.
The lack of will towards cancellation doesn't seem to be an issue given that Activision Blizzard has an "overloaded" account deletion feature which shows they have had enough deletions to make them afraid and decided to break the law over it.
Some additions though:
I know for RTSes AOE2 is still shockingly active and viable as it happens to have landed on "peak RTS complexity" from a combination of minimal auto along with some unique features like one of the fewer RTSes to have a remotely accurate tooth to tail ratio - it is extraordinarily rare for the military to outnumber the civilian sector and if you are in that position unless victory is assured defeat is inevitable.
AOE2 is conveniently open in its protocols and they demonstrate why independence from competitive tournaments is important to game making. From a business standpoint the best choice isn't to kowtow but to stay not responsible for it.
Which is an ironic but tangible advantage for open software and giving up control. Even the unreasonable can see that any controversial actions are not your fault just like Lego can't stop you from building dongs and swastikas with their bricks.
Personally I suspect MMOs would be harder to replace by "flavor" from how out of Zeitgeist they are after so many tried and failed to create WOW killers they stopped trying. Combined with Free To Play models sucking much of the staple player base away. Even longtime rivals or disliked MMO variants mourn the passing or decline of others. They have effectively become period pieces in many ways - not dead but in clear twilight.
> As much as I want to think change will happen, it's much more likely this will be a few weeks of PR and ultimately nothing will change.
I would agree with you if this wasn't all tied to ongoing protests in Hong Kong and a continued trade war with China that both don't appear like they're going to be resolved any time soon. Blizzard has inadvertently added an anchor to the situation without a clear way of removing it.
Yes, fully Japanese, and I can recommend it. I think it's the #2 subscription MMO at the moment, the recent expansion was very well received and there's been a big influx of 'WOW Refugees' but that's mostly because BFA didn't land well.
If anyone is prompted to try it then be aware that everything under ARR (up to level 50) is a real slog. The slower pace didn't bother me but makes some people quit before the good bits.
For something to change people have to vote with their wallets. In this context that means cancelling subscriptions or dropping games they are already playing in favor for ones by competitors with better integrity, and I don't see that happening.
Diablo players could go to Path of Exile, its closest competitor, but that game is massively invested into China as well and partially owned by Tencent.
Warcraft RTS players represent a small market right now with almost no microtransactions or ongoing revenue.
WoW players have alternatives, but not many I am aware of that aren't heavily Chinese based as the MMORPG category is dominated by Chinese companies like Perfect World.
Starcraft players don't have a lot of alternatives as SC has dominated the esports and highly polished RTS category for over 5 years with the same game. The closest competitor would be Age of Empires or Warhammer, I'm not sure how much influence China has over them, but they are different types of RTS games.
Heroes of the Storm players can go to Dota or LoL. LoL being owned by China and Dota being owned by Valve with strong Chinese market involvement.
More alternatives are needed IMO.