I find it a fascinating case study that some of the company’s most anticipated releases are just re releases: Diablo 2 resurrected, WoW classic, Warcraft 3 reforged. Death by a thousand lapses in game quality and you get a lot of hype about refurbished old games. Some of it is rose covered nostalgia but IMO there’s been a sea change in game design since the advent of the attention economy, pay to progress, micro transactions, etc
It speaks to executive disfunction -- an inability to currate and fund a long-term creative pipeline, instead focusing on short-term revenue generators.
I think it’s the hard times, strong people, good times process with more steps:
Passionate game creators make good games, good games get players and buyers, that creates profitable/well known companies, that can attract the (no offense) non passionate/revenue seeking MBA types, they worsen the games, passionate developers leave…
I HOPE those passionate developers can get together again to make new good games but who knows. I imagine it’s hard to attract capital without promise of simple game loop (read: minimal investment required) and with pay for progression. Those returns (I imagine) are just too damn juicy until people break the cycle
Yeah, milking existing franchises is definitely a sign of deeply rooted dysfunction. I was excited for their Project Titan of whatever but it got axed. That was years ago…
It's also telling that the team doing SC: Remastered cared enough to make an emulator for EUD maps (SC1 maps which used a buffer overflow accessible from within the map scripting language to execute arbitrary code), but the War3: Reforged release was a big steaming turd of missed promises.
At the very least they're capable of doing decent remasters, which why it was surprising how absolutely terrible the WC3 remaster was and how much they cocked it up. I have rarely seen such a bad series of decisions before in making a game. I've seen plenty of bad games but WC3R is on another level.
It doesn't say great things about the game industry in general that remasters and rereleases are so prominent.
The best Bioware game I've played in years is Mass Effect 1 in the Legendary Edition. The best Total War game in a decade is the rerelease of Rome Total War.
