Blizzard's 'Secret Sauce' 330
hapwned writes "With interviews from David Brevik, Mark Kern, and Steig Hedlund (all of Blizzard Entertainment fame), Russ Pitts creates a most enlightening explanation of Blizzard's success in the latest edition of The Escapist." From the article: "So, how does a maker of B-quality DOS and console games go on to become the single most successful videogame company in the history of the world? Even accounting for good luck and talented employees, there has to be some other key ingredient in Blizzard's larder to account for their seemingly golden touch."
Re:Borrowed from Tolkien? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's just funny looking at screenshots of the new Warhammer games and trying to fight the urge to exclaim "That looks just like Warcraft!", especially since I actually know better. I don't play the miniatures game, but I'm involved in a regular WFRP group, so I know the art style well
I think Warcraft takes a fair bit of inspiration from D&D too, if only because their world is a lot more light-hearted and high-fantasy than the Old World. Yes, even with all the demons and undead, Azeroth is still less grim and dirty than the average gutter in Altdorf. Probably less smelly too.
Confessions of a WarCrack addict (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personally.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The drawback is that this would require a reboot of your system - but many high-end games are the solitary program you want running while you're playing them anyhow - and besides, chat and browsing could still be included on the distro with the game.
I think this would be a deal-killer for me. I don't want to reboot my machine. Heck I don't even want to shut down my running applications. On OS X, the multitasking and resource management is usually good enough that I can leave resource hungry Adobe applications sitting idle while I play a game and not have it affect the performance. That is important to me. I usually have a dozen or more applications open, excluding all my terminals and I don't want to have to reopen all of them and find the files I'm working on again.
Here's another idea. Get your game working in stripped down environment and provide it in a different VM for each platform. Heck, you can build it to run in the JVM if you want. Better yet though, I'd like to see some company spearhead the development of a gaming specific environment that takes care of 75% percent of the coding needed for a given game style. Make it cross platform and sell smaller, cheaper "content" packages for it. The game is a file paradigm (an open standard format). Get a few different gaming houses on board and one or two companies can start selling dev tools that make games for it. You could undercut everyone since the cost of adding new features would be shared by all partners and the open source community and it would let you sell cheaper than anyone not on board. Companies could focus on content, with only a few coders to that are more than scripters to add new features and fix bugs. Tied into a P2P service or centralized server with advertising it would provide a way for people buy new games as well. Think of gamers booting up their favorite game and having a "buy other games" option including sequels, add ons, and similar games.
Instead of $60 titles you could sell $20 titles and still make just as much profit and have more variety and not have to worry about platforms. Heck, port it to the consoles too and watch your possible market balloon.
I'd be much happier to see this, than to see a bootCD game that makes it harder for me to play games.
Secret Sauce (Score:5, Interesting)
In the mid-nineties, Blizzard was purchased by Jan and Bob Davidson, the founders of the Math Blaster line of educational CD-ROM titles. Jan and Bob treated Blizzard well. When Blizzard said they wanted to take extra time to polish a game, Jan and Bob let them have the time they need. Each new wave of corporate acquisitions - CUC / Cendant / Havas / Vivendi - has tried to force Blizzard to push out titles early to meet release dates and profit targets, but each time Blizzard has been able to put in a phonecall to key shareholders to get the time they need to make things right.
If you combine this type of financial and moral support with the dedication and perfectionism of the employees of Blizzard, you get good games.
Next time you scroll through a Blizzard title, look at the names in the "Special Thanks" section.
Re:A flawed article the slashdot link is pointing (Score:3, Interesting)
Blizzard hasn't got a cent from me since then.
Re:Here's how (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
Blizzard has succeeded largely by consistently identifying what it is that makes gamers want to play a game, and then amplifying that all the way to 11.
I agree. If you look closely, all the really famous Blizzard games are really the same genre concepts as previous games -- but taken to a much greater level.
Picture Dune II, and the early C&C games. Great games, to be sure. Dune II really made a genre. But then look at Starcraft, and everything else that came later. SC has three completely different and quite well balanced playing styles as manifested by the races. I don't know of any game that gets that variety and balance nailed quite as well. Allied with this is a fun graphics style and a decent (not brilliant, but decent) story. Add to that a nice multiplayer system and simple controls -- you have a winner. But that game didn't come out of the blue. They had two RTS gamess coming before that, and StarCraft built atop them. The whole strategy is one of careful incremental updates -- the only thing revolutionary about SC is the amount of differentiation between factions.
Now take a look at Diablo. Hack and Slash roleplaying games have been around for ages, mostly because a real RPG is really hard to do. Neverwinter Nights, despite being hailed as a great RPG, plays as Hack and Slash, with verily little juice to it. Not many people around that make games like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura, Planescape: Torment, or the first two Fallouts, all of which are RP heavy. Blizzard looked at the half hearted RPG, saw the fun in the hack and slash, and refined it. Once again, Diablo I was simplistic, and Diablo II, while not revolutionary in any way, added a variety of classes and possible viable builds for each character that made variety tremendous. The truly phenomenal part of it was once again the online play (cheat-drenched as it was) and the collector's appeal.
Finally, look at WoW. Once again, the whole MMORPG concept has been done and redone to oblivion. Yet they managed to capture the top spot with a title that, once again, provides nothing really tremendously revolutionary. Classes and Races? Common RP notions. Battlegrounds? Besides being recent additions, they're just implementations of typical FPS concepts. Crafting and collecting? UO was there ages ago. Nothing in WoW is really new. But it's all packaged in one neat envelope, that gently introduces you into the game and that provides almost everything you could want in a MMORPG (roleplaying obviously excluded, and housing an unfortunate missing feature).
My take on the reason why Blizzard is so successful is that it works towards a complex simplicity. By this I mean that, unlike Nintendo, who goes for pure, unbridled simplicity (and Mario Kart, Super Smash Brothers et al really show how effective that is), Blizzard makes really simple games that really have a lot of potential to be taken as quite complex. I don't think I know any gaming communities that examine game mechanics quite as indepth as both the Diablo II and Wow communities, even though the games themselves have pretty simple interfaces and are easy enough to pick up (if well past the nintendo ease of pick up level). Speaking of interfaces, the whole Lua interface system for WoW is pure genious. It's the sort of thing I've dreamt of for ages. Not sure it's originally theirs or if someone else implemented something like it earlier (Civ 4 does the same with Python I think).
Ironic that they completely ignore... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes WOW is proof that blizzard can in fact milk the MMORPG crowd for more than any other company.
Yes, blizzard made online gaming practical many, many years ago. and yes, blizzard has made video games that are addictive. But the one thing they don't seem to relize is that not only do certain users crave hacks, but certain users who write said hacks use that craving for said hacks to simply exploit millions of peoples computers, with viruses, and many of those trojans are working hacks. and because of that battle.net is host to the largest botnets the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) industry paid hackers run.
there are currently 161,000 users on battle.net based on my estimates, 1 in 3 of those users downloaded some form of hack at some point. and most of the remaining 2/3rds have had little protection from various undisclosed vulnerabilities in the game engine. a bot net with easily 54,000 slaves, scattered around the world, running on computer that quite often need high speed internet (Hugesnet is only ladder playable if you are very cautious about how you play, anything below a Dedicated T-1 is iffy, once you've gained the skill to micro, and the knowledge of the game engine) not to mention you need a FX AMD and a minimum of a 20 pixel pipeline card (or a crossfire/sli solution) and preferablly a dual opteron, with 4GB of the fastest ram (lowest latency) available, to be able to play wc3 at 1200 apm*. (assuming you have a gaming mouse + gaming keyboard, usually USB 2.0 devices) Yes, considering the minimum packet size is 63 Bytes, and there are 6 seconds in a minute we're only talking about 3KB second of data, but we're talking about moving over 40 frames a second, with a profile akin to a ping -s 63 -i
Not to mention i don't know off hand what the minimum level of routing equipment is needed to handle a minimum of 800,000 frames per second**, much less to firewall*** it. It's not cheap though. neither is a full oc-96's worth of bandwith that can be sustained for an entire weekend.
*= you need to use at least 8 fingers (4 on the mouse buttons), and a custom keymap layout to consistantly achieve 1200 apm, since each digit can only sustain about 200-400 apm before the laws of physics catch up with you.
**= cisco doesn't start advertising frames they can handle until it gets into the millions per second
***= unless of course the firewall operates on layer 2, and can simply drop the packets on the floor without needing to interupt the cpu(s) to do so for each packet.
Perfect for LAN gaming (Score:2, Interesting)
There are three people in our family that play RTS, and while I can see us buying multiple copies of a game we all really enjoy, if I know a game can only be played on one machine, I probably won't buy it initally... and if I know it can be played on multiple machines simultaneously, I'm much more likely to try it out because multiplayer is really what strategy games are all about. Even two-player WarCraft understood that, and back before Battle.Net, The Craft of War IPX-over-IP game room on Microsoft's Zone.com was constantly busy with WC2 players.
Re:3D Has Killed Decent RTS Gaming (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, while it isn't exactly new to WarCraft 3, Blizzard games are incredibly moddable, to an extent rarely seen in any game. WarCraft 1 allowed modifying unit attributes so you could make your own balance tweaks. WarCraft 2 expanded on that with a full map editor and more customization of units. StarCraft's trigger-driven maps were quite a revolution, allowing everything from creating your own campaigns to the ever-popular Team fortress, Paintball, Bunker Defense, and similar UMS (Use Map Settings) games. But even SC's editor pales to WC3 (and especially WC3:TFT) where you can create entirely new units, change everything from coloring to collision size to learnable abilities, create your OWN abilities, items, and terrain effects, and more. WC3 allows creation of entirely new races for standard TRS-style gameplay... or truly RPG-like games... or over-the-shoulder camera (3D anybody?) FPS... or games like DotA, an incredibly popular WC3 mod with its own ladder, tournaments, etc. that is often considered to be essentially its own game.
Don't knock good looks. Camera control is fun, even if little more than a gimmick on most RTS... and it keeps people from whining that Blizzard games still have 90's-esque 2D graphics without even making people go out and buy a fancy new video card (i.e. they didn't take it to excess like so many companies do).