I don't see a whole lot in Hellgate that a few more months of development and polish couldn't have fixed.
(1) That can be said for many other disappointing titles, if not most.
(2) If you can see three months of work, there is probably six or more months worth of work. Ever notice how those scheduled 2-3 month Blizzard betas turn into 6-8 month beta?
And it likely has as much to do with blizzard proper as it does with blizzard north as hellsagate wasn't as much fun. The developers of hellsgate are almost the same as the core team for D ii. I think the extra things Blizzard demanded of them made D ii a much more enduring game.
Keep in mind that the core team is only a fraction of the entire team. For each person whose name you know there were many others who made significant contributions. My understanding is that one of the things that makes Blizzard very different is that they have a large permanent QA department. I also think Diablo II was the first game of theirs that shipped simultaneously on PC and Mac so it had the advantage of cross platform development. Different CPU architectures (PowerPC only at that time), different operating systems, different rendering libraries, different compilers, etc does wonders with respect to finding bugs. Debugging steals time from "making it fun".
That said, the GP is also on the right track. Blizzard is in a rare position that they can credibly tell their owners that shipping six months late and missing Christmas will not matter. That thousands will line up outside of their local Frye's/GameStop/etc at midnight on whatever day it ships.
Everyone who wants tighter border controls is the decendant of someone who immigrated to this country before there were border controls.
You are misinformed. There was screening of immigrants and border control. Every hear of Ellis Island? Note the "illegal contract laborer" reference.
"Only two percent of the arriving immigrants were excluded from entry. The two main reasons why an immigrant would be excluded were if a doctor diagnosed that the immigrant had a contagious disease that would endanger the public health or if a legal inspector thought the immigrant was likely to become a public charge or an illegal contract laborer." http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island_ history.asp
Blizzard went down the drain when Vivendi bought them. A bunch of good developers left during the "vivendi taking over" phase
"Significant numbers" is an overstatement. The absolute number looks big, if they left a small dev studio maybe the claim would be true but for a huge organization like Blizzard it looks like normal post-ship burnout and attrition.
The claim ignores the talent that leaves companies like id, Bungie, etc and joins Blizzard. It also ignore the people who left, decided they made a mistake, and then returned to Blizzard.
The people left over a very long stretch of time. For example, IIRC the ArenaNet guys left a little before Diablo II shipped. OK let's assume they had some involvement. Diablo II Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III, Warcraft III The Frozen Throne, and World of Warcraft shipped without them. Now I've read around here that these guys were involved in Warcraft III, I'm sure that's true but that must have been years before the game shipped. ArenaNet fanbois claim they wrote the War3 engine but anyone attending E3 in those days saw the engine change quite dramatically each year and I recall reading an NVIDIA paper that indicated that the engine was completely rewritten. Now, the ArenaNet guys are talented and deserve a lot of credit for Guild Wars, but the people that followed them at Blizzard are also talented and deserve a lot of credit. What people fail to realize is how much of a team effort Blizzard games are. Blizzard games are not made by a couple of "rock stars", they are made by quite large *teams*. Attrition happens after a game ships, and teams survive. History has proven this.
Let me see if I understand the cover story you are attempting to sell us:
1. Apple announces that they will switch all of their computer lines to Intel.
2. A company that has been porting it's games to Mac for over 10 years decided to start porting it's most popular game. A game which is also the most recent, the one to run most poorly under Rosetta emulation, and the one that collects a monthly fee from each player.
Yeah, right, did you really think you could sell the spin above to the sophisticated readers around here?
Let Intel waste money trying to convince a market they abandonded to listen to their PR about how "cool and fast" their chips are.
The only market Intel has lost is the hobbyist market. This will be very good, and effective, PR for them. The audience they are targeting is far more than those who show up to QuakeCon. AMD owes their position to PR and outreach to gamers and hobbyists as much as it does to actual performance. If PR did not work companies would not be spending so much money on it. And as much as it hurts my nerd sensitivities PR is probably more important then a slight technological edige.
I am sure they are all excellent programmers but I think things are mixed up and/or overstated. Which is the norm when you start a new company and go out looking for venture capital. Only your most recent title matters, not how long you had it.
I believe O'Brien, not Wyatt, was the brains behind Battle.net. There was some game magazine that listed 50 or 100 influential game programmers and I am pretty sure he was "the" Battle.net guy. The various game credits seem to back this up.
According to the Warcraft 3 credits the game engine seems to have been really lead by Jay Patel. I think NVIDIA published something referring to Patel as the 3D guy for Warcraft 3 as well. O'Brien left very early in Warcraft 3's development and from watching the game change over the course of several E3 trade shows the engine seems to have been completely redone.
Now if you want to talk Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, and Diablo 2 they have an excellent track record. Now add Guild Wars and the credit it deserves. However keep in mind that individuals don't make great games, teams do. Blizzard's success is not attributable to a handful of guys but rather large teams. Arena.net will only be successful if these guys can build teams that are effective. Their individual talents are not enough.
ArenaNet is headed up by brilliant ex-Blizzard staff - "Wyatt was Blizzard's Vice President of Research and Development and most recently acted as the Team Lead and Lead Programmer of Battle.net. O'Brien was the Team Lead and Lead Programmer of Warcraft III, having personally developed the game's 3D rendering engine. Jeff Strain was also a Team Lead and Lead Programmer there and is the author of the Starcraft Campaign Editor
I am sure they are all excellent programmers but I think things are mixed up and/or overstated. Which is the norm when you start a new company and go out looking for venture capital. Only your most recent title matters, not how long you had it.
I believe O'Brien, not Wyatt, was the brains behind Battle.net. There was some game magazine that listed 50 or 100 influential game programmers and I am pretty sure he was "the" Battle.net guy. The various game credits seem to back this up.
According to the Warcraft 3 credits the game engine seems to have been really lead by Jay Patel. I think NVIDIA published something referring to Patel as the 3D guy for Warcraft 3 as well. O'Brien left very early in Warcraft 3's development and from watching the game change over the course of several E3 trade shows the engine seems to have been completely redone.
Now if you want to talk Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, and Diablo 2 they have an excellent track record. Now add Guild Wars and the credit it deserves. However keep in mind that individuals don't make great games, teams do. Blizzard's success is not attributable to a handful of guys but rather large teams. Arena.net will only be successful if these guys can build teams that are effective. Their individual talents are not enough.
Linux is not a contender on the desktop but it has been in server space. Microsoft wanted Windows NT to move into low end server space and Linux/FreeBSD did put damper on that. They also ate into traditional Unix vendors low end.
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I don't see a whole lot in Hellgate that a few more months of development and polish couldn't have fixed.
(1) That can be said for many other disappointing titles, if not most.
(2) If you can see three months of work, there is probably six or more months worth of work. Ever notice how those scheduled 2-3 month Blizzard betas turn into 6-8 month beta?
And it likely has as much to do with blizzard proper as it does with blizzard north as hellsagate wasn't as much fun. The developers of hellsgate are almost the same as the core team for D ii. I think the extra things Blizzard demanded of them made D ii a much more enduring game.
Keep in mind that the core team is only a fraction of the entire team. For each person whose name you know there were many others who made significant contributions. My understanding is that one of the things that makes Blizzard very different is that they have a large permanent QA department. I also think Diablo II was the first game of theirs that shipped simultaneously on PC and Mac so it had the advantage of cross platform development. Different CPU architectures (PowerPC only at that time), different operating systems, different rendering libraries, different compilers, etc does wonders with respect to finding bugs. Debugging steals time from "making it fun".
That said, the GP is also on the right track. Blizzard is in a rare position that they can credibly tell their owners that shipping six months late and missing Christmas will not matter. That thousands will line up outside of their local Frye's/GameStop/etc at midnight on whatever day it ships.
Everyone who wants tighter border controls is the decendant of someone who immigrated to this country before there were border controls.
_ history.asp
You are misinformed. There was screening of immigrants and border control. Every hear of Ellis Island? Note the "illegal contract laborer" reference.
"Only two percent of the arriving immigrants were excluded from entry. The two main reasons why an immigrant would be excluded were if a doctor diagnosed that the immigrant had a contagious disease that would endanger the public health or if a legal inspector thought the immigrant was likely to become a public charge or an illegal contract laborer."
http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island
Blizzard went down the drain when Vivendi bought them. A bunch of good developers left during the "vivendi taking over" phase
"Significant numbers" is an overstatement. The absolute number looks big, if they left a small dev studio maybe the claim would be true but for a huge organization like Blizzard it looks like normal post-ship burnout and attrition.
The claim ignores the talent that leaves companies like id, Bungie, etc and joins Blizzard. It also ignore the people who left, decided they made a mistake, and then returned to Blizzard.
The people left over a very long stretch of time. For example, IIRC the ArenaNet guys left a little before Diablo II shipped. OK let's assume they had some involvement. Diablo II Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III, Warcraft III The Frozen Throne, and World of Warcraft shipped without them. Now I've read around here that these guys were involved in Warcraft III, I'm sure that's true but that must have been years before the game shipped. ArenaNet fanbois claim they wrote the War3 engine but anyone attending E3 in those days saw the engine change quite dramatically each year and I recall reading an NVIDIA paper that indicated that the engine was completely rewritten. Now, the ArenaNet guys are talented and deserve a lot of credit for Guild Wars, but the people that followed them at Blizzard are also talented and deserve a lot of credit. What people fail to realize is how much of a team effort Blizzard games are. Blizzard games are not made by a couple of "rock stars", they are made by quite large *teams*. Attrition happens after a game ships, and teams survive. History has proven this.
Let me see if I understand the cover story you are attempting to sell us:
1. Apple announces that they will switch all of their computer lines to Intel.
2. A company that has been porting it's games to Mac for over 10 years decided to start porting it's most popular game. A game which is also the most recent, the one to run most poorly under Rosetta emulation, and the one that collects a monthly fee from each player.
Yeah, right, did you really think you could sell the spin above to the sophisticated readers around here?
Let Intel waste money trying to convince a market they abandonded to listen to their PR about how "cool and fast" their chips are.
The only market Intel has lost is the hobbyist market. This will be very good, and effective, PR for them. The audience they are targeting is far more than those who show up to QuakeCon. AMD owes their position to PR and outreach to gamers and hobbyists as much as it does to actual performance. If PR did not work companies would not be spending so much money on it. And as much as it hurts my nerd sensitivities PR is probably more important then a slight technological edige.
I am sure they are all excellent programmers but I think things are mixed up and/or overstated. Which is the norm when you start a new company and go out looking for venture capital. Only your most recent title matters, not how long you had it.
I believe O'Brien, not Wyatt, was the brains behind Battle.net. There was some game magazine that listed 50 or 100 influential game programmers and I am pretty sure he was "the" Battle.net guy. The various game credits seem to back this up.
According to the Warcraft 3 credits the game engine seems to have been really lead by Jay Patel. I think NVIDIA published something referring to Patel as the 3D guy for Warcraft 3 as well. O'Brien left very early in Warcraft 3's development and from watching the game change over the course of several E3 trade shows the engine seems to have been completely redone.
Now if you want to talk Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, and Diablo 2 they have an excellent track record. Now add Guild Wars and the credit it deserves. However keep in mind that individuals don't make great games, teams do. Blizzard's success is not attributable to a handful of guys but rather large teams. Arena.net will only be successful if these guys can build teams that are effective. Their individual talents are not enough.
ArenaNet is headed up by brilliant ex-Blizzard staff - "Wyatt was Blizzard's Vice President of Research and Development and most recently acted as the Team Lead and Lead Programmer of Battle.net. O'Brien was the Team Lead and Lead Programmer of Warcraft III, having personally developed the game's 3D rendering engine. Jeff Strain was also a Team Lead and Lead Programmer there and is the author of the Starcraft Campaign Editor
I am sure they are all excellent programmers but I think things are mixed up and/or overstated. Which is the norm when you start a new company and go out looking for venture capital. Only your most recent title matters, not how long you had it.
I believe O'Brien, not Wyatt, was the brains behind Battle.net. There was some game magazine that listed 50 or 100 influential game programmers and I am pretty sure he was "the" Battle.net guy. The various game credits seem to back this up.
According to the Warcraft 3 credits the game engine seems to have been really lead by Jay Patel. I think NVIDIA published something referring to Patel as the 3D guy for Warcraft 3 as well. O'Brien left very early in Warcraft 3's development and from watching the game change over the course of several E3 trade shows the engine seems to have been completely redone.
Now if you want to talk Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, and Diablo 2 they have an excellent track record. Now add Guild Wars and the credit it deserves. However keep in mind that individuals don't make great games, teams do. Blizzard's success is not attributable to a handful of guys but rather large teams. Arena.net will only be successful if these guys can build teams that are effective. Their individual talents are not enough.
Linux is not a contender on the desktop but it has been in server space. Microsoft wanted Windows NT to move into low end server space and Linux/FreeBSD did put damper on that. They also ate into traditional Unix vendors low end.