The Warcraft III Reforged shitshow was definitely something to behold
The most amazing part was the claim that the in-game soundtrack was reencoded as lossless audio.
I looked at the new audio as a spectrograph and compared it to the original MP3s. Not only were they the same level of compression as the originals, they were the same exact graphs. The same files, renamed from .mp3 to .flac.
That’s some proper gaslighting!
The Blizzard that made good games died many years ago.
No, I’ve been actively boycotting them for many years by now.
I broke my own rule and actually preordered something – Diablo 4. Huge mistake.
I don’t really expect anything good coming from them. To me the likes of Blizzard, Ubi, Bioware, Bethesda, EA etc are shareholder-driven companies, that stopped innovating a long time ago and now only produce and regurgitate the absolute bare minimum slop.
I have been pleasantly surprised on occasion, like for ubi’s Anno 1800, or blizzard’s diablo 2 remake, but they’re few and far between.
To me the big drop in noticable internal politics happened somewhere shortly before or around the Overwatch release.
The original design of that game as-released showed a lot of the old design paradigms of Blizzard. But then all post-release direction was the “new” Blizzard, focus on e-sports, numerical balance over gameplay feel, competition over social engagement. The game is an interesting showcase for the fall of Blizzard as a whole in a lot of ways.
