Blizzard Entertainment (in Off-topic)

Either Blizzard are experiencing a mass exodus of their staff or are really looking to push on with development of Diablo 3 and WoW.
http://www.blizzard.com/us/jobopp/
I've never seen so many positions available at one time.

I don't think they're short on cash: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/05/14/eye-on-the-charts-wallet-of-the-lich-king/

You haven't heard about their new thing have you? They are working on new IP for a mmorpg that isn't warcraft or anything. Source

That new MMO better be a Western, or there will be hell to pay. ;)

*Cough*Shadowrun*Cough*

Activision purchased the rights to Shadowrun pre-merger and so its what most people are expecting to come out in the next four to five years. They did promise a game that would be the next-gen of MMORPGs and so its the most probable choice.

Also, stupid spell checker is stupid and I hates it.

I would boycott StarCraft II on principle, if it's Shadowrun. And besides, they did say it would be a new IP, with original "lore and art". Lore. Rofl.

They apparently pay full time forum moderators... but they don't say how much. I wonder what a job like that goes for.

its more than what Jon gets for making Carnage Blender :)
besides sounds fun and fairly easy to do.

I'm confused about Blizz. This whole splitting SC II into 3 seperate games for each race is kind of iffy. They say it's to be able to fully tell the story for each race, while a lot of skeptics feel it's another way to try and milk money. It deviates from the classic game release, expansion pack style.. but I'm sure they are banking on a huge amount of money when launched. I'm sure they aren't hurting financially.

I would boycott StarCraft II on principle, if it's Shadowrun.

Why? The original shadowrun universe is great. Just because one game came out and it wasn't great, doesn't mean other will tank too...

I'm an Avid WoW fan, but have little time for Blizzard as a company any more. The oriignal (or majority of) the Blizzard team left prior to WoW launching, the WoW Lead Dev was a server crashing EQ player who hated Hybrid classes for 'stealing his roles' (and was a bottom feeding walking PR dissater to boot!) and even though Blizzard has already paid for the whole running costs (everything) for WoW over its 4+ years in essentially the first 4 months subscription fees, you still can't get an Instance all the time as the servers can't cope with the load.

I'm skipping the new MMO, soley for the Reason the WoW lead Dev has been moved over to it.

Besides, there's a 40K MMO in the works. ;)

The Shadowrun universe is hardly "great", imo.
"Get this! We've got orcs, elves, trolls, and humans fighting each other. But here's the twist... get ready... they have _guns_!"

Blizzard > All

GL while you are correct about the lead dev being a walking PR nightmare for reasons already stated... You can't deny blizzard's uncanny ability to NOT release a bad game.

I've never played a Blizzard game that wasn't pure quality and I'm talking about more than their big three... Even as far back as I can remember, games like Black Thorn for the nes... quality.

So while it's pretty bad that blizzard north parted from the company (along with many other devs) the fact remains that Blizzard as a whole has an outstanding track record with and without those specific devs. Devs come and go, but Blizzard happens to be the leading video game company not only in quality, but in money. It's sad to say that with blizzard's wallet they can afford to hire the best...

They have what.... 100+ servers just for WoW, not even counting the 300-400,000 that still play starcraft? How many playing Diablo/WC3TFT still? While I sometimes am frustrated with Blizzard regarding their server situations with WoW... It's actually a lot more work than you would think... Keeping 11+ million people "happy" is no simple task.

When Black Dragon Flight (my server) started to experience lag times, would reset randomly, crash for a few hours, etc etc. Blizzard technicians were very vocal via our realm forum what was going on with the server, and fixed it / replaced it very quickly.

So all things considered it's true, Blizzard > all.

That's all legacy of Blizzard North.

Kalgan never 'created' any of them. He just came in a runied WoW. It's no surprise that as soon as he was moved elsewhere, the changes made post beta to the Paladin class we all but reverted, plus there years of flaws fixed. And i'm not into conspiricies.

Now he's got a leading hand in creating a brand new MMO.

Pass.

Ditch Kalgan, and it might be a good game.

(WoW is awesome, I left it for a while pre 1.7ish, but couldn't find aything to compete with it)

Blizzard makes high quality games, that's true. But almost all of them are at least partial GamesWorkshop rip-offs.

Warcraft only is because Blizzard were originally making a Warhammer RTS game for GW, who towards the end of production pulled the plug on it.

So Blizzard thought, what the heck, we'll just sell this game we've just about finished as our own francise. Let's call it something else from Warhammer...

I bet (and hope) GW are kicking themselves for it now.

Oh and update the DH Codex Jarvis.

Well, what about StarCraft? They could hardly have been commissioned to make a Warhammer 40k RTS.

SC came after WC, and was probably a continuation of the poke in the eye at GW, by moving into 40K Territory. But SC is very different to 40K, with probably the closest similarity being Zerg and Tyranids.

Tyranids, originally only the Genestealers, were a direct rip off of Ridley Scotts 'Alien' though.

;)

In the music world it's called influences not ripping off :)

-Tyranid/Zerg
Fairly obvious. They both are based around genetics, they want to slaughter everyone, they're units look rather alike, and they focus around having loads of units.

-Space Marine/Terran
I swear Blizzard copy/pasted the character models. While their battle philosophies might be "alien"
(I couldn't resist) from one another, they look quite alike. Firebats are rather like Terminators. ;)

-Eldar/Protoss
The technologies/magic wielders are hardly dissimilar.

I will give Blizzard points for creating an original story, and really fun gameplay.

And yeah, there is quite a resemblance to Aliens.