I miss Bill Roper

[Flux]

post Blizzard interview

In my fairly YT quick search I saw a bunch of vids from the HGL days, 2005-2007 especially, and then a few from after that. It's anything from pre-2004 that seems hard to find.

In my early days working on this site, late 90s and early 00s, bandwidth was still a big factor. It cost money to post video, people had dial up modems and couldn't download large files, and almost every interview and other feature was written text, interview transcripts, small resolution screenshots, etc. We presented all our Blizzard North 2000 visit info in articles with some photos, and that was unremarkable. We didn't post any audio or video, never even thought about it, and no one asked us to. It just wasn't done then, online.

If you look on YT for D2 gameplay, you might find some of the early promotional videos, which were limited to like 50meg in size, and looked terrible. Like 320x240 resolution, bad frame rate, etc. Up until War3, Blizzard sent out actual CD-ROMs with their beta tests and people bought gaming print mags largely for the CDs full of demos that you couldn't get otherwise, or would have to spend hours downloading.

It was nothing like we've seen since 2006 or so, now that everyone has small/cheap digital cameras, YT makes video posting/hosting free, most users have broadband, etc.

[Risingred]

Third singer.

[Dread]

I also miss him a bit. He was more or less the face of Blizzard back in the old days. I was always impressed how enthusiastic he was about his games. I don't know why he left, but I am sure he had his reasons. He took the risk and sadly he failed, but nevertheless, you have to give him respect for that. If he had stayed at Blizzard, today he would be one of the most known persons in the gaming business, I have no doubt about that.

Hellgate: London wasn't a bad game. It just wasn't up to par with Blizzard quality, it was missing the last 10% work, but the last 10% can take very long. It wasn't as atmospheric as I had hoped, I didn't like the interface and the areas of the game felt quite repetitive and I couldn't find my way into the story, it just didn't hook me up. Most stations looked the same and the art style had a generic feeling. But still, the gameplay was fun and it had potential, the core mechanics worked quite well. Sadly they ran out of money.

[Loriku]

Should've held onto the Blizzard mantra of, 'It'll be released when we're happy with it and it's finished' unfortunately it wasn't a finished game, it could've actually been fantastic, there was some parts I absolutely loved but as you said, some very repetitive sections, something that actually put me off oblivion as well (yes I know, non-related to Bill) but every gate to oblivion was the same old crap with the same old tower...bleh. Much like how HG:L stations felt and some of the areas, like I said though...some parts were absolutely fantastic, I remember crapping myself in a big library because I was surrounded and stuff was flying everywhere, flying demons were materializing out of the air. It wasn't enough though...a real shame :(.

One thing I am thankful for to Blizzard is the polish they put into their games (ok they're not perfect on release but they're always immersive) which is why when it comes down to it, I don't mind their release schedules, even though I may complain while waiting for a release I love them really and everything Bill did before leaving, like I said, shame he didn't have the resources to carry that Blizzard polish with him .

[Lord_Jaroh]

Unfortunately, the relative silence on Blizzard's part is largely understandable. As Loriku said, there are soooo many whiny, entitled-feeling people on the net...it's hard to carry out the same level of back-and-forth as you could once upon a time.

Everything you say gets dissected, or blown apart, and misinformation is spread. It's unreasonable to combat wave after wave of misinformation about your game, so instead, Blizzard chooses what they DO communicate very carefully.

You might say that smaller game companies have much more interaction with their fans, and this is true, but that's because they're smaller companies - their fanbase doesn't generally have the same sense of selfish entitlement that attracts most casual gamers :P.

It's kind of funny how you "dismiss" the fans as if they aren't important.

I see it more as a small company is actually trying to build a game for gamers, one that people would enjoy playing and so talk to the people to figure it out, bouncing ideas off them and such and seeing reactions. Now the company is big, they create games to make money, and instead of "conversing" back and forth with their fans, they "tell" their fans and expect them to like it. It's a small difference on paper, but it makes a world of difference with PR speak, and in how people view them.

Look at the companies behind Path of Exile and Grim Dawn. Both small companies conversing with their fans about what to include in the game and making changes based on that. Both are similar to how Blizzard North operated in the past. Compare that with Blizzard today and you can see a large disconnect.

[Wildmoon]

I really miss Bill. His voice is WC1 is ****ing awesome. "You pitiful worm, your defeat could mean our loss in the war against humans"

[HardRock]

The problem is that we don't know how much of the game was shaped based on fan feedback in the case of D3. I have no problem with how Blizzard communicates with us, but I wouldn't mind more frequent responses to fan inquiry. I hope we'll see just that after the release of the game.

As for listening to fan requests, it should be done with caution and careful consideration. Most gamer think that he or she has great ideas, and that may be true, but those ideas may not work in the context of a game. The designers must have a direction for their game and must be willing to throw away awesome ideas, if they don't fit into that direction. A game can't be everything that every single player wants it to be.

[Loriku]

It's kind of funny how you "dismiss" the fans as if they aren't important.

I see it more as a small company is actually trying to build a game for gamers, one that people would enjoy playing and so talk to the people to figure it out, bouncing ideas off them and such and seeing reactions. Now the company is big, they create games to make money, and instead of "conversing" back and forth with their fans, they "tell" their fans and expect them to like it. It's a small difference on paper, but it makes a world of difference with PR speak, and in how people view them.

Look at the companies behind Path of Exile and Grim Dawn. Both small companies conversing with their fans about what to include in the game and making changes based on that. Both are similar to how Blizzard North operated in the past. Compare that with Blizzard today and you can see a large disconnect.

It's not that anyone dismisses the fans, it's just that the larger a game gets, the harder it is to be in touch with everyone and please everyone, back in the day developers had a nice personal touch with customers because the playerbase was lower, people had less access to the internet and for lack of a better word it was a more 'grown-up' community, even though we were a lot younger then.

Look at the official forums for WoW and D3 now, its absolutely rediculous, you can't mention anything serious without a flock of idiots dumping their trollcrap on your head, it's even worse when a blue or MVP posts, not to mention if they did hold live Q&A's again, there's only so much crap one person can deal with and rather put up with the idiots (which is a shame for the real fans) it's a lot easier to pool questions together and release a statement with no further discussion without becoming infuriated and saying somethings that shouldn't.

It's nothing to do with being disconnected, as things grow, things have to change, you can't blame the company for the type of people that flock into the community, if the majority of people weren't idiots then I'm sure we'd still have a happy community with developers chatting about this that and the other. They try to do it on twitter because it's slightly auto-regulated. The days of Blizzard chatting personally to us are long gone though because of said reasons. However, Blizzard do take note of things being said and ideas, there's a huge community team employed solely for this reason, just because there is no personal thankyou does not mean by any means that a GOOD idea hasn't been noted and ran past someone, (unfortunately, said idiots also contribute and sometimes get their own way). Catch 22 situation.

[Flux]

Hellgate: London wasn't a bad game. It just wasn't up to par with Blizzard quality, it was missing the last 10% work, but the last 10% can take very long.

I was thinking about that when I wrote the OP, in light of D3's beta. You look at the MASSIVE changes in D3 even since the beta started, and we're only seeing some small percent of them. Endless fine tuning, but also much bigger things like the rune and skill system overhaul, removal of the mystic, big changes to crafting, itemization galore, etc, and think of all the "if we'd only had 8-12 more months on HGL" comments we've heard from Bill and Max and others. What might have been...

[Ixnatifual]

HGL had some great stuff but lacked some polish and iteration.