I’ve always been a pretty big PC gamer. One company that has produced consistent quality games, in my opinion, is Blizzard. I seem to blow countless hours with a mouse and keyboard in my hands and my eyes fixated on one of their masterpieces. From their small collection of available games, to their wonderful online service and their three franchise games, everything they develop leaves me in awe over what they could possibly do next to impress me.
Blizzard’s outstanding gameplay can be attributed most notably to their small selection of available games. Most companies publish game after game and hope that maybe just one of them will achieve great success. Not Blizzard, they have 3 main series, both developed and published internally, all of which can be considered massively successful. I think this all comes down to their devotion to quality. Instead of putting out a so-so gaming experience, they’ll scrap the idea entirely. Case-in-point: Back in 2001, Blizzard wanted to build off the success of the Starcraft license and announced an action/shooter game for Xbox/PS2 generation called Starcraft: Ghost. After an entire console generation of delays, Blizzard decided to put this game on indefinite hold. In other words, instead of releasing a mediocre game, that would only hurt their reputation with hardcore fans, they decided to trash the idea and move on. An action more companies should adopt.
Another reason Blizzard has enjoyed great PC game success has to do with their online service: Battle.Net or b.net. The inclusion of free online multiplayer is something that turns an average game into a good game and a great game into a legendary one. Blizzard’s games need no assistance achieving legendary status, but this inclusion does expand upon the replay-ability. Not only is b.net a wonderful option but the servers are relatively reliable and offer minimal lag or latency issues. This is due to their devotion to quality. At leaset in the case of World of Warcraft, every Tuesday morning the servers are shutdown for repairs and routine maintenance. Even though these weekly downtimes sometimes last 6-8 hours, I’ll gladly take that as opposed to having a couple days worth of downtime if a catastrophic hardware failure happens, one that could be prevented by a few hours of weekly repairs.
This brings me to the games, three award-winning series head Blizzard’s lineup: Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans began the Warcraft series as a real-time strategy title and spawned two sequels: Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness and Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos as well as an expansion for each: Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. Each one of these games saw great success building off the legacy paved by the previous. World of Warcraft (WoW) came along and turned the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) market upside-down. WoW has since become the most popular MMORPG with over 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. With two active expansions: WoW: The Burning Crusade and WoW: The Wrath of the Lich King and a third: WoW: Cataclysm which is still in production, Blizzard has insured they will continue to tighten their grasp on this very popular genre.
Diablo burst onto the scene in late 1996, winning GameSpot’s Game of the Year award. This action / hack & slash / role playing game is so widely praised for it’s replay-ability because of it’s multiple class selections and randomly generated environments. Even some quests only appear in the game half the time, ensuring no two games are exactly alike. Diablo 2 was released 4 years later, more class options were included but with fewer randomization options. Environments still change from game to game but the available quests are always the same. This however does not hinder its popularity. To this day gamers fill Diablo 2’s servers in pursuit of that next great piece of loot. Going back now, you can easily notice a lot of similarities between this and WoW, from the interface to the spells and class selections. Each of these Diablo games also spawned an expansion, Hellfire and Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. Now a third edition to the Diablo universe is in the making. Not very much is known about Diablo 3 but one thing remains certain, I will own it.
The final, and my favorite, Blizzard series is Starcraft. Essentially a spin-off of Warcraft, Starcraft is a real-time strategy game set in space and chronicles the three-way battle between the Tarren, a human race composed of heavy artillery and tactical warfare, the Zerg, a primitive band of animal like beings who use their own god-given abilities to grow and fight, and the Protoss, who are a highly technical and sophisticated race that used energetic and magical attacks. Starcraft is a game that’s easy to play but difficult to master. What made it unique was all the user created maps and missions that were shared online. My favorites were in the “Use Map Settings” category. They included the Tower Defense maps, which spawned a new video game genre and thousands of web-games, and the Evolves ones, which pitted 4-6 players armies against each other and after a predetermined amount of kills, the newly spawned soldiers from your endless supply would evolve into a stronger unit. Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty is being developed right now and plans are for it to be released as a main game and two subsequent expansions. Each game will chronicle the storyline of one race, starting with Tarren, then Zerg and finally Protoss.
Recently Blizzard merged with Activision, so my fingers are crossed hoping that these series do not drop in quality. Activision has released some great games in the past but they’ve also been known to stick with things for far too long, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series is one good example of them beating a dead horse. Nevertheless each of these three Blizzard series would easily appear in my All-Time Top 10 Games list.
The Gaming Savant, Ryan Smith-MuzikReviews.com Video Game Sr. Review Staff
October 22, 2009
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