jdreyer wrote on Jan 9, 2012, 15:47:

RollinThundr wrote on Jan 9, 2012, 14:50:

You mean to tell me after a decade, they only managed to finish one race's campaign? Really? C'mon it's a cash grab, you know it, I know it, Blizzard knows it. Let's be realistic here.

I'd love for Activision to give Blizzard a standard 18-24 month dev cycle that the rest of the industy uses rather than 5-10 years they take each title just to laugh at the results.

Blizzard in my eyes is the most overrated developer in the entire industry, Any other team does not need a decade to put out a standard action rpg click fest, or a standard RTS based on genre tropes.

It's astounding to me that people still defend them for being inept.

You're getting way to caught up on what they called the game, and not what is in the game. The content is superior both in quality and quantity to the original. They announced a trilogy. Each game is standalone, separated by two full years of development. This same model is used by countless developers: Bioshock, Mass Effect, Batman Arkham X, Modern Warfare, etc. How is this any different from those games? It's not. If Heart of the Swarm comes out with no SP game, and only 2 extra units per side for $60 I'll eat my words, but that seems extremely unlikely.

As for it taking 10 years to get SCII out the door, Blizzard is a smaller company that focuses on one or two projects at a time. Their products are uniformly high quality, and tend to be played for years after release. I guess if you don't like SCII, you could play that other RTS that came out 1.5 years ago that is still played by thousands of people. Oh, no you can't because there isn't one.

As for it being a "standard RTS", you can't just pump these out like apple pies: it takes a lot of time and effort to get the gameplay and balance of an RTS correct. The possibilities in chess are greater than all the molecules in the known universe. Given that an RTS orders of magnitude more complex than chess, it stands to reason that takes some time to get right. Look at two recent RTS games that didn't take that time: Stronghold 3 and SotS 2, both of which are total messes.

As for Blizzard being inept, SCII scores 93% on Metacritic, 92% on Game Rankings, and has sold over 5 million copies, most of those at full price. By any objective measure, that reeks of competence and success.