Blizzard
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This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it. |
Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer founded in 1991. They are well known in the gaming community for rising to fame by shamelessly ripping off a long list of things, the most pertinent to /tg being the similarity between its flagship franchises and Warhammer (40k). Note that Blizzard never did anything original ever, yet remains widely popular.
While not as skubtastic as the other things present, it still does cause tensions in /tg/ when brought up. Especially if it concerns one of their games' fluff.
Anti-Blizzard
How to prepare Blizzard-made games:
- 1. Slap-in copied content from several sources; change some colors, backstories, details, and personalities so they don't look like total rip-offs. For added lulz, steal some quotes from movies since it's kewl.
- 2. Throw in some typical tropes you'd see in every sci-fi/fantasy themed media. Sprinkle some fanboy's essence to lure in the weak and gullible.
- 3. Give all products a liberal amount of hype to get their selling point.
- 4. Hope you don't get your ass sued for the "gifted" concepts.
- 5. Be sure to sustain the entire thing on enough expansions to eat half of your hard-disk.
Starcarft vs. 40k/Warcraft vs. Warhammer: There's contention between the legions of GW and the hordes of Blizzard in regards to copyrights, who invented which idea first, and whether any ripping-off had in fact occurred. Facts seem to lean in the direction of no, but facts are nothing before true faith. It doesn't help that they have their own equivalent of Matt Ward If you venture into these murky depths, bring something that prevents regeneration.
The Differences between the story lines of Warcraft III and StarCraft: Warcraft happens in a planet called Azeroth and another planet called Draenor while Starcraft happens IIIIINNN SPAAAAAACE! Other than that, the stories are kinda similar with only minor differences if you look closely enough.
Diablo: Diablo 1 is a pointy-clicky version of NetHack with an isomorphic graphical interface. Given that NetHack now has the same through Falcon's eye and Vulture's eye, that advantage is lessened. Since it's less difficult, prepare to suffer relentless mockery for favoring it.
Blizzard Successes that weren't rip-offs (/tg related): In 1992, they made Battle Chess for the Commodore 64 & MS-DOS, and also a Lord of the Rings RPG for the Amiga. The LotR game was supposed to be just the first book, with two sequels, but they never got around to finishing it. They did make Rock and Roll Racing for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, but that's /V/ shit.
TL;DR: Plagiarizing faggots with forgettable premises.
Pro-Blizzard
Blizzard in fact is known for creating few yet extremely well done and successful games, for earning a lot of money, and for creating a game-dev meme "when it's done" (which means they could literally spend a decade on the development of one game, and another decade to polish the crunch with a shitton of balance patches just for the sake of perfectionism). They are also greedy bastards with no conscience, and are thus the /v/-fag equivalent of GW (alongside pretty much all other major gamedev companies, except Valve).
Fa/tg/uys though tend to accuse Blizzard for ripping off most of Games Workshop's content. They often write long angry posts about why Blizzard are bad guys, what was stolen from their precious settings, and why Blizzard games sucks so much. This sound hilarious when you think about Games Workshop, who does steal all of its content from other settings. Blizzardfags do the exact same but in reverse orientation, though since they don't give a fuck about fluff, none of them know/care about GW.
If your ever meet raging fan, crying about plagiarism ignore the fucking troll throw oil on the fire and get a-trolling. Alternatively, keep raging about Necron Flyer Lists / Terran Hellion Drop imbalance.
TL;DR: Good crunch, meh fluff (their memorable humor is arguably the best part of it), the Tzeentch to GW's Nurgle.
Today
After being purchased by the lawyer-spewing hell mouth known as Activision (Popularly known for their Call of Duty series), Blizzard is now a company enjoying some familiar sales tactics! They're selling less content with more bugs for higher prices, require their players to read shitty novels if they want to keep up with awful romance/soap opera story lines 'between' games, and their DRM practices are shutting down loyal players through the very avenues that helped make them popular in the first place (I.E.: Be online to experience the large majority (and sometimes all of it, despite the fact it doesn't need to be that way.) of your purchased product. Exemplified in Starcraft 2 and even worse in Diablo 3, which requires you to be online all the time to use.).
Welcome home, Blizzard. You and Games Workshop have always been the same company.