Blizzard has terrible in-house dev tools?

#0 - March 19, 2008, 9:46 a.m.

I'd be interested to hear what the community and possible someone from Blizzard has to say about this.

Been talking to some guildies and we can't think of any other particular reason for the current state of the game other than that the devs are working on atrocious sdks and as such that's why it takes them so long to release any content.

It's pretty worrying that every content patch gets further and further apart.

This goes for pvp too - would you play cs_dust for 3 years if that was the only map?

Some Blue recently posted that it takes time and effort to release maps like WSG, cmon, how hard can it be?

How about taking the SAME maps and changing the playstyles? Assault maps in WSG for example, king of the hill in AV. Rip off some FPS ideas, even use more of your maps from WC3 as design ideas.

The same goes for PVE content, sure, rehash the same sort of boss moves but just use the lore to make some new content.

How does it take 3 years to decide to change the way turtling in WSG works? That's a design choice and not a software issue which is the scary part.

Here's hoping all the revenue has been going into development of an amazing engine for a new MMO and that there's a different team on it.

Edit (added a reply of mine):

Q u o t e:

I notice the OP hasn't returned since this bomb went off. Well done.

Sleeping actually.

I was more after a dev response rather than some random CM.

Cute response, I'll pay that.

This wasn't meant to be a - flame Blizzard post!!

Moreso - I'm interested, any chance of getting an explanation?

Bornakk

#61 - March 19, 2008, 7:02 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I'd be interested to hear what the community and possible someone from Blizzard has to say about this.

Been talking to some guildies and we can't think of any other particular reason for the current state of the game other than that the devs are working on atrocious sdks and as such that's why it takes them so long to release any content.

It's pretty worrying that every content patch gets further and further apart.

This goes for pvp too - would you play cs_dust for 3 years if that was the only map?

Some Blue recently posted that it takes time and effort to release maps like WSG, cmon, how hard can it be?

How about taking the SAME maps and changing the playstyles? Assault maps in WSG for example, king of the hill in AV. Rip off some FPS ideas, even use more of your maps from WC3 as design ideas.

The same goes for PVE content, sure, rehash the same sort of boss moves but just use the lore to make some new content.

How does it take 3 years to decide to change the way turtling in WSG works? That's a design choice and not a software issue which is the scary part.

Here's hoping all the revenue has been going into development of an amazing engine for a new MMO and that there's a different team on it.

You sound like u have great skillz.

http://www.blizzard.com/us/jobopp/

Bornakk

#253 - March 19, 2008, 11:02 p.m.

Q u o t e:

I also think people are underestimating the complexity of such a change. While it may be relatively easy to make new maps, balance test and release. There might be software and hardware implications. It's not obvious that Blizzard designed the system so that they could just pin up hundreds of maps. But I would like to say, I'd love to see this feature added and I too am disappointed that I've been playing the same AB and WSG for years.

We briefly talked about this type of thing in BlizzCast episode #2. We would like to have more maps that have a capture the flag system, but we don't have any definite plans to add a feature like this right now to the Battlegrounds. The technical and design side are more complicated than it sounds and we are currently focused on other content like Lake Wintergrasp and Siege Weapons.