Open Source Game Clones

Re:Open Source Game Clones by vntx on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:02PM (#20115814)

A Warcraft 3 world editor clone would be really good for game innovation. If someone was willing to start up a project like that, I would definitely help fund development.

Blizzard’s world editing tools helped players innovate new genres like the MOBA but its restrictive IP terms killed innovation dead in its tracks.

All Blizzard does now is make reskin of old game(but excellent games) and release classic version of MMO’s.

What happened to the company?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by WaxProlix on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:23PM (#20116044)

Vivendi Games bought them in the late 90s and started trading long-term quality for results. Blizzard North, Diablo creators, were laid off due to slow development of D3 in 2005. Insiders say that the culture shifted slowly towards business and away from caring about games per se. Blizzard's big thing was that they'd innovate and build without fear of costs, famously canceling numerous games (Titan, eg) with no ROI because they felt it just wasn't right.

In 2008, Activision bought Vivendi and took Blizzard along with them. For a while now we've just been seeing the long-term effects of those shorter-term profitability policies. It's sad, but it kind of happened a long time ago.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by crummy on Thursday June 06, 2019 @07:18PM (#20120180)

For what it's worth, Blizzard still seems to be doing the build-half-a-game-then-cancel it thing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/report-blizzard-began...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by vntx on Thursday June 06, 2019 @11:02PM (#20121300)

A Battlefield-like Starcraft FPS pitting you as a Terran marine against a Zerg invasion?

That would have been cool.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by Fnoord on Thursday June 06, 2019 @06:32PM (#20119880)

People say the same about WoW. After WotLK (2008-2010 era being WotLK) it went downhill.

ArenaNet/NCSoft's Guild Wars 2 consists of former Blizzard employees. Then there's Max Schaefer's Runic Games with Torchlight (2). They went poof a while ago though.

Blizzard/Activision are still very profitable (record this year), yet what they come up with is Diablo mobile (reskin by a Chinese company, of the infamous quote "don't you guys have phones?"), and fired a lot of employees.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by Fnoord on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:17PM (#20115975)

Blizzard will release a remaster of WC3 at 31 Dec 2019.

They send a C&D to the platform which hosted bnetd an open source battle.net clone (IIRC Sourceforge).

All of their games run well in Wine. Heck, I played WC3 in 2005 in Wine.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by binthere on Thursday June 06, 2019 @05:03PM (#20119167)

Wow, highly agree with having an OSS editor like that.

Non OSS, there's Dota 2 map editor (which spawned the amazing Auto Chess which Valve is working on an official version now http://blog.dota2.com/2019/05/dota-auto-chess/), W3 is coming out remastered now and old W3 still exist.

I'll actually try to prototype something like that. Interesting idea.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open Source Game Clones by atm0sphere on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:21PM (#20116025)

man, i miss blizzard north.

the company was co-opted some time after d2 LoD and everything has been downhill since then.

[ Parent | on HN ]