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Originally Posted by Thanee But Blizzard never does new games. They always use well-proven game concepts.  |
You wouldn't have known that during the StarCraft beta test. People HOWLED that it wasn't like every other RTS out there and that those differences would be the death of it. (Yes, beta testers predicted SC would be a giant flop.)
I think what Blizzard does is take everything that works in a genre, throw away the stuff that doesn't (no sitting and staring at a spellbook on a screen for 10 minutes while your wizard regains enough mana to do anything, for instance) and then cannibalizes their own ideas that have worked in the past to create a new product. (The Diablo II skill trees were inspired by the StarCraft tech trees, according to Blizzard, and showed up in the final version of talents in the WoW system, which also uses the quest-giving indicators from War3.)
And just because the StarCraft clones didn't prove memorable doesn't mean there weren't a LOT of them out there in the late 1990s and early 21st century before War3 was released.
More importantly, the War3 team had been working non-stop on StarCraft and Brood War and then War3 for something like six years altogether. Changing things up so that they didn't blow their own brains out was kind of inevitable. Companies like EA that require pumping out marginal changes in established franchises in an assembly line fashion have HUGE morale problems and massive turnover far beyond anything ever seen at Blizzard.
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