Remove your personal information from the web at JoinDeleteMe.com/IDYL and use code IDYL for 20% off What are you doing down here? go back to the video wtf (seriously, thanks for watching, means a lot)
The bit you made about the physical copies is cringe, because all of those games are available for purchase digitally, you don’t have to pirate them. Blizzard offers Warcraft two and three for free even, you just have to go to their website, and as far as the other blizzard titles, they’re available on COG for a few dollars each
While 1995-2004 was a Golden Age for Blizzard, I would view the 2010-18 period as a Silver Age of sorts. Hearthstone, HotS and Overwatch all are incredible games with a passionate following - yes, even HotS, just watch Grubby. HotS only failed because it came out too late - hell, even you are talking about LoL because it overtook DotA (at least, everywhere outside of Russia/Ukraine who still prefer Dota2). - Adûnâi
@@SwagMonztrWarcraft3 is not available without sailing the high seas for patch 1.26a. Although the changes in Reforged are rather minor unless it's a non-English localisation which have all been butchered. But then again, the original RoC had no permanent toggle for health bars, and even 1.26a does not have the original RoC system of damage and armour types, and the Storm Bolting of towers was removed back in 2002. Vanilla is fleeting... - Adûnâi
Warcraft 3 is what made me fall in love with games. My dad used to play when I was 6-10 and I would watch with my brother. One day my brother and I convinced the babysitter to let us boot up Warcraft. We selected new game, HAD A BLAST, aaaaaand deleted my Dad's campaign! He said "oh, well I guess it's your campaign now".... such a fond memory of mine...
I use to watch my dad play it too! He told me I had to be 8 years old to play it 😂. Soon as my birthday hit, it was the only thing I ever wanted to play.
It's hard to describe how great Blizzard was in the eyes of the players during the Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 days, I personally think the success of World of Warcraft in the super mainstream is what started their push in what we see today.
hard to see it any other way tbh. every game that started development post WoW has been a mixed bag at best (with some highlights, but on average much worse)
@@IdylOnTV The ActiBlizzion merger also happened post launch of TBC iirc. A lot of people were skeptical, but for a while Blizzard still got to do the things they wanted, so we got things like WotLK and Starcraft2. But a few years later....
Imo this happens everytime art gets successful. Parasites who dont care about the actual art get ahold of it with interest in nothing but feeding off the corpse of what was once a great piece of art. Wow, diablo, halo, call of duty, disney, star wars, lord of the rings, marvel, etcetcetc.
It was 100% Activision take over. It was a shit need because of how big WoW was they didn’t have funds to up keep servers and developers/artist. So the cash cow came along and they were forced to succ the teet of Activision. Sadly.
@@Rangerthelonewolf “So, for everyone who keeps commenting on literally everything that WoW is "bad now" because "Blizzard sold out to Activision" and all of the variations of this idea: - Blizzard ceased to be an independent company in 1995, not just before WoW's release, but even before Warcraft II's release, when it was purchased by Vivendi, a French conglomerate. (Arguably, you could say earlier, it had a few parent companies, but this was the first time it was part of anything bigger then what you'd now think of as a small gaming company) - Blizzard was not bought by any company in 2008, in fact its the opposite, Activision got bought. Vivendi, who had already owned Blizzard for 13 years, purchased Activision in 2008 and merged them into Activision Blizzard. This wasn't a corporation, and neither company gained any control over the other, it was just a division of Vivendi consisting of a few still distinct studios (These weren't even the only two merged into it) , but to be clear: Blizzard had already had the same corporate oversight of Vivendi for 13 years at this point.”
@@trorisk Back in the 90s, all the others had practically none! I remember that I played so much Starcraft and Diablo in Bnet, that my dad almost killed me, when we got the internet bill :D
Personally I really enjoy HotS, I find the talent system more fun than a shop and think the gameplay generally has a lower barrier to entry than other MOBAs. I think it was just late, I get why people who were already into other MOBAs wouldn't switch.
Tbh I think they would have come out with something better faster if they didn’t tie themselves up fighting valve over the dota ip. Heroes of newerth already had near legal troubles and they were roughly as transformative as LoL in its own ways. Hots seemed like it tried to do too much in the wrong ways for me. The maps were pretty genius, which every other moba has not developed well. The power level of characters felt underwhelming to me, and I think they might have leaned into their blizzard universe hero characters too hard. IMO wc3 art style and mechanical dota is highly engaging, and if blizzard came out with it and gave it the dota2 quality of life improvements with artistic cohesion I would play a lot.
The issue with HotS for me is that it feels way more of an arcade game than an actual MOBA. It just feels way too casual and bland for me. Missing too many of the elements that make DotA (and LoL somewhat) what it is.
The fact that they were using WC3 sounds and voicelines and references showed that it was just a love child or what made Blizzard great. There was love put into it and all of it is a bunch of references and is basically the smash bros of blizzard. The issue is there is too many competitors. It was too casual to make people feel like it was worth to keep playing. Though I still see it get a bunch of players especially through aram. Faster queues then I'd get in overwatch. I think an issue is that the people behind it just stopped caring anymore. They were probably too focused on games that would give them more money, WoW, Hearthstone, OW :(
I remember Paranoid, Born to Be Wild, Highway Star, and Peter Gunn Theme. I think that's all there were on the SNES version that I played quite a lot of.
I never could get into it. Maps were cool and the blizzard universe looks cool for the genre. I really wanted to try the sc2 custom mobas but I was too broke to justify buying it.
Amen brother! There was a time where HotS could have been a serious lol competitor but then they dropped it and it became unbalanced and even more generic. Imho: HotS is the better Moba but players dont like a balanced battle. Abusing isolated weakpoints to get fed and op to stomp everything is just more satisfying than using more brainpower and teamplay than the other team for most people i guess.
Since you admitted not being a card gamer, I'd like to add some context for Hearthstone: 1) You praise Blizz for their genre defining changes to RTS, ARPG, and FPS games, but neglect to mention that the digital card game genre was completely redefined by Hearthstone. In fact, 10 years after release, it's still the #1 digital card game. 2) Ben Brode is the biggest hype-man you'll ever see, and no one can argue that he doesn't know how to design a good game (look at Marvel Snap) - but Hearthstone became an even better game after he left. Card designs are more interesting, game balancing is more dynamic. 3) There have been actual narrative story events / expansions / single-player events within Hearthstone. We had an entire year where 10 new characters were introduced and went through a full-on adventure across Azeroth, each with their own motivations, defeats, and victories. It was somewhat basic, but it was a story. 4) Hearthstone has a Battlepass. In fact, it might have added the pass before Overwatch got theirs. No arguing that the game has had good and bad days, but that's to be expected from "live service" games. However, the game still deserves to be treated as part of the "good Blizzard" legacy.
Most importantly, as a player, I can still feel the passion of the newer devs in the game. There are definitely some controversial decisions on some more recent monetization, but the core game is still really good and feels OG Blizzard.
Even Diablo 3 and 4 were good games at release, to be fair. Did both have issues? Yes, but even as a day-1 buyer of D3 I still had a blast the whole way through, even getting my skull repeatedly smacked in act 2 of the Inferno difficulty. The author of this video seems to jump a lot on tired bandwagons. Did I prefer D2? Yes, but I could still appreciate what D3 did really good, and even the loud complainers sinked many hundred hours into the game (if it was really bad, they would have stopped 10 hours into it max). Also, criticizing the fact that these games are repetitive when it's something that comes with the territory in these games? Like, it wasn't repetitive to chain act bosses in D2? Get out of here.
as a diehard campaing lover, it ends up revolving around people being stupid, everyone in the protoss campaing except Aldaris is somehow deceived by Kerrigan, DuGalle trusting Duran to kill Stukov without second thought and for some reason no one expected Kerrigan to betray everyone after retaking Korhal, still is really cool how it is told tho
To be fair, imagine you skip the SC campaigns and jump right into brood war, which is what it sounds like Idyl did, losing all of that content would make it feel really weak lol
@@sazjnk95 Exactly, especially that Idyl did entire WC3: RoC and TFT playthrough or at least watchthrough... Also I'd put it there, but talking about Fail Era of Blizzard and not mentioning the merging with Activision is so wrong. :V
No Rock&Roll Racing was an amazing game, and a very innovative one at that, 2 player racing COOP campaign with customization and progression elements, awesome characters, awesome music, a lot of stage variety. HOTS is a great game too, its lack of popularity has nothing to do with its gameplay. Judge the game design, not critic scores.
Blizzard's downfall began before Activision took it over, but was primarily cemented by WoW's success which led to their acquisition by Activision wherein Kotick destroyed their core principles.
@@starteremil There was a gradual decline, but a lot of events surrounding Reforged being defunded coincide such that you could indicate that time period as the evacuation of Blizzard's soul. 1. Kotick defunds Reforged. 2. The Classic team is slashed to ribbons, leaving the campaign in the hands of effectively 2 people. 3. Mike Morhaime tenders his resignation and only stays on in an advisory position for a few more months. 4. Kotick continues installing more Activision puppets throughout the company at the highest levels.
@@DesignerDave interesting indeed, over the longer term i was looking recently at how there were a lot of veterans being isolated in various ways throughout the years to build a sort of Blizzard within Blizzard: -Bobby K and co removes veterans from WoW at its peak popularity to put own people there -Bobbo puts veterans on a project(Titan) where the teams are deliberately over-compartmentalized and therefore do severely incompatible work which is doomed to fail, allowing BK to guilt-trip the veterans for losing 50mln -BK shows clemency by putting veterans on SC2, in itself also doomed due to the way it was split in three, again isolating them from other projects there and solidifying the Blizzard within Blizzard -The moment when BK and co's skeletons begin to come out of the closet, BK bribes mid-management to blame veterans of the same things BK was accused of by promising mid-management will take their positions -Veterans leave -Done But that's just a gut feeling guess :)
@@starteremil Ehhhh... there was some evil brewing within Blizzard before the success of WoW that was exacerbated by nepo-hires of the worst of the old guard and money/power. But Bobby Kotick's influence and desire to get rid of veterans is apparent in a few ways: 1. The executive level folks of old Bliz had the highest contractually obligated bonuses, and Bobby wanted that money for himself. 2. Constantly installing Wyrmtongue-like Activision people into various places within Bliz. 3. Undermining the core principles of Blizzard at every turn (basically the ones they put on the statue outside when they first moved to the new building).
Imma let you finish but Rock n Roll Racing was a BANGER back in the day. And about the "the whole time I was thinking about Twisted Metal", all I'll say is: when Twisted Metal came out all I could think about was Rock n Roll Racing. lmao It's a very different perspective when you play these games as they come out, you gotta put yourself on those shoes. There were no racing games with that level of customization at that time.
I'm proud to be a part of "Boob era", i played Rock'n'roll Racing and Lost Vikings A LOT back in like 1996. Lost Vikings was insane for it's time, the amount of levels and content it has is awesome. And the puzzles are quite challenging and required some creative thinking using vikings abilites in unusual ways. After that i enjoyed Warcraft II and Diablo 1 (especially in coop) on my Playstation One. Those are the times. Oh boy, Diablo 1 on PS One actually got a strong friendly fire, so i always played Warrior, while my uncle played Amazon. Wizard was pretty much banned. p.s. As a big fan of Lost Vikings (Mega Drive) when i look at Lost Vikings 2 visual design, i want to throw up, glad i didn't know this game existed.
Lost Vikings 2, glad I knew it existed ... SNES version that is, not that weird PC version shown here. SNES version had same graphics as Lost Vikings 1 and is the version usually used in speedruns
there is also another story about SC1 you didn't mention: the early concepts of SC1 had it look more like WC2. then they went to a gaming convention to market the new game and found, that all the other games looked so much better and cooler. so the devs went "we can't do that, releasing a game looking like it is" and reinvented the whole thing. this created starcraft we all know today. the most fun part about it was, that all the cool looking games at the gamescon where just glowed up fake and none later looked like it did on the convention. it still inspired blizard to be better.
There are only a few, very few, multiplayer games that could survive the abandonment by its development studio. This speaks volumes about the quality of HotS.
Blasphemy on saying Blackthorne is bad. This game is obviously not just for you. For those that played the original Price of Persia or Flashback, Blackthorne plays exactly like those games.
Absolutely. Blackthorne was one of the best SNES platformers of all time, and even the PC version played excellently. The mechanics were solid, the puzzles fun, the story interesting and engaging.....It was a gem of early Blizzard, especially as being the first game under that name. But if you don't like it you don't like it I guess.
I think it more shows how Blackthorne really is a product of its time. I've played them all. I can even now beat Prince of Persia in a single sitting without ever engaging any brainpower at all. But they honestly are not that good games. They just have not aged well. Compared to where we are now. They're clunky, sooo so slow and often a screen has exactly one solution and if you try anything but that solution you're just doomed. Learning by failure is never fun.
I was playing Diablo 2 when 9/11 happend, my sister came to my room saying that plane hit some towers in USA and i was like "whatever girl, im slayin Duriel", i was 12 years old
To be honest, Heroes of the Storm is probably the best Moba out there. It just "died" because Blizzard didn't give it a good support/promotion. Also, Mobas have a HUGE audience here in Latin America but Blizzard only gave us a SINGLE server and it was in Brazil. Meanwhile, League of Legends has 2 servers for Latin America, and 1 for Brazil. Like, if you want your game to be a sucess, you have to AT LEAST invest in having a good infrastructure. But nope... I suppose that was too much to ask
HotS is very average imo. Decent, but it lacks the true tops of Dota 2, which is a far better game - just extremely hard to pick up as a new player. I'd argue Dota 2 feels more like a true (old) Blizzard game than HotS does (which makes sense considering its WC3 heritage). Also hated how you couldn't immediately play as any hero in HotS, having to unlock them. Meanwhile Dota 2 has a gazillion heroes and you can play them all from the get-go.
El problema fue que llegó muy tarde, Lol y Dota ya tenían una gran fan base y hots era diferente a esos juegos, yo lo sigo jugando y como dice en el vídeo, el hecho que sean personajes del universo de Blizzard lo hace llamativo pero eso es todo, si yo hubiese jugado Lol desde un principio y quisiera intentar hots ahora, lo vería de mala gana, por eso no tiene la misma gente, aunque no me mal entiendas, para mí hots es muy bueno, pero como no dejaba dinero, lo dejaron morir.
@@Nightstalker314 I mean, you can say it was nostalgia talking, but Idyl just played the game for the first time at nearly 30 and liked it, so maybe you're in the wrong here, and the story is just good?
@@Dregomz02 classic to wotlk was amazing because it was some sort of a sequel to Warcraft series, we knew the lore from before, but we were the main characters of it back then, after that era it went downhill for them, but the main thing about Classic and the 1st two xpacs being good was not the lore, but the game itself and what it offered, now WoW tries to go big with the story and RPG elements etc, although the story telling of WoW after WOTLK is just bad lol.
There's elements that could have certainly been done better, there always are. FFXIV for all it's praise on it's story has had some real steamers of plot in various moments. Most recently Dawntrail is so hyper focused on one character part of me just wants her to die... But FFXIV is praised for it's story throughout and no one bats an eye when something goes wrong. WoW is a much older game and is more prone to have missteps. The "lol wow story bad" memes really hit fever pitch in the BfA and Shadowlands xpacs. I wasn't the biggest fan of either of those xpacs. Legion was pretty good IMO both from a story and a gameplay perspective(even that one's getting old now... holy crap). Dragonflight wasn't the most compelling story but did set the scene for a completely different arc without destroying everything behind it. I actually sympathized with the antagonist(s)... I hadn't done that in a Warcraft title in quite some time. Regardless, the "it's cool to say wow story bad" cliche is just old. Cite some examples, sure, every franchise has some not so hot story telling moments. If they're numerous to you, then the story just didn't land with you, that doesn't make it objectively bad. IMO, FFXIV's story has been hot garbage since Heavensward. Obviously that's not consensus, but the story just didn't land with me.
I don't know the specifics of the PS1 source port release, but that's probably because there've been already a solid fanmade recreation since the early 10s (Wargus) and also WC2 BNE still kinda works in modern Windows (maybe you have to help with a little community patch or two)
Some fans from Russia are making mods for Warcraft 2 that are based on the original code, for example they added new resolutions support. A different group of fans made Stratagus/Wargus and that is more or less "Warcraft 2 on a new game engine" and that is an open source project (that's what TheShinken was talking about). I think that's all... WC2 is old. Players of this game are mostly in their 40s/50s now.
Although I love (Classic) WoW, it was the beginning of the downfall of Blizzard because it opened their eyes to just how much money live service games can make. It killed any chances we would have had for a Warcraft 4, Starcraft 3 or a good new single player game because they wouldn't be near as profitable as a live service game. I bet Diablo Immortal alone made more money than rts Warcraft and Starcraft combined
Not really! I used to be a Classic Andy like a lot of people, but i'll take modern WoW over Classic anyday. Only thing classic has over modern is the story and the zones, that's it.
Diablo was one of the first games I can remember that had a true digital audio soundtrack streamed off the CD. No MIDI, no SoundBlaster, no wavetable synth, real music playing while you battled the forces of Hell. Not to mention the most atmospheric mood-setting tracks of all time in the town of Tristam. Legendary.
Blackthorn is amazing!!! Also, Rock and Roll racing was badass. We used to play it a lot with my uncle and dad. You'd have to play these at the time, I suppose.
36:29 bro is out here melee attacking with a ranged character no wonder he didn’t like the game 😂 I’ve always thought HOTS was under appreciated. I guess I just like the talent upgrade progression system more than an item based one
I don't think the criticism towards Diablo 3 is truly fair. It's kinda like with Zelda where a lot of people truly love botw/totk and that type and some people think they destroyed the games by going away from the find-key-items-in-dungeons puzzle games. Diablo 3 was a game that many people (myself included) sunk thousands of hours into and truly enjoyed. Especially with reaper of souls it had a ton of the really wonderful brains-off ARPG fun, it was just *different* from Diablo 2. Not necessarily a bad game, just because it wasn't what you wanted.
Dude I really like your videos. As a 43 year old, I grew up with Ultima (loved the Lord British video), and all these blizzard games. I still have my Warcraft 1 DOS bigbox. I begged my dad for Diablo 1 when it came out, and I got an A in English (my weakest subject) so he would buy it for me. I was doing modem battles with friends in Warcraft 2, dialing up each other directly. I grew up w/ this company and have (had) so much love for them. The last game they made that I loved was Starcraft 2. I'm just starting the video, really looking forward to it. You better be kind to my old favorites! You better cover the Silicone and Synapse games! (I know you will) I know most people go "Lost Vikings" with classic blizzard, but man, it was Rock'n'Roll Racing that owned my heart back in those days. Well, enough of me rambling. On with the show!
HotS got murdered by Blizzard trying to force it into the esport space and (in my opinion) decreasing quality of newer heroes, specifically the OW heroes, which felt out of place. It was good fun at release.
This is why it's accurate to say that Blizzard died the day Blizzard North closed it's doors. The only similar thing between Blizz and Blizz north is the Brand logo design.
Honestly, there hasn't been a single soul that has played hots and said the game is bad, it is sad how many people that played it and said "this is cool, but it is too late" are. Hots was the first moba game that felt that the better team wins and the first game that if players got their shit together there was still a chance at winning no matter how far behind they were.
HOTS is one of the only mobas I have seriously played, and will only seriously played ( having try all the mobas) It feels like it has the most map variety and everything, its easier to pickup, don't have to worry about xp stealing and everything (last hitting), and like you said, you are always able to come back. I also loved the cahracters and everything, and just everything with it. With it pretty much being shelfed now days, surprised they haven't shutdown the servers for some unknown reason, is -extremely- disappointing. I wish they invested more into HOTS instead of just killing it off. League has no map variety for the most part, your just looking at the same map every time and just doing the same thing pretty much... every single time... And it just felt super repetitive (This is all my opinion, I'm far from a pro lol)
Many would disagree with you that Lost vikings is a decent game. But everyone is entitled to an opinion. The lost vikings 2 game you presented is actually an interplay creation with updated graphics. There is also one that was released by Blizzard on the snes
You are not wrong, D2 is not only nostalgia, its still very good game. D2 was iconic game at the time. People still playing it even today, often with some good modifications developed by community. Even despite PoE being a thing. And whats even more crazy, many people will prefer D2 over any of its sequels.
Yea David brevik and his team made diablo one and 2 and he left the company sometime after unfortunately, diablo 3 was a soulless cartoon mess and 4 is just bad, enemy scaling was a piss poor decision, currently playing d2r ladder season 8 as I'm watching the vid and writing this because this really was the last great diablo game I think we're going to get
The golden era of Blizzard was my most favorite time in gaming. Starcraft, to Diablo 2, to Warcraft 3, to WoW. It really felt like Blizzard could do no wrong. Also props for using FF7 Remake and Undertale music
>skips 3 episodes of the story for made up reasons >proceeds to play the last 3 episodes of the story >"the story was not interesting" Most intelligent youtube essayist.
We never appreciated Jeff Kaplan as much as we should have. We whined when there was too much CC in OW. Now that he's gone I think the last fragment of Blizzards original spark left with him.
14:52 Okay. It's on my shelf. 20:51 Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well. 22:57 The models were great. They knew they're just blocks put together and rolled with it. Everyone being made of basic shapes and having flapping jaws combined with the lines they would spit at you gave it this good cartoony style.
I still love watching Warcraft 3 pros play, some of them are on it since release, and I vastly prefer the low unit count, micro heavy playstyle with heroes as the army linchpin over the macro '1 sec time to kill' gameplay of Starcraft (1 and 2).
Hey Idyl, how mad are you that you could play Starcraft 1 and 2 for free, BUT HAVE TO PAY FOR WARCRAFT 1 AND 2 IN THE LAUNCHER? Cuz i was very upsetti spaghetti myself.
Couldn't agree more about warcraft 2. What a nutty good game for its time. Easily the best gaming hours for me as a teenager in the 90s. Insanely good. Mindblowing on all fronts. Truly blizzard at its best, along with her next game diablo. Crazy good games. Iconic as hell. Thousands of hours for each one of those games. Best memories!
Starcraft 2 WoL was the last time Blizzard truly hooked me. I bought the game, came home, sat down at my computer and installed it --- I did not get up until I finished the campaign. Truly the end of a golden era
Wracraft 3 is probably the best game ive ever played and I got the most bang for my buck. The campaign is extremely good and still holds up today. The competative scene is deep and engaging but what truly made wc3 great was the custom games. I spent thousands of hours as a kid playing hundreds of different extremely fun custom games. Stuff like island troll tribes, Wintermaul TD (This one is a great cooperative LAN game with your friends), goblin experimentals, The vampire series, Werewolf transylvania, hero siege, hero line wars and ofcourse the biggest one of them all, DOTA. The custom games made wc3 into the first and only 11/10 game
The worst thing about overwatch is you paid 40€ for a complete game with all heroes, you could win loot boxes by doing daily quests, and it was amazing. Then OW2 came out for free, and I see when I log on: my paid account was transferred to free account? My heroes, which I played with hundreds of hours, even having golden weapons from ranked plays, are now locked away from me by battle pass and forcing me to unlock the content I had all these years.
Heroes of the Storm lost all support a couple of years ago other than maybe an intern (they put out a tiny balance patch every 6 months or so, but no new anything). It's too bad, it's the ONLY MOBA I enjoyed.
I can at least say WoW is doing preeeeetty well right now. Dragonflight was a fantastic expansion, we have Chris Metzen back, and they have plans for a narrativr spanning THREE expansions. And yes they announced the next 3 expansions at once. Part of me is still skeptical on whether or not they can cook with it, but I'll let them do it and see where it goes. Dragonflight was super refreshing after the last 2 garbo expansions
Cool video! My only complaint would be were you started "The Fail Era". While Diablo 3 was a little controversial with existing Diablo players, it did gain a huge new audience of people that enjoyed it, the expansion, and the seasons. Overwatch and Hearthstone were both critically acclaimed, massively popular, and huge financial successes on release, it wasn't until later (with Overwatch 2 development / release, and the never ending Hearthstone expansions) that those games lost steam and leaned into milking the players for money. They popularized the genres of hero shooter (nod to TF2, but Valve really dropped the ball there) and digital card game. Having played most Blizzard games on release, I'd personally put the "Fail Era" stake in 2017, after the release of Overwatch.
Diablo 3 was the beginning of seeing the paint on the wall. It's not awful but pretty fucking depressing and attempted to innovate in awful ways. The abilities and runes made me feel pathetic but the style and real world auction house were kinda awesome
"Popularized" the genre of hero shooter is def not the right word. TF2 was extremely popular in the PC gaming community, and to this day is one of the most played games on steam even with how old it is. Maybe the word is "mainstreamed" as Overwatch was playable on consoles, which made the game be more accessible to more casual/console gamers. While it was beloved, it also didn't really do much to "revolutionize" hero shooters, the way they changed the entire scene of RTS and MMORPG.
@@135791max for sure, I'm definitely using it in a more 'mainstream' sense. I think if Valve had put more effort into evolving / updating TF2 (or maybe even TF3) then I probably wouldn't think of original Overwatch as highly.
@armorvil The current audience rating summary for Diablo 4 in 3000 reviews is a 2.3. You might like the game, but some people also like Diablo immortal, that doesn't change the overall concensus that the game is pretty bad and not a return to past form in any way.
Diablo 1 is to this day one of my most favorite games. Such an amazing atmospheric experience with great music, art and visual design. Sure, the gameplay and animations are a bit dated, but everything else is sooo good
Just to be clear, WoW when it first came out was anything but easy or solo friendly. What makes Classic WoW fairly easy today is knowledge and decades of addon polish. When WoW first released most escort quests were genuinely hard and often skipped. If you got help from other people for said escort quests you'd have to do the quest over again for each person except for a handful of quests. Back in the day WoW wasn't a "race to the endgame" MMO, it was a take your time and be social game.
WoW was easy and casual friendly compared to its competition. That's why it became so much more popular than any of its competition. Sure, if you compare today's WoW and MMO's to Vanilla WoW, Vanilla looks hardcore af, but for 2004, WoW was the most casual MMO around.
@@radicalcentrist4990 I disagree on the easy part, sure it was casual friendly compared to the likes of Everquest or FF11. But Runescape was easy, WoW was not. The difficulty was in fact part of the allure. Leveling was and still is pretty hard solo. Back in the day you really could only even attempt to solo on a Hunter, Druid, or Mage. Back in the day difficulty was the default for most games including MMOs. MMOs in general didn't start to get easier and truly casual friendly until the mid 2010's. Back in the day the only way you'd really get easy was by playing a kid's game like Club Penguin, Toon Town, Runescape, etc.
@@LPcrazy_88 Bruh vanilla was easy, people where just bad at the game and games in general, any "hardcore" gamer today would blast trough every raid in a day with or without addons. That said the easiness of games comes more in the fact that information is so easy to come by. WoW was hard because information was scarce at the time.
@@Zimmerh90 The average player is just as bad today as they were back in the day, but as I said in the original post knowledge and add-ons do the majority of the heavy lifting to make things infinitely easier. Information wasn't exactly scarce back in the day, we had thottbot after all but our knowledge has gotten a lot more granular and things like questie, elvui, or any number of ui mods that add cc timers and stuff even the playing field heavily. It was hard getting 40 people together to raid, it was even harder to actually progress. Quite a lot of quests were not marked properly as group quests. Attunement quests took real effort and coordination. Alts were incredibly hard to have especially if your guild was pushing content. If you wanted to reroll you'd spend months leveling and getting entry level raid gear. Wiping even in a leveling dungeon was normal and expected at high frequency. Only 1,000 people killed Kel'thuzad before BC. Wow was not easy.
@@LPcrazy_88 The difficulty just shifted over time from reliance on social play and long quest chains to mechanical difficulty, modern wow has the best raiding any mmo provides and great class gameplay loops. Wow audience just grew older and less interested in heavy social aspect of the game. There's still wow classic and SoD if you want the social orient wow over current one to play.
You are missing a massive point about StarCraft. This is the first game where the game editor allowed to create a massive amount of different type of games within the same game which made the online section boom. Warcraft 3 took it to the next level.
Rock and Roll Racing such a classic. If you hold L1, R1, Start, Select and scroll the player selection, you can play with Olaf the Viking - that we fight in Uldaman
Man I miss the golden age of blizzard so much. Coming home from school and dumping hours into Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. Shout out to my older brother for buying these when I was young. Great video btw
You mentioned that the way to make a sequel is to make it the same, but more, and better. Thats what they did with Overwatch 2. Except it was less, and worse
For most of my life I thought the first Blizzard game I ever played was Warcraft II in 1995. Turns out the first Blizzard game I ever played was RPM Racing in 1991. Well okay then.
I loved Blackthorne, but I played it back in the day when it wasn't 30 years old. As a kid, the whole aiming the shotgun backwards and firing was really cool for some reason.
I played Lost Vikings and WarCraft 1 in 1995, and enjoyed them greatly, despite being 7 years old and not fully getting it yet. Agree with almost everything this video, but your take on Heroes of the Storm is way off. It had a few initially lackluster reviews while still in beta, but the player base was definitely not in agreement ("6.5/10 no comeback mechanics" is still an inside joke in the community, the game even celebrated its 6.5 year anniversary ; the game has great comeback mechanics), and it got a dedicated fanbase who still hold it as the best of the moba genre. I think Heroes of the Storm is very indicative of Blizzard not understanding the gaming community, and especially not the esports community. They pumped massive amounts of money into a Hots league early on, then realised it was not paying for itself, completely overreacted, cancelled all official Hots esports and cut the the development team down to a small fraction of its initial size. They thought they could buy an esports scene the size of LoL, completely disregarding how most esports develop as a grassroot community, and then punished all players when their dumb strategy didn't work. Despite this, the game state of Hots is still fine, queue times are low in the larger regions, game still receives some support patches, and there is a small but dedicated crowd-funded competition scene.
Yeah D3 never was a bad game. I played D2 at release and loved it, but the number of people equipped with nostalgia glasses who can't appreciate what D3 did good is baffling.
I met a guy who thought the storytelling of Starcraft was like, fine literature, I'm pretty sure the Protoss are real and he was one of them in disguise to learn about our earth customs
Did you not know star craft had a map editor and its own costume games inside the game? It was called "Use Map Settings" and it ment the map editor dictated the rules. All the best costume games from WarCraft 3 were created on SC first and remade. Some of the classics were never ported correctly. COD feature where you get a new gun every kill is a fan made idea from Star Craft use map settings.
For what it's worth, you can get Warcraft, Warcraft 2 (including Beyond the Dark Portal), and Diablo (including Hellfire) on GOG. No need for an expensive physical copy, or even an inexpensive "physical copy"
I have a lot of hope for a new RTS in development called Battle Aces. It is made by uncapped games and David kim, who worked on starcraft 2 as a balance designer. He spent a lot of time thinking about how to make RTS fun and more appealing to todays audience, and is working on an absolutely genre defining RTS. I played in its first beta and it is a ton of fun, even though it was extremely barebones during that time. There is clearly a lot of passion and desire to make a fun game rather than a trendy game. I think it will be very big after it fully releases. Watching this video reminds me of it when you make comments about how blizzard used to be great at doing exactly what battle aces is doing imo.
Wow, can’t believe we get to enjoy the fact that Idyl went and bought *wink wink* physical copies *wink wink* of all these games! Truly a pro gamer move!
Remove your personal information from the web at JoinDeleteMe.com/IDYL and use code IDYL for 20% off
What are you doing down here? go back to the video wtf (seriously, thanks for watching, means a lot)
No.
The bit you made about the physical copies is cringe, because all of those games are available for purchase digitally, you don’t have to pirate them.
Blizzard offers Warcraft two and three for free even, you just have to go to their website, and as far as the other blizzard titles, they’re available on COG for a few dollars each
While 1995-2004 was a Golden Age for Blizzard, I would view the 2010-18 period as a Silver Age of sorts. Hearthstone, HotS and Overwatch all are incredible games with a passionate following - yes, even HotS, just watch Grubby. HotS only failed because it came out too late - hell, even you are talking about LoL because it overtook DotA (at least, everywhere outside of Russia/Ukraine who still prefer Dota2).
- Adûnâi
@@SwagMonztrWarcraft3 is not available without sailing the high seas for patch 1.26a. Although the changes in Reforged are rather minor unless it's a non-English localisation which have all been butchered. But then again, the original RoC had no permanent toggle for health bars, and even 1.26a does not have the original RoC system of damage and armour types, and the Storm Bolting of towers was removed back in 2002. Vanilla is fleeting...
- Adûnâi
You forgot Blackthorne for the SNES. Also Blizzard.
No legs, and no hair, this is game changing.
And no mug
soon green man will emerge from his chrysalis
The hair and legs are a part of the micro transactions bundle.
Warcraft 3 is what made me fall in love with games. My dad used to play when I was 6-10 and I would watch with my brother. One day my brother and I convinced the babysitter to let us boot up Warcraft. We selected new game, HAD A BLAST, aaaaaand deleted my Dad's campaign! He said "oh, well I guess it's your campaign now".... such a fond memory of mine...
Lmao having kids kills any fun you have. Kids ruin it all
Your dad seems awesome
@@SetariMKids cant ruin what women havent ruined already
@@SetariM You are a sad, lonely, little man
I use to watch my dad play it too! He told me I had to be 8 years old to play it 😂. Soon as my birthday hit, it was the only thing I ever wanted to play.
J1mmy: "I played every WoW game"
Also J1mmy but bald: "Hold my beer"
legally distinct J1mmy
t1mmy
I played every wow game first I was just building up my power levels and building down my hair follicles
Lol @@IdylOnTV
@@IdylOnTV love the work and the humor old youtube style
I was secretly hoping that this was a bait and switch and this was actually a list of games that take place in a snowstorm
it was supposed to be but then my legs fall off and I couldn't travel to a snow storm
@@IdylOnTV Now you're even more prepared to do it in the future because you can replace your legs with snowmobile treads
It's hard to describe how great Blizzard was in the eyes of the players during the Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 days, I personally think the success of World of Warcraft in the super mainstream is what started their push in what we see today.
hard to see it any other way tbh. every game that started development post WoW has been a mixed bag at best (with some highlights, but on average much worse)
@@IdylOnTV The ActiBlizzion merger also happened post launch of TBC iirc. A lot of people were skeptical, but for a while Blizzard still got to do the things they wanted, so we got things like WotLK and Starcraft2. But a few years later....
Imo this happens everytime art gets successful. Parasites who dont care about the actual art get ahold of it with interest in nothing but feeding off the corpse of what was once a great piece of art. Wow, diablo, halo, call of duty, disney, star wars, lord of the rings, marvel, etcetcetc.
It was 100% Activision take over. It was a shit need because of how big WoW was they didn’t have funds to up keep servers and developers/artist. So the cash cow came along and they were forced to succ the teet of Activision. Sadly.
@@Rangerthelonewolf
“So, for everyone who keeps commenting on literally everything that WoW is "bad now" because "Blizzard sold out to Activision" and all of the variations of this idea:
- Blizzard ceased to be an independent company in 1995, not just before WoW's release, but even before Warcraft II's release, when it was purchased by Vivendi, a French conglomerate. (Arguably, you could say earlier, it had a few parent companies, but this was the first time it was part of anything bigger then what you'd now think of as a small gaming company)
- Blizzard was not bought by any company in 2008, in fact its the opposite, Activision got bought. Vivendi, who had already owned Blizzard for 13 years, purchased Activision in 2008 and merged them into Activision Blizzard. This wasn't a corporation, and neither company gained any control over the other, it was just a division of Vivendi consisting of a few still distinct studios (These weren't even the only two merged into it) , but to be clear: Blizzard had already had the same corporate oversight of Vivendi for 13 years at this point.”
One of the saddest stories in gaming history is Blizzard. They went from "its ready when its ready" to "Don't you have phones!"
From trend-setters to trend-chasers.
Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, WoW Vanilla... That was a magical time!
Indeed.
I agree, but I'd say TBC to Cata.
except for battlenet. Blizzard truly had one of the worst internet platforms.
@@trorisk Back in the 90s, all the others had practically none! I remember that I played so much Starcraft and Diablo in Bnet, that my dad almost killed me, when we got the internet bill :D
@@wurzelbert84wucher5 for real dude. B-Net was mind blowing.
Personally I really enjoy HotS, I find the talent system more fun than a shop and think the gameplay generally has a lower barrier to entry than other MOBAs. I think it was just late, I get why people who were already into other MOBAs wouldn't switch.
Yeah. It has more teamfights and less laning than the other big mobas which is a huge plus in my book. Also, fuck last hitting.
Tbh I think they would have come out with something better faster if they didn’t tie themselves up fighting valve over the dota ip. Heroes of newerth already had near legal troubles and they were roughly as transformative as LoL in its own ways. Hots seemed like it tried to do too much in the wrong ways for me. The maps were pretty genius, which every other moba has not developed well. The power level of characters felt underwhelming to me, and I think they might have leaned into their blizzard universe hero characters too hard. IMO wc3 art style and mechanical dota is highly engaging, and if blizzard came out with it and gave it the dota2 quality of life improvements with artistic cohesion I would play a lot.
The issue with HotS for me is that it feels way more of an arcade game than an actual MOBA. It just feels way too casual and bland for me. Missing too many of the elements that make DotA (and LoL somewhat) what it is.
I really liked Heroes of the storm
The fact that they were using WC3 sounds and voicelines and references showed that it was just a love child or what made Blizzard great. There was love put into it and all of it is a bunch of references and is basically the smash bros of blizzard. The issue is there is too many competitors. It was too casual to make people feel like it was worth to keep playing. Though I still see it get a bunch of players especially through aram. Faster queues then I'd get in overwatch. I think an issue is that the people behind it just stopped caring anymore. They were probably too focused on games that would give them more money, WoW, Hearthstone, OW :(
Rock n roll racing deserve more respect then this.
That's what got me into Black Sabbath, since Paranoid was one of the only two songs lolol
@@whocares9033 that game had more than just two songs.
@@burgertim7878 Did it? Oh lol
I just remember restarting the races so I could play while Paranoid was going 🤣
@@whocares9033 I can only remember Paranoid and Born to be wild, but apparantly there were 6 in total 😅
I remember Paranoid, Born to Be Wild, Highway Star, and Peter Gunn Theme. I think that's all there were on the SNES version that I played quite a lot of.
I will NOT take this Heroes of the Storm slander.
💯 for sure.
I dunno, i loved playing it for like 4-5 years, than it got too competetive for a constantly stoned noob like me 😅
I never could get into it. Maps were cool and the blizzard universe looks cool for the genre. I really wanted to try the sc2 custom mobas but I was too broke to justify buying it.
You will, and you'll like it.
Amen brother! There was a time where HotS could have been a serious lol competitor but then they dropped it and it became unbalanced and even more generic.
Imho: HotS is the better Moba but players dont like a balanced battle. Abusing isolated weakpoints to get fed and op to stomp everything is just more satisfying than using more brainpower and teamplay than the other team for most people i guess.
Since you admitted not being a card gamer, I'd like to add some context for Hearthstone:
1) You praise Blizz for their genre defining changes to RTS, ARPG, and FPS games, but neglect to mention that the digital card game genre was completely redefined by Hearthstone. In fact, 10 years after release, it's still the #1 digital card game.
2) Ben Brode is the biggest hype-man you'll ever see, and no one can argue that he doesn't know how to design a good game (look at Marvel Snap) - but Hearthstone became an even better game after he left. Card designs are more interesting, game balancing is more dynamic.
3) There have been actual narrative story events / expansions / single-player events within Hearthstone. We had an entire year where 10 new characters were introduced and went through a full-on adventure across Azeroth, each with their own motivations, defeats, and victories. It was somewhat basic, but it was a story.
4) Hearthstone has a Battlepass. In fact, it might have added the pass before Overwatch got theirs.
No arguing that the game has had good and bad days, but that's to be expected from "live service" games. However, the game still deserves to be treated as part of the "good Blizzard" legacy.
Most importantly, as a player, I can still feel the passion of the newer devs in the game. There are definitely some controversial decisions on some more recent monetization, but the core game is still really good and feels OG Blizzard.
Even Diablo 3 and 4 were good games at release, to be fair. Did both have issues? Yes, but even as a day-1 buyer of D3 I still had a blast the whole way through, even getting my skull repeatedly smacked in act 2 of the Inferno difficulty. The author of this video seems to jump a lot on tired bandwagons. Did I prefer D2? Yes, but I could still appreciate what D3 did really good, and even the loud complainers sinked many hundred hours into the game (if it was really bad, they would have stopped 10 hours into it max). Also, criticizing the fact that these games are repetitive when it's something that comes with the territory in these games? Like, it wasn't repetitive to chain act bosses in D2? Get out of here.
"Broodwar campaign mid" ah hell nah he did not say that
as a diehard campaing lover, it ends up revolving around people being stupid, everyone in the protoss campaing except Aldaris is somehow deceived by Kerrigan, DuGalle trusting Duran to kill Stukov without second thought and for some reason no one expected Kerrigan to betray everyone after retaking Korhal, still is really cool how it is told tho
To be fair, imagine you skip the SC campaigns and jump right into brood war, which is what it sounds like Idyl did, losing all of that content would make it feel really weak lol
@@sazjnk95 Exactly, especially that Idyl did entire WC3: RoC and TFT playthrough or at least watchthrough...
Also I'd put it there, but talking about Fail Era of Blizzard and not mentioning the merging with Activision is so wrong. :V
Brood War had fun gameplay, but the writting was indeed "the plot needs everyone to act stupid".
Except DuGalle. He really was stupid
It is, the story is awfull, muh Kerriga waifu must win so I must make every characters dumbdumb hahahaha queen b*tch of the universe
No Rock&Roll Racing was an amazing game, and a very innovative one at that, 2 player racing COOP campaign with customization and progression elements, awesome characters, awesome music, a lot of stage variety. HOTS is a great game too, its lack of popularity has nothing to do with its gameplay. Judge the game design, not critic scores.
Blizzard's downfall began before Activision took it over, but was primarily cemented by WoW's success which led to their acquisition by Activision wherein Kotick destroyed their core principles.
is it the point when WC3's scope was reduced? when was that?
@@starteremil There was a gradual decline, but a lot of events surrounding Reforged being defunded coincide such that you could indicate that time period as the evacuation of Blizzard's soul.
1. Kotick defunds Reforged.
2. The Classic team is slashed to ribbons, leaving the campaign in the hands of effectively 2 people.
3. Mike Morhaime tenders his resignation and only stays on in an advisory position for a few more months.
4. Kotick continues installing more Activision puppets throughout the company at the highest levels.
@@DesignerDave interesting indeed, over the longer term i was looking recently at how there were a lot of veterans being isolated in various ways throughout the years to build a sort of Blizzard within Blizzard:
-Bobby K and co removes veterans from WoW at its peak popularity to put own people there
-Bobbo puts veterans on a project(Titan) where the teams are deliberately over-compartmentalized and therefore do severely incompatible work which is doomed to fail, allowing BK to guilt-trip the veterans for losing 50mln
-BK shows clemency by putting veterans on SC2, in itself also doomed due to the way it was split in three, again isolating them from other projects there and solidifying the Blizzard within Blizzard
-The moment when BK and co's skeletons begin to come out of the closet, BK bribes mid-management to blame veterans of the same things BK was accused of by promising mid-management will take their positions
-Veterans leave
-Done
But that's just a gut feeling guess :)
@@starteremil Ehhhh... there was some evil brewing within Blizzard before the success of WoW that was exacerbated by nepo-hires of the worst of the old guard and money/power. But Bobby Kotick's influence and desire to get rid of veterans is apparent in a few ways:
1. The executive level folks of old Bliz had the highest contractually obligated bonuses, and Bobby wanted that money for himself.
2. Constantly installing Wyrmtongue-like Activision people into various places within Bliz.
3. Undermining the core principles of Blizzard at every turn (basically the ones they put on the statue outside when they first moved to the new building).
Idyl halfway to being a runescape bot with those green leggings. Get yourself a brown//yellow shirt and complete the look
How dare you criticize Lost Vikings and RnR Racing those games were the shit back in the day
he's delusional
Facts
Imma let you finish but Rock n Roll Racing was a BANGER back in the day.
And about the "the whole time I was thinking about Twisted Metal", all I'll say is: when Twisted Metal came out all I could think about was Rock n Roll Racing. lmao
It's a very different perspective when you play these games as they come out, you gotta put yourself on those shoes. There were no racing games with that level of customization at that time.
I'm proud to be a part of "Boob era", i played Rock'n'roll Racing and Lost Vikings A LOT back in like 1996. Lost Vikings was insane for it's time, the amount of levels and content it has is awesome. And the puzzles are quite challenging and required some creative thinking using vikings abilites in unusual ways.
After that i enjoyed Warcraft II and Diablo 1 (especially in coop) on my Playstation One. Those are the times. Oh boy, Diablo 1 on PS One actually got a strong friendly fire, so i always played Warrior, while my uncle played Amazon. Wizard was pretty much banned.
p.s. As a big fan of Lost Vikings (Mega Drive) when i look at Lost Vikings 2 visual design, i want to throw up, glad i didn't know this game existed.
Lost Vikings 2, glad I knew it existed ... SNES version that is, not that weird PC version shown here.
SNES version had same graphics as Lost Vikings 1 and is the version usually used in speedruns
there is also another story about SC1 you didn't mention: the early concepts of SC1 had it look more like WC2. then they went to a gaming convention to market the new game and found, that all the other games looked so much better and cooler. so the devs went "we can't do that, releasing a game looking like it is" and reinvented the whole thing. this created starcraft we all know today. the most fun part about it was, that all the cool looking games at the gamescon where just glowed up fake and none later looked like it did on the convention. it still inspired blizard to be better.
bruh, HOTS is goat, I still play it till this day
Came here to say the same thing! HotS is great and I still hope they'll pick up development of it again at some point
@@OriginalMokthol yeah it is bizarre how the community still alive after so many years of maintenance mode.
There are only a few, very few, multiplayer games that could survive the abandonment by its development studio.
This speaks volumes about the quality of HotS.
It's the best moba
For me it was a good game, but Overwatch/Nexus characters and 50% winrate match making killed it.
Blasphemy on saying Blackthorne is bad. This game is obviously not just for you. For those that played the original Price of Persia or Flashback, Blackthorne plays exactly like those games.
Absolutely. Blackthorne was one of the best SNES platformers of all time, and even the PC version played excellently. The mechanics were solid, the puzzles fun, the story interesting and engaging.....It was a gem of early Blizzard, especially as being the first game under that name. But if you don't like it you don't like it I guess.
I think it more shows how Blackthorne really is a product of its time. I've played them all. I can even now beat Prince of Persia in a single sitting without ever engaging any brainpower at all.
But they honestly are not that good games. They just have not aged well. Compared to where we are now. They're clunky, sooo so slow and often a screen has exactly one solution and if you try anything but that solution you're just doomed. Learning by failure is never fun.
I was playing Diablo 2 when 9/11 happend, my sister came to my room saying that plane hit some towers in USA and i was like "whatever girl, im slayin Duriel", i was 12 years old
Duriel, a.k.a. the best test to determine if a character build is at all viable.
To be honest, Heroes of the Storm is probably the best Moba out there. It just "died" because Blizzard didn't give it a good support/promotion.
Also, Mobas have a HUGE audience here in Latin America but Blizzard only gave us a SINGLE server and it was in Brazil. Meanwhile, League of Legends has 2 servers for Latin America, and 1 for Brazil.
Like, if you want your game to be a sucess, you have to AT LEAST invest in having a good infrastructure. But nope... I suppose that was too much to ask
HotS is very average imo. Decent, but it lacks the true tops of Dota 2, which is a far better game - just extremely hard to pick up as a new player. I'd argue Dota 2 feels more like a true (old) Blizzard game than HotS does (which makes sense considering its WC3 heritage).
Also hated how you couldn't immediately play as any hero in HotS, having to unlock them. Meanwhile Dota 2 has a gazillion heroes and you can play them all from the get-go.
HOTS being "the best moba" is wild, it would be lucky to be considered top 5 lol
El problema fue que llegó muy tarde, Lol y Dota ya tenían una gran fan base y hots era diferente a esos juegos, yo lo sigo jugando y como dice en el vídeo, el hecho que sean personajes del universo de Blizzard lo hace llamativo pero eso es todo, si yo hubiese jugado Lol desde un principio y quisiera intentar hots ahora, lo vería de mala gana, por eso no tiene la misma gente, aunque no me mal entiendas, para mí hots es muy bueno, pero como no dejaba dinero, lo dejaron morir.
Story telling of Warcraft 3 was amazing
For a teenager, yes.
@@Nightstalker314 I mean, you can say it was nostalgia talking, but Idyl just played the game for the first time at nearly 30 and liked it, so maybe you're in the wrong here, and the story is just good?
Way better than anything Wow ever created
@@Dregomz02 classic to wotlk was amazing because it was some sort of a sequel to Warcraft series, we knew the lore from before, but we were the main characters of it back then, after that era it went downhill for them, but the main thing about Classic and the 1st two xpacs being good was not the lore, but the game itself and what it offered, now WoW tries to go big with the story and RPG elements etc, although the story telling of WoW after WOTLK is just bad lol.
There's elements that could have certainly been done better, there always are. FFXIV for all it's praise on it's story has had some real steamers of plot in various moments. Most recently Dawntrail is so hyper focused on one character part of me just wants her to die... But FFXIV is praised for it's story throughout and no one bats an eye when something goes wrong.
WoW is a much older game and is more prone to have missteps. The "lol wow story bad" memes really hit fever pitch in the BfA and Shadowlands xpacs. I wasn't the biggest fan of either of those xpacs. Legion was pretty good IMO both from a story and a gameplay perspective(even that one's getting old now... holy crap). Dragonflight wasn't the most compelling story but did set the scene for a completely different arc without destroying everything behind it. I actually sympathized with the antagonist(s)... I hadn't done that in a Warcraft title in quite some time.
Regardless, the "it's cool to say wow story bad" cliche is just old. Cite some examples, sure, every franchise has some not so hot story telling moments. If they're numerous to you, then the story just didn't land with you, that doesn't make it objectively bad.
IMO, FFXIV's story has been hot garbage since Heavensward. Obviously that's not consensus, but the story just didn't land with me.
Little known fact, Warcraft 2's PS1 port's source code got leaked.
still surprised no fanmade port of war2 has been made using the code.
I don't know the specifics of the PS1 source port release, but that's probably because there've been already a solid fanmade recreation since the early 10s (Wargus) and also WC2 BNE still kinda works in modern Windows (maybe you have to help with a little community patch or two)
@@theshinken I wish we had something like OpenRA or Any number of doom & Quake ports.
Wait, wasn’t diablo 1 leaked from PS1? Or also Warcraft? I read that there is an open source version of D1 but you still need the original asset files
@@HNedel Warcraft 2 had the source code to its port leaked in full back during the nintendo gigaleak. been a few years and nothings been done with it.
Some fans from Russia are making mods for Warcraft 2 that are based on the original code, for example they added new resolutions support.
A different group of fans made Stratagus/Wargus and that is more or less "Warcraft 2 on a new game engine" and that is an open source project (that's what TheShinken was talking about).
I think that's all... WC2 is old. Players of this game are mostly in their 40s/50s now.
I'm babyraging at the fact he called the broodmare campaign mid without playing the base campaign lmao
Although I love (Classic) WoW, it was the beginning of the downfall of Blizzard because it opened their eyes to just how much money live service games can make. It killed any chances we would have had for a Warcraft 4, Starcraft 3 or a good new single player game because they wouldn't be near as profitable as a live service game. I bet Diablo Immortal alone made more money than rts Warcraft and Starcraft combined
One sparkle pony made more profit than an entire game expansion. Why strive for greatness when mediocrity is sufficient.
Not really! I used to be a Classic Andy like a lot of people, but i'll take modern WoW over Classic anyday. Only thing classic has over modern is the story and the zones, that's it.
Diablo 1 still have one of the best Atmosphere ever made.
Music, sound are timeless.
Just perfect.
Diablo was one of the first games I can remember that had a true digital audio soundtrack streamed off the CD. No MIDI, no SoundBlaster, no wavetable synth, real music playing while you battled the forces of Hell. Not to mention the most atmospheric mood-setting tracks of all time in the town of Tristam. Legendary.
Stay a while and listen
Blackthorn is amazing!!! Also, Rock and Roll racing was badass. We used to play it a lot with my uncle and dad. You'd have to play these at the time, I suppose.
36:29 bro is out here melee attacking with a ranged character no wonder he didn’t like the game 😂 I’ve always thought HOTS was under appreciated. I guess I just like the talent upgrade progression system more than an item based one
I don't think the criticism towards Diablo 3 is truly fair.
It's kinda like with Zelda where a lot of people truly love botw/totk and that type and some people think they destroyed the games by going away from the find-key-items-in-dungeons puzzle games.
Diablo 3 was a game that many people (myself included) sunk thousands of hours into and truly enjoyed. Especially with reaper of souls it had a ton of the really wonderful brains-off ARPG fun, it was just *different* from Diablo 2. Not necessarily a bad game, just because it wasn't what you wanted.
Dude I really like your videos. As a 43 year old, I grew up with Ultima (loved the Lord British video), and all these blizzard games. I still have my Warcraft 1 DOS bigbox. I begged my dad for Diablo 1 when it came out, and I got an A in English (my weakest subject) so he would buy it for me. I was doing modem battles with friends in Warcraft 2, dialing up each other directly. I grew up w/ this company and have (had) so much love for them. The last game they made that I loved was Starcraft 2.
I'm just starting the video, really looking forward to it. You better be kind to my old favorites! You better cover the Silicone and Synapse games! (I know you will) I know most people go "Lost Vikings" with classic blizzard, but man, it was Rock'n'Roll Racing that owned my heart back in those days.
Well, enough of me rambling. On with the show!
Next video use a green mask just be hands
I love that 😂 though i wouldnt hear a single thing theyre trying to say id just be laughing at the hands the entire video
HotS got murdered by Blizzard trying to force it into the esport space and (in my opinion) decreasing quality of newer heroes, specifically the OW heroes, which felt out of place.
It was good fun at release.
This is why it's accurate to say that Blizzard died the day Blizzard North closed it's doors. The only similar thing between Blizz and Blizz north is the Brand logo design.
Honestly, there hasn't been a single soul that has played hots and said the game is bad, it is sad how many people that played it and said "this is cool, but it is too late" are.
Hots was the first moba game that felt that the better team wins and the first game that if players got their shit together there was still a chance at winning no matter how far behind they were.
HOTS is one of the only mobas I have seriously played, and will only seriously played ( having try all the mobas) It feels like it has the most map variety and everything, its easier to pickup, don't have to worry about xp stealing and everything (last hitting), and like you said, you are always able to come back. I also loved the cahracters and everything, and just everything with it. With it pretty much being shelfed now days, surprised they haven't shutdown the servers for some unknown reason, is -extremely- disappointing.
I wish they invested more into HOTS instead of just killing it off.
League has no map variety for the most part, your just looking at the same map every time and just doing the same thing pretty much... every single time... And it just felt super repetitive (This is all my opinion, I'm far from a pro lol)
Ngl I was a bit concerned when you entered frame but great video!
Many would disagree with you that Lost vikings is a decent game. But everyone is entitled to an opinion. The lost vikings 2 game you presented is actually an interplay creation with updated graphics. There is also one that was released by Blizzard on the snes
You are not wrong, D2 is not only nostalgia, its still very good game. D2 was iconic game at the time. People still playing it even today, often with some good modifications developed by community. Even despite PoE being a thing. And whats even more crazy, many people will prefer D2 over any of its sequels.
That's because the sequels were developed by others.
Yea David brevik and his team made diablo one and 2 and he left the company sometime after unfortunately, diablo 3 was a soulless cartoon mess and 4 is just bad, enemy scaling was a piss poor decision, currently playing d2r ladder season 8 as I'm watching the vid and writing this because this really was the last great diablo game I think we're going to get
The golden era of Blizzard was my most favorite time in gaming. Starcraft, to Diablo 2, to Warcraft 3, to WoW. It really felt like Blizzard could do no wrong. Also props for using FF7 Remake and Undertale music
I love Idyl and J1mmy. They are some of my favourite youtubers. 😄 Yay for new video!
Idyll made J1mmy, but news outlets won't tell you that.
He literally made him in the basement. Wild story. You had to be there.
>skips 3 episodes of the story for made up reasons
>proceeds to play the last 3 episodes of the story
>"the story was not interesting"
Most intelligent youtube essayist.
We never appreciated Jeff Kaplan as much as we should have. We whined when there was too much CC in OW. Now that he's gone I think the last fragment of Blizzards original spark left with him.
14:52 Okay. It's on my shelf.
20:51 Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.
22:57 The models were great. They knew they're just blocks put together and rolled with it. Everyone being made of basic shapes and having flapping jaws combined with the lines they would spit at you gave it this good cartoony style.
I still love watching Warcraft 3 pros play, some of them are on it since release, and I vastly prefer the low unit count, micro heavy playstyle with heroes as the army linchpin over the macro '1 sec time to kill' gameplay of Starcraft (1 and 2).
The Wind Waker pirate theme playing over the Physical Copies portion was genius.
Hey Idyl, how mad are you that you could play Starcraft 1 and 2 for free, BUT HAVE TO PAY FOR WARCRAFT 1 AND 2 IN THE LAUNCHER? Cuz i was very upsetti spaghetti myself.
Blackthorne was awesome. One of my favourite games when I was a kid.
I can argue all night , that Brood War over Bnet was the first esports.
What’s the argument? It was, shortly after, unreal came, then CS and age of empires, and years later, dota
@@gosonegr Quake wants to have a word with you.
Couldn't agree more about warcraft 2. What a nutty good game for its time. Easily the best gaming hours for me as a teenager in the 90s. Insanely good. Mindblowing on all fronts. Truly blizzard at its best, along with her next game diablo. Crazy good games. Iconic as hell. Thousands of hours for each one of those games. Best memories!
You made me look up when the deep water horizon oil spill was.
I was 15. I thought I was gonna be unborn.
I agree with everything except RnR Racing, that game is a blast to play and has one wicked soundtrack. How can you not love the announcer???
Starcraft 2 WoL was the last time Blizzard truly hooked me. I bought the game, came home, sat down at my computer and installed it --- I did not get up until I finished the campaign. Truly the end of a golden era
You mean to tell me you didn't like Heart of the Swarm forcing you to play a moba with a single champ who makes the dumbest decisions possible?
@@Tungar111-mv2hw I liked HotS, actually - it's a revenge plot and these are always delicious ;)
@@AlexeiVoronin lol revenge plots are my least favorite kind. It's why i hate every tarantino movie.
Wracraft 3 is probably the best game ive ever played and I got the most bang for my buck. The campaign is extremely good and still holds up today. The competative scene is deep and engaging but what truly made wc3 great was the custom games. I spent thousands of hours as a kid playing hundreds of different extremely fun custom games. Stuff like island troll tribes, Wintermaul TD (This one is a great cooperative LAN game with your friends), goblin experimentals, The vampire series, Werewolf transylvania, hero siege, hero line wars and ofcourse the biggest one of them all, DOTA. The custom games made wc3 into the first and only 11/10 game
The worst thing about overwatch is you paid 40€ for a complete game with all heroes, you could win loot boxes by doing daily quests, and it was amazing. Then OW2 came out for free, and I see when I log on: my paid account was transferred to free account? My heroes, which I played with hundreds of hours, even having golden weapons from ranked plays, are now locked away from me by battle pass and forcing me to unlock the content I had all these years.
dropped everything i was doing to watch this and was immediately mesmerized by the use of green screen.
Honestly believe WC3 is the GOAT. The campaign, the online multiplayer, the map editor that spawned so many custom games...it's just too good.
Heroes of the Storm lost all support a couple of years ago other than maybe an intern (they put out a tiny balance patch every 6 months or so, but no new anything). It's too bad, it's the ONLY MOBA I enjoyed.
I can at least say WoW is doing preeeeetty well right now. Dragonflight was a fantastic expansion, we have Chris Metzen back, and they have plans for a narrativr spanning THREE expansions. And yes they announced the next 3 expansions at once.
Part of me is still skeptical on whether or not they can cook with it, but I'll let them do it and see where it goes. Dragonflight was super refreshing after the last 2 garbo expansions
The Aeris theme playing hit hard
It's almost like the company formerly owned by people who just loved games was sold to a company who only cares about sales and marketing.
Cool video! My only complaint would be were you started "The Fail Era". While Diablo 3 was a little controversial with existing Diablo players, it did gain a huge new audience of people that enjoyed it, the expansion, and the seasons. Overwatch and Hearthstone were both critically acclaimed, massively popular, and huge financial successes on release, it wasn't until later (with Overwatch 2 development / release, and the never ending Hearthstone expansions) that those games lost steam and leaned into milking the players for money. They popularized the genres of hero shooter (nod to TF2, but Valve really dropped the ball there) and digital card game. Having played most Blizzard games on release, I'd personally put the "Fail Era" stake in 2017, after the release of Overwatch.
Diablo 3 was the beginning of seeing the paint on the wall. It's not awful but pretty fucking depressing and attempted to innovate in awful ways. The abilities and runes made me feel pathetic but the style and real world auction house were kinda awesome
"Popularized" the genre of hero shooter is def not the right word. TF2 was extremely popular in the PC gaming community, and to this day is one of the most played games on steam even with how old it is. Maybe the word is "mainstreamed" as Overwatch was playable on consoles, which made the game be more accessible to more casual/console gamers. While it was beloved, it also didn't really do much to "revolutionize" hero shooters, the way they changed the entire scene of RTS and MMORPG.
@@135791max for sure, I'm definitely using it in a more 'mainstream' sense. I think if Valve had put more effort into evolving / updating TF2 (or maybe even TF3) then I probably wouldn't think of original Overwatch as highly.
The Fail Era doesn't even exist imo. The guy bashes D4 when it has always been good and is getting better as time goes on.
@armorvil The current audience rating summary for Diablo 4 in 3000 reviews is a 2.3. You might like the game, but some people also like Diablo immortal, that doesn't change the overall concensus that the game is pretty bad and not a return to past form in any way.
Diablo 1 is to this day one of my most favorite games. Such an amazing atmospheric experience with great music, art and visual design. Sure, the gameplay and animations are a bit dated, but everything else is sooo good
23:07 the throwsen frone ahh yes everyones favourite expansion.
Ty I misses that. Lol
The launch of D3 was a tragedy in itself
I remember growing up playing these games up to warcraft 3, and... Well, I can't play D3 or D4. I was in love with this studio.
D2R is sooo fun to play, and bonus points because there isn't a battle pass or MTX being obnoxiously advertised in between toon swaps
You know who's Gen Z when they trash on Blackthorne and Rock N Roll Racing.
Never thought I'd miss Jeff Kaplan
Just to be clear, WoW when it first came out was anything but easy or solo friendly. What makes Classic WoW fairly easy today is knowledge and decades of addon polish. When WoW first released most escort quests were genuinely hard and often skipped. If you got help from other people for said escort quests you'd have to do the quest over again for each person except for a handful of quests.
Back in the day WoW wasn't a "race to the endgame" MMO, it was a take your time and be social game.
WoW was easy and casual friendly compared to its competition. That's why it became so much more popular than any of its competition. Sure, if you compare today's WoW and MMO's to Vanilla WoW, Vanilla looks hardcore af, but for 2004, WoW was the most casual MMO around.
@@radicalcentrist4990 I disagree on the easy part, sure it was casual friendly compared to the likes of Everquest or FF11. But Runescape was easy, WoW was not. The difficulty was in fact part of the allure. Leveling was and still is pretty hard solo. Back in the day you really could only even attempt to solo on a Hunter, Druid, or Mage.
Back in the day difficulty was the default for most games including MMOs. MMOs in general didn't start to get easier and truly casual friendly until the mid 2010's. Back in the day the only way you'd really get easy was by playing a kid's game like Club Penguin, Toon Town, Runescape, etc.
@@LPcrazy_88 Bruh vanilla was easy, people where just bad at the game and games in general, any "hardcore" gamer today would blast trough every raid in a day with or without addons.
That said the easiness of games comes more in the fact that information is so easy to come by. WoW was hard because information was scarce at the time.
@@Zimmerh90 The average player is just as bad today as they were back in the day, but as I said in the original post knowledge and add-ons do the majority of the heavy lifting to make things infinitely easier. Information wasn't exactly scarce back in the day, we had thottbot after all but our knowledge has gotten a lot more granular and things like questie, elvui, or any number of ui mods that add cc timers and stuff even the playing field heavily.
It was hard getting 40 people together to raid, it was even harder to actually progress. Quite a lot of quests were not marked properly as group quests. Attunement quests took real effort and coordination. Alts were incredibly hard to have especially if your guild was pushing content. If you wanted to reroll you'd spend months leveling and getting entry level raid gear. Wiping even in a leveling dungeon was normal and expected at high frequency. Only 1,000 people killed Kel'thuzad before BC. Wow was not easy.
@@LPcrazy_88 The difficulty just shifted over time from reliance on social play and long quest chains to mechanical difficulty, modern wow has the best raiding any mmo provides and great class gameplay loops. Wow audience just grew older and less interested in heavy social aspect of the game. There's still wow classic and SoD if you want the social orient wow over current one to play.
One memory I will always have is reading the mouldy tome as a child for the first time in diablo 2. Learning about and taking on the countess.
Pls do " i played every fifa game ever made" next
Rock and Roll Racing, Lost Vikings and Blackthorne are awesome!
i love the fit. green screen pants are revolutionary
You are missing a massive point about StarCraft. This is the first game where the game editor allowed to create a massive amount of different type of games within the same game which made the online section boom. Warcraft 3 took it to the next level.
Rock and Roll Racing such a classic.
If you hold L1, R1, Start, Select and scroll the player selection, you can play with Olaf the Viking - that we fight in Uldaman
I loved Diablo 3 and I knew once I got to this part of the video what was coming but man it still feels bad to hear.
Man I miss the golden age of blizzard so much. Coming home from school and dumping hours into Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. Shout out to my older brother for buying these when I was young. Great video btw
You mentioned that the way to make a sequel is to make it the same, but more, and better. Thats what they did with Overwatch 2. Except it was less, and worse
ranking brood war for the campaign is like ranking counter-strike for the training course
For most of my life I thought the first Blizzard game I ever played was Warcraft II in 1995. Turns out the first Blizzard game I ever played was RPM Racing in 1991. Well okay then.
I loved Blackthorne, but I played it back in the day when it wasn't 30 years old. As a kid, the whole aiming the shotgun backwards and firing was really cool for some reason.
I played Lost Vikings and WarCraft 1 in 1995, and enjoyed them greatly, despite being 7 years old and not fully getting it yet.
Agree with almost everything this video, but your take on Heroes of the Storm is way off. It had a few initially lackluster reviews while still in beta, but the player base was definitely not in agreement ("6.5/10 no comeback mechanics" is still an inside joke in the community, the game even celebrated its 6.5 year anniversary ; the game has great comeback mechanics), and it got a dedicated fanbase who still hold it as the best of the moba genre.
I think Heroes of the Storm is very indicative of Blizzard not understanding the gaming community, and especially not the esports community. They pumped massive amounts of money into a Hots league early on, then realised it was not paying for itself, completely overreacted, cancelled all official Hots esports and cut the the development team down to a small fraction of its initial size. They thought they could buy an esports scene the size of LoL, completely disregarding how most esports develop as a grassroot community, and then punished all players when their dumb strategy didn't work.
Despite this, the game state of Hots is still fine, queue times are low in the larger regions, game still receives some support patches, and there is a small but dedicated crowd-funded competition scene.
I don't know why but this video makes me believe Idyl would make a very entertaining Kingdom Hearts series retrospective video.
My first ever diablo game was D3 and it was many years after it came out. I actually really enjoyed it, but i could see how fans didnt.
Yeah D3 never was a bad game. I played D2 at release and loved it, but the number of people equipped with nostalgia glasses who can't appreciate what D3 did good is baffling.
I like videos comparing "old Blizzard" and current one. It gives me some kind of pleasure. It's like vengeance for destroying our childhood. XD
I was born on the day that Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was released, and it's still by far my most beloved game of all time.
I met a guy who thought the storytelling of Starcraft was like, fine literature, I'm pretty sure the Protoss are real and he was one of them in disguise to learn about our earth customs
Probably an unpopular opinion but i loved Diablo 3. I put sooo many hours into that game.
Really digging the camo slacks, Idyl
Did you not know star craft had a map editor and its own costume games inside the game? It was called "Use Map Settings" and it ment the map editor dictated the rules. All the best costume games from WarCraft 3 were created on SC first and remade. Some of the classics were never ported correctly. COD feature where you get a new gun every kill is a fan made idea from Star Craft use map settings.
The moment he said that blackthorn was a bad game i knew he didn't had any idea what he was talking about.
It says a lot about someone when they hear silicon and synapse and think booba. That is such a good / hard hitting name for a company that makes games
Criminally underrated channel - this is excellent content
For what it's worth, you can get Warcraft, Warcraft 2 (including Beyond the Dark Portal), and Diablo (including Hellfire) on GOG. No need for an expensive physical copy, or even an inexpensive "physical copy"
I have a lot of hope for a new RTS in development called Battle Aces. It is made by uncapped games and David kim, who worked on starcraft 2 as a balance designer. He spent a lot of time thinking about how to
make RTS fun and more appealing to todays audience, and is working on an absolutely genre defining RTS.
I played in its first beta and it is a ton of fun, even though it was extremely barebones during that time. There is clearly a lot of passion and desire to make a fun game rather than a trendy game. I think it will be very big after it fully releases.
Watching this video reminds me of it when you make comments about how blizzard used to be great at doing exactly what battle aces is doing imo.
You kind of forgot to mention a huge aspect of Diablo 3 particularly regarding pay-to-win: the real money auction house.
Wow, can’t believe we get to enjoy the fact that Idyl went and bought *wink wink* physical copies *wink wink* of all these games! Truly a pro gamer move!
I loved Rock and Roll Racing growing up