Just a few hours before BlizzCon 2023 goes live, an autumn chill is in the air in the wee hours of the morning here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s time to reflect. The last 10 years have been tumultuous for Blizzard Entertainment. The video game studio once revered by their loyal fans, is now the object of ridicule. Most of the blame for Blizzard’s woes can be placed directly on the head of Mike Morhaime and the rest of the executive team. A fish rots from the head down.
Somehow, the greatest video game company in the world tripped and fell into the gutter. But it was no sudden mishap; it was a process of incremental emasculation that took many years to accomplish.
It’s not fashionable to care about Blizzard or World of Warcraft anymore. One reader got upset with me when he realized I was playing WoW Classic some months ago and he’s never talked to me since. He knew I was playing because both of us were on the same Discord server where Discord loves to broadcast what games you are playing. I decided to give WoW Classic a spin and I guess that was a bridge too far for him. I was going through a bad time in my life and I felt didn’t owe him an explanation nor was I going to justify it to him.
How WoW Went from Stunning Starlet to Crazy Cat Lady
WoW is like a beautiful actress that you once admired but found out she is now old, fat, and living on food stamps in a dingy apartment full of cats. Even though I despise Blizzard for what they did to WoW, I still have a flicker of love for the old MMO.
The period from 2004 to 2010 from classic to the Wrath of the Lich King era was the golden age of the fantasy MMORPG. I loved the genre ever since EverQuest. Since Sony Online Entertainment under the stewardship of John Smedley could never duplicate what Blizzard achieved with WoW, the torch passed from Sony to Blizzard and with it all our hopes and fears.
That golden era of World of Warcraft represented me as a male gamer. Unlike the overly feminized, diverse, and inclusive company they are today, Blizzard was a masculine company back then. Hot sweaty Mountain Dew guzzlin’ male gamers were their bread and butter.
The Fall of the Titans
The failure of Titan was a gut punch to Blizzard. They were devasted and crestfallen that they were unable to replicate the magic of WoW. Suddenly they were exposed as frauds who got lucky with WoW which was essentially a more accessible version of EverQuest. The egos of Metzen and Kaplan never recovered so they opted to cannibalize the assets of Titan and embrace a woke worldview with the ambitious Overwatch. Overwatch is everything I hate about WoW. It epitomized their hubris, their braggadocio, and their vanity.
Both Metzen and Kaplan got married and presumably had kids. I think this domestication had a lot to do with how the direction of Blizzard started to change and embrace a more kid-friendly, female-friendly, and alphabet-friendly mindset.
Jeff Pardo left Blizzard and went to form Bonfire Studios in 2016. $26 million dollars and 7 years later, they have still not announced their upcoming game. Where’s the beef Jeff? Seriously dude, what are you waiting for?
The glow of invincibility has long worn off Blizzard.
The other critical thing to know is that Blizzard transferred all of their A-list talent from WoW to Project Titan. The “B” team took over the helm of WoW and ran it into the ground.
Don’t expect to win the NBA championship if you replace the Harlem Globetrotters with the hapless Washington Generals but that’s exactly what the geniuses at Blizzard did.
BlizzCon is a Joke
In the past when you showed up at BlizzCon, you were greeted with unapologetic kickass male gamer content like Diablo, Warcraft RTS, Starcraft, and their flagship World of Warcraft. Even the cosplay stuff was limited back in the day. Today, events like Blizzard are a magnet for throngs of annoying cosplay girls who most likely also have OnlyFans accounts.
Sadly they have not learned their lesson and are planning another pointless Inclusion Nexus lounge for alphabet people and sodomites. They have to justify the millions they are spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In contrast, Blizzard 2.0 exudes a very unserious, wimpy, LGBTQ-friendly, feminized aura. The inclusion of the Disneyesque Overwatch followed by the campy Hearthstone was a turn-off for me as a male gamer. Overwatch was Blizzard’s attempt to turn lemons into lemonade from the failed Project Titan.
The problem is that Blizzard became too big for their boots. They started believing their own hype. They were high on their own supply. Incredibly, they started believing that they would be the Disney of gaming. They had the audacity to create a Disney-type theme park for Overwatch. Nothing says narcissism more than creating an in-game shrine to yourself.
Since the release of the ill-fated Cataclysm expansion, WoW has been on a downward trajectory. In 2023, WoW is no longer cool. If WoW Classic or Hardcore didn’t exist, the future for the WoW franchise would be extremely dim.
The long-awaited return of Warfact messiah Chris Metzen is perhaps the only thing that can save the flagship franchise after alphabet simps Ion Hazzikostas and Steven Danuser have utterly destroyed the franchise with their amateur-hour shenanigans and woke pandering.
Blizzard Needs to Man Up in a Hurry
The only way Blizzard has a future is if they stop trying to appeal to everyone and start focusing on niche demographics: white male gamers. Period. Stop. End of fucking story.
In his heart, Chris Metzen knows this.
In a perfect world, Alex Afrasiabi would return triumphantly to Blizzard to run the entire show. In a less-than-perfect world, Chris Metzen would return as he appears to be doing so later on today. Now that Microsoft has purchased Acitvision-Blizzard the future is even shakier than before. Microsoft are the grim reapers of the video game world. Halo excepted, most of what they touch turns to shit and dies.
What’s Next for WoW?
About a year ago I read that Holly Longdale had formed an “experimental” team to work on WoW. I believe that the purpose of this was to chart a course for WoW Classic post-Wrath of the Lich King era. Cataclysm is when the problems started for WoW. They would be foolish to allow that to happen.
I think they are going to take WoW in a new direction using all of the assets of subsequent expacs and repurposing existing geography. That’s the smart play. This way they can let all the alphabet freaks and non-binary feminists continue to play WoW live and recapture the white male gamer niche for WoW classic. By the way, I figured this out long before the recent leaks. I was so down on Blizzard that I had no motivation to bother posting it.
The only way that the Warcraft franchise can be saved is if they can somehow find the courage to go back to their male-centric “war” — the war in “Warcraft” — conflict-based roots. It goes without saying that need to jettison all of the diversity/inclusion/representation wokeness and dumbed-down gameplay that was introduced into the MMO since Cataclysm.
Does Blizzard Entertainment deserve to die? They sure do. But they can redeem themselves if they wake up and smell the stench of death that is coming for them.
Wow Classic Plus?
A robust, reimagined WoW Classic Plus is the only path forward worth taking. If I was Microsoft, I’d resist the temptation to meddle in Blizzard’s affairs. But one thing I would do is spin the entire Warcraft team into a new studio — preferably not in the People’s Soviet Socialist Republic of California. They need to distance themselves are far away as possible from the cutsey, garish Disneyesque, globohomo trajectory that they have been traveling for 25 years and go back to male gamers making games for male gamers. They need to fire their entire diversity team, the useless trophy hires, and the HR bimbos they brought in the past few years.
Instead of forcing your political and social agenda on your customers, focus 100% on your core value proposition: making kickass video games. Anheuser-Busch, Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and a host of other companies learned this lesson the hard way. Activiosn-Blizzard will learn this as well if they don’t smarten up.
Conclusion
You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t appeal to all people, nor can you keep everybody happy. Focus on a niche, then work hard to make the consumers of that niche happy. It’s like good game design philosophy: it’s better to have a few highly polished amazing features than to have a slew of unpolished mediocre features. This is exactly the same mistake that Morhaime and his executive team learned the hard way. But have they learned?
Let’s see what happens at BlizzCon 2023.
–Wolfshead
Good read. Can’t wait to hear what you have to say about what they showed at BlizzCon today!
Thrall and Anduin are back! They let Metzen have that.. but unfortunately they’re talking about feelings again..
I am looking forward to your report from Blizzcon, though you are right, it is no longer cool. Last time I watched it in a livestream for a few seconds was to get a pet for WoW not that long ago. I played during late Warlords and Legion again, these two expansions picked up the old Orc/Draenor/Outland storyline I loved the most in WoW. I quit again after playing the open beta for Battle for Azeroth. I guess I saved myself a headache with all the Sylvanas story arcs and stuff they came up with.
I am not much into trying to re-experience nostalgia (I think it just doesn’t work), so I just cannot quite imagine me ever going back to WoW Classic and maybe trying a class I never played to max or much at all.
That you lost a reader over WoW Classic… hmm. People can be weird. I guess you lost more for going more political than for playing WoW. But some will come back. You were just earlier than most to spot where the journey is going, not in a good direction to say it overly politely.
Overwatch: Not my genre, I found the art style and the personalities and look of the heroes also rather repulsive. Like a checklist, include every perversion and fetish, sexualize the female heroes and the guys mostly still have the trademark WoW male extra-wide shoulder pads. That was never my favorite part of Metzen’s art style.
I just played a game that is literally from 2008. That was the release of the first Mount & Blade. They really did not manage to improve anything but details and even kept a lot of weaknesses, so the 2022 release looks rather dated, but a fantastic core can salvage even a low effort re-release, it’s just the same game. But this game is fun to play, nevertheless.
I very much liked Legion and even the late Warlords of Draenor, which wasn’t that well received. The world worked for me, and I didn’t play WoW for years. I must have smelt what was coming in BfA. Like the fatso humans and so on.
I hope for a new studio to create the next big thing. Re-juvenating or re-inventing WoW, I am afraid even if Metzen pulls of a minor miracle, it is somehow not the time anymore for any MMO. The genre got quite run down after WoW and people play a lot of other things by now. There is still a huge fanbase for MMOs and many will return once they feel a worthwhile MMO or fantastic new WoW expansion is there.
The next big thing is not yet there, no idea what it will be. It is for sure neither Baldur’s Gate nor Starfield.
I would not mind anything, MMO or not, to be the next mega big thing and bring me and others lots of joy, influence culture in a positive way. So, it will definitely not be an Amazon re-education game with representation for everyone and everything…
The world could use some amazing fantasy or scifi games. The real world is serious and dark enough as it is right now. Finding solace, strength and inspiration in games, not just escapism or addiction, is invaluable. I met so many interesting people playing video games and talking about them. Nowadays this somehow doesn’t work well anymore.
Why not play on private servers? There are some really solid ones, like Turtle WoW that have custom content and over 9000 daily players. I wouldn’t pay them money since they have been disrespecting their players for over a decade now.
I don’t think Chris Metzen is the messiah who will save WoW. Retail WoW is unsavable, unless they say “Syke, this was a joke!” And then say everything after Vanilla is non-canon and stop working on it and then focus on Vanilla and move it to a new graphics engine. Which won’t happen ever.
I believe Chris Metzen went to make his own studio about tabletop games or whatever, now he’s back working on WoW. Why is that? Did his tabletop venture fail or what and he wanted to come out of retirement to where the good money are?
I don’t think he cares about WoW and I think he also sees WoW as unsavable, except the narrative now is to present him as “the savior”. For me Vanilla is the best version of the game, not Classic, Vanilla, on private servers. And the feeling that WoW in this state gives me, no other version does, TBC and WoTLK feel like more and even more washed out Vanilla and after that it feels like a completely different game.
I think the last expansion I tried to play was maybe Shadowlands where they added a new starting zone for everyone, I only wanted to try it out for free to experience the feeling, well, it doesn’t feel like WoW to me. Everything happens so fast – mobs die in almost one shot, when I level up, abilities appear on their own rather than me having to go to a class trainer. It just isn’t something that I see as salvageable, unless they roll back time, which as I said, they won’t, it would be like Valve releasing CS2 and retiring CS:GO but with it all the skins people bought, this will be suicide for Valve.
Last sentence is Tl;DR
While for me this “masculine” thing is not 100% a requirement, it has sparked something inside me that got me thinking – 15-20 years ago, games weren’t like they are right now – trying to pander to someone. Sure, you say 1996-2006 Blizzard was about the masculine audience, but I don’t think so.
And the games before that too (1985-1995), although I was not born or was too young to know (born in 1991). But I’ve seen screenshots and some gameplay from old games and have tried to play some myself and they feel pretty much the same as the ones up until maybe 2010… after that it went downhill more or less.
What impression I get from games between 1980 and 2010 is they are “just games”. And they aren’t trying to pander to anything or anyone. It just feels like the developers wanted to make a game and that was it, it was well received and loved for what it was, not because it was pandering to a certain demographic or trying to hit some check boxes.
My most favorite games, some of which I still play to this day are:
– Age of Empires 2
– Heroes of Might and Magic 3
– Worms Armageddon
– The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind
– Need for Speed Underground 1
– Star Wars Galaxies
– Star Wars Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy
– Star Wars Battlefront 1
– Vanilla World of Warcraft
– Vanilla Lord of the Rings
For me these games weren’t trying to be anything for any particular audience… these games “JUST WERE”. And this is what made them so good and iconic.
Games now are failing and are disappointing, because they are trying to pander to a certain demographic, or more likely – pushing an agenda/propaganda and being poorly received is still a win for the ones calling the shots, because if they flood everything with propaganda, it converts someone and that’s good enough for them.
That’s where I think Wolfshead you are wrong, or just not entirely right. You are saying that Rings of Power or Overwatch or Velma and later seasons of Witcher TV series were woke and were hated for it and failed. Yes, that is true, but you are looking at it from a very narrow point of view – yours and that you hated them. I hated them too without even watching them, but that’s not my point.
My point is for the ones who call the shots to put the woke propaganda even a failed show or movie or game is still a victory. Because the more they do it, the more normal it will begin to feel. I also like watching that guy on YouTube OverlordDVD who’s constantly ranting against woke crap in beloved franchises like Star Wars and I agree with him to a certain extent, but he is also missing the point like you.
Even if us anti-woke people hate it and don’t play/watch it, it doesn’t matter, because some will still play/watch it. And it doesn’t matter how well it sells, because the next movie/game/TV series will be just as woke and lame and that’s what their goal is.
Think of it like drops of water against a rock. From today until 5 years, nothing will happen. But in 100-200 years, these drops of water will begin to delve into the rock and in another 300-500 years it will be an even bigger hole made by the water drops.
This is the goal they are trying to achieve. And they will achieve it slowly and steadily. When old people who are anti-woke become too old and die, the younger ones will be less anti-woke and so forth until the cleansing is complete and only “goodthink” drones remain who think woke is 100% good and something that doesn’t have woke in it is scary and offensive.
If there is no World War 3 soon and humanity gets wiped out or returns to the prehistoric era, kids in 100 years will be so scarily brainwashed by this propaganda, that anyone who sees them now will probably commit suicide out of desperation at the sight.
Now, regarding Microsoft-Activision and their WoW and D4 presentations on The Convention, I think I’ve stated here a few times that I stopped being excited about WoW after Cataclsym released and that hasn’t changed and I stopped being excited about Diablo after D3 released and this still hasn’t changed. In fact, with both games, my stance has only been reinforced.
I only read news about the Convention reveals, because I deep down wanted to be proven wrong and that they actually have plans to release something exciting, like Vanilla Plus or Classic Plus. It seems like they won’t even do that.
Before I would say Retail WoW or D4 were horrible, now I would be more objective and impartial and say they are both painfully mediocre. So mediocre that I can’t bring myself to play them even if they were free to play with no P2W or microtransactions.
There are several games I’ve bought, like ESO, which I don’t play anymore, because they made the leveling so easy that when I play, I actually feel bored and miserable rather than excited, happy and motivated. I have LOTRO with all content from level 1 to 140 and I can’t play it anymore, because they made it woke, they made it clear anyone who is anti-woke is no longer welcome, and the game is so easy that when I played on the Vanilla LOTRO private server Echoes of Angmar and saw how much better the game was in 2008, I realized I could no longer play Retail LOTRO even the woke changes are reverted – the game is just too easy to be fun.
So it’s not hard for me to avoid games that don’t excite me anymore, it’s actually becoming easier, and I don’t even feel bad about not liking them. With Retail WoW and D4, I’m more curious how long will they last as B2P/Subscription-based. There has to come a time when even the most addicted fanboys get so bored and leave. At which point they will have to make some changes to the business model. I’d imagine Retail WoW getting more free content.
I just checked the prices for D3 and D4. I’m surprised D3 is still being sold for $60 after all these years, Microsoft-Activision must have really strong beliefs that a game this old is worth this much after so many years. I personally don’t see their logic.
But at some point the future Retail WoW will have to become unsustainable and milking it has to become impossible and they would either have to make it F2P or make WoW2, which I somehow, deep down, think they are incapable of doing and even they know that well enough to not even attempt it. As for D3 and D4, they can only run on servers so they will want to shut those servers down at some point.
At the end of the day, I don’t think there is a bright future for Microsoft-Activision and ex-Blizzard games like WoW, Diablo, Overwatch or anything else – they will remain in mediocrity until the generation that grew up on these games becomes too old to play and the next one won’t play it as much. And WoW private servers will continue to remain popular for as long as there are living people who want to play some old version of the game and not give money to a company that disrespects them, but such people will become less and less.
Lots of good points!
Regarding masculinity, I agree. I don’t think it was a conscious thing that most video games and MMOs 20 years ago were made to be specifically masculine. They were masculine because males made them for males. That sense of masculinity is more appreciated today because the entertainment culture has shifted towards feminist ideals and being more inclusive. So in retrospect, WoW classic just feels more serious, more dramatic and harsher in contrast to the WoW of today which looks like a Disneyesque joke.
Over the years, Blizzard games became more female-friendly because Activision wanted Blizzard to make more money by broadening their demographic appeal. Their games became more dumbed down as well. As always, follow the money to ascertain the real reason why corporations do things.
No man can have two masters.
These old times will never return, mark my word. They would rather sink with the ship than change anything. Besides, most people who grew up with their good games got old and grew out of games. I still have the urge to play games sometimes, but compared to how I way, 5 years ago, I definitely have less and less desire to play games. Even if they return to the old times, there won’t be enough people to appreciate them, besides, there is another side to this, there need to be developers who want to do this and now there aren’t such or not enough.