WoW - The Burning Crusade - Shatters Sales Records

I would certainly agree,chamr, that anyone saying "Blizzard has never innovated at all." is talking some trash. The very term 'Diablo clone' now famous in the industry, has to say that. Everything Blizzard has done in the past has been smart, gamer friendly and personally for me a lot of fun as well.
I'm curious, however about Blizzard's future, as I firmly believe that a company is only as good as its employees. I'm sure Blizz has the cash to hire the best, but then many would argue, they already had the best and ran them off.
I really wonder what will happen next for them. They haven't attempted a new game since Roper, et al. left, and correct me if I'm wrong, an expansion to an existing game is all they have to show for what..the last two or three years?
Although it's hard to forecast too much gloom and doom for them with those sales figures breaking limits unknown to man:)
 
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I would certainly agree,chamr, that anyone saying "Blizzard has never innovated at all." is talking some trash. The very term 'Diablo clone' now famous in the industry, has to say that.
Success is never a sign for innovation. The fact that the term "Diablo Clone" is nowadays often used to describe a certain type of game does not automatically mean that Blizzard were the first ones to come up with it. Take WoW for example. Without doubt WoW was not the first MMORPG, and certainly it was not very innovative. If you look at Everquest, Everquest 2, Asheron's Call, AC2, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, and all the other games that went live before WoW then you have to realize that these games partly or in full possessed all the features that WoW has - in some aspects they surpassed them by far. Still, already today you can hear the term "WoW Clone."

Now, I guess we should not turn this into some kind of "Is/was Blizzard innovative?" debate, since that has also a bit to do with personal perspective or point of view. And, looking at the op, this wasn't the main question anyway... it was more about WoW being innovative or not.
 
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Still, already today you can hear the term "WoW Clone."

To the point of being nonsensical! WoW borrows much of the character look and feel from the Warhammer characters as detailed in many arguments, yet many articles now call anything that looks like that a WoW clone. Even Mage Knight Apocalypse, which has plenty of flaws of its own, was getting called a WoW clone in early (clueless) reviews ... despite being a single player action RPG ...
 
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Only if you play them wrong. Incidentally, Ion, that was an awesome blizzard of obfuscatory bullshit, and the funniest thing I've read all week.
 
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Success is never a sign for innovation.

:S Surely you didn't mean to use the word "never".

I'm not claiming Blizzard was the first to come up with action-RPG's and RTS's. I'm asserting they were (prior to WoW) innovative in those genres. As you indicate in your post, "innovative" and "the first" are not necessarily the same thing.

Also, it's a bit of false analogy to devalue the pervasive "Diablo-clone" term in gaming literature just because a few hacks are using "WoW-clone" these days at the height of WoW mania. Check back in 9 or 10 years and see if every single MMORPG is referred to as a "WoW-clone" like every single action-RPG is referred to as a "Diablo-clone" today.

Diablo can trace a good deal of it's lasting success to Blizzard's innovations in the context of the genre. For instance, were they the first to come up with on-line multi-play? Of course not. But the way they implemented that feature and the fact they did it in an action-RPG was truly innovative. Battle.net was, arguably, the biggest factor in the franchise’s unprecedented longevity. So in this case, I would argue that success certainly was an indication of innovation.
 
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Blizzard is innovative for making an "uber" formula that produces quality products that sell well everytime. Wow is just one example of the use of that formula. They transformed the aging and flawed concept of everquest mmog into high quality wow-mmog that everyone wants to play.
 
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:S Surely you didn't mean to use the word "never".

I would rather say that success is never a guarantee of innovation or quality or ... well, anything.

Relentless pursuit of a quality experience seems something Blizzard does very well at - regardless of the fact that the game of theirs I played the most was also the one that completely turned me off of RPG for ~7 years!
 
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:S Surely you didn't mean to use the word "never".

I'm not claiming Blizzard was the first to come up with action-RPG's and RTS's. I'm asserting they were (prior to WoW) innovative in those genres. As you indicate in your post, "innovative" and "the first" are not necessarily the same thing.

Also, it's a bit of false analogy to devalue the pervasive "Diablo-clone" term in gaming literature just because a few hacks are using "WoW-clone" these days at the height of WoW mania. Check back in 9 or 10 years and see if every single MMORPG is referred to as a "WoW-clone" like every single action-RPG is referred to as a "Diablo-clone" today.

Diablo can trace a good deal of it's lasting success to Blizzard's innovations in the context of the genre. For instance, were they the first to come up with on-line multi-play? Of course not. But the way they implemented that feature and the fact they did it in an action-RPG was truly innovative. Battle.net was, arguably, the biggest factor in the franchise’s unprecedented longevity. So in this case, I would argue that success certainly was an indication of innovation.

Indeed, my mistake... what I meant was that success is not necessary a sign of innovation. And I didn't mean to devalue the term Diablo-clone (if that is possible) - I just wanted to express that such terms are rather an indicator that a game was very succesful than an indicator that it was very innovative. I mean, just take the WoW-example. You can say about the game what you want, but in a way WoW hit the mmo scene like a truck. I'm sure it will leave a lasting impression. People are using the term WoW-clone already, and almost noone talkes about Ultima Online anymore, although UO was certainly a major step in the course of mmorpg history. Such terms come and go and mean almost nothing. Might well be, that in the case of Diablo success was an indication of innovation... it's hard to tell for me. I never was a big fan of Diablo, although I played the first part.
True innovation, I think, is hard to find nowadays. You know, it is an accepted fact in literature that innovation in literature is almost non-existing. Writers nowadays get most of their ideas from other literature (and the rest from other media) - there is hardly an idea that they create themselves.
Admittedly literature is a bit older than computer games, but for me parallels are obvious. Most of the basic genres were created in the pre-pc area. Companies later on developped and mixed them as technical possibilities grew. But is that innovation? Guess that greatly depends on point of view.
 
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Fair enough. I think I'm just using a looser definition for "innovation" than you are. "Nothing new under the sun" and all that...
 
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Blizzard isn't all that innovative, in most cases some small company invents it in some small game, and Blizzard copies it and makes it a standard. They are very good at combining the best features to make the most solid games. Warcraft was never "new" in any way - RPG elements in strategy games? Wasn't new, strategy games in general? Come on, there were dozens before WC1.

The term "diablo clone" comes from Diablo being the biggest, the game that set the standard, not by being the most innovative. Remember that innovative means first, it means to invent something. There were action RPGs before D1, there were strategy games long before WC1/Starcraft, and there were MMOs with all of WoWs features before WoW, but Blizzard still set the standard by combining all the greatest features(well, a lot at least) into one game, and making it a polished, solid product. That's what they're good at.

True innovation still exists of course, and there isn't any less now than before, but there has always been far inbetween good inventions. For every good invention, there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of poor ones.

Just like graphical operating systems - Microsoft weren't the innovative ones, they copied it and made it a standard.
 
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