Starting off, I think Blizzard All-Stars is a defensive move from Blizzard to keep such players on the Battle Net platform. I don’t think it is Blizzard’s intention that there is a ton of growth in this area or profit (there is neither).
RTS is my genre. I remember Guinsinoo (or whatever his name was) and the original Starcraft version of DOTA back then. I remember DOTA being made by the Warcraft 3 community (which it was and certainly wasn’t made by Icefrog. Most of the content in DOTA was ripped from Blizzard’s Warcraft 3 and most of the spells were stolen from other people’s work. There was so much stealing of people’s JASS codes back then).
DOTA has been, and continues to be, a joke to me. The only reason why it exists is because RTS gameplay overshot most users. Most people couldn’t handle the complexity of Warcraft 3. But they could handle the mono-hero Warcraft 3 (i.e. DOTA). Starcraft 2, which is also very, very complicated, also goes over most people’s heads. This complication of the RTS is why things like DOTA exist.
In the past, RTS games were nowhere near as complex. Most Starcraft Broodwar multiplayer games, including South Korea, were played on maps like Big Game Hunters (a map with infinite resources). Since Warcraft 3, Blizzard began controlling maps for match mapping and this is why most of those players found alternatives in custom maps (i.e. tower defense, DOTA, simplistic alternatives to proper RTS gameplay). I actually like Big Game Hunters and think people should play the game however they want. I was involved in the making of the original high resource map for the original Red Alert (the map called hjk because the designer, Dr. Frank, saved it before he thought of a name. It got released and spread all over).
RTS gaming became popular because of the Internet and the social nature that Internet multiplayer brought. RTS gaming has become less popular because RTS gaming has tried to be about ‘skill’ (i.e. E-sports) instead of a social nature.
And I think Blizzard is on to something with BALLS (Blizzard All-Stars).
Blizzard correctly has analyzed that the reason why people are playing these MOBA games isn’t for E-Sports or ‘skillz’, but as a social interaction over the Internet. BALLS is designed to be primarily a social interaction game and not about ‘skillz’.
“Then it sucks! OMG, no one is going to play it!” says the League of Legends or DOTA 2 fan. But this is exactly what the Starcraft 2 fan once said.
“But there are millions of people who play games like LoL which is free!” Yeah, and there is about ten million people who play World of Warcraft which ISN’T free. I think everyone is severely underestimating Blizzard’s ability in Internet multiplayer.
Blizzard has made BALLS to be something WoW-lite. WoW mostly revolves around people of different roles working together. There is the tank, the healer, and the DPS. BALLS seems to revolve around that trinity as well as adding the siege. BALLS seriously threatens to undercut not other MOBAS but WoW itself. However, Blizzard undercutting itself is where it wants to be instead of another company doing it.
BALLS appears to be focused entirely on the team aspect of the game and how well the roles perform with each other. Just as WoW is not a complex game solo but becomes more complex managing ten to twenty five people to work together, BALLS will likely have its complexity be within the team managing instead of the solo performance.
From everyone I’m talking to who is playing these MOBA games, they aren’t playing because of ‘last killing skillz’, they are playing for the social interaction and team interaction.
I wouldn’t underestimate Blizzard on this one.
How BALLS will differentiate itself…
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