On the one hand its cool Blizzard came with remasters of Warcraft I & II. But it is a shame they don't just open source these things and throw them into the public domain (I wonder if it would even impact sales all that much, maybe). Practically speaking these things have been leaked or reverse engineered already anyway. From what I gather from one reviewer is that those communities in a lot of aspects do a better job than what Blizzard themselves did with these remakes.
Discussion
The fact that gaming companies never open source anything anymore, even their thirty year old shit they don't even TRY to sell anymore, is a travesty. It was never that popular, but look at what cultural cornerstones Doom and Quake managed to become. Being great games helped a lot, but opening them for the community to maintain is what solidified their positions.
Of course, if you're still playing Doom or Quake or Warcraft 1/2/3 or original StarCraft, how much harder is it to convince you to buy the latest rerelease or shitty sequel? Or what if a competitor *gasp* moderately improved their code by studying yours? Fuck the culture, we need to make 0.3% more profit.
The mistake is thinking we would need any new games in the first place.
FPS was perfected with Q3
RTS was done with Broodwar
I'm partial to QuakeWorld myself. That movement is so gooooood. Brood War was amazing, but there are definitely some nice quality of life changes it could get, like larger selection groups. I'm fond of Beyond All Reason and Zero-K these days for RTS.
No, larger unit selection groups would favor zerg too much. With remastered they barely touched the game itself which is good. They made the engine handle more stuff and fixed some minor things.
People don't want good games, they want new games.
i am addicted to Kingdom: Two Crowns these days and what i like about it, even though it's kinda shitty and stuff, is how it visualises the notion of being able to manage only a small part of a system that you set commands on... it's literally like a metaphor of computer programming
stories are really important mostly, with games, a lot of games get away with just putting the same old mechanics with an engaging storyline, so, there is really a lot of games that are the same but have interesting enough stories to carry them, but when they are sandbox games, this is a recipe for boredom, and only can work when humans are the opponents
if you don't have stories, or other people to make the game interesting, you need to construct a genuinely different game mechanic scheme
so, yeah, good games are usually new mechanics, mostly people just want new stories, new skins, more fancy graphics and "smarter" control interfaces, and really new games are pretty rare and hard to find, and often are done badly
nostr:nprofile1qqs9afryspzmk8ljyfj4mhfkumwwmhzrtyxzvzgvfp477w80g5x6t0gppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehgu3wvfskuep0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9ugrlzw0 foreshadowing a new starcraft podcast with nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxmhwden5te0wfjkccte9emk2um5v4exucn5vvhxxmmd9uq3xamnwvaz7tmhda6zuat50phjummwv5hsx7c9z9