Should Legacy of the Void Come Out At All?
Yes, Blizzard should finish and release Legacy of the Void. The first two of StarCraft II’s three parts, Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm, are already out, development of the third part is underway, and there is little sense in Blizzard quitting at this point. A better question is whether there should ever be a StarCraft III.
Blizzard censors criticism of StarCraft II aggressively. That censorship does not extend to the standard whining about this or that aspect of the game being overpowered; if Blizzard did that, there wouldn’t be many posts left in the Battlenet forums. Blizzard does censor serious critiques of the game itself. When a company believes its product cannot stand on its own two feet, that company is actually saying something quite negative about its product. Here is what will happen if you, for example, suggest that matchmaking is broken because it is routinely pairing bronze and platinum players, that the HOTS campaign was a step down in quality from the WOL campaign, that multiplayer has become tedious for most players both because it is often impossible to progress through the leagues and because the maps and build orders become boring, and that Blizzard’s effort to get people to look at the arcade games is effectively an admission that the company is losing market share now as people run from the game for the reasons mentioned above (among others):
Wow. Why is Blizzard’s response to bad news to kill the messenger instead of trying to fix the problem? Heaven help you if you make a forum post setting forth why the thing Blizzard considers most important above all in StarCraft II, balance, is what is actually destroying the game, and that the more they pander to the few pro gamers with the kind of mental processes that insist on this notion of balance, the worse the game becomes for normal consumers (a game in which keyboard actions per minute must be in the three figures for a player to succeed, and entire strategies much be timed out to milliseconds in the early game, just doesn’t work for regular folks). It’s astonishing that anyone ever believed that eSports would pay off for Blizzard as a strategy for getting rich off of StarCraft II, but it is not at all astonishing that this misdirected focus has sent casual gamers fleeing from the game.
Of course, Blizzard deserves this fate because of its abhorrent corporate behavior. From the initial greedy refusal to let families play the game because Blizzard wants each individual person using a computer to buy a separate copy of the game, to the current desperate episodes of censorship, the company doesn’t have much redeeming value. But StarCraft II’s fans don’t deserve it.
