The name Blizzard is still magical to me. As the maybe 15-year old playing Warcraft II and drawing strategies on a piece of paper.
I don't play computer games anymore. But it was magical.
Not just "like" - they are a completely different company.
It's well known that in the wake of the huge success of WoW they had to completely re-organize the company in order to be able to properly support a game with an active audience of that size. Their size, their structure, their culture, everything changed.
Back in the day, Starcraft was my thing. I didn't get into Diablo too much, but I thought it was cool. I remember playing the original up to the final level. A few years ago, I played and beat it on my retro PC, and it was exactly as fun as I remembered it.[0] I tried Warcraft, but I didn't get into it.
Even outside of the recent scandal, I've long had mixed feelings about Blizzard: harassing independent servers, always-connected DRM (I got booted out of single-player CoD: MW so many times), and milking franchises with remasters. I will say, though, that after a several year hiatus, a friend and I have discovered StarCraft 2 co-op with weekly mutations, and it's a lot of fun.
SC 2 recently went free-to-play. If the rest of their catalog is added to Game Pass, that will be something. Blizzard games have been stubbornly expensive years after release. I wonder what this means for Battle.net?
