Released to wide acclaim in a year long before most of you idiots were born, Warcraft III is better than ever, and the launch of Patch 1.31 represents a revolution for Blizzard Entertainment and its parent company, Union Carbide. “Early Access” is the latest innovation made possible by the ubiquitous nature of the modern internet, where a company releases a shitty videogame, and when you call it shit, the company and its fans can claim it is in “Early Access” and that you need to give it more time.
So as part of the never-ending quest for corporations to retroactively engineer culture and art in the pursuit of their bottom line, Blizzard Entertainment has hired a team of graduate students who have never lived a day in their adult lives where real-time strategy games were important, and asked them to “fix” a game that never needed to be fixed.
This is because we no longer pretend videogames are fixed and tangible, instead claiming they are a “service”, and in combination with the sort of consumer-friendly laws that ensure Mickey Mouse will forever be the property of Disney, we can update and revise games into perpetuity for maximum profits.
Now some of you more cynical types would probably suggest that the transition of Warcraft III to the Battle.net 2.0 platform happens to coincide with major mechanical and programming changes to the game, the kind to stonewall the rebellious types who would build the illegal servers in order to deny Robert A. Kotick his third yacht.
The reality is that videogame players are both children and adults who act like children. With help from the internet, the individuals who lose well over half their games can now take to the official messageboard and take control of their destiny, not by “GITTING GUD”, but by complaining that the developer needs to fix their crappy game.
The end-result – or shall we say, the never-ending result – is a game where there is always something new to explore, always a breath of fresh air, because the developer is artificially forcing the evolution of tactics and strategy so that clueless journalists and idiot players can wonder how Dota 2 and League of Legends stay fresh after all these years.
Blizzard Entertainment is giving the children exactly what they want, delivering the game-changing update in which they quickly backpedal on the Control Magic change, because nobody working on the game actually knows what they are doing, beyond the fact that if they make changes, they can justify the salary that allows them to purchase the food which they can then consume in order to sate their biological necessities.
So instead of using this as a golden opportunity to follow the model laid forward by Age of Empires II and Doom and the other classic videogames which have been receiving “official” expansion packs and updates, the bean counters at Blizzard have determined the company is strapped for cash and does not have the finances for a follow-up to The Frozen Throne, perhaps the kind where Sylvanas and Jaina finally kiss.
The result is that this exciting march into Early Access will make pretty much nobody happy and inject zero interest into a genre that pretty much nobody plays anymore, because new technologies and new games mean a new time in history, while aggravating the shit out of the people who were happily enjoying the game for close to two decades and without interruption.
But no matter what happens, Warcraft III represents just another exciting part of the timeline in which rapidly-changing technological progress alters the social norms and means of capitalism, allowing a corporate construct that exists purely to make a profit to salt the earth of a classic 2003 videogame so that it can slightly increase its year-to-year operating revenues in 2019.
Me and all the other Warcraft III fans can’t wait to see how the game plays out as it moves into the closed beta phase sometime in the 2030s, but that’s a long way out. The game is in Early Access and we to support Blizzard in this difficult time for him and his loved ones.