One look at the amount of uncompressed, unoptimised, and incomplete bits of the game's engine would tell you that Blizzard is wholly incompetent. I don't understand how people are still blind to this. If any other company had released a game with the amount of problems and the shitty engine/graphics/gameplay/plot that SCII has, that game would have fallen completely flat. Companies like Activision buys shills out the asshole to review their games (why do you think Conan has a 69 metascore? It deserves a 0). The rest of the game's supporters are merely casuals who bought in because of the logo and the flash.
Quality doesn't sell Blizzard's games. Blizzard's logo sells Blizzard's games.
I swear I felt a sting when I saw the 'built very well' part. It's passable from the end user's point, but try to develop for that thing. Hell, after over 2 years Blizzard is still at the level where every single patch breaks maps and mods in completely undocumented ways.
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Lol the average gamer doesn't give two shits about the backend. Hell they don't even know about the backend. Uncompressed, unoptimised? Who gives a fuck?
It's all about gameplay. And the gameplay is awesome.
The performance suffers massively if the engine is not compressed or not optimised. You should certainly give a fuck if your modern machine can run most modern games, yet struggles to pull SCII melee matches on medium graphics settings. You know all those tools who say 'don't play SCII if you don't have a good computer'? SCII uses a 2006-7 engine and runs poorly on 2012 machines. That doesn't happen with most other games, because the engines are generally better-compressed than SCII's. For the record, WarCraft III runs like shit on modern technology as well, but because the game's engine is so old anyways it isn't nearly as taxing as, say, Diablo III - which is an even worse mess.
I also think it's hilarious that you say the gameplay is awesome. SCII matches are extremely boring. The only fun I'll ever have watching replays is when I cast low-level matches where people use retarded tactics like gundam rushing and proxy Nexxi. Quite the contrary to SCII's high-level scene, SC:BW had interesting high-level matches that often had a lot of back and forth. There was a lot to talk about in SC:BW. Not so in SCII.
But hey, as long as casuals buy into games without no/low skill ceilings (like SCII), these titles will turn a profit. I still won't view them as successes.
Yeah I'm not a big fan of Westernhagen either, Fanta vier much better! But they didn't drop the lyrics that fit the situation. Farty: Ich bin wieder hier; nobody: in meinem Revier; Me: war nie wirklich weg