Pretty damn cool experience. Definitely the most polished browser game I've tried. The limited scope really makes it fantastic and since it's such a small vertical slice the world feels very full of detail. The art style is fantastic as well.
To you it might sound like a lot of effort but for a user who is on his 1 day off for the week not having to wait twice the amount of time to log in to play his game probably means more than you or I could ever imagine. Blizzard used to be about making everyone have an excellent experience and some of the legacy features they've had for years seriously still do show what kind of commitments to that fact they have made in the past.
I think you're also over-estimating how hard it is to flag something as not-necessary for the majority of users. Especially when downloading a fresh copy of a new expansion. If you know most players aren't going to be in the final boss lair for 3 weeks but still ship the game with that content it's not unimaginable to just allow the game to download those files in the background.
Blizzards downloaded is top tier. The startup time from initial, bare bones install to playable is very fast.
It starts with placeholder content to get you running, and anything immediately necessary for your area. For example, if you’re in a capital city, it doesn’t wait to download the entire city, just where you are. It can rough out the other areas and add details almost in real time as you start making your way through it.
Things get more difficult if you mount up and start flying more world to load, but even still it doesn’t load it all.
There’s certainly a cost, there can be FPS loss during busy areas, but by the time you get to something important, it should all be loaded.
Contrived example is you’re in a raid, some reason you feel you need to reinstall, you could do that, fire up the game, it’ll load the raid and by the time you hit the first boss, it’ll all be there. This will take minutes.
Since I leave the client running, it updates in the background. During new releases it starts to download the entirety of the new release a couple of weeks before it’s due, to get the bulk of the content down. When they cut the release, it’s typically a much smaller update to turn the new content on. I rarely have to wait to play the game.
Experiencing a few other games makes me really appreciate the work Blizzard had done in this regard. It’s top drawer.
Gaming industry is notoriously crunch time. Feels a hard ask to spend any resources on partially downloaded gameplay vs the mountain of bugs which likely exist in the non-quantum state of download-or-not.
Steam supports this as well but actually I have read that it is a lot of effort.
Firstly, your entire asset pipeline which combines and compresses resources needs to be aware of it.
Secondly, it's work that can't be reused cross platform. (The effort for Steam will not apply to PS5&etc).
Thirdly, it's another configuration to test, and as the user will forget about the feature after they get started playing, it's natural to just say it's too much effort.
I just need to comment that this is alarmist and ridiculous. I have had no issues running old applications on modern versions of windows whatsoever.
If anything, I think it's particularly impressive that Windows has as much backwards compatibility as possible going back to some of the earliest popular versions of windows.
At most, you could argue that BASIC and DOS are the biggest examples of us losing compatibility but realistically noone cares because they can be emulated at speeds a thousandfold the hardware they once existed on.
The most terrifying part about steam is them banning you arbitrarily or your account being hacked.
That's the real concern not some kind of compatibility nonsense.
