Is Blizzard the Best in the industry?

[Azzanation]

Hynad said:

WoW killed Warcraft for me, so no.

More seriously,  I'd say they're among the best in the industry (along with the likes of Naughty Dog, who have made 4 pretty different franchises and nailed each of their respective game genre). Blizzard's games are always greatly polished and of quality only a select few matches in the industry.

But I think they've lost a lot of the energy and originality they had during the 90s.

I am more interested in knowing what those 4 genres Naughty Dog nailed? I can think of Crash being one of them, which is fair enough, they were fun platformers, but what are the other 3? Kart racing went from Great with CTR to below average with Jak X. There next platformer series Jak and Daxter are far from top of the table games. I would consider them good games but there nothing above that, let’s be totally honest here. There’s a reason they stopped making them. Naughty Dog are great at making linear action experiences like Uncharted and they did make great platformers with Crash for the PS1, however years later there next attempts at platforming and kart racing fell below par. Which is why you don’t see them jumping into those genres anymore. Rockstar are the same, they can produce GOTY games like Red Dead and GTA however that’s the only genre they work on.

I am saying what a company can do now, not what they did 2 to 3 generations ago. I use to consider Rare the best in the industry in the 90s but its quite clear that Rare of today is far from that mark, much like ND are with Crash. If we go by what you mentioned with ND and the genres they covered years ago then Rare would still hold that crown today by a big margin.

As for Blizzard losing their energy compared to the 90s? Not sure how they lost energy when today they have a lot more on their plate and become so much more as a company then what they ever dreamed of becoming.