Lets assume you were a veteran investor, that knows about everything that goes behind the market.
What would be your "best" assumption of d3 release date?
Some investors base their decision from the game director's attitude or even by small things like Jay Wilson's posture in Blizzcon, etc.... This is actually what happens when you take NZT Pill (from the movie Limitless)
You gather bits of information from all over the place and put the pieces together. Was Jay Wilson confident about the current state of the game in Blizzcon? How many programmers work on the game? Looking at the trend of working speed and etc.
I'll give my assumption first.
According to Blizzcon 2010 interview, Jay Wilson wasn't able to give answers to many questions that people asked in Q/A session. He also stated that "There were no variations on Demon Hunter skill yet, meaning no rune addition"
He also said "we're working on finding the best way to trade, and looked unsure of the current state with trading"
I'm also very confident that there were no real work done on the battle net side. The network that connects all the users together. Considering they always "iterate", god knows how long the battle net will be done.
I predict the release date is going to be somewhere 2012 2Q. Blizzard works rediculously slow, they always say they "iterate"... what they need to do is sit down on a group table, and pick the best idea and stick with it. Their losing so much time just implementing and coding things that are not even goign to be used.
Wizard's TP won't matter any more since every class now has a mobility skill.
It all comes down to the one build that kills the quickest. However, They have also said that farming bosses will no longer be the best way to farm gear. So, there is really no telling what class will be the best because we do not know what the best way to farm is now.
Huh? I'm pretty sure killing hell bosses is going to be the best way to find lewt.
No matter what blizzard has planned out, it will require some sort of monster killing.
It makes logical sense to kill bosses, which are the strongest monster in the game..... is it not ?
Its weird that blizzard would say someting like that, hope its not true
I'm curious as to what the "best" or the "standard" MF group will consist of. [I'm very positive that there will be the best method of killing a certain boss. just like how Hammerdin was the "standard" in d2]
4 Wizards? 4 Barbarians? or a mix between the 5 characters?
If I were to form a group to MF, I'll go for a 4 wizard group.
If we come across a massive number of monsters, one of us could have freezing chain lighting and the other stun chain lighting and maybe also extra damage just to kill faster.
And using teleportation to get to the boss faster, although theres a 8 sec cool down. (Still faster than other chars)
The massive final boss will stand no chance as meteors will shatter their bones into pieces.
Well, not EVERY monster will drop loot Imagine that. But every time you see a piece of loot drop it only shows up on your screen.
Cool I thought it was only for bosses.
But thats a nice feature to have. Maybe this will motivate more players to play in groups now.
Since theres nothing to lose by playing with other players, and plus it doenst get boring after all.
Diablo's difficulty and difference between single player to multiplayer is designed differently than the game you mentioned. With diablo, the entire game is soloable which I like since I mostly play SP. The difference from what you mentioned is that rather than making it harder for single players, they increase the difficulty for multiplayers. This is a better system IMO. There is no reason to punish those who want to play SP.
SP is preference. But my concern is will it completely nullify the need for Group play?
For example, doing Andy run. Soloing Hell Andy was easy, with such difficulty level, group play becomes pointless.
My point was, adjust the difficulty of solo, such that it doesnt take away the group play component.
I played couple of RPG games where the gameplay is 95% identical to Diablo, except it was an MMO. (1500 per server)
You can take a look at the game at www.cabal.com
I'll be comparing the two games, and find problems within Diablo 3 and how it can be improved.
[This is totally subjective, if you have different opinions, feel free to post]
Cabal was a great game for many reason. It rewarded Group dungeon instance runs, and most of "epic loot" were from these dungeons. How did it reward group play? They made soloing these dungeons almost impossible unless you had the equipment which drop from the dungeon. So, unless you had one of the best gears out in the market "solo" was not a choice. And the only to go about getting these items were, going into the newer released dungeon with group of 5 guys, trying to finish it as fast as possible. Time was a big factor because there was a time limit. You had to move fast, and move onto the next component of the dungeon as soon as you finish the previous one.
The difficulty of these dungeons were set such that you cannot effectively solo on your own.
If you were to solo with "medium-high" gear... it would take you anywhere up to 1 hour where as group of 3~5 would take you around 15~20 minutes. [Some top guilds were able to do some of the hardest one in 10 mins, thats where they really gained edge over others with gears] They were able to complete dungeon so fast, that they did countless number of dungeon runs every day. While few struggled to even finish.
Now notice, this is a dungeon. It is bound to take quite a long time to finish.
The rate at which monsters die in Cabal is similar to Diablo 2 with moderate gear. If you have moderate gear, killing a monster obviously takes just as long as it would in Diablo 2. But this is not an attack same monster for 10 mins and kill. The monsters die pretty fast once you obtain good gear, and high end gear raped these dungeons.
After a month or so later these patches, most people were able to do them solo. But of course, it still took them a lot longer than they would when they joined up with 1 ~ 2 more players of the same calibre.
Conclusion.
Soloing is good, but the difficulty in Diablo 2 made it such that Solo was the only way to MF. Diablo 2 Failed to capture the essence of group/party play. So, Diablo 3 needs to boost the difficulty of Hell, after all, this is the end game, this is the last place we resort to for all our monster killings. If monsters gave little to no challenge, then the game wouldn't be as exciting. There would be no thrill, there would be no strategy, there would be no group play. In my opinion, once you get to a certain point, it was more like a single player in Diablo 2. You constantly remake the room with pw, so you can run MF from act1 ~ act5, and repeat this process for hours and hours.
I got burnt out from this, and had little to no enjoyment from it.
I'm not saying make soloing impossible, but design it such that the time you spend on finishing the instance on your own is not merely worth the effort. Group of 1~2 would be a reasonable number once players obtain "top of the line" gears, but soloing should still be somewhat hard even with these gears.
Otherwise, we'll be witnessing the seperation of diablo 3 community as it was the case for Diablo 2.
P.S - How about design the difficulties where once you obtain a decent gear.
Make Nightmare in Diablo 3 like Hell in diablo 2. Solo Mf is possible but group is waste of time.
Make Hell in Diablo 3 harder, so soloing is still possible but its hard. Group play is the best choice for the instances in Hell.
Achieving max level in d2 was quite ludicrous. You literally had to do bajilion baal runs.
Most level 99 were bots anyways.
D3 will make achieving max lvl more reasonable this time around.
Level 60 should be hard in some sense, but not "d2" hard
I'm not sure how beta key will work.
Blizzard said their not going to give beta keys because they don't want people making money off from it.
So will Diablofans host contest and get the winner's battle net account and email them to blizzard?
I feel like this is whats probably going to happen.
Giving keys strictly in its own, might create problem that blizzard always wanted to avoid. Which is beta-key market on ebay. These things will prob go for $500+ on Ebay.
I think Blizzard will prob request for battle net account of the contest winners from diablofans.com
and they'll add the game to the winner's acc.
I disagree. I think casual gamers stick to one genre more than hardcore gamers. Because they don't play a lot of games, they tend to stick to the ones they know they will like. Hardcore gamers understand the differences in game genres and are not afraid of the different playstyle. Although some diehards will only play one genre.
I think that Diablo 3 has very little competition out there. People who want to play D3 will play D3 no matter what other games are out there at the moment. I also think that Blizzard has enough popularity that even casual gamers recognize the name and may be interested in trying Diablo for their first time.
We'll just have to see.
It's Blizzard's role to attract gamers from different genre.
And one way to do it is, by ads and tons of it. This strategy wont work, if the entire gaming market is flooded with gaming ads that are soon to come; The games I've mentioned before.
I used to be a salesman in video games and i can safely assume that people who like FPS and RTS won't be looking for games from other genres. If there's nothing new for their favorite genre they usually go for budget games that received good reviews in the past.
Besides, Blizzard always overhypes their games before the release. Previews in magazines and sites, commercials and more important than everything: fans of the franchise that talk too much to their friends. Think of StarCraft II for example. The timing of the release wasn't ideal, yet it killed off (almost) everything else at that time.
Again like i said, your targeting the "hardcore" gamers. A typical or "casual" gamers don't have a set "GENRE" they only play. They are more mutual on the selection of games they want to try, for what I know, they are willing to try all games out there. It's blizzard's marketing strategy to appeal to thoes casual gamers who might play all different genre.
You think they even know what "FPS" or "RTS" or "RPG" stands for ?
Only targeting thoes people who play "RPG" is a bad strategy from Blizzard is prob not the case.
You need to attract the rest of 6 billion+ population not just 1 million hardcore gamers in the world. probably less.
4Q 2011 ~ 1Q 2012 is going to be when All gamers from different RTS, RPG, FPS will be hunting down for a new game.
Think about if D3 was missing on the list.
I am not an expert at marketing strategy but it seems like Blizzard might put themselves in a bad situation if they pass 4Q of 2011 for their D3 release. As far as platforms are concerned, D3 is going to be released for PC and then consoles few months or years later. The problem that I see is, there are "WAY" too many games that people are anticipating to be released, just like we are for D3. Could this hinder the sales of D3? As much as I love Blizzard games, the truth of the matter is not many people know about them. More people found out about Blizzard with the release of SC2. (Thoes who are not Hardcore gamers)
Lets face it. Casual gamers who play few hours a week are not going to be remember every single game developer company, even if their the biggest one.
The number of casual gamers far outweighs the hardcore gamers. Some people who play 1 hour a day are what we call "Typical gamers" and not a game addict. This is the "Big" target market Blizzard wants to aim for. and of course, they also want to bring in you hardcore Blizzard fans, but they know your going to buy the game anyway.
This is the reason why they make the game more "dumbed" down. A method which will be more appealing to casual gamers.
"Auto-stats, Easier to see follow UI, simple dialogs, Simple Skill tree"
Heck but this all wont matter if these casual gamers get lost in the midst of all these great games coming out in 4Q 2011 to 1Q 2012. This is the golden time of oppertunity.
Some of the highly anticipated games to be released in 4Q 2011 ~ 1Q 2012 are, guild wars 2, Starwars: MMO, and Battlefield 3 and a couple more.
Side Note: [I'm not a big fan of Battlefield 3, But just do be a favor and watch. http://www.youtube.com/user/Battlefield#p/u/2/ekDutunw1mk]
I respect Blizzard's choice and their priorities. But realistically speaking from an economic point of view of the company, they need to speed things up, as I'm guessing they are already.
It comes down to, quality vs quantity. But how much sales would you be suffering just to make the game "tiny" bit better? Delaying 4months ~ 6months is going to be huge this year. It almost should be avoided.
The faster they get "casual" gamers attention with "Beta" and send out the message that this game is indeed coming in 2011, it will create a narrower view for casual gamers to decide on what games to buy.
Whatever happens, happens. But at least they can dictate when they want to sell their products.
And I propose that 4Q 2011 will be the best time of their release, with beta being the "Audience grabber" during 3Q of 2011.
So... What's up with the diablo forum on battle.net?
Its the worst I've ever seen.....
Not only it blocks new users but it also BLOCKS old gamers like myself !
I dont understand how their login system works, I have both classic and LOD on my account.
but when i log in and hop on to d3 forum, im not logged any more. and whats up with the cd-key?
Can anyone tell me how to log in on bnet diablo ?
[Never thought i'd ever ask this.... sigh]
The better quality of beta testers = a better D3. We should have a vote to whom gets a couple of the keys because I know of a few people on this site that would truly dedicate themselves to providing excellent feedback on what the community as a whole wants.
You know... Blizzard value's opinion from noob players as well.
Its part of the working process with representation of their content.
While hardcore gamers who'll play 9+ hrs a day is good way to find bugs, glitches or exploit, Noobs who generally are new to Action RPG might be better to find out what the game actually feels like on their hands for the first time.
Is it too confusing? Are there any parts you thought you were lost? Does the "Help" actually Help...
you know what I mean.
P.S - I think at one point blizzard actually told in Q/A session that they prefer "Noobies" than hardcore gamers.
Just to make sure that the game has a strong "starting point" for these new players to adventure off.
I'm just curious, do tickets run out in the first 60 seconds becuz ppl tr to sell it on ebay?
I might as well try that myself. Its rediculous how fast this thing goes out on sale.
Superbowl of the internet
0
What would be your "best" assumption of d3 release date?
Some investors base their decision from the game director's attitude or even by small things like Jay Wilson's posture in Blizzcon, etc.... This is actually what happens when you take NZT Pill (from the movie Limitless)
You gather bits of information from all over the place and put the pieces together. Was Jay Wilson confident about the current state of the game in Blizzcon? How many programmers work on the game? Looking at the trend of working speed and etc.
I'll give my assumption first.
According to Blizzcon 2010 interview, Jay Wilson wasn't able to give answers to many questions that people asked in Q/A session. He also stated that "There were no variations on Demon Hunter skill yet, meaning no rune addition"
He also said "we're working on finding the best way to trade, and looked unsure of the current state with trading"
I'm also very confident that there were no real work done on the battle net side. The network that connects all the users together. Considering they always "iterate", god knows how long the battle net will be done.
I predict the release date is going to be somewhere 2012 2Q. Blizzard works rediculously slow, they always say they "iterate"... what they need to do is sit down on a group table, and pick the best idea and stick with it. Their losing so much time just implementing and coding things that are not even goign to be used.
So yea. I predict 2Q 2012
0
Huh? I'm pretty sure killing hell bosses is going to be the best way to find lewt.
No matter what blizzard has planned out, it will require some sort of monster killing.
It makes logical sense to kill bosses, which are the strongest monster in the game..... is it not ?
Its weird that blizzard would say someting like that, hope its not true
0
4 Wizards? 4 Barbarians? or a mix between the 5 characters?
If I were to form a group to MF, I'll go for a 4 wizard group.
If we come across a massive number of monsters, one of us could have freezing chain lighting and the other stun chain lighting and maybe also extra damage just to kill faster.
And using teleportation to get to the boss faster, although theres a 8 sec cool down. (Still faster than other chars)
The massive final boss will stand no chance as meteors will shatter their bones into pieces.
What does your group consist?
0
Cool I thought it was only for bosses.
But thats a nice feature to have. Maybe this will motivate more players to play in groups now.
Since theres nothing to lose by playing with other players, and plus it doenst get boring after all.
0
0
SP is preference. But my concern is will it completely nullify the need for Group play?
For example, doing Andy run. Soloing Hell Andy was easy, with such difficulty level, group play becomes pointless.
My point was, adjust the difficulty of solo, such that it doesnt take away the group play component.
0
You can take a look at the game at www.cabal.com
I'll be comparing the two games, and find problems within Diablo 3 and how it can be improved.
[This is totally subjective, if you have different opinions, feel free to post]
Cabal was a great game for many reason. It rewarded Group dungeon instance runs, and most of "epic loot" were from these dungeons. How did it reward group play? They made soloing these dungeons almost impossible unless you had the equipment which drop from the dungeon. So, unless you had one of the best gears out in the market "solo" was not a choice. And the only to go about getting these items were, going into the newer released dungeon with group of 5 guys, trying to finish it as fast as possible. Time was a big factor because there was a time limit. You had to move fast, and move onto the next component of the dungeon as soon as you finish the previous one.
The difficulty of these dungeons were set such that you cannot effectively solo on your own.
If you were to solo with "medium-high" gear... it would take you anywhere up to 1 hour where as group of 3~5 would take you around 15~20 minutes. [Some top guilds were able to do some of the hardest one in 10 mins, thats where they really gained edge over others with gears] They were able to complete dungeon so fast, that they did countless number of dungeon runs every day. While few struggled to even finish.
Now notice, this is a dungeon. It is bound to take quite a long time to finish.
The rate at which monsters die in Cabal is similar to Diablo 2 with moderate gear. If you have moderate gear, killing a monster obviously takes just as long as it would in Diablo 2. But this is not an attack same monster for 10 mins and kill. The monsters die pretty fast once you obtain good gear, and high end gear raped these dungeons.
After a month or so later these patches, most people were able to do them solo. But of course, it still took them a lot longer than they would when they joined up with 1 ~ 2 more players of the same calibre.
Conclusion.
Soloing is good, but the difficulty in Diablo 2 made it such that Solo was the only way to MF. Diablo 2 Failed to capture the essence of group/party play. So, Diablo 3 needs to boost the difficulty of Hell, after all, this is the end game, this is the last place we resort to for all our monster killings. If monsters gave little to no challenge, then the game wouldn't be as exciting. There would be no thrill, there would be no strategy, there would be no group play. In my opinion, once you get to a certain point, it was more like a single player in Diablo 2. You constantly remake the room with pw, so you can run MF from act1 ~ act5, and repeat this process for hours and hours.
I got burnt out from this, and had little to no enjoyment from it.
I'm not saying make soloing impossible, but design it such that the time you spend on finishing the instance on your own is not merely worth the effort. Group of 1~2 would be a reasonable number once players obtain "top of the line" gears, but soloing should still be somewhat hard even with these gears.
Otherwise, we'll be witnessing the seperation of diablo 3 community as it was the case for Diablo 2.
P.S - How about design the difficulties where once you obtain a decent gear.
Make Nightmare in Diablo 3 like Hell in diablo 2. Solo Mf is possible but group is waste of time.
Make Hell in Diablo 3 harder, so soloing is still possible but its hard. Group play is the best choice for the instances in Hell.
0
Most level 99 were bots anyways.
D3 will make achieving max lvl more reasonable this time around.
Level 60 should be hard in some sense, but not "d2" hard
0
Blizzard said their not going to give beta keys because they don't want people making money off from it.
So will Diablofans host contest and get the winner's battle net account and email them to blizzard?
I feel like this is whats probably going to happen.
Giving keys strictly in its own, might create problem that blizzard always wanted to avoid. Which is beta-key market on ebay. These things will prob go for $500+ on Ebay.
I think Blizzard will prob request for battle net account of the contest winners from diablofans.com
and they'll add the game to the winner's acc.
0
We'll just have to see.
It's Blizzard's role to attract gamers from different genre.
And one way to do it is, by ads and tons of it. This strategy wont work, if the entire gaming market is flooded with gaming ads that are soon to come; The games I've mentioned before.
0
Again like i said, your targeting the "hardcore" gamers. A typical or "casual" gamers don't have a set "GENRE" they only play. They are more mutual on the selection of games they want to try, for what I know, they are willing to try all games out there. It's blizzard's marketing strategy to appeal to thoes casual gamers who might play all different genre.
You think they even know what "FPS" or "RTS" or "RPG" stands for ?
Only targeting thoes people who play "RPG" is a bad strategy from Blizzard is prob not the case.
You need to attract the rest of 6 billion+ population not just 1 million hardcore gamers in the world. probably less.
0
Think about if D3 was missing on the list.
0
Lets face it. Casual gamers who play few hours a week are not going to be remember every single game developer company, even if their the biggest one.
The number of casual gamers far outweighs the hardcore gamers. Some people who play 1 hour a day are what we call "Typical gamers" and not a game addict. This is the "Big" target market Blizzard wants to aim for. and of course, they also want to bring in you hardcore Blizzard fans, but they know your going to buy the game anyway.
This is the reason why they make the game more "dumbed" down. A method which will be more appealing to casual gamers.
"Auto-stats, Easier to see follow UI, simple dialogs, Simple Skill tree"
Heck but this all wont matter if these casual gamers get lost in the midst of all these great games coming out in 4Q 2011 to 1Q 2012. This is the golden time of oppertunity.
Some of the highly anticipated games to be released in 4Q 2011 ~ 1Q 2012 are, guild wars 2, Starwars: MMO, and Battlefield 3 and a couple more.
Side Note: [I'm not a big fan of Battlefield 3, But just do be a favor and watch. http://www.youtube.com/user/Battlefield#p/u/2/ekDutunw1mk]
I respect Blizzard's choice and their priorities. But realistically speaking from an economic point of view of the company, they need to speed things up, as I'm guessing they are already.
It comes down to, quality vs quantity. But how much sales would you be suffering just to make the game "tiny" bit better? Delaying 4months ~ 6months is going to be huge this year. It almost should be avoided.
The faster they get "casual" gamers attention with "Beta" and send out the message that this game is indeed coming in 2011, it will create a narrower view for casual gamers to decide on what games to buy.
Whatever happens, happens. But at least they can dictate when they want to sell their products.
And I propose that 4Q 2011 will be the best time of their release, with beta being the "Audience grabber" during 3Q of 2011.
0
Its the worst I've ever seen.....
Not only it blocks new users but it also BLOCKS old gamers like myself !
I dont understand how their login system works, I have both classic and LOD on my account.
but when i log in and hop on to d3 forum, im not logged any more. and whats up with the cd-key?
Can anyone tell me how to log in on bnet diablo ?
[Never thought i'd ever ask this.... sigh]
0
You know... Blizzard value's opinion from noob players as well.
Its part of the working process with representation of their content.
While hardcore gamers who'll play 9+ hrs a day is good way to find bugs, glitches or exploit, Noobs who generally are new to Action RPG might be better to find out what the game actually feels like on their hands for the first time.
Is it too confusing? Are there any parts you thought you were lost? Does the "Help" actually Help...
you know what I mean.
P.S - I think at one point blizzard actually told in Q/A session that they prefer "Noobies" than hardcore gamers.
Just to make sure that the game has a strong "starting point" for these new players to adventure off.
I'm not a noob !