The art direction won't change, and as you'll notice by my signature below I really, really, really would like it too, but I know it won't. So for those here bummed about the art director, relax it won’t. That job opening was posted for some time before this thread.
I've worked in IT for 20 years and have worked through a number of large development projects. Blizzard is no spring chicken they know you can't change a spec midstream on developers or artists, they are too far into this project to $crap it or change it $ignificantly. They story board and flow chart these things out before writing one line of code, at the end of the day this is a business, this investment has a $et burn rate, they have already projected their sales estimates, time is money.
When I represented Adobe Systems many years ago they would find out if there was significant public interest by announcing a new product with a description of what it would do. If the response was not what they hoped they would scrap it a few months after the announcement without investing hardly anything. Blizzard is way past that point, you don’t give a game play demo at a major convention and then shift gears because of some public outcry. I’d bet good money they expected there to be some outcry.
The best people like me who are not happy with the overly light look and feel can hope for is some mild accommodations. This petition won’t matter on this release and likely not the expansion packs. It will only matter on D4 when they plan the next chapter and there is a good chance fans like me will have to compromise on that too because your fan base is only as good as your last game and it will bring new different fans.
I think it’s important to point out no matter what Blizzard says publically about releasing the game at a time of their choosing, that is just PR. No matter how deep Blizzard’s pockets are this project has a projected profitability, budget, and timeline associated with it. Until it is released that arm of Blizzard has a set money burn rate associated with a projected timeline until completion. In other words it’s liability on the books until the game hits the stores. As disturbing as it may be to us fans, investors and business principles don’t care about this game or how cool it’s going to be, they care about getting their money back plus return on investment.
With all that wind said, Blizzard doesn't want the top headline on release day be they alienated hardcore fans as the news was quick to pick up on with the petition. Also they are too far into this to scrap it so the time line remains with minor room for pushing it out. I think those of us that are dissatisfied will have some effect so long as it doesn’t detract from the aforementioned, in the end we will have to acquiesce at several levels.
Yes it would help if they make the loot more realistic, and they may be able to do that if they haven't worked out the classes making it quite possible the loot is unfinished. Yet Blizzard has stated that art direction in general won’t change, it takes a lot of time create all of that art. I don’t think they are going to go back and change thousands of objects. I suspect though we are going to have to learn to live with the light, and maybe the garish loot. If they knew up front what the classes dimensions were for each character (I'm betting they do), then loot creation probably moved ahead unimpeded from almost the beginning especially since they indicated loot was not going to be class based.
I think it’s important to point out no matter what Blizzard says publically about releasing the game at a time of their choosing, that is just PR. No matter how deep Blizzard’s pockets are this project has a projected profitability, budget, and timeline associated with it. Until it is released that arm of Blizzard has a set money burn rate associated with a projected timeline until completion. In other words it’s liability on the books until the game hits the stores. As disturbing as it may be to us fans, investors and business principles don’t care about this game or how cool it’s going to be, they care about getting their money back plus return on investment.
Well thought out point as a whole, but if I may be allowed to rhetort (and if anyone know for certain I am wrong, please feel free to correct me in a civilised manner) - Does Blizz even need investors outside of its own company? I would think not - WoW is advertised as having 10 million players - but lets be realistic, theres probobly not 10 million accounts, so lets do some rough estimating: Lets assume everyone has 2 accounts, thats 5 mil - no lets assume that out of those only 1 mill is active, and lets even go so far as to give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend everyone pays a year in advance at the discounted rate of about 12 bucks a month. So, taking this highly conservative estimate into consideration, we can safely assume that Blizzard has about 12 million dollars a month income JUST from WoW. with that kind of scratch, I think Blizz has the monetary power to do whatever the hell it feels like and can afford to actually mean "when its done" as there realease date.
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"We must all fear evil men, but there is an evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifferance of good men."
k3719er right you are, that is why I said “investors and business principles”, It may only be the principals inside the company even so there is still a business model, it’s all about cash flow. The purpose of any business to produce profitable cash flow, which in turn become vehicles for investing into other cash flow producing assets. Companies like Kraft for example control other profitable companies, rules of the rich own nothing but control everything, live well off the cash flow of assets.
Diablo at the end of the day is a defined business plan to for producing cash flow, if it steers too far off course then profitability is negatively affected and it ceases to be a viable profit driven entity and becomes a tax write off. Blizzard won’t tell us, but internally there is a time line that needs to be met.
Reading all the defense from Blizzard it seems to me Jay Wilson is on the forefront of the defense even taking the fan mockups to task. I suspect (my opinion) he probably set the tone for D3. His own words reveal what they were thinking going into it "There's no going back now," he said to MTV. "We're very happy with how the art style is. The art team's happy. The company's happy. We really like this art style, and we're not changing it." They made a fundamental mistake from the start, they didn’t ask what would make the paying core fan base happy; he was more concerned with everyone inside Blizzard being happy. I think they know that now but we are still going to have to live with what makes them happy because they are too far into it now to significantly change it. Roll the bones!
You have to wonder though VegasRage, at what point does one draw the line between pursuing a higher profit margin and pursuing a great game everyone loves. Your right, that is how a company works - but I would like to believe that Blizzard (along with all great companies) was founded on principles based on pleasing the audiance, not money. Before WoW, Blizzard still had the "when its done" mentality", even though the most certainly had an internal timeline. My point was I guess that now that blizzard has that wonderful cash-cow known as WoW, they dont NEED to produce anything else. If Blizzard was to shut down the WoW servers, cancell support and pull it from the shelves, every single person at Blizz could retire, right now, and live very lucrative lives until they ended up dying from partying to much. With that kind of affluance within a company, anything else is motivated by one of two factors: 1) greed and lust for MORE money or 2)Love of the game. Untill this whole fiasco with the D3 artwork, I would of staked my repuation as a gamer (what little I have, I mean lets face it, im no Fatal!ty) that Blizzard was all about the love of the game - but now? I am becoming more and more convinced that Blizzard looks at D3 and SC2 and sees not the potentialy great games we see, the mind blowing sequals weve all wanted - but rather they come to work and see $$$3 and $$$2 on the production desk. I mean why couldnt they redo the art if they wanted? And I do believe they want to, instead of defending it whole heartedly, they say "theres no going back." Bullshit. If Blizz could afford to scrap Starcraft Ghost, and the little known late 90s project Warcraft Stories (probobly the precurser to WoW) - both pre - WoW titles - then SURLY they can afford to change the art style in D3. I just think it comes down to them not wanting to because they cant see past the curtain of greed WoW has drawn over the eyes of those in charge.
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"We must all fear evil men, but there is an evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifferance of good men."
k3719er, I agree with what you saying, I think what is needed now is a rich D3 core fan with enough righteous indignation to form a company for the purpose of creating a game that delivers the goods, it’s pretty clear there is a market for it. It will take 5 years but it would sell.
Art Director is a big position, it's the same position Richard Garriott had for Ultima Online before he left, lets hope there isn't a curse on the team from el diablo himself you think the devil would want this game out but since his ass is kicked in statuette form already he might be a little pissed. I was planning on buying a new computer just for Diablo 3, maybe I should wait a while...
k3719er, I agree with what you saying, I think what is needed now is a rich D3 core fan with enough righteous indignation to form a company for the purpose of creating a game that delivers the goods, it’s pretty clear there is a market for it. It will take 5 years but it would sell.
I agree there should be more diablo-like games, the only I've seen that even come close are pooly made korean games, Personally I'd like a fan to build a mmorpg diablo world similar to Ultima Online, preferably be 2d but interactive with player housing and everything yes it will not happen anytime soon I can dream.
k3719er, I agree with what you saying, I think what is needed now is a rich D3 core fan with enough righteous indignation to form a company for the purpose of creating a game that delivers the goods, it’s pretty clear there is a market for it. It will take 5 years but it would sell.
Nah, it wouldnt take 5 yrs - all we would have to do is wait for the game to come out and then mod the textures - because really that all thats being called into question. No one is bitching about gameplay mechanics, or model desigh (sept for armor size) - but rly all it needs is new textures.
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"We must all fear evil men, but there is an evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifferance of good men."
will armor shrink to their normal and reasonable size as the game progresses, along with stone statues getting to look more serious and mean? will the color actually make some sense as the game progresses unlike the green in tristram cathedral?
the petition also points these thing out, its not that simple
i thought fanboys are people who belive blindless in game comapanies if they were some almighty god
i think blizzard is just a bunch of talented humans that can take some advice sometimes
Ok, sorry about my comments but this is about the tenth post about this topic i have looked at and it is the same thing over and over, its not dark enough, it looks like wow, blah blah blah.
My point still is if you dont like the direction, short of whining and signing petitions, either help or just stop complaining.
Well that's the thing, should we be saying something now and letting those changes get implemented the first time around, or should we wait till things are too late and too much of a bother to alter in later stages of development.
If people are going to "shut our pieholes", we'd at least like to hear something from some of the developers. If they said something like: "Your opinions have been noted. We're experimenting with our artwork based on some of the suggestions by the fans and we'll try to make the best decision on how to proceed with the artwork with the project."
If they managed to at least acknowledge some of our requests to some extent, then that would probably make people feel a little bit easier. Instead what happened is a critique of some of our photo shopped images, using some talking points which I don't consider to be completely truthful.
Personally I think him stepping down is most likely due to some internal conflict with some members of the art staff and the management. It may have been rolling around some his justification of his choices, maybe not, but I do think there was some sort of issue that led to his resignation. For an important title like this, it's very unusual for an upper level developer to leave at this stage in the title (usually it's either very early or very late, nowhere in between).
this is true, however has anyone taken the time to draw up an official business plan to show the justification for the extra time it would take to start from scratch? Honestly, I know i wouldn't have the time. Also other than a petition has anyone even contacted the Development staff to submit intelligent suggestions? and i don mean "don't make it so WOW'ish".
Oh they got the message now, knowing exactly what the complaint is and what the fans want. If they had just done a little market research they wouldn't had any backlash at all. I think it's clear reading all the defense from Blizzard that Jay Wilson was likely the one who just pushed his agenda even taking the fan mockups to task. In his own words "There's no going back now," he said to MTV. "We're very happy with how the art style is. The art team's happy. The company's happy. We really like this art style, and we're not changing it."
I think its pretty clear he and others didn't even bother asking or wondering what the fans wanted. In their defense a lot of the art look good but there is a very specific look and feel that Diablo has held for the last two games and it got lost in the game play demo.
Oh they got the message now, knowing exactly what the complaint is and what the fans want. If they had just done a little market research they wouldn't had any backlash at all.
No matter what Blizzard does, there will always be a vocal minority of complainers that will be heard. Market research? How would spending a bunch of money to...research the market...lead to a game in which there was no backlash?
[/I]I think its pretty clear he and others didn't even bother asking or wondering what the fans wanted. In their defense a lot of the art look good but there is a very specific look and feel that Diablo has held for the last two games and it got lost in the game play demo.
First of all, Blizzard PAYS people to overlook forums for their games and they do take suggestions. They listen to their fans probably more than anyone else.
Secondly, the man even looked at the silly photoshopped screenshots and he even commented on them to explain to people why it doesn't work. I was amazed he did that. He went the extra mile and told people what was up.
In the end, Blizzard doesn't make their games for a niche of "fans". They make them for the love of making games. Blizzard doesn't need to venture out and ask people what they want to see in D3. It's their freakin' IP.
And perhaps the look of Diablo didn't get lost in the game demo, as much as it has evolved into something new and fresh for dungeon crawlers.
Creepsville no one can accurately claim it’s a “vocal minority of complainers” anymore than they can claim it’s a majority. There has been no scientific poll taken, only a petition site which was prematurely closed and a counter petition site which got far fewer numbers. Accurate numbers are an assumption at this point. Also those trivializing 50,000 plus signatures on an unadvertised petition by contrasting it to millions of WOW subscribers is a disingenuous comparison as well.
There is no way to know how many people were aware of the petition or how many fans would bother signing either petition for or against. I helped start a .com from the ground up and know what “subscriber base means”. There are subscribers and then there are active paying subscribers, every company fudges those numbers in their favor as much as they can. Further Blizzard is a private company and does not have to release it’s earnings or numbers to anyone, they can tell the public whatever they like and we have no idea how profitable they are.
Jay Wilson is defending his project, of course he course he is going to say these things. I’ve worked with enough 3D animation applications to know they could have done more than his defense would have us believe, if it wasn’t important he wouldn’t have bothered taking the time to defend them nor would the fan disdain have hit the news. Blizzard doesn’t want to alienate it core fan base, no company would.
Yes Blizzard does make games for a niche of "fans”, it is the core niche of fans that buy the Diablo books, spend $300 on a statue, purchase Diablo when it was first released and then turn around and bought the battle chest, later. Since word of mouth is the still best form of advertizing, you don’t improve business by alienating your most loyal customers. They are the ones who will inspire people to buy D3 for the first time (maybe even get them into gaming) to those who would otherwise not pay attention to the game at all because of their excitement for the game.
Creepsville no one can accurately claim it’s a “vocal minority of complainers” anymore than they can claim it’s a majority. There has been no scientific poll
You know what's strange? You made the claim that you know what "fans want" - when you have no poll or study backing up your claim either. The difference between my claim and yours is that I will have game sales backing up what I said - and you won't.
Yes Blizzard does make games for a niche of "fans”, it is the core niche of fans that buy the Diablo books, spend $300 on a statue, purchase Diablo when it was first released and then turn around and bought the battle chest, later. Since word of mouth is the still best form of advertizing, you don’t improve business by alienating your most loyal customers. They are the ones who will inspire people to buy D3 for the first time (maybe even get them into gaming) to those who would otherwise not pay attention to the game at all because of their excitement for the game.
Thanks for the theory. Now for the truth: Blizzard makes games for people. They don't sit around thinking of how best to please a niche of fans - if they did - they would have changed the art direction based on the petition of complainers.
Its still cracks me up, that the ones that are complaining call themselves true fans when we all know that they are really just a loud mouthed minority of the fan base that likes to look for reasons to complain instead of reasons to compliment on what a great game they are making for us. The textures are flawless, The gameplay looks very solid, the animations are intuative, the lighting effects will diversify the game and add replayability, no more pressing alt to see the drops, gold picks up automaticaly, there is even more blood and guts than in the previous installments, the armor design is functional and ergonomicaly designed, and best of all, ORAL DECAPITATION!!!
Creepsville no that is called marketing 101, and Blizzard forgot it. I am more than qualified to make that statement but I’m not going to wave my flag here about that. You would be hard pressed to find a savvy entrepreneur who would disagree with the point I made. I expect Diablo will sell very well, too many have waited too long for it to come out and there are a load of WOW fans who will identify with the more cartoony characters; no doubt Blizzard won’t change much if anything at all for those like me, so you have nothing to worry about with D3.
What I do expect is if Diablo has too much of the 100 acre wood look and feel through out the game; boards will be buzzing with complaints for years to come. A void will be left for a darker game to emerge, I hope I’m wrong about D3 because I would like to enjoy it but at this point I’m thinking not. Those who think D3 is fine are just going to have to deal people who don’t. If D3 sucks, I will get a lot more work done and I guess that is a good thing.
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srry if this has been posted!!
OLYMPCIS
Yes my friend it has been posted 3 times already.
Thanks though
Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.
I've worked in IT for 20 years and have worked through a number of large development projects. Blizzard is no spring chicken they know you can't change a spec midstream on developers or artists, they are too far into this project to $crap it or change it $ignificantly. They story board and flow chart these things out before writing one line of code, at the end of the day this is a business, this investment has a $et burn rate, they have already projected their sales estimates, time is money.
When I represented Adobe Systems many years ago they would find out if there was significant public interest by announcing a new product with a description of what it would do. If the response was not what they hoped they would scrap it a few months after the announcement without investing hardly anything. Blizzard is way past that point, you don’t give a game play demo at a major convention and then shift gears because of some public outcry. I’d bet good money they expected there to be some outcry.
The best people like me who are not happy with the overly light look and feel can hope for is some mild accommodations. This petition won’t matter on this release and likely not the expansion packs. It will only matter on D4 when they plan the next chapter and there is a good chance fans like me will have to compromise on that too because your fan base is only as good as your last game and it will bring new different fans.
With all that wind said, Blizzard doesn't want the top headline on release day be they alienated hardcore fans as the news was quick to pick up on with the petition. Also they are too far into this to scrap it so the time line remains with minor room for pushing it out. I think those of us that are dissatisfied will have some effect so long as it doesn’t detract from the aforementioned, in the end we will have to acquiesce at several levels.
Yes it would help if they make the loot more realistic, and they may be able to do that if they haven't worked out the classes making it quite possible the loot is unfinished. Yet Blizzard has stated that art direction in general won’t change, it takes a lot of time create all of that art. I don’t think they are going to go back and change thousands of objects. I suspect though we are going to have to learn to live with the light, and maybe the garish loot. If they knew up front what the classes dimensions were for each character (I'm betting they do), then loot creation probably moved ahead unimpeded from almost the beginning especially since they indicated loot was not going to be class based.
Well thought out point as a whole, but if I may be allowed to rhetort (and if anyone know for certain I am wrong, please feel free to correct me in a civilised manner) - Does Blizz even need investors outside of its own company? I would think not - WoW is advertised as having 10 million players - but lets be realistic, theres probobly not 10 million accounts, so lets do some rough estimating: Lets assume everyone has 2 accounts, thats 5 mil - no lets assume that out of those only 1 mill is active, and lets even go so far as to give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend everyone pays a year in advance at the discounted rate of about 12 bucks a month. So, taking this highly conservative estimate into consideration, we can safely assume that Blizzard has about 12 million dollars a month income JUST from WoW. with that kind of scratch, I think Blizz has the monetary power to do whatever the hell it feels like and can afford to actually mean "when its done" as there realease date.
Diablo at the end of the day is a defined business plan to for producing cash flow, if it steers too far off course then profitability is negatively affected and it ceases to be a viable profit driven entity and becomes a tax write off. Blizzard won’t tell us, but internally there is a time line that needs to be met.
Reading all the defense from Blizzard it seems to me Jay Wilson is on the forefront of the defense even taking the fan mockups to task. I suspect (my opinion) he probably set the tone for D3. His own words reveal what they were thinking going into it "There's no going back now," he said to MTV. "We're very happy with how the art style is. The art team's happy. The company's happy. We really like this art style, and we're not changing it." They made a fundamental mistake from the start, they didn’t ask what would make the paying core fan base happy; he was more concerned with everyone inside Blizzard being happy. I think they know that now but we are still going to have to live with what makes them happy because they are too far into it now to significantly change it. Roll the bones!
I agree there should be more diablo-like games, the only I've seen that even come close are pooly made korean games, Personally I'd like a fan to build a mmorpg diablo world similar to Ultima Online, preferably be 2d but interactive with player housing and everything yes it will not happen anytime soon I can dream.
Nah, it wouldnt take 5 yrs - all we would have to do is wait for the game to come out and then mod the textures - because really that all thats being called into question. No one is bitching about gameplay mechanics, or model desigh (sept for armor size) - but rly all it needs is new textures.
Ok, sorry about my comments but this is about the tenth post about this topic i have looked at and it is the same thing over and over, its not dark enough, it looks like wow, blah blah blah.
My point still is if you dont like the direction, short of whining and signing petitions, either help or just stop complaining.
this is true, however has anyone taken the time to draw up an official business plan to show the justification for the extra time it would take to start from scratch? Honestly, I know i wouldn't have the time. Also other than a petition has anyone even contacted the Development staff to submit intelligent suggestions? and i don mean "don't make it so WOW'ish".
I think its pretty clear he and others didn't even bother asking or wondering what the fans wanted. In their defense a lot of the art look good but there is a very specific look and feel that Diablo has held for the last two games and it got lost in the game play demo.
No matter what Blizzard does, there will always be a vocal minority of complainers that will be heard. Market research? How would spending a bunch of money to...research the market...lead to a game in which there was no backlash?
First of all, Blizzard PAYS people to overlook forums for their games and they do take suggestions. They listen to their fans probably more than anyone else.
Secondly, the man even looked at the silly photoshopped screenshots and he even commented on them to explain to people why it doesn't work. I was amazed he did that. He went the extra mile and told people what was up.
In the end, Blizzard doesn't make their games for a niche of "fans". They make them for the love of making games. Blizzard doesn't need to venture out and ask people what they want to see in D3. It's their freakin' IP.
And perhaps the look of Diablo didn't get lost in the game demo, as much as it has evolved into something new and fresh for dungeon crawlers.
There is no way to know how many people were aware of the petition or how many fans would bother signing either petition for or against. I helped start a .com from the ground up and know what “subscriber base means”. There are subscribers and then there are active paying subscribers, every company fudges those numbers in their favor as much as they can. Further Blizzard is a private company and does not have to release it’s earnings or numbers to anyone, they can tell the public whatever they like and we have no idea how profitable they are.
Jay Wilson is defending his project, of course he course he is going to say these things. I’ve worked with enough 3D animation applications to know they could have done more than his defense would have us believe, if it wasn’t important he wouldn’t have bothered taking the time to defend them nor would the fan disdain have hit the news. Blizzard doesn’t want to alienate it core fan base, no company would.
Yes Blizzard does make games for a niche of "fans”, it is the core niche of fans that buy the Diablo books, spend $300 on a statue, purchase Diablo when it was first released and then turn around and bought the battle chest, later. Since word of mouth is the still best form of advertizing, you don’t improve business by alienating your most loyal customers. They are the ones who will inspire people to buy D3 for the first time (maybe even get them into gaming) to those who would otherwise not pay attention to the game at all because of their excitement for the game.
You know what's strange? You made the claim that you know what "fans want" - when you have no poll or study backing up your claim either. The difference between my claim and yours is that I will have game sales backing up what I said - and you won't.
Thanks for the theory. Now for the truth: Blizzard makes games for people. They don't sit around thinking of how best to please a niche of fans - if they did - they would have changed the art direction based on the petition of complainers.
Fuck you, I'm a dragon.
What I do expect is if Diablo has too much of the 100 acre wood look and feel through out the game; boards will be buzzing with complaints for years to come. A void will be left for a darker game to emerge, I hope I’m wrong about D3 because I would like to enjoy it but at this point I’m thinking not. Those who think D3 is fine are just going to have to deal people who don’t. If D3 sucks, I will get a lot more work done and I guess that is a good thing.