Quote from Don_guillotine
I could continue, but I got tired of finding more ones because I have only limited interest in proving my point.
I'll lay it down in simple, bold and friendly letters:
When South took development of the game over in 2005 and named Wilson as the lead designer
All that verbiage, and not a single quote that backs up the "drama queens" assertion nor a single thing that contradicts what Huang wrote. You even have your facts screwed up - Wilson didn't join that team until over a year after it was shut down. "Development of the current engine begun in 2005" - Huh? Source? And in some cases, your logic is just bizarre: "They had everyone at Blizzard working on the game..." So, BN was working on something else or not? Did the team after the flagship departures have a chance to get it right, or was everyone too distracted by WoW? Do you really think their RTS experts would be useful working on an MMO? If you're just going to make up your facts without a single link, at least be consistent.
As for this: "leaving a financially stable game development company because of some disagreements with some "suits" over at Vivendi seems like a really emotional choice (opposed to a rational one)."
How do you know who left and who was fired? As always, you're conflating two (and sort of three) different groups of people and events two years apart without offering a single bit of documentation for it. And you're engaging in mind-reading without a single direct quote from the people involved. The best you can do is speculative quotes from a guy who left years before the shutdown and one who joined over a year later. That, and a vague and qualified phrase "kind of..." from someone who doesn't have a credit on a single Diablo game. It's one thing to engage in assumptions, another thing to readjust facts to fit those assumptions, and another thing to engage in character assassination on top of those assumptions.
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Great, you think Blizz was lying in that clear, short statement in the cinematic. And that the multiple documents illustrating groundwork in terms of classes, backgrounds, concept art was part of a grand conspiracy. Got it. Don't stop believin', Ruk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NQIPVqLMUg
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Well, that's why Blizzard North was such a poor fit. Diablo was incredibly innovative as the PC space goes in terms of combining new elements, wherease the Warcraft RTSs were just Dune II reskinned and polished, Starcraft was just War II with Warhammer 40K and Geiger IP skins and WoW was just a polished Everquest with D2 mechanics.
"Hellgate" is a good example of why innovation isn't always a great idea. And, of course, D3's always-online railroading (and, to some degree, badly failed itemization as an extension of this) into AHs is proving to be another example of it.
Genuine creativity is always a bad fit for a profit-hungry global conglomerate. It leads to blown projects because of feature creep and endless experimentation, and prima donnas that don't make for functioning organizational command structures. That's why Irvine has fought so hard to get rid of it.
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Sure it was a feature, but I've heard that the majority of Diablo and Diablo II players never played a single battle.net or LAN game. Interested if there was some documentation on it. And I still don't get what's "convenient" about an inability to play single player away from the 'net and/or lag. IMO, it isn't about convenience, it's about piracy and monetization, and the only ones that deny it are paid shills and/or koolaid drinkers.
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Sorry to multipost - Brevik has been very clear in multiple interviews that it is exactly that:
"I came up with the idea for Diablo ... when I was high-school," says Brevik. "It was modified over and over until it solidified when I was in college and got hooked on an ASCII game called Moria/Angband. When we pitched Diablo to Blizzard, we pitched a turn-based, single-player DOS game."
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_48/289-Secret-Sauce-The-Rise-of-Blizzard.3
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Ah, but they are making everyone uses their servers to play the most basic single-player game. And the only reason you'd obsess over the potential "security" therein (of course, the reality is the opposite) is if your focus was multiplayer and item ownership, and, ultimately, the AHs. And, of course, even the ersatz "single player" game design is so warped towards gear-gear-gear that if you have even the slightest interest in an endgame, they're making you use the AH.
So, actually, they are making me use the AH, and they're making the basic game experience the absolute opposite of "convenient".
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Agreed, though it is potentially (and probably IMO) disastrous.
Basically they assumed that everyone wanted to play like a multiplayer item-trading D2er, despite that being a small minority of the total D2 audience.
Of course, it really isn't much of a gamble in the big picture if you think of any backlash being confined to the IP and not attaching to the brand itself. If it is overwhelmingly negative, that's isn't true, of course.
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Where it really innovated - basically in making itself an MMO-lite with gamers railroaded into the RMAH - is where it has failed hard, and will fail even harder if they're bold enough to actually launch the RMAH.
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What? Ruk, you haven't posted a single source.
You accidentally bring up an interesting point, though, in terms of the 9 years vs 12 years. I don't know if Huang and Boos are referencing work from before the Flagship people left, nor do I know if the Lee piece signed just a few weeks after that incident represented a new direction that represented a totally different project. My sense is that it began, in some form, when the older games shipped, just because we know (through those sources) that work was definitely happening as of 2003, and "Lord" shipped in mid-2001, so it would make sense that some of that team was working on it as soon as the older games shipped. And, of course, we have the clear words of the narrator representing the perspective of Bliz's current managment, which is about as good a source as it gets, despite your feelings about them.
.....
After you've listened to that phrase at 8:50 a few dozen times and it has finally sunk in, you may want to read that paragraph I just wrote. It's an example of an adult working with documented sources to form an opinion, and speculating based on those sources without coming to conclusions like "... Blizz took 12 years to develop this game? That's nonsense."
In any case, have a good night, and hopefully this conversation has at least helped cure you of the common meme around here that Lichtner - probably the fifth art director on the project - showed up in the last quarter of development and magically pulled a half-dozen years of character and background designs out of his ass and improved them to the extent that the previous work may as well have not existed.
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Ruk, I assume you've never worked on a long-term project to develop something like a movie, game, business software, textbook, etc.
I know this is hard for you to believe - but coming up with ideas and selectively throwing out all but the best of them is called development. In games in particular, that stuff which is clearly documented as happening in 2003 or earlier in those interviews - things like establishing an engine, codebase, class structure, locations for backgrounds and story events - that's all stuff you build on later, and sometimes radically change.
If you're satisfied with innuendo and secondhand sources, probably encouraged by some of the many people who came on the project later, that's great. I'll stick with the words of the actual company that released the game, and multiple documented sources in various media that have been confirmed to have worked on the project.
If your birthday is accurate, it's a little sad that we have to spell these things out for you at age 40, but life is all about learning.
Also, for future reference, when you're discussing something and the person you're discussing things with comes up with multiple actual documented primary sources, it is best to not reference documentation that you don't have and almost certainly can't have because it doesn't exist. Just as a matter of form.
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"I remember back at Blizzard North when Jason Regier was first designing a rough game engine, and how it was always so exciting to see the new features added, day by day."
I believe he left the team in 2003, so that would mean he was referring to 2002 or even earlier. You'll note that Regier recently did interviews and is still on the team, and you won't find any mention from him about scrapping that work, AFAIK. Which probably means he built on it as part of a continuing development process.
http://diablo.incgam...comments-on-d31
"I left Blizzard North in 2003, when prototype work was still being laid out, like what classes were going to be in it, and what the environment should be like, and basic storyline stuff."
http://diablo.incgam...comments-on-d31
Believe it or not, prototyping, deciding on background location, classes is part of the development process.
So, ruk, 1) the crystal-clear words of Bliz themselves in a slick video recently released - 2) 3) two primary, documented statements, one of which mentions someone's work by name - 4) a concept piece which can be seen to inform monster design in the present game by someone apparently still there - all going at least back to 2003, if not earlier... And you show up with... well....
As a chance to not totally embarrass yourself, did you want to make a half-assed amendment to it in some way? Or did you maybe want to admit that the words of Bliz themselves, which a five-year-old could clearly understand, are, more or less, true?
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So I guess Blizz is lying? Try watching that ten seconds a few times, it might help.
And to suggest that guys like Cheng, Regier, Love, Lee, and others that apparently moved down had nothing of substance to build on after years of working on the title (Lee, being a concept artist, is the only one that really document that work) really makes you the hater, doesn't it?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFJaTXNs51k
go to 8:52
http://diablo.incgamers.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=7311
note august 2003 date, and the fact that the artist still works there.
But, sure, why take Blizzard's own crystal-clear words and a documented piece of art when we can regurgitate undocumented rumors and treat unsourced wiki articles like gospel?
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Uh... isn't 12 years of development time and over ten billion dollars of WoW revenue (which we gave them) a little better than "faith" when it comes to making a game and putting an infrastructure in place? An infrastructure that only needs to exist because of an insistence on online only, and a game design skewed towards a real money auction house?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO_g5Ocr4K0
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No, but because you're a new member with a minimal profile that takes a strong interest in fanatically defending the Kotick line, you quite possibly are one.
An assertion of Diablo as "always being online only" probably indicates a paid poster that was born after Bush Sr was elected, as well. I didn't know that the millions of copies it sold over 15 years ago - or the playstation version that came out shortly after - or the fact that the battle.net accounts created a dozen years ago were a fraction of the copies sold of D2 - were due to the fact that everyone was actually buying an "online only" game. The idea that fans "wanted" to be unable to play while servers are off line or while they have the audacity to take a trip on a plane etc is almost as fascinating.
But thanks for playing! Hopefully you still make more than the poor GMs in Texas, if you keep on posting enough.
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Actually, only a minority of D2 players used battle.net, and only a small minority of those people every bought or considered buying third-party items. The overwhelming majority saw it as a single-player game, and couldn't have cared less about the launch issues involved with battle.net server stress. But far be it from me to interrupt a hard-working paid poster from his or her job.
Any other bits of revisionist history for us? Did Diablo III development begin in 2006 despite the V Lee signed 2003 concepts which clearly informed present art which we can see on the incgamers wiki?