Really just a different voice from the same crew that is the D3 team. What I found interesting was this:
...no-one believes the ramblings of the now-aged Deckard Cain and everything has turned into a somewhat baffling legend.
Scope for our hero then to do some exploring to see if those decrepit senile ramblings of Cain's are true? So Cain was really right after all...
The opportunity for humour as well to balance the dark story line - perhaps Cain drifting off on a tangent, his mind awash with dementia?
Additionally the article made me think about the potion/orb system:
[the] health globe system replaces piles of potions with glowing red orbs, dropped by slain enemies, that heal you and anyone near you when they're touched. This makes the game more mobile and in co-operative situations lets you save your partner from a quick death, rewarding those who keep close to each other.
Yes! The new health system makes it a little harder for us to tag along on the edges of battle in normal mode while our friendly uber helper from hell lays waste to all.
I wouldn't say *much* harder to help at this stage without more details. The effective radius will have to be wide to incorporate ranged party members similar to D2 amazons and necromancers.
Yes my friend it has been posted 3 times already.
Thanks though
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.
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.
I used to run my own online store. I know a bit about this stuff. And I don't think that Blizzard needed to research the market in order to create a sequel to their own IP. I think that is a silly statement to make, as it implies that Blizzard shapes their games around current trends - when all they've ever done with their games is stuck to a simple, unintimidating, easy to pick up game that even Mom can enjoy playing.
The characters in D3 aren't cartoony. They are stylized.