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.
I stop to comment on this alone: HOLY SHIT THANK GOD!!
I have gold pickup OCD. Whenever I clear the Tower key hunting, I pick up every single piece of gold.
Blizzard doesn't make games for 300 players. I think you're confusing a niche market with niche players. As per your definition of a 'niche fan,' it would mean the players that will attend Blizzcon, buy the miniature figurine and purchase the Diablo novels. That definition of niche would actually constitute as hardcore in this case. Those are the very hardcore Diablo lovers that will follow in Blizzard's footsteps. Despite any graphical overhaul, those very same hardcore players will continue to buy Blizzard merchandise because they want more Diablo simply because they love it. Those 'niche fans' won't suddenly hate and give up Blizzard because just they changed the graphics of the game.
You can find the vocal minorities very easily. There is an easily accessible example right on these very forums. Look through the threads and look for people that aggresively argues for an overhaul of graphical design. Those are your vocal minorities. People who signed the petition are not vocal minorities because they are purely statistics -which cannot even be cited as a valid source because of anonymous signers and repeated signers- not noise. People who create the noise can be found on the forums.
Is it alienation if the 'fans' don't want to change and adapt? Every sequel to popular games undergoes this process. CS1.6 to CS:S, SSBM to SSBB, and so on. In the end, players that don't make the change stick with the old game, despite buying the newer sequel regardless of their 'hatred' for <Developing Studio>'s direction.
Would any of you snub 53,000 sales a year? I wouldn't. Let's see 53,000 x $25.00 (guestimating wholesale price) is a paltry $1,325,000. Yeah who needs that chump change.
That and how many of those 53,000 were individual ACTUAL people.
Not to mention they'll probably gain at LEAST 53,000 NEW fans to the series by making the game look more Blizzard like and familiar.
Some people may not like it, but I think all in all they'll be gaining more fans than losing. Which means more sales, more people to play with, more income for Blizzard which is going to lead to more updates and expansions and possibly sequels if it becomes real popular.
Of that ~50k, how many are real people? How many are repeated signers? How many will actually buy the game regardless? And it won't be ~50k sales per year because Diablo doesn't have a business model like that. It would only be far less than a couple hundred thousand dollars per year if D3 ran a subscription model, but they don't run subscription. They run a purchase-the-box F2P service, as with other b.net games. It'll be probably a few hundred people that won't buy it on release, create numerous hate threads about how awful D3 is, the general distaste for the art direction and minor scrapes and bruises, and will continue to purchase the game a few weeks/months subsequent into D3's release.
That one million dollars is massively inflated due to invalid sources. Online petitions don't mean anything as a real statistic and ultimately, I doubt if there are even 25k on that list, and moreso 7/8ths of them would purchase D3 regardless.
Its funny people are ready to believe Blizzards PR released 10 million online paying customers but question 53,000 signatures. It’s a private company and they don’t have to report anything, they can say anything they want. I helped start a .com in the 90’s and take it public. We embellished our subscriber numbers as much as possible (and yet be technically honest) so we could get investor money, it got us $40 million in investment dollars. Blizzard is trying to create excitement with their number, hey look we got 10 million, maybe that will make another 10 million join, that’s the point of that number.
Even if the petition numbers were flubbed I’ll bet you can find 100,000 real people to sign if one tried without any trouble. I know some here think the art is stylized and looks great, to me I see it falling (thankfully to a lesser degree) in the same direction of the overly polished polygon 3D characters that are on a load of games that made me put their boxes down and not buy them. DSII, WOW, NWN, EQ, and on and on. I made the mistake of getting DSII, I hated it, what a boring game.
The big problem with most of these games is the characters look too polished and frequently too sexy for the medieval setting they are in. OK, here I am in a dark medieval place, evil is covering the land peasants are getting racked in some dungeon by vile creatures and along comes the shiny 21st century sex kitten hero. Hey I’ll save your land, oh and check out my rack. Be amazed at my bubbly cotton candy magic I’ll thrash them with. FLMAO! Give me a break!
Fluffing up big numbers is always great when trying to ipo. You could even take revenues and fluff that number everywhere despite having poor year with an exponential increase in expenses. The problem is, what you compare is legitimate subscribers/prepaid card numbers with a puny, insignificant anonymous online petition of ~50k signers. Despite Blizzard's 10mil subscribers, how many are on their free trials? Those numbers are included, but whereas for that online petition, how can you measure? You can't say John Smith has signed, double signed or triple signed repeatedly because he wanted to inflat the numbers on the petition. What about people who can write scripts to autonomously sign the petition repeatedly? How about the people who signed, but then completely feel wrong about their initial perception of the game and have buyers remorse about signing it? Those are just some of the reasons of why you falling back on that petition as a given mandate is completely moot and unarguable with common sense.
The world is transitioning from a time of prosperity and peace to an age of hellish invasion- you're not going to see corpses hanging off trees and rivers of blood right off the bat. It's going to take time. That's why I have every reason to believe and no reason not to believe that it will get more "gruesome" and more "dark" as the game goes on. They only showed us the very beginning setting (though using a pre-fabricated dungeon, they admitted it was using the tilesets of that area.)
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/activision-faq.html
Look clearly there are many, many out there not happy with the look and feel we can debate numbers until we are all blue in the face. You can’t deny though there has been backlash and to suggest it’s just a few people whining is no more verifiable than proving there were double entries on the petition. There is no right or wrong here, just peoples views and we’re entitled to them.
All I can tell you is I haven’t plunked down money on most of the dungeon themed games because IMO they look like my description above. Granted the flaming hammer and charged axes are better then the foo foo fluff magic of many games but its one step towards being less realistic. To me what makes fantasy games fun is they walk that fine line between realism and fantasy.
By itself the barbarian looks cool with the flaming hammer but when you go online and there are a thousand characters all magically glowing from some part of their body its looks utterly ridiculous. Hey look everyone has rare glowing items and freakish floating things revolving around them, ooh aah. In that setting it you might as well have Dee Dee dance across the screen singing with her pet unicorn.