I wrote a rather long post, but it got eaten. Oops.

So I’ll just note the one huge, glaring, beating-you-over-the-head omission in his discussion of the adventure genre: the new Sam & Max games. They’re fantastic: funny, well-written, visually attractive, and generally well-paced in terms of puzzles. And apparently financially successful too, since the company is now producing Strong Bad and Wallace & Gromit adventures.

To sum up my far too long vanished-into-the-ether post: forget genre. Great and innovative games are always possible, regardless of your perceived constraints. Did the zillions of adult readers of Harry Potter go out looking for a children’s book about a boy wizard? Were they avid readers of the fantasy genre? Probably not. Why can’t we also assume that many gamers have broad tastes as well, and are just as open to great works regardless of genre?

I’m not 100% sure how this relates to Diablo, but on a principle, you’re right. I mean blizzard didn’t start out saying “we shall create the foundations of a new genre, the Action RPG gameplay”, they just made a heck of a good game in Diablo I, and then improved on it for Diablo II.

Genre is something you label a game with to make it easy for others to understand without an elaborate explanation, not a goal from the gamemaker.

This dude thinks Crystal Chronicles is a Diablo clone and thought that D2 in 2D-graphics and engine was “surprisingly outdated!!!” LOLLL

  Since the beginning of game journalism, there have been countless articles claiming particular “genres” or series to be dead, and they’re wrong most of the time.  In published work, experienced editors can bop the newbie writers in the heads to reduce the rate these things pop out (unless it’s for comical purpose of course), but no such editor exist in WEB 2.0, thus the influx of these type of articles and other such no-no topic. :/

  Bottom line is, a genre means a series of clones of an original best-seller.  A genre might be perceived “dead” because there hasn’t been a best-selling clone of that genre recently, but it’s almost guaranteed that some time down the line somebody from somewhere will make something that takes the core ideas of a genre and make a smash hit game out of it (and “revive” the genre).  So imagine that a doctor tells you that your dog is dead, but you know that the dog will get revived anyways, does it really matter if the doctor ever tell you that the dog is dead in the first place?  Thus the act of saying that a genre is dead is generally perceived to be pointless.  That isn’t to say that a critic can’t make good points about why games of a genre isn’t selling well, but the act of trying to prove that a genre is dead is rather meaningless in itself.

  For example, in 2002~03 journalists loved jumping on the bandwagon to proclaim that Tomb Raider games were dead due to decline in sales of subsequent installments in the series, but what did they really prove?  Did they want Eidos to put Lara into a tomb of her own, seal it, and never let her see the light of day again?  Because in 3 short years, (less than half the time it’ll take to develop D3), Tomb Raiders Legend was released and was profitable enough to spawn even more sequels.  So what purpose did the critics really serve in claiming that the Tomb Raider series were dead that the sales figure didn’t already spoke loud and clear about?  The same goes to the oft-cited “RPG is DEAD!” and “SIM games are dead!” bandwagons.
  Again, it’s one thing to analyze why a genre or seires hasn’t been doing well in the market, but IMO, the very act of claiming that a genre is dead is nothing more than people either trying to be the first to say something (a very unoriginal way to do that), or to just jump on the bandwagon of something.  In this case, i wouldn’t even call the writer of this article any names because he said so himself that he’d been too busy to find materials and had nothing better to write about.  Plus, it wasn’t even his idea to write that piece.  *Shrug*

I do think Blizzard is aiming for a game that feels recognizably similar to the Diablo series. It is a sequel. I don’t think Diablo 3 will flop, at least not if it follows Blizzard’s current trends. Their games have steadily been ramping up in quality. It’s not about genre, it’s about making a good game. Blizzard puts a huge amount of work into making their games top of the line and they have their massive successes to show for it.

Actually, he’s right.

The only company that can pull off a Diablo game at this point is Blizzard. D3 has little immersion (isometric view), little player skill (isometric view), small and repetitive world and a quick progress to the end game of item farming. If any other dev made something like this, they’d go bankrupt. (See Hellgate London, which ‘only’ missed the latter two aspects)

Blizzard can pull it off due to their huge fanbase, but the genre is dying - just as 2D fighting and car combat games are already dead, overtaken by their simplicity.

As soon as someone figures out how to implement the player skill factor into an MMO, tosses the endless running and shouting LFG and solves the extreme dependency on server population to have fun, ‘single player’ action RPGs are doomed.

Just to be clear: the cause of Hellgate’s fall wasn’t some missing magical element of gameplay. It was thrown out a year before it could be a good game, at release it was outright unplayable. I still liked it, wasn’t bothered by the repetitive environments. I even found the various weapon designs the most innovative ones I’ve seen in a long time.
When I looked back two months after launch, I still couldn’t finish the main quest due to bugs . The guys in singleplayer were in an even worse situation.

Hellgate was completely fucked up by the early release, by the time they fixed the main problems noone cared. An excellent game that became a disaster.

Car combat isn’t dead by a long shot, I hope it’s only a matter of time until a new Carmageddon arrives

Diablo 3 will clearly not flop. just look at the fans now, and as you pointed out, it seems hellgate’s main problem was released too early? i have heard people say this same thing over and over. its fun, but like playing a buggy beta, and paying for it.

SSH83 said some really intelligent things, and i agree. a genre dont die, it will just have dry spells in terms of the good games coming out in the genre. “dead” implies people won’t buy it, while the journalists actually mean “dead” as in no games have come out in a while.