Interesting Forbes article on D3

[Icy Mental]

So how bout that Justin Bieber fella. you guys like?

[Carisma]

And hello? do you even know what MMO stands for. D3 IS AN MMO DERP!

I am on the D3 bash wagon, but I wanted to correct this statement. Here is the definition to MMO.

A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO and MMOG) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and feature at least one persistent world.

What keeps D3 from being a MMO is the fact a game can only support up-to 4 players in any one game, by which no means is massive. How ever there is a lo of similar qualities in the game play compared to other MMO, especially with all the things the took from WoW.

[Tenet]

thats the thing, if you spend 200 hours on a game you must like it. who is going to spend 200 hours doing something they dont enjoy or even hate? i mean you have a choice to play or not to play this is not a job or some family function you are expected to attend, this is a game and no one is gonna play any game for 200 plus hours if they dont enjoy it

no the real problem is and always has been with the people playing the game. they wanted a game to last 10 years. i really hope people fully understand just how crazy that sounds. how can anyone expect something that cost 60 bucks to last 10 years?

Ehhh... I mean maybe 200 hours is excessive, but it does take quite some time before certain end game flaws begin to show themselves. This goes back to the fact that it takes a large time investment to reach end game since you have to play through the game three times. I agree with you that some people's expectations were just too high. That fault lies with both the individual and the company for the ridiculous amount of hype. When you announce a game four years in advance and constantly throw around the term "bad ***" as its descriptor, you should prepare for this type of backlash if and when it doesn't meet expectations.

I love the game, but it is most definitely flawed. But I also believe it can be fixed. The other thing is that $60 doesn't mean as much to me as it may mean to others. That could be their whole budget for entertainment that summer.

[sacridoc]

The question whenever you got your moneys worth with the game is irrelevant. I played the game 300 something hours and i'm not asking my money back. Still doesn't change the fact that the game left very unpleasant after taste.

Few years back Blizzard was THE company in the gaming industry just like the Nokia was THE company in the mobile phone industry. Arrogance is/was the downfall of them both. Both forgot what they were doing and started making money instead when reality works in the fashion that do what you are good at and money will follow.

Now whip will start slashing and heads roll. Pressure is on and it's not that easy to force out masterpiece under do or die situation. Lesson learned: Here is at least one person who will never again pre-order another Blizzard tittle. They have to earn it again just like anyone else.

That 50 or 60€ the game did cost is nothing in the western parts of the world. Diablo 3 still was prime example that brand matters. Pretty sure the game sold more pre release and during the first day than it did after that. Respect is very fragile thing. It has to be earned, it takes long time to build and often when it's lost it can't be rebuilt. I think that with D3 Blizzard won the battle, but lost the war.

Indeed, Blizzard has built up a lot of respect all the way up through Burning Crusade probably. People can hate on WoW all they want, but originally it was a very good game that people really liked. SC2 wasn't an awful game but feels like a re-skin of BW basically and has some undesirable features, though I don't know the ins and outs of SC2.

The company is definitely headed in the wrong direction. A lot of people will blame the merger with Activision I guess or the popularity of WoW.

The problems with D3, the redundancy of SC2 and the staleness of WoW aren't enough to derail Blizzard though. I believe all 3 franchises will end by the time TITAN comes out. Which leads to an "all eggs in one basket" type of scenario. Which, if you're a creative, innovative developer is probably a bad idea. But if you're trying to produce a product that hits as many people as possible for the largest profit possible it's a very good idea.

I disagree with the idea that TITAN would be a FTP micro-transaction model. I definitely think they can still get people to pay $15.00 / month for it no problem and probably have micro-transactions on top of that.

Blizzard probably wants TITAN to crush the MMO market and concentrate all their development on retaining subscribers. From a business point of view that's a much better plan than spending like 10 years to develop a new game that can only get you $60. An MMO will get you that much in 4 months of added playtime for a person.

What's easier? Adding content to retain a subscriber for 4 months or creating an entirely new game from scratch... pretty obvious which one makes more sense. Especially when there tends to be more and more player overlap between Blizzard titles.

You just have to wonder if Blizzard has enough creativity left in the tank to make TITAN good enough to be the MMO that completely takes over the market.

[Carisma]

I would imagine if Blizzard continue to drag their name through mud like they have lately Titan will fail, because people will not buy it.

[Karpalo]

The company is definitely headed in the wrong direction. A lot of people will blame the merger with Activision I guess or the popularity of WoW.

I would most definitely blame Activision. Be it EA or Activision they both try to manage gaming industry like it would be movie industry. Sure enough they both are different branches of entertainment, but still very different. One can mass produce shallow blockbusters and people will watch them and that's whatever since it's only few hours of the consumers time, it's not interactive and there is no commitment of any kind. Making games takes vision and dedication that doesn't blend well with the quarterly profits. That's not where the Harry Potters come from. Sure enough they might eventually monetize them, but something like Harry Potter series sprouting from environment like that is as likely as spontaneous combustion.

As an example just look most of the all time gaming classics. Majority of them are the prologues of their creators careers with very few epilogue exceptions. Even today's big name League of Legends is one of them. Few years back no one had heard the name Riot games. Diablo 3 on the other hand is classic Hollywood reboot. 100% American Idol bull**** to the bone.

[krischan]

I can't stand this argument 'oh you've played the game for 200h and you still complain'...imagine someone telling you that book with 1000 pages must be better for you than the one with 200 pages.

No, it's not like that at all, but like reading a 200 page book 20 times and complaining that you didn't find anything in the 21st read which you overlooked in the 20 reads before.

It's not about quantity, but quality.

It's certainly about the quality of the loot, but you are talking about the content. Playing seleted parts of selected acts in a selected difficulty again and again is definitely a matter of quantity.

ARPG are expected to give you a lot of hours of gameplay, because you are replaying the content.

People are certainly the game because of the action, but the real long-time factor is the aspect of loot. Likewise, nobody was probably thrilled by the action when doing the moat trick versus Mephisto in D2 for the 123rd time, but by the aspect of a golden shako, orspiderweb sash on the ground when he died. People aren't replaying the content, but the act of finding loot and once you found so much that almost nothing is better than what you already have, the game doesn't offer anything new.

There's a point in saying that the game doesn't offer enough of that (among other topics), but that might be covered in an expansion. If people refuse to pay for one after they played D3 for 200 hours, then they might not be the kind of customer in which Blizzard is interested. After all, they do it for the money.

I've been by far more satisfied with experience of playing Witcher 2 or Deus Ex 3, who even 20-30h long, provide a much more quality content that D3 does.

I don't know these games. Do they focus on loot in the same manner as D3? I agree that the storyline of D3 is shallow, if not embarassing, but there's no game which makes people play them for years because of what you call content (i.e. something else than looting and trading in this case). I think everybody who informs himself just a little bit about D3 in advance would notice that it's about killing monstes and hoarding the loot and not about your eidea of content.

Anyway, whatever your criteria for quality are, I had fun not just in the first 20-30 hours, but in all thiose 150-200 hours I played the game so far. If you say that these other games don't offer fun for that long, they cannot compete with D3 with respect to that in my eyes, no matter what makes up the fun of playing them.

[Carisma]

It's certainly about the quality of the loot, but you are talking about the content. Playing selected parts of selected acts in a selected difficulty again and again is definitely a matter of quantity.

I think more or less it is about the quality of the whole game, which in my eyes is very poor. It defiantly does not meet the standard which Blizzard has set themselves with their past titles. Blizzard even said before release they were taking so much time on the game because it would have to meet their standard, this is why they said they scrapped games like Starcraft Ghost and Warcraft Adventures. I guess they decided to throw that policy out the window. Diablo 3 is no way near the finished and polished product they have told us about. I could not imagine how bad Starcraft Ghost and Warcraft adventure would have been if they tossed them out, and they actually considered Diablo 3 a finished product.

I also would like to state that Companies like Blizzard set their own bars, and they should make sure they meet them every time when they come out with something new. Blizzard might of not been a huge company like Activision ( which I believe tainted the company with greed) or EA, but they were a better one because the games where about the "Quality" and not the "Quantity." This goes for other companies, as many people would expect BOSS to continue to make the best audio devices and Dyson to make the best vacuums; If these companies would release a new product that did not meet there standard, people would be outrages and returning what they bought, and looking else where to spend their money. Blizzard needs to step up and fix their mistakes.

People are certainly the game because of the action, but the real long-time factor is the aspect of loot. Likewise, nobody was probably thrilled by the action when doing the moat trick versus Mephisto in D2 for the 123rd time, but by the aspect of a golden shako, or spiderweb sash on the ground when he died. People aren't replaying the content, but the act of finding loot and once you found so much that almost nothing is better than what you already have, the game doesn't offer anything new.

Your right I did not kill Mephisto because it was something fun to do, I did it for the chance foe the amazing loot - which diablo 3 is lacking. The loot is boring, which by now that statement should sound like a broken record, but it is true. That is why that complaint and the end game will continue to be pointed out til these issues are fixed. The Action house also kills the aspect of finding your own loot, with all the affixes you could farm for a straight month and never find an upgrade, but if you have the gold or money, you can buy your upgrade in minutes. This also kills the games. Diablo 2 was probably 50% trading, 35% pvp, and 15% playing through the content. That is what made the game so fun.

There's a point in saying that the game doesn't offer enough of that (among other topics), but that might be covered in an expansion. If people refuse to pay for one after they played D3 for 200 hours, then they might not be the kind of customer in which Blizzard is interested. After all, they do it for the money.

Blizzard used to do it for the game, this is why I believe they have became greedy. The company is no longer about the game or its fans, it is how much money can we make. I hope the failure of Diablo 3 will show them their faults, but I doubt it will because they already have our money.

Anyway, whatever your criteria for quality are, I had fun not just in the first 20-30 hours, but in all thiose 150-200 hours I played the game so far. If you say that these other games don't offer fun for that long, they cannot compete with D3 with respect to that in my eyes, no matter what makes up the fun of playing them.

Generally people who say they are enjoying the game are the people who have not hit the end game wall yet, where there is nothing left to do. If you had made it that far, I am glad your able to enjoy the game. If not I would hope you never hit that wall as I did in the first week. It saddens me to think the game I Waited for over a decade was a failure, not sue to the change of time, but rather just the horrible game Blizzard released with the Diablo name on it.