Diablo 3 Complaints

[InteNuIgen]

....and what is your question?

[mr punk]

So undoubtly Jay Wilson's long awaited departure please many many of us.

i guess that makes me an outlier. i'm not pleased. jay may have been an vastly overrated and average game director, but was hilarious, albeit unintentionally.

Well, I think the general consensus from the other thread is that the trends seen in d3 were out of Jay's hands. This is just what happens when companies get so big. There is pressure to be more mainstream, market more, widen the audience, take less risk, and lean heavily on the formulaic blueprints or ancient oaks known to sell. The spearheader doesn't matter.

pretty much. D3 was designed exactly how blizz, jay and many players wanted it to be. it may be hard for diablo players to believe, but jay's initial assumptions were not wild or far fetched. D3 had what would be considered a solid design or formula by most other modern AAA companies. a formula with broad appeal and has been financially successful and popular for many other modern games including D3. a formula that received many, many, many players approval before release. they got the game they deserved.

I don't understand the risks and formulaic blueprints part since the AH/RMAH was a huge risk as was removing skill points/stat points, etc. I mean, these are changes that upset A LOT of people. These guys could have played it a bit safer.

the removal of points and AH isn't risky. the industry has been increasingly moving away from highly tuned closed game design to open, customizable systems to sell endless products for quite some time and simplification is hardly a risky or novel trend in gaming. it just seems edgy and risky because D3 is late to the party because of the time gap.

[pulli]

Well, I think the general consensus from the other thread is that the trends seen in d3 were out of Jay's hands. This is just what happens when companies get so big. There is pressure to be more mainstream, market more, widen the audience, take less risk, and lean heavily on the formulaic blueprints or ancient oaks known to sell. The spearheader doesn't matter.

This is bull****.. Really bull****; Blizzard was when they developed diablo 2 already one of the biggest companies in the computer gaming. And what reason is there that you should take less risk when you are larger? If anything a larger company has much more backbone: so they can take actually more risk without fear of a bankruptcy, for a big company a single flopped game doesn't mean bankrupt - in a small company it does.

[Dogbert]

I think this thread should be merged with the complaints thread.

[Ivan E]

This is bull****.. Really bull****; Blizzard was when they developed diablo 2 already one of the biggest companies in the computer gaming. And what reason is there that you should take less risk when you are larger? If anything a larger company has much more backbone: so they can take actually more risk without fear of a bankruptcy, for a big company a single flopped game doesn't mean bankrupt - in a small company it does.

That would be true if the company were private, but that's not how pleasing shareholders works. It's your growth trajectory, not your raw asset accumulation, that matters. In other words, it's precisely because Blizzard is a bigger company that it had to go and broaden the base even more, because it's the only way for them to expand sales / market coverage / revenue options / etc.

[pulli]

@ivane: uh no.. ASML is the world leader in chip-machine design; they have a lot of "shareholders". But that doesn't stop them for constantly designing newer chips, and spending billions on research, where around 50% of the research is simply void.

Also: blizzard has always been a large company - always had shareholders, how than that only in the last few years they stopped with innovation? The only reason can be that the new top management teams don't create a working climate where innovation is easily spread.

In the end the directors and managers are responsible for this: if shareholders become to much of an influence you just need a strong director to keep them at bay. So that actually the employees can just work.

[Ivan E]

Yeah, firms in the semiconductor industry have basically no financial analogues to firms in the entertainment industry.

There is no probabilistic R&D component for game development - nearly everything gets pushed to product, and as a result, everything gets pushed to a product that evolves to maximize revenue, because incremental revenue improvements are the only way to achieve constant growth. ASML, and other semiconductor, pharmaceutical, general tech, and other firms that function in a probabilistic windfall environment have to invest in R&D because it's the only way to get an edge on competitors - the industry is full of Schumpeterian creative destruction that occurs via scientific breakthrough rather consumer choice, because their products are not aimed at end users making that choice (and hence their customers are more informed than end users, which means that the need for genuine, over perceived, quality is higher).

Blizzard has not always been a large company. Blizzard before and after the release of WoW is like the U.S. before and after the Louisiana Purchase. Note that Blizzard wasn't even purchased by Vivendi (so it wasn't even part of a very large company) until 1998, meaning that its first releases came out prior to being part of any sort of massive conglomerate. Between 1998 and 2008 (the merger of Vivendi with Activision), Blizzard was one of a stable of developers under Vivendi Games, which included Sierra. Note that Sierra had something like 10 times the employees of Blizzard at this period, so assuming Vivendi's games division even really mattered for its finances back then, Blizzard was probably less than a majority of Vivendi Games' value at that point anyway. Anyway, the point of this is that, as you surely know, Blizzard's revenues, profits, and employees exploded given the release of WoW, at which point Blizzard became a huge entity in the gaming world, and began to broaden its base. Diablo 1/2 and Starcraft were immensely popular with their players but were still relatively niche games among gamers in general, partly because of their poor console availability and partly because, in Starcraft's case, the RTS genre has always been a redheaded stepchild of gaming genres due to high barriers to entry. So no, Blizzard has not always had shareholders, as its performance was generally irrelevant (or not as highly scrutinized) to the holding company owning it until after WoW released, and the subsequent and resulting merger of Activision and Vivendi, when Blizzard became a prime piece of the newly-formed holding company.

[mr punk]

Also: blizzard has always been a large company - always had shareholders, how than that only in the last few years they stopped with innovation? The only reason can be that the new top management teams don't create a working climate where innovation is easily spread.

how can one stop being innovative if they never were in the first place? according to jay, Blizz values perfect execution over innovation as a company culture. jay also says all blizz games are like D3 in that sense. he says the criticism against D2 was that it was non-innovative and ugly. apparently, this is another thing jay says you guys don't recall correctly about D2. perhaps, it's nostalgia clouding your minds. of course, blizz north was before his time, but you know jay once he starts pontificating. lulz..damn, i'm gonna miss that guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrli-by8oOU&t=2m28s

The criticism that we are not innovating, innovation is usually the word, I don't know of a Blizzard game that did not get that criticism. StarCraft II got it, Diablo II got it, when it came out people railed against it as being non-innovative and ugly. I remember that was a really... World of Warcraft... almost everyone of our games people say they're not innovative, and I feel the reason why is because they're looking for innovation to be in a big uppercut-punch-super feature. They're looking for some thing, one thing, that says to them, this is the next greatest thing ever. And, you know, we just think that that's the way to make games, like We think innovation comes in perfect execution. Like, we have a saying around the office; would you... if you had a choice between playing a perfectly innovative game, or a perfectly executed game, which would you do? And the answer for us is always perfectly executed, because an innovative game that is poorly executed is not a good game. But a game that is executed very, very well is always a great game. jay "Titan" wilson

[darkstarhub]

I believe his question is: "Where's the beef"?

The answer is to me far more reaching than just blaming Jay Wison. I love the game, I actually missed my first day since launch yesterday because I couldn't play thanks to ****ty hotel wifi. There are many great aspects of the game, but it's missing the second hamburger patty that a double should have. I think things will be added in through time, and with an expansion, we will have a triple burger with cheese and bacon, and everything else. I really hope in time I will not just be eating my own words!

[pulli]

Well I for one did not think of diablo 2 as a reallyinnovative game. However it was still in that time much ahead of the rest - unlike diablo 3. That still means correct USE of innovation. Take a look at warcraft 3 for example: blizzard did a large gamble there with adding some "rpg-like" elements to the RTS table with heroes.. That is kind of innovation you should expect from a large game design thing. Adding new effects.


Also take a look a the "portal" game: they really made amazing use of a new innovation at that time regarding 3d rendering. Or take a look at the legendary DOOM title. Really innovation is not alien to large companies and I still don't buy it why a game shouldn't have it? Games that were innovative are STILL remembered these days: and they make or break a company.

Gaming is actually one of the more innovative regions: game design was one of the first things that actually made good use of non-shared memory in graphic cards. And really the moment shareholders stop innovation any director worth his mouth should just call those back & tell them once again that the shareholders don't run the company: the employees run it.