The Great Disconnect Between the Diablo Universe and Diablo 3 the game.

[krischan]

I dont think people expected the story to be amazing.

But they didnt expect it to be attrocially bad either.

What you said is so ambiguous that I wouldn't be surprised if an archeologist has already found an ancient stone tablet with a text like that about Homer's Iliad

[Kiroptus]

Then you are really lacking in reading comprehension.

Let me put it in an easier wording then: People were not expecting some shakespearing and citizen kane alike oscar nonimee script, like you so exaggerated put on your previous post, but what is in the game not only is horrible enough to make Michael Bay's films look deep but it is also shoved down your throat through the game so it gets more spotlight on how horrible it is. If it was like D2 where you could ignore the story if you didnt feel like caring about it, maybe people wouldnt complain about it so much.

I mean, Torchlight 2 story is horrible but it doesnt get the same flak that D3 gets because it doesnt get shoved down your throat so much that you have keep your finger on the ESC button and be ready to skip cutscenes every 3-4 min of play.

[krischan]

Then you are really lacking in reading comprehension.

No, I don't "lack in reading comprehension" (interesting construct BTW), but with such a communication problem between us two, our discussion ends here before it even started.

Perhaps you mean comprehension of texts, but "reading comprehension", that makes no sense to me. I think it would be a good idea for you to concentrate on your lack of vocabulary and grammar instead of pointing out an imagined lack of reading skills or at comprehending English texts.

Let me put it in an easier wording then:

Sorry that you wasted any time on that.

[Kiroptus]

Well its not my first language. But I am sure you understood what I meant, you just wanted to nitpick something else about the post (its grammar) rather than the actual discussion in the thread.

[mr punk]

It resembled a c-class low-budget horror movie, fully equipped with cheesey villains with terrible one-liners, horrifically bad story-arch and laughable themes.

IIRC, i believe jay said he was going for camp. in any event, it's par for the course since narrative is emphasized much, much more in modern games. D3 was probably pitched like a movie. perhaps, D3 is jay's homage to Army of Darkness.

The thing that baffles me is that at some point there comes a time where you look back at something and just think - wow, this is way too terrible to ship. Surely the QA testers said something?

apparently, they thought it was great. in fact, jay says their internal testers and strike teams thought the entire game was awesome. of course, later blizz admitted they were wrong about a lot of things concerning D3, but that's besides the point. the real problem is you uncultured ingrates can't appreciate a great story or modern game design. ok, jay didn't say that, but he's probably thinking it.

Spoiler

Q: How do you handle fan feedback? Of course, there was the art controversy a few years ago. Were there any aspects of the game that fans criticized, and you thought, "Hey, these guys have a point"?

JW: Well I actually can honestly say that I don't think I've made a decision on this project, or the team has made a decision on this project, that hasn't been criticized by someone.

So you learn very quickly to listen, and decide whether you agree. And that's critical. And that's one of the things that I think, when we do get criticized sometimes by some people in the audience, saying that we're not listening -- it's really more that we're not agreeing.

Listening and agreeing are two totally different things. And if we listened to everyone complain and try to solve all their problems, we would have a mishmash mediocre mess of a game. I can't even get two groups to agree, a lot of the time, about exactly how they disagree about something. You have to listen, but you still have to make your own judgment call.

And so a lot of the times we've had a lot of negative responses to the skill system [from fans]. We looked at the complaints that we had, and a lot of the complaints were, "Okay, that's not reflected in what we see internally." The problems that they're running into, the things that they're complaining about, we're not seeing. That's not what we're seeing internally when we have people test the game, when we look at our own developers playing the game, and listen to their responses. Is [the complaint] invalid? No, but is it a downside that we can accept? Yeah.

[pulli]

Yes, these aren't very witty texts, but you have to admit that those of the D2 act bosses aren't more inventive.

I'm a bit surprised about the expectations on the story for a Diablo game. It's DIABLO! People don't play it for hundreds or thousands of hours because of the story line, but to find LOOT and KICK ARSE in some manner. I guess a lot of them skipped the story completely and cut off all text lines when the game came out, just to win the inevitable (and IMO dumb) race about who's the fastest. Second, it's for children from 12 up IIRC, so a 30 year old player shouldn't expect anything like a Shakespeare drama with music from Wagner. It's more likely to find a kind of Power Ranger or Pokemon shallowness.

IMO the story becomes irrelevant after being through it for a few times. I didn't listen much to the monsters or NPCs anymore after playing through D2 three times, for example, and i didn't notice a difference with D3. I also don't think that D3 lacks gloom. The act 1 dungeons and the second half of act 4 have enough of it. Since D2, the game doesn't have much of a gothic atposphere, so I neither expected it in D3 nor was it missed by me. That's a matter of taste, however.

It's other things which make the game at its current stage (or the last stage I played it so far, to be honest) fail at providing long-term play fun.

Well the game directors DID market diablo 3 with "completely changing the way a story is told in a game, making it much more natural and better".

[Sass]

Well the game directors DID market diablo 3 with "completely changing the way a story is told in a game, making it much more natural and better".

They did. We go from finding story only in completely out of place books to more NPC focus to a combo of them that incorporates more of the reading lore to give it depth, yet keep it more out of the way to streamline gameplay IF that is what the player chooses to do.

Lore was never ignored for the sake of anything. It was kept in the background like it has in every Diablo game. If the player chooses to delve into the lore, it's very rich and the immersion lends suspense and intrigue. When you play it more than 2-3 times (enough to get all the little journals), it becomes boring, lame, etc. If you delve into it expecting it to be a horrible story, you distort the perception before it began, and it leads to the biased whining you get. There is a big difference between a legitimate disapproval and whining because it didn't match your imagined fannon. There's a noun for that feeling, but it escapes me.

[pulli]

yet keep it more out of the way to streamline gameplay IF that is what the player chooses to do.

Tell me how to ignore all those cutscenes, cheesy lines and boring comments?

The only good game with lore I played recently was dragon age: origins. There the lore actually gave the game more dimension. In diablo all the lore about monsters etc is so boring and distached from the game.

Another good game with good lore is the half life universe, there also the story unfolds as you walk through the game.

[stillman]

It was all an elaborate con job. They made the game for children, but they wanted to trick the older fans into anticipating a darker game for adults. There is a long list of lies:

-the game will get darker in later acts.
-"a near infinite number of items to find."
-all kinds of new features (skill rune drops, talisman, supposedly many others, etc).
-pvp will be ready shortly after release.
-DH will have medieval armor.
-Cydaea, female barb, and mystic all had rougher if not hideous faces suggestive of a scary game.
-barb will be the same from d2.
-we're not modelling it after WoW.
-we're watching movies to copy--I mean research how horror works.
-Less related, but their panel literally laughed at the idea of cheats and security breaches.
-5 billion (or w/e the number was) builds with the skill variants--I mean "runes" system.
-we're removing burning crosses and such b/c we want to develop Sanctuary's culture.
-we want you to send us your ideas on new item mods, some of which will end up in the game.
-these pitiful legendaries are just placeholders!

All of this is suggestive of a nightmarish game that carries over plenty from d2. Admittedly, I was suckered in by ignoring all the warning signs.

[Kiroptus]

^Oh I remember those. Also when people were pointing out how lame the legendary item stats were they said "Dont worry, those are just placeholders".


It is very interesting to see how they changed their tone after some months of the when the game shipped. At first they were throwing champagne bottles all around celebrating the success of D3 sales (which they didnt seem to have too much faith on) foolishly thinking that their great design decisions and blizzard's themselves that earned all those sales but if they were more sane they would realise that it was due to Diablo 2's legacy and thats what people expected, so they should be scared of those sales. As soon as the torrent of criticism and hate that the game received, they were quick to dismiss it as a "vocal minority" and boasting sales numbers and the approval of internal test teams would say that the game is perfect.

But something happened that changed their tone and threw them in a huge rush of despair to throw as much band-aid fixes to the game so much that the PvP that was supposed to be in 2 months maximum after the released had to not only be pushed back but also to be completely scrapped in favor of a very basic form of PvP. Maybe it was probably a huge decline in the playerbase soon made them realise that the criticism wasnt particulary a minor group as they first thought and that the legacy and name of Diablo 2 was still too strong to be changed like that, so yeah, Mike Morhaime himself had to do some damage control, it was all just too glaring for them to just remain silent, it was that bad.