Diablo II Dev: Diablo III Was Originally an MMO

[Twilight_guy]

Yeah and team Fortress was originally Half Life. What's your point?

9 years of dev is going to completely gut and remove nearly everything from a project except the name and core premise. Aside from being an interesting fact this bit of information is fairly useless. (aside from another place for people to make quick jabs at Blizzard and its games pro and con and flinging large amounts of mud).

But the problem is that it still has some really obvious relics from the MMO concept, like there being no truely single player option. Storing almost all game info on a server, that you must keep a constant internet connection to to be able to play, which leads to MMO problems such as rubberbanding, lag, being completely disconnected from your game without warning, and not being able to log onto the servers at all to play because they are full/offline.

All this is in place to protect a microtransaction auction house that will make more money for Blizzard, and to fund the server costs, and things like drop rates and rare item stats have had to be nerfed to protect this.

All these are relics from the initial concept of having a Diablo MMO, because if they didn't need to fund server costs, they wouldn't need to generate income through an RM aution house, meaning they wouldn't need secure servers to store the game data, eliminating the vast majority of complaints about the game, complaints that have led to huge fan outcry and legal action against Blizzard.

That's the point of the article.

Actually the point of this article was to explain what an old Blizzard dev said about the development of Diablo 3. The problem here is that you are useing this as a weak excuse to bring up another separate issue you have a problem with even thought 9 years of development went on and anything that this guy worked on was mostly washed away. Blizzard made an active decision to have several features like their online connectivity and Real Money auction house that are entirely separate from any decision to make an MMO that happened early on. Saying these two are related is showing a gross ignorance of game development and how much things change and evolve. Hell even the early beta looks entirely different from the current game and that wasn't that long of a dev period between. I don't care about people's opinions of the controversial features since its like arguing religion at this point, but I won't stand for people to willful making themselves ignorant of game development in order to have the discussion again by way of a weak tangent.

 

[Skratt]

MMO - the largest bandwagon in human history.

On a lighter note, anyone want to buy my copy of D3? Slightly used.

Anyone?

*crickets*

Bah, it'll probably get better later, right? *sigh*

 

[RedDeadFred]

I don't need to "explain" my argument in relation to D2 or Torchlight, because it's not really dependent on them. I'm saying that it's frustrating and transparent design, seeing the vast majority of magic items be completely useless vendor trash, and it's designed like that specifically because of the AH, as the sexy Bashiok will explain for you in a second:

Except that you talked about getting frustrated with D3's shallow loot system in the same post that you talked about deciding to preorder Torchlight 2. I have news for you, 90% of the loot you find in Torchlight is going to be worthless vendor trash. In fact, you're going to wish that Torchlight has a way to trade with players (maybe it will, since it'll be multiplayer this time), because you're going to get that one spectacular item... for another class. Then what? Then it's time to hope and pray that you can find someone who wants to buy it off of you, then you have to hope that you can find someone who has a piece of gear that you can buy with the money from the gear you sold. Or you can just post to and buy from the AH.

Or I could be playing games for the fun of it, instead of treating it like a damn job. Everytime someone talks about how they're "playing" Diablo 3, all I hear is work. How they're having to farm this or that. How they have to do some workaround to get more something or other. And just...jesus christ, it doesn't even sound like a game.

The best thing I can say about Diablo 3 is it got me back into Borderlands and now I'm crazy hyped for Borderlands 2.

Agreed. Borderlands 2 is going to be magnificent.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Yeah, I did look; and according to D3DB weapons can have defensive stats on them. They can't. All it does is list every possible affix that any item can have on it, then lets you apply the affix to said weapon. On the one hand, it can be useful to plan-out your ideal weapon if you know what affixes can be on it; though on the other it lets you create impossible items to try and "prove" your point about item drops being ****ed, kinda like you admitted to doing.

Damn, you came so close to being correct there. No, it doesn't list every possible affix, the problem here was that some of the affix restrictions still haven't been accounted for.

Yeah, after playing around with a weapon a little bit, I did notice that things like Movement Speed and Armor weren't able to be affixed, but it still proves the point that a weapon slapped together on that site doesn't prove a damn thing, because it does allow affixes that can't happen in the game.

I could've sworn I had something like that drop for me that my brother, who was in the room at the time, commented on. But hey, after having checked out a dozen AH pages and googled around without finding any of these, I stand corrected. Maybe it was just a non-class-specific weapon or something.

*Shrug* I guess we'll never know. I know I've done it more than a couple times where I thought a piece of gear in a game was completely absurd, then after weeks of thinking so, I realize that I simply misread part of the stats; sometimes after someone pointed it out to me, making me feel like a buffoon. >_<

I don't need to "explain" my argument in relation to D2 or Torchlight, because it's not really dependent on them. I'm saying that it's frustrating and transparent design, seeing the vast majority of magic items be completely useless vendor trash, and it's designed like that specifically because of the AH, as the sexy Bashiok will explain for you in a second:

Except that you talked about getting frustrated with D3's shallow loot system in the same post that you talked about deciding to preorder Torchlight 2. I have news for you, 90% of the loot you find in Torchlight is going to be worthless vendor trash. In fact, you're going to wish that Torchlight has a way to trade with players (maybe it will, since it'll be multiplayer this time), because you're going to get that one spectacular item... for another class. Then what? Then it's time to hope and pray that you can find someone who wants to buy it off of you, then you have to hope that you can find someone who has a piece of gear that you can buy with the money from the gear you sold. Or you can just post to and buy from the AH.

Except I didn't say that this is the main reason I'm buying Torchlight 2 for, or even implied it.[/quote]Exclaiming how you got fed-up with D3 and decided to pre-order Torchlight 2 despite having previously being disinterested in it, followed by a full paragraph ranting just about the itemization actually implies quite a lot. I suppose I could assume that you just found the challenge to be too much, since that's the only other thing mentioned (being half-way through Inferno when you threw your hands up in disgust).

I don't frankly care. It's really, extremely random, and purposefully so. Whether you think it's solely because of the AH or only partly because of the AH (the other side of blame probably rests with people who enjoy getting mountains of unnecessarily shitty loot) is completely immaterial to me.

And yet it doesn't change the fact that Torchlight 2 is going to be exactly the same way. Maybe you never played Torchlight, but one of its perks was that you could load-up your dog with all the garbage loot you found and send him back to town to sell it so that you didn't have to break from the dungeon crawling. So what's that tell you about the loot drops in Torchlight?

Another mitigating factor as far as D2 is concerned, if I accepted your proposition for the sake of argument, is that skills mostly have an inherent power to them. Not everything is based directly on weapon damage, in fact, very little is, so a lot of your character's progression as far as damage is concerned didn't even come from items. With D3, items are everything.

Only to make room for more resist gear. Or maybe you forget how in D2 it was "Resist or garbage" for its loot drops. Oh, but I guess those rose-tinted glasses don't allow for admitting that there were faults in a game you used to love.

...What? I thought your argument was that D2 had a loot system that was just as random as it is in D3.

And it is just as random, I was making the point that gear was just as important in D2 as you say it is in D3; not so-much for the attack power it gave, but because you needed to stack resists in order to survive in Nightmare and Hell. If a piece of gear didn't have resist, it was scrap. Total garbage. Okay, so maybe one or two pieces of gear could get away with no resists, but they'd have to be damn good in the other stats.

 

[RandV80]

Sorry, I'm gonna let you finish, but the game has been in development for practically 6 years. Not having the most basic, core functions of a loot-based game down by this time is incompetence. I don't care if it's fixable or not at this point. This is way too much time to have waited for a simplistic, boring and sometimes outright broken loot system.

Now let me start by saying that I've never been a Diablo fan, or even much of a Blizzard fan for that matter (only time they ever really had me hooked was Warcraft 2), but this is what's really left me wondering about the game. Blizzard is supposed to have a rep for highly finished products. Now we're looking at a game that uses relatively low tech (ie. cheaper to develop), an apparent six year development cycle, plus millions of rabid fans waiting to throw their money at you taking all the financial risk out of the equation.

How can this be a game that now requires some patching to optimize? I can understand the constant patches with Starcraft 2, those are for the PvP where you literally need thousands of players having thousands of matches to get the correct data and make the appropriate fine tuning. But for Starcraft that is the multiplayer that's getting patched, the single player campaign came out ready to go. I understand Diablo is multiplayer too, but it's not the same competitive PvP that Starcraft is and if anything is more like a coop version of the single player campaign.

Basically I just can't fathom how Diablo 3 can be a game that still needs some serious balancing after launch.

 

[piinyouri]

Oh well.
That explains a lot.

 

[Beautiful End]

"Diablo II Dev: Diablo III Was Originally an MMO"

Spoiler: Really...

That was my reaction even before I clicked on the article. I guess that explains a lot.

 

[BreakdownBoy]

So the myth of Blizzard spending large amounts of time on developing games is about quality has been debunked.

We now know that it is because they can't make up their damn mind!

I am sure consumer confidence in Blizzard dropped at least 25%-50% after Diablo3.

 

[DonTsetsi]

Another mitigating factor as far as D2 is concerned, if I accepted your proposition for the sake of argument, is that skills mostly have an inherent power to them. Not everything is based directly on weapon damage, in fact, very little is, so a lot of your character's progression as far as damage is concerned didn't even come from items. With D3, items are everything.

Only to make room for more resist gear. Or maybe you forget how in D2 it was "Resist or garbage" for its loot drops. Oh, but I guess those rose-tinted glasses don't allow for admitting that there were faults in a game you used to love.

...What? I thought your argument was that D2 had a loot system that was just as random as it is in D3.

And it is just as random, I was making the point that gear was just as important in D2 as you say it is in D3; not so-much for the attack power it gave, but because you needed to stack resists in order to survive in Nightmare and Hell. If a piece of gear didn't have resist, it was scrap. Total garbage. Okay, so maybe one or two pieces of gear could get away with no resists, but they'd have to be damn good in the other stats.

Unless you were playing a high damage ranged class with teleport or a summoner with a lot of minions. A good summonmancer would never get hit, even on hell. He was garbage in PvP, though.

 

[bobmd13]

Hellgate London was a great idea forced out of the womb too early by EA.

Hold on I hear cries of disbelief that EA would release a game that was not up to standard with the alpha and beta test players.

The game wanted money from the start to create guilds and give a slight increase in storage. Now that may have been acceptable if the SERVERS HAD WORKED.

But EA as usual scrimped on the servers and the game crashed so often (I think I know of one game recently that has the same problems) it made it virtually unplayable.

EA forced Flagship to release and bemoaned its failure.

Its time that the publishers admit that they cause 90% of the problems and ok sometimes the designers need a kick in the arse,but forcing crap out is not the answer.

I bought Hellgate at full retail and cried every time I had to replay an area cause the servers crashed.

The big publishers have a lot to answer for, Microsoft for Shadowrun,I mean what to hell,a RPG with a large following so lets turn it into a FPS with limited maps.

Activision for Diablo 3, I cant say anymore other than the server crap, RMAH and the authenicator which you have to buy to use a service boasted on their packaging. And now we have a 72 hour wait on all digital copies before full access is allowed.

EA: Mass Effect and SWTOR which has virtually no endgame,6 months after release.

It just goes on and on, the thing is in the last year gamers have become vocal and now the investors are worried,cause they know that the slip shod behaviour is not going to be accepted anymore.

My next prediction is that Microsoft will have a major scare with Windows 8,since when do gamers want to buy new monitors so we can use their system. Monitors btw that have a lower resolution than we have now and cost more and are also smaller.

Also business has no interest in changing monitors to use the full abilities of Windows 8.

Little hint Microsoft, sort out Windows 7 so its not a hard drive hog. Rewrite the software so it allows the removal of old files and the insertion of updates into existing files instead of rewriting the whole file and then keeping the obsolete file.