Diablo III Sells Like Crazy

[mrdude2010]

I'm guessing they like the gameplay style of Modern Warfare. Oh well.


Let me tell you a little story. Back in the late 70's a young director made a very successful film trilogy. In the late 90's, he released an updated version that had numerous extra scenes and changes.

And the fans flipped out, and threw the biggest internet wide drama queen hissy fit that made all fans of this series look like insecure, whiny, crybabies who think they own the films.

No reason for this, just something to ponder.

. I like the CoD style of gameplay too. But it's been basically the same since MW. They could easily charge $15 for new maps and patch the multiplayer to its current state with a lot less work. I don't understand why people would pay that much for almost exactly the same thing in yearly iterations. The "fans" bitching about the Star Wars special editions of the 90's were idiots. It was 20 years later, and new technology allowed them to update the visual style and effects while keeping the dialogue, story, and characterization the same. The director wasn't pretending they were releasing something new, he was updating something old. All of the recent CoD iterations have been on the same console and in rapid succession.

Dear god, it's not like we can play the game without buying it's DLC. I mean, what kind of psychosis is that???

It's not about whether you can play the game without buying the DLC or not, it's that you paid $60 for the "full" game and didn't even get everything the developers put on the disk. It's the developer trying to squeeze extra money out of the consumer. It's more frustrating if the content they're holding back is especially intriguing or important to the game's lore.

Stand up for themselves, or stand up for you?

Stand up for themselves. The game industry isn't exactly trending in a consumer-friendly direction.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that the millions of people who bought this game looked at the Always online feature and thought "So what?"

Judging by the fan reaction, they probably hated that aspect of it, but bought it anyway.

That's not even very expensive. This is sensationalist crap. If you internet is cutting out, or you are losing your connection repeatedly in a game, then one of the following has happened:

1. You've tapped into a neighbour's wifi and they booted you off.
2. You have a basic internet connection shared with most people.
3. You didn't pay your bill.

Or you live in a rural/isolated area and don't have any access to internet, period. If a game can function as a single player game, there's no reason to force people to be online constantly to play it. I should also point out that younger gamers, who are still a significant portion of the market, can't always afford a decent internet connection. It's more expensive than you think if you're a student on a limited budget.


I should also point out that this also puts you at the mercy of their servers- if they're the ones having an internet problem, you still suffer because you have to be connected to them to play.

Now, I didn't buy Diablo 3 because of the always online thing, but not because I think it's anti-consumer. Because my internet admin changes the wifi code if I so much as look at him funny. I can't garuntee an internet connection, so I don't get to play Diablo 3.

Isn't that just a little frustrating/annoying? A solid game that holds up as a single player experience that's practically forbidden to you for the time being because you don't have a consistent internet connection? I can understand online validation and other such things, because that requires a temporary, one-time internet connection, something inconsistent wifi or public internet can usually get you access to, but there's absolutely no reason for the game to require you to be constantly online.

Blizzard is the only one who suffers if someone can't play their game. That's a lost sale for them. But those lost sales have to be in a significant number to make a difference to the marketing division. Gamers with a good internet connection look at the Always Online and think "Meh, whatever."

The pure number of gamers is increasing. At the current pricing levels, even what would have been a solid number of gamers not being able to purchase their products matters a lot less now because of the increased size of the consumer base. Hitting a lower percentage can still make you more money.

Do you have any games activated through Steam? Are you okay with that? If yes, then shut up about hating DRM you hypocrite!

Steam is a digital distribution service. It's necessary for you to be online to purchase, download, and activate the game. Also, once the game has been activated, you don't need to be connected to the internet to play the games. There's a difference between "connect to the internet to download this and you're done," and "you must be connected to the internet to access single player content."

I should also point out that I still find it annoying to have to spend time entering codes between putting the game into my system and playing it. That just punishes people who bought the game legally, since pirated copies work as soon as they're installed.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

At least they didn't get my money. That is something at least.

 

[Random Fella]

I bought it, because in my opinion the gameplay is amazing
Just hoping now I won't be hacked
Already suffered from the DRM
Time will tell

 

[crepesack]

It's fun, I like it. Don't care about DRM. You guys can stand on your soap box all you want. I'm a gamer not a protester.

 

[akrass100]

I could not wait to get this game and now can not get it anywhere. He is my only shop. How do your impressions?

 

[keinechance]

Good for Blizzard, bad for the comsumer, worst possible case for the future of gaming.

 

[bakan]

I agree 100%. The game has evolved from a single-player only, to a multi-player game that you can play solo or with friends. I happen to enjoy the chat and drop - in , drop - out aspects. I've played WoW, so having to get passed a login screen is just par for the course. Blizzard has been building the knowledge and infrastructure to pull this off for 7 years (ala WoW). I don't know of any other truly single player based developer that could pull off this type of system with out attaching them selves to services like steam, or making up their own like EA.

I don't have to have a second program, or a browser window open to play Diablo 3.

Are you the second or third guy I saw the last two days making an account, praising the game and saying the DRM isn't bad?

After this no other comment was made.

This should be reportable...

On topic:
I didn't buy the game and won't buy it. I enjoyed the Torchlight 2 beta and will wait for it's release - better than anything D3 has to offer.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

6. America is apparently getting gig network lines.

Pray tell, where? Certainly not Chicago.

Most of America's Home-Internet service is a solid DECADE behind the rest of the developed world. My DSL speed, at its current price, was STANDARD for Japan in 1999.

As I said before I can't remember where, I read the news article here that America where testing out and building gig network lines,

7. Always online is the future.

That is a future no customer should want. Please don't just accept it.

Why not? We're getting better and better network lines and soon enough we'll probably be completely independent of it.
Someones just jumped on this train a bit earlier.

Disregarding that every place on Earth that plays games isn't America with those fabled lines of continuous internet, here's the thing: Connections can be shut off.

Company connections can be shut off. And the goal of a company is to make money. Which means when a game isn't profitable anymore, those servers that enable you to play your game will be shut down. No more game. Not online or offline. If Blizzard shut down D3 servers, you'd have payed 60 bucks for those gigs used up on your hard drive, and nothing else.

Always online for MMOs makes sense, but for everything else, please... don't.

That can be said about practically anything.
Anyways, I've got nothing to say to that, seeing as after a few years your comp might not be able to play that game anymore anyways. And I partially agree with you.

 

[DrOswald]

I agree 100%. The game has evolved from a single-player only, to a multi-player game that you can play solo or with friends. I happen to enjoy the chat and drop - in , drop - out aspects. I've played WoW, so having to get passed a login screen is just par for the course. Blizzard has been building the knowledge and infrastructure to pull this off for 7 years (ala WoW). I don't know of any other truly single player based developer that could pull off this type of system with out attaching them selves to services like steam, or making up their own like EA.

I don't have to have a second program, or a browser window open to play Diablo 3.

Are you the second or third guy I saw the last two days making an account, praising the game and saying the DRM isn't bad?

After this no other comment was made.

This should be reportable...

On topic:
I didn't buy the game and won't buy it. I enjoyed the Torchlight 2 beta and will wait for it's release - better than anything D3 has to offer.

It should not be reportable. Stop being silly. The entire point of a comment system is for people to comment and express their opinions. Just because you disagree with those opinions and the person does not normally speak up doesn't mean we should censor it.

 

[shintakie10]

6. America is apparently getting gig network lines.

Pray tell, where? Certainly not Chicago.

Most of America's Home-Internet service is a solid DECADE behind the rest of the developed world. My DSL speed, at its current price, was STANDARD for Japan in 1999.

I believe it was google who planned to start doin that actually. They picked some random town in like...Tennessee as their testin ground and if it works out well and is feasible they plan to try somethin to get it to the rest of the country. I assume either they'd try to get the government to subsidize it or they just sell it to states or whatever.

 

[DrOswald]

Diablo 3 is excellent so it deserv-BAHAHAHAAHAAA. Sorry, couldn't do it with a straight face.

Diablo 3 has done a couple things fairly solidly, and a whole slew of things so incredibly sloppily that if even half of those 6 million think the game is "excellent", I've no hope for humanity. Either way, I'm done with them. Blizzard has been getting consistently shittier as a game dev, and they're going to keep going down that route until they hit rock bottom.

In other news, Diablo 3 thread is infested with binary thinking and deserves to be nuked.

Just out of curiosity, what do you think is so bad about Diablo 3? I personally find the game excellent, probably a 4/5. What in particular for you drags it down to less than excellent? What are you comparing it to?

Started off with an attempt to condense it into one sentence. Did not succeed.

-The visuals are embarrassingly outdated on top of being inconsistent with the rest of the franchise.
-The soundtrack is trite. The best part of it is the part we've been hearing for something like 3 years, it's not anywhere near excellent, and it's overused as fuck. Seriously, it's used in the menu, in the trailers, in the actual cinematics, in a lot of act 4, during the Diablo boss fight... I mean, come the fuck on, do they even have a composer at this point?
-The writing as far as dialogue is concerned is some of the worst I've ever had to experience.
-The writing as far as plot is concerned is close to the same. Chock full of mind-numbing cliches, contrivances, conveniences, retcons, nonsensical plot points, et cetera.
-The crafting is useless and an incredibly transparent gold drain.
-Gems could be more interesting.
-The gem progression is lame and too expensive (an extension of crafting), with an added insult of an arbitrary limit to which level of a gem can be dropped. 14 gem levels (7 that don't even drop), barely any difference between one and the next, and a fucking enormous price tag attached to every move up the ladder.
-Health globes are a shitty replacement for potions (see PoE [http://www.pathofexile.com/] as an actual improvement over D2's potion system).
-The loot game is developed for the auction house, and not the other way around. It's designed in a way where there are many shitty fluff stats[footnote]+exp, hp/sec, gathering, thorns[/footnote] clogging up the RNG[footnote]Random Number Generator[/footnote] on top of the fact that the actual potency of magic properties is incredibly random. You can, and will, find pieces of gear that are twenty levels above what you're carrying that has the same stats, but less. I can accept, indeed I welcome, some randomness to the potency of the magic properties, but not this much. This is just an artificial and transparent way to give the loot game more longevity, and it has no benefits to the player being this way.
-Legendary and rare items are victims to this as well. It's frustrating seeing 20 rares in a row turn out to be completely useless vendor trash, and even more frustrating to know that there's nothing legendary about legendary items.
-Arbitrary limits on how many spells you can use at any one time. I'm sorry, but the game is nowhere near keyboard-intensive to warrant the keyboard skills being limited to 4. If it were at least 5, I could live with it, but as it is, it's just an arbitrary restriction that's supposed to - and does, but not in a good way - create difficulty.
-Passive skills are mostly either really weak, really boring, or both. And you can choose only 3. The thing is that if they went with anything resembling a talent tree, the first sixth of the points you'd spend would accomplish the same as (or more than) all three of these sad excuses for customization.
-Nothing about it screams 6 year (+4 year prep) development. It's lacking in ambition on every front you can imagine.

It's late now, and I'm going off the top of my head. These are probably not even all of my gripes with the game.

The thing is, I bought the game expecting nothing more than a half-decent time waster. I had no illusions about it blowing my mind on any level, and the expectations were set very low for a Blizzard title (I know, living in the past). But like Tyrael came crashing down through Tristram's cathedral, the game came crashing down past my expectations.

After the first playthrough, the most I could even think about giving the game was 6/10 (that's if the writing is out of the picture). But the more I think about it and experience it, the less I find there to compliment and the more frustrated I get.

I suppose we just have different opinions.

I'll give you that the graphics and music are lackluster, but that has more to do with atheistic choices than technical skill. I disagree that the graphics are inconsistent with the franchise. In fact, I think that is why they are only ok, they tried to keep the feel very consistent with Diablo 2's. It sounds like Diablo 2, it looks like Diablo 2, and they failed to put anything new and interesting in there to differentiate it from the many dungeon crawlers out there that attempted to clone Diablo 2.

The writing was terrible, but who really cares? Diablo lore and story telling has always been pathetic. It was never the focus of the series and no one actually expected it to be good. To me, saying the bad story seriously hurts the game is like saying a Mario game is bad because he fights Bowser to save the princess.

All your complaints about the loot grinding system may in fact be legitimate, I am not far enough in the game to make the judgement call, but I just don't care and I bet most others don't care either. I don't intend to grind for loot, so none of that crap effects me at all.

The limits on how many spells you can use (and binding each spell to a specific slot) was a design decision, one that I personally agree with. It adds an interesting cost vs benefit choice to the game. But I admit this is a matter of personal opinion. I just like what you don't.

Finally, I believe the skill system of Diablo 3 is far better than the skill tree of Diablo 2 or similar systems. While it is true that the skill tree of Diablo 2 allowed for greater customization there was always a best build and deviating from that build would ruin your character. Basically, you had the option to customize your character to be bad. Experimentation in anyway would seriously and permanently damage your character. An option to respec somewhat lessens these problems, but there is still the best build problem. A standard skill tree system allows for customization but seriously punishes you for it. The Diablo 3 system, on the other hand, throws out the ability to customize in favor of allowing experimentation without penalty. You don't have to follow rigid builds you find on the internet to keep your character effective.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I believe it was google who planned to start doin that actually. They picked some random town in like...Tennessee as their testin ground and if it works out well and is feasible they plan to try somethin to get it to the rest of the country. I assume either they'd try to get the government to subsidize it or they just sell it to states or whatever.

So it'd be government-supported Internet?
Well, that's hardly an original idea. I just hadn't heard of that coming to the states.

Really, I don't want to get started on my tirade about the incredible, monopolistic bullshit that has set America's broadband infrastructure development back. I could go on for hours.

 

[Zyst]

I actually bought the game, was mad for half a night where I couldn't log in at 12 am sharp and then have had an amazing pretty much problem-less time since then.

Get off your high horse some of the first escapists, I play games for freaking fun, and Diablo 3 is fun as hell. I have a stable internet connection and guess what? I don't think Blizzard is spoon-feeding me crap. So take off your hipster glasses, we don't care that you're gonna buy torchlight instead, and let people who did buy the game and are enjoying it keep enjoying it without having to say anything else.

At Blizzard, good job! Another good game, but that's pretty much granted.

EDIT: As a final note I already bought torchlight 2, and I do think it's gonna be an amazing game, I just hate the holier-than-thou attitude going around.

 

[Weaver]

So either everyone who bitched about the DRM is a whiny hypocrite and bought it anyway, or the vast percentage of gamers who like this type of game don't care that Blizzard is spoon feeding them shit.

Only way we'll see no more DRM is if they saw sales numbers of maybe 1 million or something along with hundreds of thousands of people saying:

"No! We won't take this garbage anymore. You don't say when and how we can play the games we bought!"

I didn't buy it for this reason, and I wish others felt the same. I mean I work at a work site 30 weeks a year with no internet access so that means I'm not allowed to play something I could buy? How is that fair? Steam does it just fine without always online DRM.

I didn't buy it either. Don't lump me in with them!

 

[Weaver]

I would be a fool to pass up one of the best in years because of the minor annoyance of always on DRM.

That's awesome for you. I got home last night and my internet was off (again, I'll add) until 8pm because my ISP is flaky. They're also the only ISP in my entire Provence that offers an unlimited data plan. So I can either pay $200 a month in bandwidth usage fees or deal with intermittent outages (which would mean I couldn't play D3).

I was also in the D3 closed beta for months, my ping was constantly around 300 - 400 every. single. time. and rendered the game nearly unplayable. I'm glad you and you're friends are in so fortunate a position to have a great server ping and have a stable ISP, but for people like me the always online DRM isn't just a minor annoyance, it essentially stops me from playing the game in any way.

 

[DrOswald]

I would be a fool to pass up one of the best in years because of the minor annoyance of always on DRM.

That's awesome for you. I got home last night and my internet was off (again, I'll add) until 8pm because my ISP is flaky. They're also the only ISP in my entire Provence that offers an unlimited data plan. So I can either pay $200 a month in bandwidth usage fees or deal with intermittent outages (which would mean I couldn't play D3).

I was also in the D3 closed beta for months, my ping was constantly around 300 - 400 every. single. time. and rendered the game nearly unplayable. I'm glad you and you're friends are in so fortunate a position to have a great server ping and have a stable ISP, but for people like me the always online DRM isn't just a minor annoyance, it essentially stops me from playing the game in any way.

I understand why you don't like always on DRM, and I acknowledge that it is a real problem for many people, and for you it is not just a minor inconvenience. But so many people are freaking out that gamers are just letting Blizzard walk all over them, that we just take whatever shit they dish out and eagerly buy it. But that isn't what is happening. They aren't screwing us over or actively trying to cause us pain just because they can.

Diablo 3 has sold so well because Blizzard is providing an excellent product that far out weighs the minor inconvenience attached to it. The problem for people in your situation is that Blizzard has decided they don't care to have you as a customer. They don't want to sell to you because selling to you costs them more than you are worth as a customer. And that sucks for you, but it means very little to me.

I can only fight so many battles, and there just isn't anything in this one for me. Passing up the extremely rare opportunity to play a cooperative game with my wife entirely for the possibility of a bunch of people who I will never know to maybe someday purchase and use an entirely theoretical luxury good would be foolish.

I don't like always on DRM, I would rather Diablo 3 did not have it. But it is hardly worth getting worked up over and it certainly isn't worth boycotting Diablo 3 over.

 

[antipunt]

These people are geniuses...

they can justify their ultra-DRM via 'auction houses' 'scams/dupes' and 'needing to spawn items/monsters server side'.

Made a hugely anticipated game. Blocked off all the pirates simultaneously.

Roll in da dough. Piracy defeated. What more could they ask for?

Also, we all knew this game would sell like hotcakes. I admit I'm kind of cynical, but honestly right? Money talks. And a precedent has been set. Oh wells

/negativity

 

[bakan]

snip

It should not be reportable. Stop being silly. The entire point of a comment system is for people to comment and express their opinions. Just because you disagree with those opinions and the person does not normally speak up doesn't mean we should censor it.

Actually, these accounts get created for every major game which has controversies going on for it and they are obviously not some average guys posting that they loves the game.

 

[DrOswald]

snip

It should not be reportable. Stop being silly. The entire point of a comment system is for people to comment and express their opinions. Just because you disagree with those opinions and the person does not normally speak up doesn't mean we should censor it.

Actually, these accounts get created for every major game which has controversies going on for it and they are obviously not some average guys posting that they loves the game.

But how are they obviously not some average person who loves the game? We are on a gaming website. People tend to comment on things they are interested in, things for which they have strong opinions, and things that other people are already talking about. Major game releases with controversies around them are going to attract comments from people who normally wouldn't speak up. Perhaps even people who are new to the site and simply haven't care enough about anything yet to create an account. Banning a person for expressing a positive comment about a game they love would be insane. Especially when there is no reason to believe that this person wasn't just commenting on the ongoing discussion of this article.