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On December 29 2012 18:36 Seiniyta wrote:Show nested quote +On December 29 2012 10:55 Thereisnosaurus wrote:Diablo 3 sold millions of copies and many players played for hundreds of hours. Diablo 3 scored 88 on metacritics. (The Diablo got 94 (topping the original Starcraft, which scored 88), Diablo 2 got just 88 too, Lord of Destruction only 87.) It was of course a comercial success. The fact that you used the commercial metascore rating for the game just shows you're not really up on how opinions run. Every commercial game metascore is vastly overadjusted, the best way of determining whether a game is actually good is if the user and reviewer reviews are on roughly the same level. A game where the user score is a little under the reviewer score is probably a touch overhyped. A game where the user score is a little better than the reviewer score is probably a niche jewel. Diablo II's reviewer/user score was 88/87 Starcraft II's reviewer/user score was 91/81 Diablo III's reviewer/user score was 88/38That puts it in the same league as ME3 (89/45) and CoDMW3 (78/28), both also commercial successes but massive critical failures. The fact that a game sold a lot of copies clearly no longer is indicative that it is a good game. Success does not equal quality. Metacritic user scores are even less reliable then normal reviews when it comes down to big game releases. Just because the ending in ME3 wasn't as good as they hoped people bombed Metacritic with poor 0 score reviews. ME3 was a fine game up until the lame ending. Does that deserve a 45? No, not at all. Same for Diablo 3 really. "I played 200 hours and the game is shit" I really scratch my head with those statements....why did you play 200 hours you didn't enjoy? Are you okay? It boggles my mind.
Metacritic user reviews are a terrible place to look for game reviews. It is quite obvious to see that when ME3 has a 45 score from user reviews and is 15 minutes away from narrowly getting 2nd place in gamespot's people's choice video game of the year selection (currently at 49.7% compared to Farcry 3 at 50.3%). Not to mention if you go back to the very release of D3, most of the user scores are 0-2 simply because of connection errors.
Gamespot user reviews give Diablo 3 a 72 even with a lot of bad scores on release because of connection problems.
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On December 29 2012 18:36 Seiniyta wrote:
Same for Diablo 3 really. "I played 200 hours and the game is shit" I really scratch my head with those statements....why did you play 200 hours you didn't enjoy? Are you okay? It boggles my mind.
200 hours is a lot. A good, non biased reviewers should be able to produce a better, extensive review of the game with 200 hours under his belt vs someone with only 40 hours. Maybe you should focus on the review instead of whether the reviewer is in good health and enjoying the game or not.
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On December 30 2012 05:59 Jindo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 29 2012 18:36 Seiniyta wrote:
Same for Diablo 3 really. "I played 200 hours and the game is shit" I really scratch my head with those statements....why did you play 200 hours you didn't enjoy? Are you okay? It boggles my mind.
200 hours is a lot. A good, non biased reviewers should be able to produce a better, extensive review of the game with 200 hours under his belt vs someone with only 40 hours. Maybe you should focus on the review instead of whether the reviewer is in good health and enjoying the game or not.
No, I wasn't talking about reviewers (well I guess if you count the user reviews as reviews). But if a consumer plays a game for 200 hours, even though he has no actual need to do so because he doesn't get paid for it in a reliable way and afterwards says the game is shit I scratch my head a bit. I would never play a game so long I don't enjoy....ever.
Of course, if a reviewer decides for whatever reason to spend 200 hours in Diablo (I think reviewers usually only play as long as the campaign and a bit of the multiplayer before moving on to review the next game) then yeah they can give a really good judgement of the game. But that applies to any game where you spent so much time in I think.
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On December 28 2012 03:48 Zozo wrote:
How can these people keep their jobs? We fire people over being late, let alone not working for 5 years.
I lol'd.
So true though. Honestly the code in the game isn't bad at all, but how the designers have their job still or at the very least haven't been transferred to somewhere more appropriate for their skill-set is beyond me.
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Metacritic user scores are even less reliable then normal reviews when it comes down to big game releases. Just because the ending in ME3 wasn't as good as they hoped people bombed Metacritic with poor 0 score reviews. ME3 was a fine game up until the lame ending. Does that deserve a 45? No, not at all.
bolded for emphasis. It wasn't 'the best game of all time ever' up untill the lame ending. It was a moderately good shot at wrapping the series, worth maybe a 75 or 80 without the ending. I'm sure some people gave it 10s just because they thought the ending wasn't all that bad either. What matters is the score was 45 overall. A game is not represented by what it could have been had it not had bugs, design errors, last minute changes and false marketing. A game is represented by what happens when it is put into the wild. Any developer could design a perfect game to run on an isolated test system with ideal players. But that's not what good videogame design is about, nor is it a reasonable standard by which to judge said games.
Same for Diablo 3 really. "I played 200 hours and the game is shit" I really scratch my head with those statements....why did you play 200 hours you didn't enjoy? Are you okay? It boggles my mind.
ever read a book through hoping it would improve by the end, with a nice twist or good climax? ever tried to finish a bad meal just to be done with it? People have many reasons to continue to play games that aren't fun, particularly the bit where they paid $60 for it and want to get their money's worth. Videogames, in particular, have a history of making people do a lot of work to reach a distant reward. We're used to putting in the grind to get to the top level where the fun metagaming begins. I would say a *majority* of gamers (those who aren't new to the genre) would prefer to begin the game with a fully geared and kitted max level character on hand, just so they can 'take a break from serious play and have some fun'.
Now in an ideal world, the journey is the reward. If you get to paragon 100, get fully geared and suddenly your character is deleted, you should be magnanimous about it, it's cool, I had fun playing. Would you be cool with that? No, because in this genre in particular, the fun comes from achievement, and achievement is reached through a lot of trivial diegetic work. Without the achievement, the work is... well, just wasted time, but you can never know that until you've done it. It's up to the game designer to make fucking sure when you get to the end of the trip you feel satisfied, and almost every design related complaint about diablo 3 has been that the game doesn't do that at all well.
Metacritic user reviews are a terrible place to look for game reviews. It is quite obvious to see that when ME3 has a 45 score from user reviews and is 15 minutes away from narrowly getting 2nd place in gamespot's people's choice video game of the year selection (currently at 49.7% compared to Farcry 3 at 50.3%). Not to mention if you go back to the very release of D3, most of the user scores are 0-2 simply because of connection errors.
That's kind of how it works, if you are a mainstream, experienced developer and you release a product that is untested and fails horrifically to perform smoothly in the wild, that's not a great product. Again, a game can't be rated on how good it is for the ideal user in the ideal situation. This is an incredibly arrogant and foolish attitude that developers and enthusiasts adopt and is certainly one of the reasons a lot of otherwise great games tank, because not enough effort is made to ensure they are actually good products instead of just good concepts. I agree a game shouldn't be judged entirely on that, but if it was D3 would have a user score of like 1.1. If it hadn't had such a craptastic launch it probably would have scraped 5. Barely. Still not so hot.
The game of the year poll is sort of a joke, btw. The main reason is that it's a narrow demographic poll, somewhat like asking what the best dessert of 2012 is on a website devoted to chocolate. Gamespot is the most AAA culture-centric news outlet these days and it shows. The poll ultimately only shows what people bought (which in AAA directly ties into which games had the biggest advertising budget- guess which 4 had the biggest budgets of 2012. It shouldn't be too hard.), not what was good. I'm not going to rag on it too hard, and it certainly does make the point that ME3 wasn't a complete and utter failure, and given the incredible amount of media coverage and anti-hype the game got in the mass media after release I think it's fair to say that the user score IS a bit down on where it could be, with the game rebounding over time.
Diablo 3 has no such mitigating factors, and I certainly don't see it in the running for any critical acclaim outside of art direction (which was admittedly stunning).
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On December 29 2012 02:06 Staboteur wrote:Show nested quote +On December 28 2012 20:32 [F_]aths wrote:On December 28 2012 19:16 HyunA wrote:
If Jay Wilson will show his face at the next Blizzacon, i think people should boo him and throw things at him. This is totally unacceptable and altho it hurts me to say this, Blizzard is nothing but a wreck of what it used to be.
RIP Blizzard february 1991 - may 2012. ... why? Diablo 3 sold millions of copies and many players played for hundreds of hours. Diablo 3 scored 88 on metacritics. (The Diablo got 94 (topping the original Starcraft, which scored 88), Diablo 2 got just 88 too, Lord of Destruction only 87.) Wings of Liberty got score of 93. Despite declining playercound, WoW still seems to be a big game in the MMO genre. Does anyone really doubt that a yet-to-be-announced Diablo 3 expansion will do for the game what so far any Blizzard expansion did? The number of copies it sold is a testament to what people hoped it would be, not what people hope it is. The unignorable truth is that, for a game with 3 million copies sold, it seems a very, very sad few of those people actually still play the game... and while a hundred hours is a damn lot for a single-player game, it doesn't feel like a lot for a multiplayer game produced by blizzard. Is Diablo 3 blizzard's downfall? Hell no... but acting like it's a 94 to Starcraft's 88 only applies if they were released the same year.
Diablo 3 did not meet the expectation of most Diablo 2 fans. Instead Blizzard developed the game for a larger audience. My feeling about D3 is, that the game is not fleshed out yet. But the core gameplay is right. D3 fixes many, many flaws of the previous games and introduced a handful of new ones, but the actual gameplay is fun. An expansion can work with that.
I am disappointed by many things in Diablo 3. It feels too linear, the side quests are worthless, buildings are new instances instead of placed in the real world (a house is inside bigger than on the outside, you don't really enter the house, you get into a new area, I experience this as a continuity issue.) Item management feels too simplistic, I always look for the same stats and almost any slot can have almost any stat. The cut scenes are a mess: We get real videos, the cheap videos, and on top of that ingame cutscenes where you no longer control your char. It feels like someone pulled my keyboard away. When I cancel the sequence, I still have to confirm and then I have to wait until the camera scrolled back. And the cut scenes don't even render the whole party, they leave out my pets and the follower. This is a continuity issue, too.
However, Diablo 3 seems to be still played by enough guys to allow for an expansion. Blizzard can fix issues without the need to repair the core game.
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Ill just leave this here.
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Jay: Oh for the PvP patch? For the PvP patch, we definitely... I would say, we want to get it out within months after release. I would say, if it showed up close to the end of the year, that would be... I would say, almost a disaster. So I don’t see it slipping out of this year at all, and I think it’ll be much sooner.
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On December 28 2012 06:01 Logo wrote:
I don't get this at all. TDM/DM in maybe 90% of games sucks and is never played more than a passing amusement. This includes everything from say Bioshock 2 to XCOM. Generally the only games where people hang around for TDM are games designed heavily as multiplayer or have some incentive hook to keep people around (like WoW). Pretty much exactly what Jay said.
To Blizzard releasing a shitty multiplayer TDM that will go largely unused doesn't count as 'having PvP' [b]and yet you people bitch about it?[/b] Yeah Blizz kinda blows and dropped the ball on a timely PvP release, but between releasing crap to fulfill their obligation and releasing a good PvP mode they're aiming for the latter. I don't know why you all would want the former.
Anyways to me this indicates we're probably going to see something that borrows a bit from the MOBA genre in terms of objectives & mix of PvE content with PvP.
Maybe because they had 4 years to develop it, and still NOTHING.
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On December 30 2012 09:14 CROrens wrote:
Ill just leave this here.
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Jay: Oh for the PvP patch? For the PvP patch, we definitely... I would say, we want to get it out within months after release. I would say, if it showed up close to the end of the year, that would be... I would say, almost a disaster. So I don’t see it slipping out of this year at all, and I think it’ll be much sooner.
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I thought I remembered him saying something like that, thanks for digging it up. Would like to see the rest of this article/interview probably many other hilarious statements.
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On December 30 2012 09:14 CROrens wrote:
Ill just leave this here.
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Jay: Oh for the PvP patch? For the PvP patch, we definitely... I would say, we want to get it out within months after release. I would say, if it showed up close to the end of the year, that would be... I would say, almost a disaster. So I don’t see it slipping out of this year at all, and I think it’ll be much sooner.
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Diablo 3 is on life support. The playerbase is incredibly small, and Blizz knows the only thing that is keeping anyone around is the possibility of PvP. So instead of releasing a medicore pvp system that would ultimately kill off the game entirely, they just release dueling to stall time. It's less risky doing it this way.
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you know, I'm fairly sure you guys are misundertstanding blizzard's goals here. They don't *want* to have a sustained playerbase for diablo III so long as they can avoid massive PR trauma. They're not getting any more money from the game now the AH is laughable and main sales are concluded. Keeping the servers and support running is just a cost to them at this point.
This is the issue with traditional game retail models (large upfront payment for an ongoing service), there's no incentive for the designer to commit to supporting the game once 80% or so of the people who would buy it have done so.
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On December 30 2012 09:36 Thereisnosaurus wrote:
you know, I'm fairly sure you guys are misundertstanding blizzard's goals here. They don't *want* to have a sustained playerbase for diablo III so long as they can avoid massive PR trauma. They're not getting any more money from the game now the AH is laughable and main sales are concluded. Keeping the servers and support running is just a cost to them at this point.
This is the issue with traditional game retail models (large upfront payment for an ongoing service), there's no incentive for the designer to commit to supporting the game once 80% or so of the people who would buy it have done so.
Well Blizz taking a cut from sales on the RMAH was supposed to be that incentive, but the game flopped on its face because they forgot to make it actually fun instead of a grind fest. You could also make the argument that they didn't exactly WANT D3 to have an incredibly elaborate end game because in a way it directly competes with WoW (also look to the "buy a years worth of WoW time and get D3 for free!"), and WoW players pay 15 a month. I have a suspicion that if the the RMAH was a booming success then we probably would have gotten a badass endgame with the x-pac, but it was just too risky to make a great Diablo game without knowing 100 percent how much money they could make off it.
It's all about making money these days, not making the best games possible. And people said the Activision merger wouldn't have any effect on Blizzard....
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What
are
they
doing?
I can only imagine Blizzard pulled like almost the entire team away from the game to do other things.
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What I want to know is why they have to implement dueling instead of team fights. From what I gather in the PvP blog, they couldn't balance the game, make a good reward system, or have a game mode that's fun for more than a few hours. While they are working on this for the future, why are we getting dueling to play around with in the meantime? Why can't they just give us a sandbox arena with no rewards or rules, and let us do everything? D2 PvP was an absolute disaster, but there was so much freedom in it. It was fun when you got together with your friends and set your own PvP locations, rules, gear, and rewards. Sometimes we like to do 4v4 clusterfucks in a tight area, and sometimes we like to roam around entire acts. Game modes like VIP were also fun. I would love it if they just gave us a barebones PvP arena for us to play with.
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wtf, is it even legal to do this? I mean isn't this false advertisement? They've been advertising and promoting deathmatch and arena for over a year, showing playable demos, explaining the details on their web, and it's even in the back of the box afaik.
I mean yea, it made a disclaimer that PvP will be added in later in a patch, but a normal customer will read that as implying it will be 1-3 months max; But it has been more than 6 months, and it doesn't look like it'll be out for another 6... so a lot of people who got the game just for PvP (i'm one of them) never got what they paid for until long after they quit
So can they even do that? Sounds really shady from a business perspective.
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Its legal. But it is not a practice that is endearing to customers.
I can imagine the original projections were from before Blizzard pulled staff off of the project. Putting money and manpower into D3 is not a smart thing to do. Its better to give up on it and write it off as a dead franchise and make something new.
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On December 30 2012 09:26 AnomalySC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2012 09:14 CROrens wrote:
Ill just leave this here.
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Jay: Oh for the PvP patch? For the PvP patch, we definitely... I would say, we want to get it out within months after release. I would say, if it showed up close to the end of the year, that would be... I would say, almost a disaster. So I don’t see it slipping out of this year at all, and I think it’ll be much sooner.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diablo 3 is on life support. The playerbase is incredibly small, and Blizz knows the only thing that is keeping anyone around is the possibility of PvP. So instead of releasing a medicore pvp system that would ultimately kill off the game entirely, they just release dueling to stall time. It's less risky doing it this way.
Wonder what will happen with all the people who grinded only for the PvP arena. Must suck being them when Jay came out with the " NO PVP ARENA FOR YOU". :/
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On December 30 2012 10:34 Medrea wrote:
What
are
they
doing?
I can only imagine Blizzard pulled like almost the entire team away from the game to do other things.
I guess, they tried to get a PvP mode working but since the game was developed with PvE in mind, it turned out to be much harder than expected. The code to have duels and even team arenas is there (since years) but it isn't as much fun to play PvP. So the developers tried this, tried that, discussed with the team. Still, the core issue remained.
Since the clock is ticking, no-one proposes to scrap the current PvP content, instead everyone tries to fix it. Now Jay needed to make a decision: Go further, with no good idea in sight? Or bring duels but scrap current team arena content to make way for completely new ideas?
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On December 28 2012 03:41 Spyridon wrote:
Holy crap.
I can't beleieve how bad the development of D3 is. All my friends gave up on the game, and I gave up on it too, but told myself that this is Blizzard and they never quit until a game is profitable, and with the state of D3 they would NEVER be able to sell an expansion until things are fixed. So (even though all my friends thought I was crazy) I thought that there may be some hope for the future.
But this is just a JOKE right now. After all these months they basically are giving us no information on the PvP mode????
This also brings up the question, why the HELL was the blog delayed for a month???? "Sorry, we need a little more time to tell you NOTHING!". I guess they had to take a few extra weeks to come up with BULLSHIT to fill in the gaps of nothing. They probably had absolutely nothing to report so they planned a quick duel mode to give people something at all!
This is such a bad situation that even if a brand new indie company was developing this game, most people would say that's no excuse for this. But this is fucking Blizzard, a company who made like 3 or 4 of the 5 biggest games ever!!!
It's a damn shame that Blizzard isn't the same company as they used to be, and it makes me kind of ashamed that I'm actually going to be buying HotS.... These people don't deserve our money!
I can say you why right now they delayed the blog. Because they never worked on PvP. All their precious time went into developing paragon levels, ubers, fixing broken legendaries, etc. They didn't plan to do those thing on release but game was so broken that they were forced to.
I am really sad about arenas because they seemed really casual and fun. And dueling? This should have been implemented on Day1, I see absolutely no reason why it wasn't. In fact, duels wasn't implemented just because they wanted something "better" and now this "better" is scrapped, so we got nothing for 8 months. Now we'll get dueling which prolly took them 2 days to implement.
At first i liked Jay Wilson but now i see he is a joke.
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The price of gold dropped from 0.30 USD to 0.25 USD (the minimum) since the PvP blog was posted. Looks like many are giving up hope on D3 and cashing out.
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EPT
