EPTDiablo IV - Page 37
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hfghretzhgfh
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hfghretzhgfh
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Archeon
3253 Posts
The RMAH was a fiasco because it undermined the fundamental gameplay loop. Just like diablo 2 trading became much more profitable than actually playing the game, but unlike diablo 2 finding an upgrade the normal way became very very rare even when you were in the mid-tier of progression. Trading also became extremely easy and streamlined. So in the end it was a fiasco because lots of people used it. Also there are pretty sizeable differences between different battle royales (Fortnite has the whole building stuff f.e.). And yes, the large 3 publishers don't really innovate, but the medium publishers definitely do on occasion. | ||
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rewrtewgfd
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Turbovolver
Australia2394 Posts
On October 31 2022 01:52 Miragee wrote: Anyhow, what I disagree the most with - and that is somewhat up to taste of course - is the notion that those Blizzard games are still good games. Diablo 3, HotS, Overwatch are super average games. They are not innovative (never Blizzard's strength), they are bland, the stolen ideas are not better implemented compared to their competition (previously Blizzard's strong point) and systems are deliberatly designed to be worse to feed a certain monetisation model. Especially for the last point, you can't really say the game is good but it's a bad product. How do you seperate the two if the game is literally impacted by it? My sentiments exactly. Even things like story really suffered. Starcraft and Brood War were just a really clean implementation of a bunch of tropes, some bits are a little eye-rolly looking back but it's simple and fun and frames the gameplay perfectly. In SC2 the story is overblown, tries to flesh out those tropey characters but has nothing of substance to do it with. And although I fell off after Wings of Liberty I know the story gets really dumb in the expansions, or at least it sure sounds that way from the synopsis I read on a wiki. Diablo changed similarly around that time. D1 let itself be carried almost wholly by its atmosphere, which was great. D2 sacrificed a little of that for a bit of plot but kept it pretty unobtrusive and simple. D3, just like SC2, tried to "improve" the plot with bigger scope. Notable that in D2, you're somebody new. In D3, you're the Nephalem, grand hero and all the townsfolk, who are supposed to sell to you how hostile and awful the world is, are instead too busy telling you how powerful you are. I didn't play much of D3 though so maybe it gets better after the start. Or maybe Blizzard stories were always crappy and there's some nostalgia from me here, but what is more objective is that at least in their earlier iterations, the story wasn't ever in the way. | ||
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KobraKay
Portugal4231 Posts
On October 24 2022 09:10 Manit0u wrote: Some games have NDAs that even forbid the testers to mention they're testers. I would assume Blizz is keeping the lid shut on this one so it might be similar. edit: no point in leaving this up and risking anything. In other news, just started a cold/fire bowazon for the first time in my life in D2 and am having a blast. | ||
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hdfzrezthgf
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Manit0u
Poland17257 Posts
On October 31 2022 22:47 hdfzrezthgf wrote: *mod edit* Can you please stop? https://www.polygon.com/2013/9/17/4741452/blizzard-removing-gold-and-real-money-auction-houses-from-diablo-3 Blizzard removed RMAH because it fucked up the core gameplay in ways they didn't intend to and they came to a realization it was a bad idea. Also, apart from this official statements there were also talks that they got pressured behind the scenes by the legal department because potential lawsuits resulting from RMAH would be a nightmare for the company to deal with. | ||
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jhkghufzuf
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Manit0u
Poland17257 Posts
Apparently using only the basic battle pass in OW2 it would take 327 years of grinding or an expense of $10,000 or more to get all the unlocks in the game (skins, characters etc.). That's what shifting from loot boxes to battle pass in OW has become. With their recent track record in the form of Diablo Immortal and now OW2 I'm very, very scared. Are those games being used as a test ground to refine monetization systems for D4? | ||
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iizutzrthfgfgfgh
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Archeon
3253 Posts
On October 31 2022 09:27 Turbovolver wrote: My sentiments exactly. Even things like story really suffered. Starcraft and Brood War were just a really clean implementation of a bunch of tropes, some bits are a little eye-rolly looking back but it's simple and fun and frames the gameplay perfectly. In SC2 the story is overblown, tries to flesh out those tropey characters but has nothing of substance to do it with. And although I fell off after Wings of Liberty I know the story gets really dumb in the expansions, or at least it sure sounds that way from the synopsis I read on a wiki. Diablo changed similarly around that time. D1 let itself be carried almost wholly by its atmosphere, which was great. D2 sacrificed a little of that for a bit of plot but kept it pretty unobtrusive and simple. D3, just like SC2, tried to "improve" the plot with bigger scope. Notable that in D2, you're somebody new. In D3, you're the Nephalem, grand hero and all the townsfolk, who are supposed to sell to you how hostile and awful the world is, are instead too busy telling you how powerful you are. I didn't play much of D3 though so maybe it gets better after the start. Or maybe Blizzard stories were always crappy and there's some nostalgia from me here, but what is more objective is that at least in their earlier iterations, the story wasn't ever in the way. On the story part: I think it's a mixed bag. In one part because let's be real, expectations for storywriting and presentation were just a lot lower back in the days and people were much more willing to forgive. Also due to developments in game design and graphics there are nowadays a lot more options to introduce story into your gameplay and as a result more opportunities to fuck up. SPOILERS AHEAD!!! + Show Spoiler + I've played all these games you name besides d1 and d2 recently. The difference in how the hero is perceived between d2 and d3 isn't big, the Nephalem plotline takes some time to build up your hero and in d2 you definitely are the cavalry. Tyrael doesn't want to fight Diablo because "this is mankind's hour of glory", Deckard tells you that he always knew you could do it and while at the start of the act people usually are wondering if you're really powerful enough to solve their problems once you solved a few quests they all start singing your praise. Diablo 3 in that way definitely mirrors d2 in that there's someone in cutscenes for whom this whole ordeal is pretty scary and who ends up dead (effectively) by a twists while the ingame NPCs tell you how fucking awesome you are. Where Diablo three imo fails is at making evil scary within their gameplay. This is especially noticeable for Belial and Asmodan who just are fucking idiots but from the comic look over the removal of horror elements like light radius to a lot of questionable decisions by the good guys the devil is definitely in the detail. I might add that Andariel had almost zero and Duriel had exactly zero setup for comparison, so Blizz didn't screw up there because they didn't even try. Similarly Sc2 Hots tells the story of Kerrigan accepting the Zerg and consciously becoming the Queen of blades instead of being a being that is torn between her human and Zerg personality and tells how that decision influences the people who know her. LotV gets the final boss of the Xel Naga rolling and tells of the fall but in the end unification of the Protoss, who up to then were still a powerhouse. In the end it's a similar plotline to WC3 where the three weakened races need to unite with the difference that Kerrigan who is by then the strongest psyker in the plotline inherits the power of the Xel Naga and deals with their last one. And either perishes or gets her happy end with Raynor, which is intentionally up to interpretation. All of this is fundamentally fine, the devil is again in the details. Details I might add a lot of the former games just skipped. Overall Blizzard is certainly aiming more for a power fantasy and has a more character centered plot telling than d1 and sc1, but that likely comes with them trying to reach a wider audience. That certainly makes their stories cartoony at times and again they suck at getting their details right, but fundamentally I wouldn't say that they got much worse, we became more critical and the old games expected us to fill in more blanks. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17257 Posts
On November 01 2022 22:57 Archeon wrote: On the story part: I think it's a mixed bag. In one part because let's be real, expectations for storywriting and presentation were just a lot lower back in the days and people were much more willing to forgive. Also due to developments in game design and graphics there are nowadays a lot more options to introduce story into your gameplay and as a result more opportunities to fuck up. Why you do make some valid points I can't really agree with this sentiment. If anything back in the day storywriting and presentation were more important and usually better implemented. After all very few games released in the past decade or two can even approach the level of storytelling in the old games. I guess the main difference would be that nowadays stories are more centered around the main character whereas in the past they served more as a tool for world building (and it was up to the player to figure out where their character fits into that instead of being told and guided through it). Even in D1, which seemingly didn't have that much story but there was actually quite a lot of it. Talking with the townsfolk and finding various tomes in the dungeons revealed more about the world and current situation. It was there but it wasn't "in your face" like newer games tend to do it (similarly you can compare Morrowind and Skyrim from the Elder Scrolls universe). | ||
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Miragee
8509 Posts
On October 31 2022 09:27 Turbovolver wrote: My sentiments exactly. Even things like story really suffered. Starcraft and Brood War were just a really clean implementation of a bunch of tropes, some bits are a little eye-rolly looking back but it's simple and fun and frames the gameplay perfectly. In SC2 the story is overblown, tries to flesh out those tropey characters but has nothing of substance to do it with. And although I fell off after Wings of Liberty I know the story gets really dumb in the expansions, or at least it sure sounds that way from the synopsis I read on a wiki. Diablo changed similarly around that time. D1 let itself be carried almost wholly by its atmosphere, which was great. D2 sacrificed a little of that for a bit of plot but kept it pretty unobtrusive and simple. D3, just like SC2, tried to "improve" the plot with bigger scope. Notable that in D2, you're somebody new. In D3, you're the Nephalem, grand hero and all the townsfolk, who are supposed to sell to you how hostile and awful the world is, are instead too busy telling you how powerful you are. I didn't play much of D3 though so maybe it gets better after the start. Or maybe Blizzard stories were always crappy and there's some nostalgia from me here, but what is more objective is that at least in their earlier iterations, the story wasn't ever in the way. I very much agree with your assessment of the Diablo and Starcraft series. I honestly don't think Blizzard was ever good with their stories. However, I do think they have gotten worse compared to the 90s/early 00s. They also put a lot more emphasis on the story, put it front and center in their games. As you said, D1 was almost solely carried by it's atmosphere. The story was extremely simple and can be summed up in 2 sentences. But the delivery was not emphasised, it was delivered by just experiencing the game. If they had the same fleshed out story, with all the dialogue, characters and cutscenes in D1 as they had in D3, I'm sure it would have been not as good of an experience. I don't think it would have been as bad as D3 though. If you take the writing of Azmodan in D3 for example: It is so out of place, cartoonish and simply bad it's hard to believe any of the writers at Blizzard North could have fabricated anything close to this disaster. On November 01 2022 10:46 Manit0u wrote: I wonder if Blizzard will go for a similar scheme for Diablo IV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvKapAgxp3Y Apparently using only the basic battle pass in OW2 it would take 327 years of grinding or an expense of $10,000 or more to get all the unlocks in the game (skins, characters etc.). That's what shifting from loot boxes to battle pass in OW has become. With their recent track record in the form of Diablo Immortal and now OW2 I'm very, very scared. Are those games being used as a test ground to refine monetization systems for D4? They are constantly testing of course. And they are trying to condition people. One tactic certainly is overreach, then backtracking to something worse than before but better than the overreach and people will be more accepting... It won't get better from this point onwards. From all I have heared about OW2, they basically took away the skins people owned in OW, released OW2 which is not really a new game and are now reselling those skins to people. | ||
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emperorchampion
Canada9496 Posts
On November 02 2022 00:59 Miragee wrote: I very much agree with your assessment of the Diablo and Starcraft series. I honestly don't think Blizzard was ever good with their stories. However, I do think they have gotten worse compared to the 90s/early 00s. They also put a lot more emphasis on the story, put it front and center in their games. As you said, D1 was almost solely carried by it's atmosphere. The story was extremely simple and can be summed up in 2 sentences. But the delivery was not emphasised, it was delivered by just experiencing the game. If they had the same fleshed out story, with all the dialogue, characters and cutscenes in D1 as they had in D3, I'm sure it would have been not as good of an experience. I don't think it would have been as bad as D3 though. If you take the writing of Azmodan in D3 for example: It is so out of place, cartoonish and simply bad it's hard to believe any of the writers at Blizzard North could have fabricated anything close to this disaster. They are constantly testing of course. And they are trying to condition people. One tactic certainly is overreach, then backtracking to something worse than before but better than the overreach and people will be more accepting... It won't get better from this point onwards. From all I have heared about OW2, they basically took away the skins people owned in OW, released OW2 which is not really a new game and are now reselling those skins to people. Imo Blizzard just got too big for it's own good (well the good of the games) and it's more or less as simple as that. You need all these voice acting, cut scene, story, etc. elements to justify the people working there. At the same time, you need all these micro transaction elements to support them. Overwatch 1 was a surprisingly good game, so I have to give credit to that team (probably the vision of Kaplan but also on the technical side from what I understand) for pulling a good game together. As was noted before, OW is another game that told the story through the game itself (to the extent possible in a multiplayer game). It's really no wonder that indie games are really driving gameplay these days. I suppose that's always been the case, just what we consider an indie studio these days was basically the extent of a company like Blizzard 25ish years ago. | ||
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tzrztrzztrztr
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Manit0u
Poland17257 Posts
They've had some of the best IPs out there with StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo. All they really had to do to keep it fresh and people interested was shuffle the genres around. Diablo MMO would most likely be a huge success, the same would go for WarCraft ARPG and StarCraft FPS. Instead of trying to develop new IPs they could've easily focused on strengthening their 3 core franchises and developing them further/innovating. This would also help with talent retention since MMO/ARPG/RTS/FPS teams would have different stuff and ideas to work with, instead of being stuck with the same thing forever. | ||
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