Ok, I am going to rant about Diablo 3 and the things wrong with it. I don't expect you guys to agree with me. These are my opinions and thoughts. 1) You have to always be online to play and all games are hosted on Blizzard servers. I think this is utter BS. This is totally a money play by them. They real money auction house necessitated a system that they controlled to prevent hackers from creating items and then exploiting the RMAH. The RMAH is a way for Blizzard to try and earn money form a game after the purchase. They don't think they could get people to pay a fee to play(and they are right), so they come up with this POS. This leads into... 2) Real money Auction House. I don't think you should be able to buy power in a game for real money. Those incapable or too lazy to play the game and earn what they get will just buy it from the RMAH. I think this is ridiculousness. I won't even try to exploit the system to make money. I will not play games with randoms in PUG's. If you did not buy items with in-game gold or earned them through crafting or random drops, I don't want to play with you. 3) Too damn easy and very little challenge on normal mode. The normal mode is easy mode in more ways than one. I played through the demo...sorry beta and did not die once. The random disconnects caused my only deaths during my playtime in beta. I wanted some sort of challenge and I never got it. You rarely fight more than 3-4 enemies at a time. The only time I felt stressed was fighting the demo/beta boss and that was only after they buffed him. That fight was one of the few times I had to use a pot. Also, no the health globes that drop at random did not really help me from having to use pots. I was playing a monk for the most part, and rarely did I even need health as I took little damage. 4) The skill system sucks. I liked the old system where you chose your skills from a list and they were not unlocked at specific levels. I think Blizzard decided to do it this way to make it easier to balance the game. If they know what skills you have at a given level, then they can tune the monsters around that. It also takes a level of complexity out of the game and opens it up to more casual players. They call it steamlining...I call is simplification and it isn't a good thing. 5) PVP fucking where? Blizzard is forsaking their cardinal principal for thew first time. "When it is done" no longer means jack shit anymore to them. It has become a release when the angry comments about it taking too long reach a fever pitch we will start dropping features. They say they will patch it in after launch. No idea how long that will be. It takes them 3-4 months to release bug fixes for WoW. 6) No inventory tetris. I actually enjoyed this. I actually miss it. Everything in the game takes 1-2 blocks of your inventory and always 2 block vertically. Overall, I still like the game and I more than likely will still buy it on or before launch. I still like Blizzard games. I just think they have gone down a path that will drive away a few of their older fans. I am sure they will get more than they lose and I think that is all they care about now. I think it is quite obvious that the sucess of World of Warcraft and the tens of millions of dollars that game brings in in gross revenue has changed Blizzard. WoW itself has changed as Blizzard has changed. The game has become easier and has been "streamlined"(aka simplified) to the point of being near brain dead. This change of philosophy to make games that appeal to as large of an audience as possible seems to be new for Blizzard. Before the merger to become Activision Blizzard, I remember Blizzard making the games they want to make and working on them till they were up to standards. It just doesn't feel like they are doing that anymore. I miss Blizzard North....oh wait. The core members of Blizzard North founded Runic games and make a game called Torchlight. Will TL2 be better than D3? I don't know. I hope so. TL2 is also a $20 game and D3 is a $50. Only time will tell. I am secretly rooting for Runic to put out a better game. It would hopefully wake Blizzard up and make them do better next time.
Actually, this one, and all of Steam, are more involved with fighting piracy than anything else. They could have a real money system that didn't need an always on connection, some MMOs you can buy character goods while not even in game. Its more of a reflection of rampant piracy of PC games. This is why the bulk of middle-market game developers that put out B+ titles have largely abandoned the PC and gone to console developing. The -A- game pc developers consist of those who stayed so that they could continue to work on the absolute bleeding edge of graphics, thats not gonna change. And also consists of those who are established franchises, or 1st party to these 'always on,' or 'sometimes on' compulsory registration systems. Piracy is alot easier to control on gaming consoles and even tho the liscensing up front is a pain, developers have an easier time making money. This is actually a crossover problem with something I handle alot of these days. I a/v-tech for fan conventions, mostly anime but scifi too. we've observed a lot of anime and sci-fi production having dropped off because the players lose money to online piracy to easily. They instead run to game development in the last 3 years where they can do very similar things with more protections to their revenues.
All of the being online and real money business is all apart of Activision. Which is also why WoW is going on so long with 2 more expansions still being planned for it. Activision is literally a money whore and will do anything and everything to squeeze out as much money out of their consumers. It was only after Blizzard partnered with Activision that all of that shit happened.
I agree with the RMAU. But I'm pretty sure there will be some limits to what you can buy and cant. Like epics, heroics, top dog items wont be even available in AU.
A lot of things are unavailable in Australia. I do believe that Left 4 Dead was banned as well as Dead Island because it was deemed too graphic and gory of a game. There are some changes made to game in Australia simply because of their regulations. If there is much gore in D3, there will probably be some minor chan ges to the graphics so as to meet regulations in AU.
Amazing. I actually thought more of you would disagree. As for piracy, even an always online option will not keep people from pirating it. To limit piracy you need to offer a better service and options than what the pirates can. You (the developer and publisher) have to give people enough value for them to justify the purchase. DRM and other methods only make it worse for people that actually pay for your products.
thats not proving to be the truth of the matter, :/ as can be seen with the direction the producers of content take their stuff. as long as the drm layer is transparent enough to the consumer (doesn't have to be invisible)...Between pay-to-win models and jumping to a console... It follows the path of least resistance when it comes to making money. Lots of gaming companies went to console gaming despite the liscensing fee to nintendo, MS, and sony. But whats more telling is how those platforms with a stronger layer of anti-piracy countermeasures have pulled producers away from other fields in the industry.
Consoles have something just as bad as piracy when it comes to getting publishers and developers paid and that is used games. The only people that make money on that is the brick and mortar store. I see the next generation of consoles using digital download as the preferred method of getting games. It has already shifted that way for the PC. The next gen will probably be the last with discs as an option.
you are not far off there. This is of course because Gamestop or what have you can basically dial in their own markup. Most folks dont realise that the markup on a retail video game is usually less than %5 margin from the retailers level. on a used game they gave someone $20 credit for, they can flip it for $45 for a %250 markup, and undercut the new game at $50. but the digital download games as near as I can tell have represented a good thing for consumers, too. The cost of most of those games from b- team developers is much more reasonable out of the gates.