Diablo 3.

[Inspired]

Sorry for the double post but yeah I don't plan on seeing diablo 3 out till around 2012. They just had the WoW expansion and SC 2 is suppose to be coming out with something new soon so they aren't going to compete with their selves. I'm sure they will keep them as separated in time as they can.

[Shadow]

There was a leak recently that put Diablo 3 in the 4th quarter of 2011. Whether or not that really happens is a different story.

[Bluddy]

Interesting update here: they're STILL making huge balance changes. Not a huge surprise there -- hat's what takes the longest time. Also, they stole the town portal button and the item identification scheme from DC!

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

Interesting update here: they're STILL making huge balance changes. Not a huge surprise there -- hat's what takes the longest time. Also, they stole the town portal button and the item identification scheme from DC!

I saw that. That makes me really wonder if they are trying to compete with Duke Nukem Forever or they are just doing their normal polish for a long time thing.

We actually did the ID scheme and most of the town teleport all of the way back in DoP.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Shadow

I saw that. That makes me really wonder if they are trying to compete with Duke Nukem Forever or they are just doing their normal polish for a long time thing.

I think they spent a lot of their time trying to reinvent the ARPG formula to make it fresh, like having more than 4 main stats, but after experimenting for a while (a long while) they decided to go back to many of the things that worked in D2. Of course, given the fact that they have WoW cash to fall back on, they can take as much time as they want.

The danger is that competitors will have innovated past everything in D3 in the meantime, which is exactly what happened in Duke Nukem Forever. Though an FPS using the latest graphics tech is much more sensitive to time passing than an ARPG using cartoony graphics.

We actually did the ID scheme and most of the town teleport all of the way back in DoP.

Yeah I realize the ID scheme is from DoP but a town teleport integrated into the interface is from DC so I just mentioned DC.

[Shadow]

It looks like one of the senior producers has left now, read it here. Usually a senior person like that leaving towards the end of a project means bad things, their part of the project is done, or someone get a much better offer somewhere else, but who knows what it means at Blizzard.

[Bluddy]

Here's my reading of it:

- It's unlikely that someone would willingly leave Blizzard, which is one of the most stable companies in the video game world.

- If an senior producer wanted to leave, he would probably want to wait until D3 is released so he can put the release on his resume.

- One option is that he's leaving a sinking ship, but that's a very improbable option -- D3 will sell amazingly well regardless of its actual quality.

- The more likely option is that just like the rest of the world, the powers that be in Vivendi/Activision/Blizzard have gotten fed up with waiting for D3 to be released. Management probably thinks the D3 team has been dawdling because they weren't in the spotlight. Then again, I'm sure most of the resources in Blizzard have gone towards WoW, so it may not entirely been the team's fault.

- If you look at the changes that the team is about to implement now that they're supposed to be pretty close to release, some of them are minor -- like integrating the town portal into the interface. But others, like narrowing down the stats back to 4, are pretty major. This is the kind of change that requires rebalancing the whole game. It also speaks of admitting defeat -- the team spent a lot of time trying something new and now went back to the original implementation from D1 and D2. While the dev team would like to present this as a small change, it could cause a delay of perhaps 3 months.

- The natural conclusion is that corporate did what they know best -- they've decided that the management wasn't doing its job adequately, and have brought in a new producer to wrap things up. The old producer may have been fired or may have chosen to leave under the circumstances.

[Shadow]

Ok, now that Diablo 3 has been out for a couple weeks, is there any features it has that you guys think other developers should pay attention to? I'll definitely play it eventually, but I've been pretty busy since it launched for some reason.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Shadow

Ok, now that Diablo 3 has been out for a couple weeks, is there any features it has that you guys think other developers should pay attention to? I'll definitely play it eventually, but I've been pretty busy since it launched for some reason.

I think the main things from my perspective are the skill system, which is a radical redesign of what ARGs since D2 have been doing, and the removal of stat point assignment, which takes the game further away from the RPG genre.

[Delilah Rehm]

Mmmm-hmm... Is Diablo going mainstream? Chasing the dollars? I wonder if I'll like D3 as much as I liked D2.