After Blizzard’s tone deaf announcement of Diablo: Immortal at BlizzCon 2018 last month, the company has found itself testing the goodwill loyalty of many of their more ardent supporters. As I’ve opined before, it’s not that a mobile version of Diablo doesn’t make sense (it does and will do well in various regions including the west). The issue was more or less making this announcement at an event (BlizzCon) which is still heavily attended by Blizzard’s PC playing demographic.
For many long time Diablo players (especially those who played Diablo and Diablo II when each of those were released), Diablo III ended up representing a shift; it wasn’t the epic ARPG they expected. While there was a lot of noise early on with the “I Quit” posts, the franchise and Blizzard by default, still had huge appeal (because the games “on rails” design and more casual friendly designs, appealed to the much larger demographic which Blizzard executives had tasked the team with).
As I noted in that 2015 post, I briefly touched on the goodwill aspect (of burning through it when it came to how the team that were tasked with taking over the franchise, failed to keep more of the ARPG type elements in the game (as opposed to iterating a lot of it out in favor of making the entire game more casual friendly). I’ve never denied that this system allowed the Diablo franchise to embrace a lot more players (which is why from a unit sales perspective, D3 across all platforms is very successful).
But some of that came at the expense of slowly losing more of the players that started playing Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction on each of their respective launches, and became enamored with the IP. That was a different place and time for those games compared to May 2012 when Diablo III launched. Those previous titles were designed by a different team (Blizzard North) which was comprised of old school D&D types from a time when PC gaming was still mostly computer nerds. There was of course collaboration and cooperation with Blizzard Irvine which was an important component on the story and lore side (reference David Craddock’s book “Stay Awhile and Listen” or this online interview done with the Schaefer brothers and David Brevik) but the bulk of the core game play designs were Blizzard North.
Myself, I held out hopes as I watched others who I knew stopped playing. But I finally just gave up the ghost as well after BlizzCon 2015 (not just with Diablo III, but the only other Blizzard title that I played, StarCraft II) because back then, I just generally felt that the company as a whole was really operating in their own bubbles and not properly picking up and dealing with the cues from their player base of actually addressing concerns across several of their games (the new Blizzard president J. Allen Brack was of course the one who responded to a BlizzCon 2013 Warlords of Draenor Q&A participants question about the possibility of legacy servers with a resounding “No”…. and “by the way, you don’t want to do that either…. you think you do, but you don’t” citing the lack of the quality of life enhancements in those older titles missing the point that it’s about having a way to experience prior versions of the game (warts and all).
And that is the general mentality that exists at the higher lead design levels where the thinking is that players don’t really know what they want. There are nuances in being able to properly parse feedback and what I learned with D3, community management often times did as good a job as they could do… but it often times went into the black hole once sent along to the design team due to the mentality that “those players think they know what they want, but don’t”. And as I noted awhile back (when Incgamers used to have archives of postings from the old forum), Diablo III’s team back during the 2011 timeframe were essentially chalking up a lot of feedback they were getting from hardcore Diablo players, that a lot of that feedback was based on “misplaced nostalgia”. So there are real concerns that the “D4” team will operate in an even more protected bubble knowing what went down with D3 with Jay Wilson’s willingness to create blog posts and having the occasional Q&A to discuss some of their design goals during the development process.
Digressing, key members of Blizzard North were also instrumental in assisting with helping to complete the companies two RTS titles (Warcraft III and StarCraft) when those were hitting their respective crunch times. So it goes without saying that when many of the Blizzard North principals left (and then the subsequent closure of the Bay Area studio), that Blizzard Entertainment as a whole, lost a lot of design braintrust (more specifically on the ARPG side and also those with intimate details of Diablo’s designs and the decisions that went into them).
Irvine’s expertise had NEVER been in the ARPG area. The emphasis was on the creative story telling side, art, and then World of Warcraft which utilized aspects from the Diablo franchise for some of the game play and combat (but expanded upon and changed in order to fit into a persistent world, 3D, tabbed targeting MMO design). So the team that ended up being assembled for Diablo III had to not just carry the legacy of that franchise, but also come up with designs and game play that moved that franchise into the modern era. While both Julian Love and Wyatt Cheng were previous Blizzard North employees, neither were with the studio early on during the design/development of the first two titles. Blizzard Entertainment themselves (during D3’s development cycle) were also no longer the small group of computer nerds who were making the games they themselves wanted to play because it was now big business.
What Blizzard did do right was to foster this larger sense of a Blizzard community where they brought that community together in an event they called BlizzCon (first held in 2005). While not held in 2006 and 2012, each year has seen significant growth in attendance with World of Warcraft being a huge part of that. The Diablo franchise itself was still in limbo and it wasn’t until it was announced at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational (Paris France in 2008) that the franchise became heavily involved in BlizzCon (with much anticipation for ARPG fans looking for the rebirth of this iconic franchise).
Cutting to the chase, the core design issues with Diablo III are now known by many when it comes to the compromises made to make the game accessible to a much wider audience, something which they sort of touched on back at BlizzCon 2014 during portions of the Evolving Reaper of Souls panel where Josh Mosqueira touched on his own feedback while part of the console team, as to the complexity of the item system where if he couldn’t make sense of some properties, how some of the casual players they were targeting, would ever be able to understand it.
I also made note in that post regarding Kevin Marten’s (D3 senior lead designer) statement during BlizzCon 2013 regarding how they normally consulted with the World of Warcraft team during development (which is why it is no mistake that D3 utilized a lot of MMO mechanics including ilvl’s on gear and the original Inferno difficulty tuning where act bosses were DPS gear checks and the best gear meant to clear Inferno Act III and IV required ilvl 63 items which could only be farmed in Act’s III and IV (because he admitted they also originally designed the Inferno loot hunt to last years). While the game ended up being streamlined for Normal through Hell difficulty (and you systematically unlocked your class skills during that leveling process while also making it easier to respec since there was no lock in except for Nephalem Valor stacks which was a mechanic meant to keep players from constantly changing their skills once they hit level 60), the game ended up being somewhat shallow despite all of Blizzard’s resources.
Some of these game design decisions (including making the entire game story based where it lacked a fully open waypoint system) naturally has led to this growing chasm between players looking for that Diablo and Diablo II style game play from Diablo III which had those elements iterated out of it, leading to this alienation of portions of the fan base. Loot 2.0 and Reapers of Souls tried to bandaid fix some of this but it was still based on a broken foundation (nothing could be done with the itemization since it was tied to the rune on rails skill system) along with the same on rails approach to game play (bounties with spelled out objectives where you could only get certain items from bounties, Nephalem Rifts where you could only obtain required materials like Death Breath’s and Blood Shards from, Greater Rifts which was the only way to upgrade Legendary Gems) since the designers had this overwhelming desire to make sure players used the solutions they created (while having game play outside of that meta completely nerfed). Which leads me to the subject of this entry.
The Blizzard team that is now tasked with “Diablo 4” needs to be careful when it comes to how much MMO elements they decide to incorporate in to the final design. There are obvious pitfalls I’ve covered previously regarding going with an open world design where the challenge becomes how to create a randomized world (with fog of war), how to manage diverse itemization, and not funnel the end game into gated content (basically turning it into a linear gear progression grind) or content that requires mandatory party play (ala raids) since one of the appeals of the classic RPG/rogue-like is the ability for a player to clear the content completely solo.
I’ve noted many times as well that playing games is a form of disengagement for myself where I do not want to be on other peoples time or having the feeling that I need to work around the games event scheduling (which is the case in most MMO’s). As much as I have lauded LOST ARK, it’s current end game content isn’t immune from these things including item level gating, limited daily entry, and limited dungeon/raid content. Additionally, there is a point where partying and guilds (end game guild systems haven’t been implemented yet) are required which isn’t necessarily what a portion of D3’s player base desires.
Including too much MMO influences could alienate those D3 players who enjoy the current instanced multiplayer (optional) design where there are no dailies trap, no content that is clearly locked behind multiple gates, or content designed around mandatory multiplayer partying. Echtra Gaming has a bit of luxury (to experiment) being much less known with the Torchlight franchise compared to Blizzard with Diablo so they’ll have this benefit of being able to have some differentiation (which to me, will play well for Torchlight Frontiers when it comes to being an MMO-ARPG). “Diablo 4” is going to have to walk this fine line with moving the franchise forward (once again), without design decisions that end up being unwelcomed by portions of the existing player base. And given Blizzard’s recent follies with the Diablo franchise including the sheer lack of new content (or inability to even tease anything regarding “D4”) along with the Diablo: Immortal announcement, has shown some major cracks in what used to be seen as a pillar of strength in this AAA studio.
I also know about the Wishpond Nintendo Switch photo contest where it requires the contestant to submit a photo of themselves playing Diablo III on the Nintendo Switch in order to win a Nintendo Switch (the Diablo III Eternal Collection Edition version) along with a copy of the game. I realize the intention (the Diablo themed version of the Switch) but in light of the recent Diablo: Immortal PR blunder, the contest itself should have been better formulated (since it just makes Blizzard’s marketing which is normally sharp, also come across as incompetent given the BlizzCon miscalculation). All of this is just turning the Diablo franchise into this ever growing meme which puts a lot of pressure on getting “D4” right because the cynicism is now very palpable across even some of the companies loyal supporters.
