First of all, I guess this lends credence to the rumors from last year regarding the original scrapped design for D4 (Project Hades) being more Dark Souls like which also dovetails with how they kind of stressed the isometric camera aspect during the Unveiled panel (since Project Hades used a third person over the shoulder view).
Looking back, the 3 year period when hiring began in 2015 while continuing through 2016, 2017, and 2018, turned out to be several years of “wasted” development (wasted in the sense of not working on something that was more true to what Diablo players except from this franchise). Within this time period was also a cancelled D3 expansion with portions of it piecemealed out in 2015 in the form of several zones including Kanai’s cube.
And while they did begin hiring in early 2019 for positions that looked like ones that are normally indicative of the production phase, those positions in hindsight, were likely for producing the game play demo they had at BlizzCon 2019. Which leads to the “not even Blizzard Soon™” statement that was made during the Unveiled panel. That translates to something that will be over 2+ years away (3 years is probably more reasonable when you look at this in context as to how long they worked on just the Necromancer for D3).
That is going to leave this space that Blizzard will need to fill with D3; honestly a tall order for a game that has been moved over to the classic team. While they did mention it will get some updates, those updates (not major content except for what few remaining pieces remain for the aborted expansion) aren’t the type that will really change the fact that it is still a game that will be in maintenance mode. A D2 remaster was also not announced (despite the rumors coming from the same individuals who got the other things right with regards to the WoW expansion, D4, and Overwatch 2 (all of these I still consider were actual well placed “leaks” by Blizzard’s marketing that were still played off as actual leaks by folks like Jeff Kaplan). Basically, there is only so much that can be squeezed out from D3 for another 2+ years.
This opens up opportunities for games from other companies to fill this void. Torchlight Frontiers still seems to be on schedule for an official launch this year (Echtra has given no indication yet that this will be changing even though it is still in the alpha test phase). Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem could also likely fill some of this IF players who had not bought the game earlier (when it was much cheaper), can stomach the retail price. I personally have some issues with the reward loop and the lackluster feel of the items and lack of options (like you can’t salvage them so it is basically NPC’d for currency) in Wolcen though.
Some folks may be wondering about Lost Ark from Smilegate RPG. I personally feel that it is a lost cause from a longevity point of view because any western publisher that manages to negotiate a contract and gets the rights to publish it, will end up ruining it (not that Smilegate haven’t managed to ruin parts of it on their own). The biggest problem is the entire end game item level grind. Your gear doesn’t even feel rewarding as it’s just this constant treadmill of increasing that item level. Game play wise, it’s the usual Korean MMO style of grind; the ARPG angle is mostly non-existent since it’s all linear gear progression (gated behind item level and dailies/weeklies for the parceled out material which you need for progressing that gear). It also doesn’t help that I am near the end of my limits with the BS of these Korean MMO studios (and how western publishing studios end up monetizing them).
I would say the first initial play throughs of the main story are fun and also interesting in terms of how some quests are delivered/what is required for the player to do (that was all of the designs that were worked on by the original design team). Everything past CBT2 was done by new teams that replaced the ones who were summarily let go due to Smilegate’s policies that forced resignations. Since the last time that I played earlier this year, all kinds of streamlining has taken place (making some aspects that were obnoxiously character based like island hearts, required emotes and songs, available account wide). The entire sailing aspect however became lost potential (it was just turned into a time sink to get required island hearts, songs, emotes; some of which were heavily time gated).
Despite the world content (from the main story questing) and overall refinement, I ended up finding Lost Ark to be a less than satisfying experience compared to Devilian even with its issues, bugs, and lack of a lot of end game content. With that said, Smilegate does have a small window of opportunity to carve out a niche (they could have garnered a lot more mindshare last year if they had prioritized at least making some overture to a timeframe for a western release) with D4 being not even Blizzard Soon™.. They’ve taken a Eurasian launch priority (Korea, Russia, Japan, and likely a resumption of the Chinese version) for the time being. I guess we’ll see if they miss the boat over the course of the next few months without any announcements of a western publisher.
