Looks like I was wrong about this one since I was really skeptical they would do one more cash grab with an actual port to the Nintendo Switch.  Forbes “accidentally” published the article before the embargo date where it can still be viewed in the Apple News app on iOS.  I say accidentally since this may be just the beginning of a bunch of Diablo related teasers for the “multiple project” hint that was dropped the other week.

After 13 years at Blizzard I’ve decided it’s time for a new adventure. This friday will be my last day with the company and while I’m not entirely certain what I’m going to do next I am excited to see what the industry has to offer.

— Travis Day (@Indalamar2) July 11, 2018

Like many Blizzard designers, he got his start in the customer service department (as a game master) before moving to another position that many use to try to move up into actual game development at the company; QA analyst.  There also happens to be another Travis Day who was previously with Activision (Blizzard’s parent company) before becoming a senior producer at Blizzard in 2015 (which is why there is at times confusion).

Day’s first stint as a designer began with the World of Warcraft team in 2004.  In 2012 (after Diablo III had already launched), he was brought on to the Diablo III team to help fix the games legendary items (and later spent most of his time on the games itemization system).

This was his first official posting as a Diablo III game designer (in the official forums) during a time when it was rare for any member of the D3 design/development team to even engage with the community in their forums.  Tangent: part of this was a result of pre-launch decisions resulting from heated discussions regarding the designers decisions as well as corporate ones resulting from the merger with Activision where there was a concerted effort to control the PR communications.  Bashiok aka Micah Whipple (who wore several different hats at the time as an editor and community manager), made a long post regarding a policy that was being instituted across all Blizzard games.  DiabloII.net followed this very well back in 2011.  Thus there was a period of time where blue posts were primarily community managers (where they served as liaisons between the community and the development team).

Digressing, he was also fairly new to the team and at the time, it seemed like a breath of fresh air to see an actual designer with the team making a fairly long post on the official D3 forums.  That ended up being short lived though as Day eventually developed a nickname; “Doctor No” for saying “no” to a lot of ideas during the development of Reapers of Souls.  He was also someone who tended to give off the wrong vibes when he met people at Blizzcon (sort of like near the beginning of this clip leading all the way to his facial expression near the 17 second mark).

Besides the few anecdotal stories I’ve heard, I can’t personally say what type of personality he really had; the fact that he was with Blizzard for 13 years says he wasn’t a misfit for the companies overall corporate culture though (so the stories I have heard may have been just how individuals approached him first).

As far as his impact on Diablo III (vanilla and Reaper of Souls), I have to look at my own personal experience where while there were some good changes, the fact that the games meta and power creep with items made me play the game less and less from 2014 onwards (to where I stopped playing altogether after Blizzcon 2015), says a lot.

Repeating what I’ve mentioned many times before when this blog was dedicated primarily to D3, this title lacked experienced game designers with actual ARPG design experience.  Blizzard South (Irvine’s) design chops were always primarily World of Warcraft (which even though it drew a lot of its inspiration from Diablo and Diablo II, was designed primarily by MMO veterans who were experienced raiders in MMO’s that predated WOW like Everquest; so the game utilizes far more MMO mechanics and elements in its design); Day was no exception spending 8 years learning design in WOW before transitioning to D3.

Blizzard Entertainment is obviously changing as the years go by; the fact that so many higher level executives (folks originally thought to be lifers like Rob Pardo and Chris Metzen) have left in recent years is rather telling.  Way further down the chart, it’s also not surprising to see more veterans leaving.  Basically, internal changes at higher levels is slowly impacting the corporate culture in subtle ways where even vets can feel that new blood is needed.  As for the Diablo franchise, I’ve always maintained that the next version of the title needs designers with actual ARPG experience and needs less people crossing over from D3’s “Team 3” (preferably a full purge).

The fact that so many designers that had been associated with D3 have now pretty much left Blizzard (including Day), signals that there has been a higher level decision made to fill most of the key positions with different people.  However, until a concept is publicly unveiled, it’s going to remain unclear if this is actually going to be for the better ad whether or not the vision for the franchise is going to emphasize its dungeon crawler/ARPG roots or move onto some hybrid that builds on D3’s much more MMO inspired design elements.  Time again will tell.

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/d3/topic/20759227193

This usually isn’t the Blizzard M.O. but the last few years have resulted in unrealistic speculation and expectations which never materialized.  Rather than let that ramp up again over the next few weeks, the team made a wise decision to nip it in the bud now.

The inevitable speculation would have ended up centering around a potential announcement of D4 which they are nowhere close to doing since that unannounced Diablo project team would need to have some sort of concept and foundation to talk about.  And they will need to get that initial impression right whenever they are ready to do the unveil.

— Harrison G. Pink (@GilesPink) July 18, 2017

Seriously don’t know what to make of this as they hired someone with virtual no ARPG design experience… and this position is likely for “Diablo 4”.

Adventure games like The Walking Dead tend to utilize decision tree based designs (timed responses or player actions that branch to other decisions which results in differing outcomes).  So there are some specific differences when it comes to designing the character development systems.

There hasn’t been more specific details as to which area he will be a senior designer though.  They could be tapping him for world game design for example since his resume shows that he was recently working on “open world combat level design” for Hangar 13’s Mafia III.

Hey all, 

We wanted to provide an additional update in light of the community feedback we’ve received. It’s clear that more transparency is needed in this situation, so we want to provide some additional details and the philosophy behind the steps we’re taking to combat this and future exploitive behavior. 

In approaching this situation, we wanted to make sure any actions we took ensured the following key points: 

• Not punishing legitimate players, including those who may have participated unwittingly, such as other members of a 4-man party where only the Necromancer and Demon Hunter were exploiting.
• Punishing the worst offenders. To do so, we will be issuing temporary suspensions over the upcoming Bonus XP weekend to those who are found to be the most egregious abusers, with a focus on those who continued abusing this exploit after we originally issued a public warning. 

This may seem lenient, and that brings us to a philosophy we’re working on: improving our communication. This includes both currently and in the future. Diablo III is a game designed to encourage players to find powerful combinations of skills and items. While the effect of this particular combination was unintended, nothing in the game explicitly indicated that was the case. It is our responsibility to clarify intent, and we simply weren’t quick enough with our communications. 

One more point we want to emphasize: We are not okay with exploits. We made mistakes in our communication and the speed of our actions, and for that, the community has our utmost apologies. Our intent is to continue to fix exploits and communicate clarity behind them as quickly as we can in the future.

Development team via community manager Tyvalir.

Communication has always been an issue once the game launched.  The root cause of this relates back to the often times arrogant communication that happened during early development and then during the “closed beta” (aka starter edition test) which is why the animosity/hostility that has been focused at the team throughout the years (which then led to them being less community oriented than the other franchises).

This is why many nitpick their ever changing philosophies because they had this tendency to use DBST (designer bullshit talk) to justify and rationalize their hypocritical/contradictory designs.

They’ve “promised” better communications before only to not follow through (actions tend to speak louder than words and well, this team has never been great on the action part).  That is a signature of failure at the lead level for those individuals directly managing the franchise (and those individuals should not be allowed to play any major role in any D3 followup).

This is why the unannounced Diablo project should not include Kevin Martens as part of that team (both he and Wyatt Cheng have been the primary senior/leads dating back to before launch in 2012) if players do not want to see a repeat of D3 with just a new name.

Not surprising.  When the first of one of my other accounts was flagged for beta access, I specifically mentioned that besides the most egregious issues, that feedback will be filed into a virtual wastebasket (a month later, another one of my accounts was also flagged for access) which was why I didn’t bother playing from the get go (a friend had to convince me to just get me to login to the beta mid-May).  The problem is that they’ve been even failing to deal with exploits that ended up being reported during the closed beta test.

One common remark has been “why didn’t Blizzard hold off on releasing the Necromancer until they could get it fixed?”  The reason as I mentioned in this prior post is that Activision Blizzards fiscal quarter closed on June 30th.  It was a higher up business decision to release before that date in order to book those initial revenues (normally the highest at release) for that (now) prior quarter.

I had been done with the game since late 2015 and knew they had moved on from addressing any of the underlying core issues (instead focusing on hiring for the unnanounced project).  In the past, I was absolutely disgusted with how they failed to learn from their past mistakes when they ignored far too much feedback again during the Reaper of Souls closed beta (this was the second part followup).

After that, I progressively stopped giving any sort of detailed feedback.  And that grew when I ended up being invited to the early technical alpha for Heroes of the Storm, a fairly early invite to the closed beta for StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, and most recently, the Necromancer closed beta; I barely took part in any of these because I already know that the majority of it is an exercise in futility (more so with D3).

So while there are some players saying that next time, Blizzard should try to invite players that actually play the game, the reality is that it won’t matter one iota.  You can give detailed feedback that reads like a thesis and it won’t be actioned on.  The worst is providing completely reproducible bug/exploit feedback and having it totally ignored.  I used to send a lot of stuff to their hacks e-mail and the only time many of them were addressed was only when someone put stuff up on YouTube to show it; the invulnerable wizard one (back in 2012) being one of the most egregious as it was known for over a month until people began putting videos up on YouTube in July 2012 (this was during the period when the RMAH had just gone live).

A large number of the player feedback in the above thread is clearly not positive but none of it will matter unless people start voting with their wallet.  The leaderboards for Diablo III aren’t meant to be taken as seriously as that of StarCraft II but that also doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any sort of integrity to them; they should because it’s meant for players to gauge their actual progress against others (and hopefully most of that is via legitimate means).

Unfortunately, any type of ladder system will invite those who prefer to use any means to get ahead of the pack.  And any publisher or developer that has a laundry list for their terms of service, should do their best to stand behind them.  Unfortunately, many game publishers/developers fail to live up to those words.  Blizzard tends to be much better in this regard than shitty ones like Trion Worlds for example, but they aren’t perfect.  And D3 being a one time purchase, tends to not have a lot of backend support to deal with the granular details when managing the type of exploits that do occur (and that is more so truer now that the game is slowly heading towards maintenance mode).

June 27th @ $14.99 (so they are indeed looking to book some upfront revenue for their fiscal 2nd quarter which closes on June 30th).

This is $10 lower than I originally expected them to price it and since it is coming in below the $19.99 price I mentioned, they are indeed shooting for those sitting on the fence.

Pricing and release date is eminent (and it is going to likely collide with Path of Exile’s Fall of Oriath expansion release since as far as Blizzard marketing is concerned, they will welcome any type of PR; even the inevitable comparison ones that will be taking place between the two official releases (there were comparisons during their respective initial announcements but the volume will be even greater once they are both live).

And there’s been all kinds of speculation going on the past few days about whether or not Diablo IV will be an MMO because of the small little snippet mentioning massive multiplayer game development experience being a plus.

Diablo III is an online massive multiplayer game albeit it being concurrent instanced sessions with limited multiplayer co-op within those instances.  I do believe that higher level executives at Blizzard already came to the conclusion during Diablo III’s early development that the franchise is not one that will fit well with being a completely persistent open world design (the classic MMO).  The Blizzard North version of D3 was intended to be an MMO in the World of Warcraft sense in terms of sprawling areas as well as lore (the objective per David Brevik was to do away with load screens between zones).

The Diablo III team took a ton of flack for how non-randomized the instanced game world felt like prior to adventure mode/rifts in Reaper of Souls since they went with a design where the peripheries were static while the middle tiles were randomized.  A persistent world like in most MMO’s is not going to be something that is welcomed by many ARPG players let alone D4 since that open world cannot be randomized nor does having a fog of war make sense.  MU Legend gave their dungeon instances (interdimensional rifts) fog of war in order to give them more of that ARPG feel but the rest of the persistent open world is obviously static and does not have an initial fog of war.

Path of Exile allowed their town hubs to be filled with the characters of other players to make those areas feel more alive.  Former Diablo II lead designer David Brevik noted they had to scrap plans (they ran out of time trying to implement it) for something they called Battle.net Town where instead of the chat lobby, players entered the world (sort of like Path of Exile’s town hubs) where they could do things and also see other random players, trade with them, etc.

I think this kind of design where the smaller hubs are populated with players in a channel makes sense for this genre as opposed to having larger open world areas where you encounter smaller dungeon instances (as is the case with many MMORPG’s).  So that is where I expect changes to be made for D4.  I would be very surprise to see them backtrack on turning the franchise into an actual MMOARPG though like Albion Online, Lost Ark, Lineage Eternal, or MU Legend though.

With that said, the personnel that fill several senior level positions (especially the content designer position) will determine how the designs in D4 will end up proceeding.  D4 needs completely new blood there including those with actual ARPG design experience (not the on rails action arcade design of Diablo III).

As mentioned before, I’m doing this entirely blind and just used each set (swapping in the skill for it) as is.  There’s a lot of non-optimization since I don’t have a lot of support items (nothing for the cube, only a few legendary gems, etc) or crafting materials.  I don’t even have the recipes for crafting gems beyond flawless imperial.  A lot of this is jarring my memory on things that I have forgotten (having not fully played since November 2015) like having to run bounties for cube materials as well as recipes.  Much of that reminded me why I stopped playing (not going to get into that again though)…

To cut to the chase, the set which I personally found engaging to play was Grace of Inarius (Bone Armor).  As of this post, I have no idea which set is actually the strongest in terms of pushing Greater Rifts (I have not changed my mind about my dislike of the Greater Rift system either) since I haven’t looked up any builds, watched any videos, or looked at the leaderboards.  I just want to play something that isn’t full of tedium.

My opinion on the class feeling fun to play (at the non-high level that I am playing it at) hasn’t changed.  It is way more fun at 70 though (my opinion on it is far more favorable compared to the crusader which ended up being my least played class).  The new graphics for bone armor (which is now in the style of the way that it was in D2) is much better.  I obviously have no informed opinion of the higher level Greater Rift play for the class though and have no intention at this late point in time in the beta of grinding bounties so that I have the materials for cubing some legendary powers from items via the PTR vendor.

Again, none of this has been enough to compel me to log in on my main account and play.  The necromancer would probably give me around 40 hours of fun play before it devolves into continually pushing Greater Rifts for eventually marginal increases to stats (something that has never been my idea of fun when it has been the only end game thing to do).  I did give the new Challenge Rift mode a try but have no gameplay opinion at this time until I play it several more times (there are some opinions I have on the design which I really do not want to get too deep into since it surrounds some of the contradictory design decisions that have been core to Team 3 since the beginning).  So I will end this entry here.