Thursday, July 3, 2008

Time For A Rant


Ihmhi on the Diabloiii.net (new name) forums posted an amazing analysis on the first 9 minutes of the gameplay video. He compares the game to WoW a lot which I think is unfair. Every game copies another. There wasn't a need to mention WoW 7 times...

*talking about D3's buffing system* "I can see they are making the game VERY different from WoW by having it completely on the opposite side of the screen. d:"

"WoW-style cooldown"

"the inventory seems to be more like WoW now"

"the player swap out his axes for some fancier ones. Again, some ideas taken from WoW and similar MMOs."

"Apparantly they've taken some tips from WoW's AuctioneerAdvanced addon (and similar addons)."

What really made me cross was when he was talking about the Elixers. "Will we have stat-boosting potions (like WoW's alchemy) in Diablo III?" Maybe he never played the original Diablo but they had Elixers which boosted up stats.

"Small Bag. So it looks like bags (like WoW) will serve some sort of function in Diablo III."

I'm not trying to beat on the guy. He made great points. I just do not see the need to compare it to just WoW.

http://forums.diii.net/showthread.php?p=6581118

Another controversy surrounded Diablo 3 is that the environments look too bright. Diablo is supposed to be a dark world and yet they're making it look more colorful.

First and foremost, my opinion on the matter? IT'S A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS! After all these years, you would think that the Blizzard Devs know what their doing. 10 Million Subscribers to World Of Warcraft and TWO video games (10 and 7/8 years old) being played by thousands of people daily (Diablo II and Starcraft). Video games that are being played DAILY after almost a decade. Not to mention that Diablo II is now selling at the Top of the Amazon.com carts and when Starcraft II was announced, it too jumped to the top. Now, after all these months since the Starcraft II announcement, it's at #18. Come on. Give it up already.

There's a petition going around which is against Blizzard's art direction. (I will not post a link to the petition). They are saying that it look too "cartoon'ish" (mind you, they repeated that it looked too much like WoW's cartoony style way too many times). They also want the light radius back.

Pesonally, it looks fine. If I want to walk around in a dark dungeon, I'll go lock myself in a closet or walk around my house with the blinds shut at 3AM in the morning. A game should be pleasing. It doesn't mean it has too be "cartoon'ish"; it just doesn't have to be black, dark red and grey. It's an art style and by the look of all Blizzards games (including Starcraft), they all have the "cartoon'ish" look. It's Blizzard's art style. Don't like it? Get out.

/end rant

4 comments:

JIRAIYA said...

waa i can't wait diablo3! when sc2 comeout actually?they haven't annouced yet? i thought i heard its going out this year end.

wow addon

Aticus said...

They haven't released a date yet. I would guess they would announce it at BlizCon and maybe a March/April release. Just a guess though.

Anonymous said...

Hiya, thanks for reading my post. I'd like to mention that I used WoW as a comparison for a lot of the things seen in the video because... well, they look like stuff out of WoW? I mean, a lot of other games (especially MMOs) have similar things like cooldowns. It just makes sense to mention WoW because it's the MMORPG that Blizzard gamers are most likely to know. I could have just as easily said Dark Age of Camelot or Age of Conan, but not everyone would understand it. d:

You might also want to check out the original Battle.net thread as the discussion there is much longer and varied than the one at diii.net.

Moreover, if you look at my Diablo III.net forum profile, you will notice that I am not a "new name". I have been on those forums for two years, and I have been playing Diablo II for longer than that.

A lot of people are doing the whole "D3 looks like WoW!!!" thing, including myself to be honest. I will admit I'm not comfortable that they are taking this in the right direction, especially in light of Michael Huang's Blog Post. Mr. Huang worked for Blizzard North before they went off to other companies. One of his most interesting statements:

" One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago. "

So it seems like Diablo III WAS going in a fresh and new direction, until Blizzard Irvine got into it. I'm a hardcore fan of Diablo II and I'm worried - it's as simple as that.

Aticus said...

Oh no, I was talking about the website having a new name - not you. (fixed it. I forgot it was diii.net)

I wasn't necessarily flaming at you. You made outstanding points. I was more so disappointed and thinking 'Wow, this guy really did his homework. But... oh man, he had to ruin it for me by comparing it to WoW... Just like everyone else.'

Thanks for the comment :-)