Diablo Immortal
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My take: Blizzard made all the wrong moves. They told a bunch of PC gamers to their faces that they will not get the game on their PCs, after teasing an announcement and getting them all riled up.
If they had said, "...And there are other Diablo projects under continued development." I doubt there would have been a single complaint. Or if this had been a Fallout Shelter situation.
I'll disregard the usual inflammatory articles from the usual suspects that are blind to the situation, because no one cares about them anymore.
But honestly? A Diablo mobile game is cool, and probably the best business move Activision could take: they can even add loot boxes and monetize it forever. This is a dream come true for them. Diablo has been a franchise where old series fans have had their faces spat in since Blizzard North stopped being the ones in charge of D3, so the furthering of the trend of alienating old fans for more new revenue streams makes sense. It'll just seriously piss people off.
Which is all good for me, Path of Exile will benefit, and I like that game better :D
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You didn't mention the best part:
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@Magus said in Diablo Eternal:
And there are other Diablo projects under continued development
They did, before and after. Personally, I don't see it as cut and dried that it's going to be horribly casual as everyone else seems to assume.
However, I do think they hit a wrong note and should've planned the announcement better.
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@PleegWat said in Diablo Eternal:
They did, before and after. Personally, I don't see it as cut and dried that it's going to be horribly casual as everyone else seems to assume.
However, I do think they hit a wrong note and should've planned the announcement better.Right. I'm sure they have future plans. But if they'd said so, vaguely even, fans could have seen this as an additional thing they're getting. It looks... bad the way they did it.
They billed this as something they thought would make everyone happy, not realizing that the only people it will truly make happy are shareholders of Activision. Because you can bet that real money is how you become the best at this game. From anyone else that would be in question, but not from Activision.
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@Magus It's also the fact that they made this announcement as the FINAL opening annoucement at Blizzcon, which is usually reserved for their biggest thing every year. And then expected the people at Blizzcon (who are almost entirely made up of PC gaming enthusiasts) to be excited about a mobile game which is almost certain to be microtransaction laden, and were honestly shocked that there was disappointment involved. (See the "Do you guys not have phones?" line that was uttered)
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@e4tmyl33t This. There are several places they could have announced this. But it was going to be ignored by most of the Blizzcon-goers no matter what they did. The more they try to sell it to their PC gamers, the more pissed off everyone gets.
Honestly I think that a mobile game was just a bad move overall. It'll be shit and few people will play it. If they want a game that can be mobile in the literal sense, port it to the Switch.
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@pie_flavor said in Diablo Eternal:
If they want a game that can be mobile in the literal sense, port it to the Switch.
Which, ironically, they just DID with Diablo 3.
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My take: it's a load of nerds getting angry over something silly.
A take I'm sure we're all familiar with here...
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@loopback0 It is that, but I don't blame them: Two major game releases in a beloved franchise, the old fans have basically been told they don't matter.
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@Magus said in Diablo Eternal:
I'll disregard the usual inflammatory articles from the usual suspects that are blind to the situation, because no one cares about them anymore.
Misogynist.
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Why they didn't pull a Bethesda and have a ~30 second clip saying 'Diablo 2 HD' or some other big project they're working on after announcing a mobile game is beyond me. It would have certainly helped placate the angry crowds.
I knew it wasn't going to be good when they put out a post a few days before Blizzcon essentially saying 'Don't get too hyped, multiple Diablo projects are in the works but the one you want won't be the big announcement' but I didn't expect they'd announce only a mobile game and nothing else for the Diablo franchise.
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@Lathun The rumors are that they were going to do exactly that and then pulled it at the last minute:
Sources: Blizzard Scrapped Plans For Diablo 4 Video [CORRECTION]
When Blizzard’s sole Diablo announcement at this year’s BlizzCon turned out to be a game for phones, it set off a firestorm of angry reactions from fans who had hoped for a new Diablo on PC. But what about Diablo 4?
Boy that was dumb, can't believe they did that!
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Path of Exile's announcement today: PS4 support going live with the expansion they're releasing next month.
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I think the saddest part of this: I liked D3. I played the story, and not much beyond that, because everything else feels stale and boring, and I don't feel a need to repeat the story I played. But the new one is set between 2 and 3, and therefore might have lore that interests me.
But no, not on any platform I own, and touch controls sound like a pain anyway.
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BTW: Why isn't the title of this thread "Diablo Immortal"? When I look for "Eternal" I get something about a collection and not the expected mobile-game hatefest.
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@JBert I got the name wrong.
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@Parody Are they trying to game people's emotions? Piss everyone off, then reveal the greatest game they've ever seen after a couple of weeks?
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@pie_flavor said in Diablo Immortal:
@Parody Are they trying to game people's emotions? Piss everyone off, then reveal the greatest game they've ever seen after a couple of weeks?
That only works if people have NO expectations. You can't let people down and then release something they wanted you to announce weeks later.
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@pie_flavor said in Diablo Immortal:
@Parody Are they trying to game people's emotions? Piss everyone off, then reveal the greatest game they've ever seen after a couple of weeks?
Absolutely not. As much as people will keep begging them, they aren't going to be willing to publish a game full of the imagery of Diablo 2 without infinite bad press.
A Diablo 4, when they finally figure out what they're going to do with it, will probably not even please fans of D3, and will never please fans of D2.
New fans are where they want their money to come from.
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@ben_lubar said in Diablo Immortal:
@pie_flavor said in Diablo Immortal:
@Parody Are they trying to game people's emotions? Piss everyone off, then reveal the greatest game they've ever seen after a couple of weeks?
That only works if people have NO expectations. You can't let people down and then release something they wanted you to announce weeks later.
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@Magus said in Diablo Immortal:
I think the saddest part of this: I liked D3. I played the story, and not much beyond that, because everything else feels stale and boring, and I don't feel a need to repeat the story I played.
You absolutely nail what is wrong with D3 there. There's no problem with the first playthrough… but after that it's strongly toward the Meh. There's a few bits in the “randomly generated for exploring” mode which are OK, but they're very much the exception.
I think the problem might be in part the long underground sections. They're not so visually appealing.
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@dkf For me it's more that the characters all feel the same... Every time I've made the attempt, it's been as a different character, and it's essentially the most basic gear check: big numbers win, use whatever skills you want, because they're all the same.
Meanwhile in Path of Exile, I've been playing for years and have done at least 3 builds in the current league that I'd never tried, and that were GOOD, but in very different ways, and helped someone else make a build that I'd only theorized, which was more effective than anything I was playing.
That says a lot to me.
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@Magus said in Diablo Immortal:
@dkf For me it's more that the characters all feel the same... Every time I've made the attempt, it's been as a different character, and it's essentially the most basic gear check: big numbers win, use whatever skills you want, because they're all the same.
Meanwhile in Path of Exile, I've been playing for years and have done at least 3 builds in the current league that I'd never tried, and that were GOOD, but in very different ways, and helped someone else make a build that I'd only theorized, which was more effective than anything I was playing.
That says a lot to me.
See, that's kind of the exact reason I stopped really playing Path of Exile. I liked playing D3 and taking a character around, then deciding I wanted to do a different set of skills and just changing some gear pieces lets you do that. Doing that in PoE means starting completely over from scratch.
I don't want to have a hundred casters. I want one caster that I can repurpose to do what I want to do at the time.
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@e4tmyl33t Yeah, but the end result can actually be a significantly different character; using armor vs evasion, energy shield vs life, etc; If your build is generic enough, like a generic elemental crit inquisitor, you can use any elemental spell or attack with no changes to your tree, and elementalist is similar.
In D3, even if I do respec my character, or even if I play an entirely different class, it feels exactly the same.
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A lot of people not liking the talent system of D3 and who want the "complete freedom" talent system of D2 seems to forget one critical thing: The talent system of D2 is horribly broken, and if you want to complete the game on Hell you pretty much only have very few correct choices for how to spend them, often based around a particular skill (or a particular set, but glhf getting that if solo). Going in causal will most likely lead to a broken build which will start failing in Nightmare. Luckily there is respeccing to salvage a broken char nowadays, but originally there was only the option to restart from level one if you fucked up your talents and stats. Oh, and the stats only have one correct choice regardless of class: Just enough strength and dexterity to meet gear requirements, dump everything else in vitality and ignore energy completely. Yes, even for casters.
In regards to Diablo: Immortal. I don't mind, but yeah, the announcement could have been handled a lot better. I think a problem was that they didn't have any big news to show at BlizzCon this year and that fucked them over. The current WoW expansion is still too new to talk about the next, so there's just the future content patches. New heroes for HotS and OW don't need any big announcement. New HS expansion also not enough to warrant a big show. WoW Classic just got a release date announcement. So that leaves two new things: WC3 Reforged and Diablo: Immortal. So they got to choose to bring in the big guns for either an UHD remake or a mobile game. Feels underwhelming either way. So I don't see how they could have done anything better this year tbh.
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@Atazhaia
Flagged for being an obvious corporate shill
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@Atazhaia said in Diablo Immortal:
A lot of people not liking the talent system of D3 and who want the "complete freedom" talent system of D2 seems to forget one critical thing: The talent system of D2 is horribly broken, and if you want to complete the game on Hell you pretty much only have very few correct choices for how to spend them, often based around a particular skill (or a particular set, but glhf getting that if solo). Going in causal will most likely lead to a broken build which will start failing in Nightmare. Luckily there is respeccing to salvage a broken char nowadays, but originally there was only the option to restart from level one if you fucked up your talents and stats. Oh, and the stats only have one correct choice regardless of class: Just enough strength and dexterity to meet gear requirements, dump everything else in vitality and ignore energy completely. Yes, even for casters.
Equally, however, people don't believe that a good way to fix that system was the way D3 did. Path of Exile has a similar dependency on focusing on survivability above all else, but at least gives you a few very different options to make that happen, and while you can ruin a character, there is no end to the number of builds that can complete the very hardest parts of the endgame.
@Atazhaia said in Diablo Immortal:
So I don't see how they could have done anything better this year tbh.
"And while we don't have anything to show yet, we have other Diablo projects in-flight that are decidedly not mobile-only."
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www.playdiablo4.com why cant you make just a normal hyperlink...
Maybe that finally worked?
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@Atazhaia said in Diablo Immortal:
and if you want to complete the game on Hell you pretty much only have very few correct choices for how to spend them, often based around a particular skill
That's just realism
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[source]
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@ChaosTheEternal Are you sure that has enough jpg compression?
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@PleegWat finally, something that's better on mobile than desktop
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@ChaosTheEternal I would have thought it'd be the Heroes of the Storm announcements.
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@Parody That isn't a decades-old beloved franchise. Just a fairly good game.
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@Magus But an entry (meaning 76) that I'd already forgotten about. :)
