DiabloFans

Indeed.

Yes, Hellgate: London flopped massively. Blizzard's huge array of games was pretty damned terrible up until the jackpot that was WarCraft II, if anyone recalls. That started the chain reaction that has allowed them to ride their huge success thus far.

So many factors go into what makes a game 'successful' that very often even the best of games (not that Hellgate: London was) are buried alive while mediocrity (not that Hellgate: London wasn't) flourishes.

My point is that there is a strangely emotive Corporate Spencerist presence in this thread that is annoying me: the idea that anyone less successful than Blizzard has no business criticising them. I don't know about the lot of you, but as a die-hard BioWare fan, by no means would I dismiss or fail to take seriously criticism of BioWare from an Obsidian team member just because they're the outcast sibling of BioWare that hasn't done as well for themselves since moving out. I'll take the criticism on it's own merit and not scoff because of who delivers it.

Ah, the mythical trade-off between graphics and gameplay.

People are talking as if Roper said something rather different.

All this is about is the difference in art direction that separated Blizzard and Blizzard North. Diablo III has Blizzard art direction and unarguably shows it, now more resembling the Craft games.

You're reading from that some kind of hostility from Roper that I'm just not seeing. Seems like a reasonable (and oft-made) observation to me. Lower the pitchforks, they're embarrassing, not to mention pathetic.

Looking at what StarCraft II and Diablo III are doing, I can see it going either way.

My two best arguments for a StarCraft MMO:

1. Futuristic sci-fi MMOs are on the rise to challenge the dominance of EVE (such as Earthrise, Dark Prophecy, Jumpgate Evolution, Star Trek Online, and Star Wars: The Old Republic), and it seems likely that Blizzard would want to compete.
2. It seems likely that StarCraft II's campaign, supposedly so massive that it needed to be split into three separate releases, packs far more IP-building goodness than Diablo III will. IP-building goodness that could help make an MMO make sense, hopefull so Blizzard wouldn't have to pull all the retconning they did for World of WarCraft. They seem to be approaching Diablo III quite lightly in comparison.

My two best arguments for a Diablo MMO:

1. Diablo III seems to be opening up the world of Sanctuary in exactly the manner that would be needed to set the stage for an MMO. They've advanced to non-gender-restricted classes from vastly different corners of the world. Heaven is becoming more involved. The Worldstone's destruction allows humans born afterward to regain the power they once possessed as the Nephalem, making Sanctuary a more high-fantasy, anyone-can-be-a-hero kind of setting, and inflating the formerly sparse human population. I personally fear that this will obsolesce the loneliness that greatly helped the setting work as a dark fantasy in the past, but that's another topic.
2. While StarCraft is a futuristic, soft science-fiction setting, it is in many ways but a high-technology mirror of WarCraft. Mostly in atmosphere. High-fantasy with lasers is still high-fantasy. Just ask George Lucas. Meanwhile, Diablo is, despite being far closer to WarCraft technologically, very far from WarCraft indeed when it comes to just about everything else. It may be that StarCraft would steal more of WarCraft's audience than Diablo would. It may be that World of WarCraft players would be more interested in a StarCraft MMO's colorful and magical pew-pewing than an Abrahamic Dark Ages fantasy MMO. It may be that a Diablo MMO would attract people that won't play WoW for other reasons than that it features swords rather than guns.

Quote from "FingolfinGR" »

Because they already mentioned that "Diablo 3 will be the end of the trilogy but not the end of the franchise".

Good point. In all seriousness, what else could that mean? A Diablo RTS? Hah!

I've sometimes rather suspected that Tyrael comes from Babylonian/Assyrian mythology's Teeraal. The implications make me smirk.

Look him up.

Exactly. I think it would suit a WarCraft game extremely well, and I hope they use it in WarCraft IV. Hell, if World of WarCraft looked like this, I might even be playing it.

Yeah, I'm thinking more like soulstone-sized and glowing more as you draw close to them. Having to look for them a little bit if the floor is covered in corpses sounds good to me, though not to the extent of gemstones.

Meh, I can dream.

I mean, they're beautiful, but they seem to demand too much attenton for something as simple as a little health. With how huge and luminescent they are, I'd expect one to make me immortal or something. Consider how small the soulstones were and yet how much power they could contain (and impart).

Consistency, man!

Mechanically, I am all in favour of a limited healing resource that cannot be banked for spamming.

However, I'm very irritated by the appearance of these health orbs. They're huge, floating, solid, glowing orbs that simply appear over corpses. If they resembled shards of the Worldstone, were about the size of Diablo II's gems or soulstones, and laid on the ground, I'd be more receptive.

A development mantra of mine would be: 'Don't put anything in the gameworld that you wouldn't put in a cinematic.' Is that unreasonable?

I've always felt Hell should be nightmarishly illogical and unpredictable.

One of my favourite Hellish realms thus far was Oneiros in Undying. It combined the popular colour pallet of Hell with surreal physics and an extreme sense of vertigo. It feels silly to play through today, but in its time it was the most unnerving environment I'd encountered. Add to it unpredictably placed monsters with such abilities as being able to pull you invisibly towards their gaping jaws as time around them slows, and you have a nightmare, indeed.

Having seen Slow Time on the Wizard already, I'm starting to have high hopes for these sorts of dynamics.

Quote from "Magistrate" »

That's what they tried to accomplish in the Plains of Despair and City of the Damned- a lonely, eerie, and dark abyss. Then, to stay true to both Diablo I and the written book lore, the River of Flame is encompassed with fire and brimstone.

I'd go further in saying that I'd prefer Hell be so far from uniform that one is never quite sure if they are in Hell or not. Realms of fire and brimstone, of course. Realms of emptiness and despair, sure. Other realms that play on the extremes of other common fears? I'd like to think so.

Perhaps Blizzard will run an internal survey on everyone's worst fears and places they'd least like to be. Although that may have the undesired consequence of creating a Hell that closely resembles Los Angeles.

Quote from "Num3n" »

im tempted to not watch it because it might anger me even more... however i suppose there is always a chance it could cheer me up... oo the choices... 'sigh'

If you're like me, Julian's 'I guess there are some people who just don't like colour,' will have you facepalming, but the rest of it is actually quite encouraging to me.

I'm a fan of White Wolf and have immersed myself in their sourcebooks but I've never found a local group to play with. So again, I'm more geek than gamer.

Actually, I'm about to get very geeky, but I'm a big fan of the colour commonly used for arcane magic, which is also used here, because it is very amusing if you know a bit about light and the human brain.

This colour, which is the one most frequently used, from Baldur's Gate to Hellgate: London, doesn't exist in the light spectrum. Whereas every other colour has its own position in the spectrum, we see this colour because we are presented with the otherwise brain-breaking situation of detecting wavelengths from both ends of the light spectrum at once. Generally speaking, our brain has two options for interpreting the input data:[alphalist=a]
Sum the input responses to produce a colour halfway between red and violet in the spectrum (which would in this case produce green – not a very representative colour of a red and violet mix)
Invent a new colour halfway between red and violet[/alphalist]This is the evidence that the brain takes option b – it has constructed a colour to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a colour does not exist in the light spectrum -- since it isn't actually a wheel, but a finite line from low to high wavelengths.

What better colour for arcane magic than one that doesn't exist but is produced by our minds when presented with a visual paradox? I always grin.

Immersion isn't about escapism for me, and I don't play games for escapism. Nor for competition.

I was a stage actor for about a decade, and I never felt that I was the character I was playing. I'd frankly consider that psychotic. But I was immersed in that character: I enjoyed attempting to think in ways the character needed to think. It's not about becoming another person, it's about understanding another persona, about different perspectives. It's empathy. It's also a matter of searching yourself to consider what you would do in the same situation, and learning about yourself in the process.

Roleplaying is the same way, and it is something that applies -- to some degree -- to other game genres, as well.