Jay Wilson and Warhammer 40k Dawn of War

[Abysal]

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So, I was just replaying Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War (found the CD buried somewhere and went haywire) and after finishing THE AWESOME CAMPAIGN I sat through the credits and noticed Jay Wilson as Lead Designer and Story writer. Now, don't get me wrong, he did some terrible things to Diablo as a franchise (or he might have been a scapegoat, who knows)

He was at least partially a scapegoat, just like GC is with WoW and every lead designer everywhere is with every game. People seem to think "lead designer" means "solely responsible for every single thing that's wrong with the game" and that's just not true. Do lead designers deserve the most blame? Probably, but at the end of the day I think we also have become "spoiled" to the point where we're almost impossible to please. We have unrealistic expectations and as a result everything disappoints us. It's a really crappy way to go through life IMO.

At any rate, D3 was a mess before he was even lead designer. There's a reason that it took about a decade between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. Blizzard clearly didn't have an exact idea of what they wanted to do with the franchise.

---------- Post added 2013-06-22 at 11:21 PM ----------

People are expecting $60 for thousands of hours fun.
Is that possible?

Blizzard is expecting the AH to be a cash cow without new contents every a few months.

Sure it's possible. I mean, people play LoL and have thousands of hours of fun. It's extremely rare and only the best of games can deliver on it.

Besides, ~1m people got D3 for "free" through WoW's annual pass. I know a good number of these people who vocally complain about how much they hate D3. You could easily say these people expected thousands of hours of fun for "free".

[Dragonshardz]

Besides, ~1m people got D3 for "free" through WoW's annual pass. I know a good number of these people who vocally complain about how much they hate D3. You could easily say these people expected thousands of hours of fun for "free".

Indeed. I do think most of those 12 million people approached Diablo 3 thinking "hey, this is going to be just like WoW, so I can play all the time and not get bored from it." Diablo was never a game that had a, erm, "end game". The items were the effective end game (after Lord of Destruction, runes) and all people did was just farm the same spots/bosses for years and play on ladder. That was it. Though I do think we have way more "end game" now than we had in Diablo 2.

Now, with Diablo 3 they did try to spicy things up a bit but in my own humble opinion, they offered way, way too few options in terms of farming spots and exploration. The maps from Diablo 2 are far bigger (had them compared recently... any Act 3 map (Flyer Jungle for instance can strech FOR MILES and you could end up killing more than 10 elites) and while the graphics kinda suck when compared to Diablo 3, they did have a distinct feel that never grew out of style. But basically, the overall "bigness" in Diablo 3 is cut way short by the inability to teleport to other Acts, making the 3484584823728327 farm of Act 3 that much more BORING.