Wired Interview with Ion Hazzikostas, Fan Art - Cosmology Chart, Rumor - Diablo 2

[MyndZero]

"Nobody would trade the accessibility of information today for half a year stuck below level 40"

I mean maybe not to this extent but I would absolutely make a trade like this. Accessibility of information ruins immersion and the chance to have FUN figuring it out yourself and learning on the fly, as intended. I even think they should delete the PTR and alpha etc should be under NDA or not done at all outside the company. Invest into QA more and have them find and fix the bugs so the players and regain the sense of immersion that's been eroded away over the years and learning things as they do. FFXIV manages to have a nearly bug-free game in comparison to WoW and it doesn't do a PTR etc, they just have a QA team that does its job.

It absolutely sucks knowing everything about an expansion, patch etc before it's even officially released. You can argue you can avoid spoilers but since literally everything is known you're bound to get spoiled on something regardless.

[Nobleshield]

I think part of the issue is the game has embraced the min-maxing esport culture. I get it, people want to "win" and want to feel better than everyone else, it's human nature. But WoW has taken that and basically become an e-sport MMORPG. So you see that mentality trickle down into everything else in the game. From M+ encouraging speedrunning and very selective composition to raid mechanics that have every boss with half a dozen spell effects flying around and four difficulties so your top 1% can earn a living/feel special, the game has just gone where no MMORPG has gone before (that wasn't intended to be a Star Trek reference haha) and I question whether it's a good thing overall. It might be a good thing now (lots of people like M+ even though I hate it because of the timer) but for longevity I think it's pushing the wrong things to the forefront. Do we really need four difficulties instead of scaling boss difficulty? Does every boss need to have tons of flashy effects and mechanics? Maybe, I'm not a game designer. But it feels sometimes like WoW is going in a different direction than all the other MMOs and has lost the way.

It's gotten to the point where people expect you to do homework constantly about the game, even when it's brand new (like a new expansion will be out and the first week everyone expects you to have been following Alpha/Beta and know everything immediately). Why should a game require that?

[Tomana]

So which korean studio are they outsourcing this remaster to and just how badly should we expect this to be a disaster as well?

In the article, they say Blizzard is apparently outsourcing it to Vicarious Visions.

[Zephire]

IF this is like StarCraft 1 remaster, sure... IF it is like WarCraft 3: Refunded, then no Blizzard, NO.

It got to be a remaster like SC1. I mean, they have D3 being updated somewhat now and then while also developing D4. WarCraft3 is on the same level as SC2 which is active therefore a simple remaster wouldn't do.

Also, WC3 is getting fix after fix and many of the bugs I saw in the beginning are now gone, some remains but don't just blast WC3 away due to history

[Razorice]

After Reforged shit-show I'm not looking forward to D2 remaster to be honest.
I hope I'm wrong.

[Logwyn]

hah I remember back when wow launched. There were MMORPGs on the marked, but wow really was something else. The MMORPGs didnt really pull in the masses. The whole idea and concept about running around in a world slaying monsters and chat with random people was so cool.

Everytime you saw a player it was cool. You wanted to interact in one way or another. Just knowing there was a human behind that character you saw killing gnolls in Redridge was really something special.

I think alot of the nostaliga towards vanilla stems from that. Many of us were young adults or late teens and were in the startpit for how MMORPGs and gaming overall turned into a full online experience.

As the years went by that feeling faded away and in retail now it can almost feel like its you and random bots. You can easily forget that humans(mostly) play the characters you see.

Its not really the same in classic either. It was something for that magical time back in 04-06 and vanilla wow. It will never come back

One of the problems with wow then vs. now is also back then you needed others to help you in most of the outworld content. You kinda needed to form a social bond with people. To use Redridge there was a series of quests where elite mobs were. More than just one mob and we are done. To do it on level you had to group or for the most part you could not do it. Nothing like this exists in-game currently.

If you do need someone else you just click a button and get transported to a group kill mob X and then go on your merry way. No chance to even say thank you to the group. ***POOF*** you are gone. Add to this those people are all on another server and you will more than likely never see them again.

The same goes for leveling. Throw in CRZ. You are leveling up and see a person. Guess what chances are they are from another server. I always see people from "Pridemore". Everyone I see is from that server. I honestly do not remember seeing anyone from my server in the past week of world quests or leveling. Once again a pool of strangers that I will never see again.


Another thing to add in is that WOW's VOIP function was crap when they added it in. Everyone pretty much migrated off WOW to teamspeak, ventrillo, and now onto discord. Even if you join a guild. If you do not join the discord server then you are just another nameless face in the crowd.

So wow adding in features that really persuade you to not be social in the game and add in the discord, not in-game. And well poof wow isn't social.

[Kel_Sceptic]

"Nobody would trade the accessibility of information today for half a year stuck below level 40"

I mean maybe not to this extent but I would absolutely make a trade like this. Accessibility of information ruins immersion and the chance to have FUN figuring it out yourself and learning on the fly, as intended. I even think they should delete the PTR and alpha etc should be under NDA or not done at all outside the company. Invest into QA more and have them find and fix the bugs so the players and regain the sense of immersion that's been eroded away over the years and learning things as they do. FFXIV manages to have a nearly bug-free game in comparison to WoW and it doesn't do a PTR etc, they just have a QA team that does its job.

It absolutely sucks knowing everything about an expansion, patch etc before it's even officially released. You can argue you can avoid spoilers but since literally everything is known you're bound to get spoiled on something regardless.

^This is my thinking aswell. At patch 8.3 I havent read anything and havent watched any videos about horrific visions. The first attempt I was a 100% fail cause I had no clue wtf I was doing in there, but it has sure worth my time to explore how that stuff works. All that after a 1 year breake from the constant azerite power sh1t fest. The psychological stress artifact power and azerite power added to my gamer life just made me quit WoW after playing since 2005.

The game is kind of ...booring... to be known before release. All big streamers and popular website create their content on the unreleased contend and that is a sad thing. One of the big advantage of Vanilla and TBC was exactly this, that most players didnt knew nothing about what was going to come out. The internet was at 32/64Kbps for Best Effort and 128Kbps for Business clients in 2005 and with it we barrely had Thottbot to lockup quests and stuff like that.

Sure streamers put the game on the main page, create the hype, free publicity/marketing, but at the same time it washes the game with all the information that comes out. Just like watching a great movie while you already heard tons of spoilers

[crusadernero]

One of the problems with wow then vs. now is also back then you needed others to help you in most of the outworld content. You kinda needed to form a social bond with people. To use Redridge there was a series of quests where elite mobs were. More than just one mob and we are done. To do it on level you had to group or for the most part you could not do it. Nothing like this exists in-game currently.

If you do need someone else you just click a button and get transported to a group kill mob X and then go on your merry way. No chance to even say thank you to the group. ***POOF*** you are gone. Add to this those people are all on another server and you will more than likely never see them again.

The same goes for leveling. Throw in CRZ. You are leveling up and see a person. Guess what chances are they are from another server. I always see people from "Pridemore". Everyone I see is from that server. I honestly do not remember seeing anyone from my server in the past week of world quests or leveling. Once again a pool of strangers that I will never see again.


Another thing to add in is that WOW's VOIP function was crap when they added it in. Everyone pretty much migrated off WOW to teamspeak, ventrillo, and now onto discord. Even if you join a guild. If you do not join the discord server then you are just another nameless face in the crowd.

So wow adding in features that really persuade you to not be social in the game and add in the discord, not in-game. And well poof wow isn't social.

Sums it up pretty well. Believe it or not, I still remember the days when I would even call my friends on housephone to talk while playing certain games, like Starcraft or WC2-3. Instead of typing in the chat while playing, cause that doesnt work very well there. It was a huge deal for us when wow launched, was like magic.

These days people got other places to communicate and talk. Facebook, twitter, IG, discord, twitch and whatnot. To talk with someone in a MMORPG aint that cool anymore and the people you interact with are more a tool of convinience right there and then and nothing else. wow turned further away from the social aspects and has become more of a hunt for gear, mounts, titles and achivs.

back in the day people met in guild chat, party chat or raid chat. Even in open world chat. Now the communities has shifted places from ingame to other places like discord. The guild is there but chat is dead. everything happens on discord etc.

You could argue that the social aspect really carried vanilla. Vanilla was great, but it had a lot of flaws but we could live with them and I think that comes alot down to the social aspect of how vanilla was played. We were all in this together.

These days most people dont give a shite about anyone in the game. Clear dailys, do some dungeons/bgs/raids with random peeps, log off. Level a character without utter 1 word to anyone.

[ExtremelyCrusty]

After how WC3 Reforged out - this could be bad.

[HailToTheKing]

Please don't ruin Diablo 2 for me. Just leave it be.

[unbound]

...they are still always chasing that mystery, the fantasy of the unexplored and undiscovered...

Yeah, right.

Because chasing that mystery is always accomplished by creating less and less content, and pushing racing through that minimal content over and over and over again...

[Kyphael]

Yeah, right.

Because chasing that mystery is always accomplished by creating less and less content, and pushing racing through that minimal content over and over and over again...

On the ground no less so "we can take in the scenery." Ion's full of shit.

[RoKPaNda]

This is yet another example of why Ion is so much better at his job than his predecessors. People like GC can wax poetic about the old days, but Ion realizes that getting here was inevitable. The game now is far more complex than it used to be, but it's so much easier to access information now than it was then. This community, if nothing else, is very dedicated. That's always been the case, but as the internet evolved the result of their dedication became much more accessible.

In Vanilla the warrior and rogue communities came up with AEP/SEP (Agility/Strength equivalent points) as a way of determining which gear was best, people figured out that item level was a thing based on a pair of (iirc) cloth boots that was improperly budgeted, etc. Finding that information was a lot more difficult though. Now you've got some of the best players for each spec writing detailed guides for 3-4 different websites / class discords / etc.

Even in Vanilla WoW other players were just tools that you used to get through the goals that you were working toward. The difference being that you didn't have a choice. Now with Classic players are better, and the PUG community is way better than it was in Vanilla, and the social aspect of the game isn't there. Beyond the first two weeks of Classic I didn't have any interaction with anyone outside of my guild. Unless you count trading which isn't really social, it's just "LF crafter w/ [recipe] my mats + tip", get invited to group, trade, done. Might as well be a vendor.

It's not just WoW, and it's not because of anything that WoW has done, modern gaming is just like that. Most of the multiplayer games I play it's a struggle to make long term friends to play with. I might interact with 200+ people in-game in some games in a session but we'll never talk to each other or form friendships beyond that. You'll see threads about it on subreddits and forums and such for pretty much every popular game. "How do you make friends to play with in this game?"

I'd probably play a D2 remaster for nostalgia sake, but tbh I'd rather be playing D4 or PoE 2. I somehow can't see them doing a D2 remaster while working on D4, seems counter productive.

[Roar-Powah]

Blizzard really are just disconnected from WoW, players have said time after time what works and doesn't and it gets ignored. Classic shows how communities can work together when servers are not mutated to unrecognizable levels with sharding, CRZ etc. Played BfA this week(good friend wanted me to play with him in some M+) for the 1st time since the end of 2018 and servers are a mess still with how broken crz and sharding really is. It also just feels wrong, i don't know anyone anymore, open world is just people popping in and out and for what fucking reason? Will not be buying shadowlands if this shit keeps up as I'm done with the path that retail has taken.

[Oxna]

"Lets not make new games but continue remaking our old glories"

[mmocfd1b0ab5a3]

"Nobody would trade the accessibility of information today for half a year stuck below level 40"

I mean maybe not to this extent but I would absolutely make a trade like this. Accessibility of information ruins immersion and the chance to have FUN figuring it out yourself and learning on the fly, as intended. I even think they should delete the PTR and alpha etc should be under NDA or not done at all outside the company.

PTR has nothing to do with ruining immersion, it's to test bugs etc and you are not forced to join them.

PTRs have been thing since 2005 and WoW and still managed to immerse players back then.

[Easo]

It got to be a remaster like SC1. I mean, they have D3 being updated somewhat now and then while also developing D4. WarCraft3 is on the same level as SC2 which is active therefore a simple remaster wouldn't do.

Also, WC3 is getting fix after fix and many of the bugs I saw in the beginning are now gone, some remains but don't just blast WC3 away due to history

Bugs? Bruh, they removed features, especially those important to multiplayer. There is still no ladder, for example. And none of the few patches which came out added anything big. Btw, where is that "agressive patching" they promised?
Not to mention the whole lying/false advertising thing.

Sure, Diablo 2 is isometric game, much easier, but to blindly trust them now is foolish.

[Strawberry]

Blizzard really are just disconnected from WoW, players have said time after time what works and doesn't and it gets ignored. Classic shows how communities can work together when servers are not mutated to unrecognizable levels with sharding, CRZ etc. Played BfA this week(good friend wanted me to play with him in some M+) for the 1st time since the end of 2018 and servers are a mess still with how broken crz and sharding really is. It also just feels wrong, i don't know anyone anymore, open world is just people popping in and out and for what fucking reason? Will not be buying shadowlands if this shit keeps up as I'm done with the path that retail has taken.

I was gonna write a reply something like "stay in classic", but then I put some thought into it and you're actually right.
I like tons of stuff they have done with the retail, but sharding is not one of them.

[GreenJesus]

PTR has nothing to do with ruining immersion, it's to test bugs etc and you are not forced to join them.

PTRs have been thing since 2005 and WoW and still managed to immerse players back then.

FF14 doesn't have a PTR and their game is perfectly fine. All a PTR does is spoil content since look at how well Blizzard has used PTR's in the past... Maybe blizzard could try spending a couple bucks testing their own game and let the players experience the game as it's intended on the day it launches?

[De Lupe]

Love the colored cosmology chart. It's already a work of art, but it's beautiful in color.