Are the D3 Devs Just Noobs Compared to WoW/Sc2 Devs?

[nyc81991]

I think the problem is that Diablo was never meant to be a game that you play every day for years with new stuff to do like WoW.

World of Warcraft is an Mmo. Trying to play Diablo like you would play WoW is a mistake on the players part. Not Blizzard. (thats not to say D3 was perfect).

[Zaqwert]

I made what I consider a pretty well thought out and detailed post on the official D3 forums.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7811482232

If everyone could read it and if you agree maybe bump it and note what you most agree with. I think getting it noticed might help generate some positive discussion, if Blizzard is really serious about repairing the game.

[PBitt]

I really don't feel that D3 is that poor of a game, at least since they made some improvements in later patches. I also never played D2 (or D1), made 200 dollars off the RMAH which is about 199 more than I really expected to make, and I would rather shoot myself in the face than even think about playing hardcore mode between lag and always having to be on their servers and shit, so in that regard I think I'm an outlier. It's not really my type of game, usually, but I didn't particularly feel anything was (drastically) wrong with it from a development point of view, and as a tanky barb I actually kind of enjoyed grinding shit to save up for some good stuff to move on.

That being said, I have no idea what took them 7 years to make it, it seems more like a 6 month side project. And yeah, it's obvious they tried to make it casual-friendly and morever, milk the dough from the RMAH, but in that regard, it's not the little guys in the company that make the game that are really benefiting from that. Again, I've never played many dungeon crawler games before this so it was actually kind of something new to me which perhaps helped me enjoy it more while it lasted.

[Deleted]

I had a blast playing through hardcore (excluding inferno) twice (second time using barely any stamina and no ah), I do think that it seems a bit silly designed once you get to inferno though, you 'need' to grind to be able to proceed, yet said grinding is the most retardedly boring thing ever made (killing treasure goblins, really?). If I just exclude inferno (and normal mode) it's to me a really solid, albeit quite short (especially considering the development time), game.

[Pendulous]

Two weeks of broken auction house, which pretty much eliminates the reason to farm gear. So....yeah....

[Temsen]

Remember the bug with missing monster health on higher MP levels, that one was fixed a few days after blue recognition, yet said post stated it wasn't high on their priority list. Of course, that one was fixed because it "helped" players.
Now take the reflect damage bug, (the one where minions reflect way more damage than intended) also recognized by a blue but still present. "But reflect will be changed next patch!" Yea, right, took 'em long enough, lol. And I bet minions will still reflect too much after that.

[torterra275]

No, Diablo 3 in my opinion isn't a horrible game, its just it did turn out exactly like Diablo 2 so people got a little annoyed, sure it isn't the best, somewhere between good and above-average.

[Kymei]

It's exactly the opposite. D3 devs are too professional.

From a technical point of view the game is amazing. It runs smooth, the combat is fluent and responsive
and there is nothing really to complain about in that regard.

The problem is that the way D3 is made is that they devs don't think about what would be cool in a video
game, but think about what would be cool from a technical point of view. I would guess that the devs who
are working on Diablo III are significantly older than the ones who made Diablo II back in the day.

As a framework and a game engine Diablo III is astonishing. As a game it's boring, 1 dimensional and dull. There
are a ton of developers who could make wonders if they could get their hands on the engine diablo III was built
on.

The game doesn't run smooth, the game runs like shit on high end PC's, mostly because yet another flaw that was missed on how the game loads from people's harddrives. Like the OP mentioned, this has not yet been fixed.

Next, we have the america, europe, and asian servers, at launch there was so much server instability that drew people away from playing hardcore and made a mockery of hardcore mode. People saw hardcore mode as not getting disconnected rather than being a skilled, don't die by playing well and gearing well mode.

I think its also worth mentioning screen shaking not being fixed, as well as extreme fps loss areas in act 3 ie. core.

[Coldkil]

Diablo is a game based on farming.

AH removed farming for gearing purposes - people farm to sell things in AH or RMAH.

This is wahat ditched the game mostly. I like the game since i can get into whenever i want, smash things, then log out with any commitement needed, but it becomes old pretty fast.

They made a good job in fixing endgame/gearing/farming, but nothing can solve the mess the AH has done - a few ultrarich and ubergeared palyers who feed on a mass of new/poor players. For the first nothing they can add to the game can represent a challenge since they are already decked in BiS.

[Deleted]

Uh, no, you fail. That's not how it is at all. They have departments that specialize in MMOs, RPGs, and RTs. They tried to do what you just said, sending Jay Wilson from the RTS team onto D3 and guess what happened? He stepped down as Game Director.

Pretty much this. Blizzard North closed its doors and Blizzard put an RTS team on D3 instead. They tried, but they failed hard.
Only reason so many people bought D3 was because they had expectations since D2 was a great game. Oh how wrong we were.

[reemi]

The biggest problem of D3 was community. They hyped it over many many years, i wasn't surprised that it was flop,

D3 a flop? My god, you have no idea what's a flop.

Lot of people hate WoW too, and it's still a good game.

---------- Post added 2013-02-05 at 12:18 PM ----------

The game doesn't run smooth, the game runs like shit on high end PC's, mostly because yet another flaw that was missed on how the game loads from people's harddrives. Like the OP mentioned, this has not yet been fixed.

I have a 2 years old computer and the game run perfectly, at ultra high graphics, maybe you have a problem with your computer.

[Deleted]

First of all diablo 2 set up a pretty high bar and d3 on release didnt really match its predecessor, now with all the patches the game is actually becoming somewhat decent, the problem is that it should have been this way on release and not almost a year after its release.
There are lots of issues that could have been much better like: switching acts ingame and not having to make a new one, the complete lack of multiplayer unless you have 3 more friends to play with,the crafting system,the socket system with having just plain gems and by plain no one else actually uses other gems than emeralds in their weapons,gear rolls are just terrible 95% of the time you can farm 10hrs and get nothing but trash,the AH is a better way of trading instead of getting scammed or buying from Chinese websites but it removes the need to farm for your own gear.
The game has potential I just dont quite understand why they removed all the good ideas they presented on the panels at blizzcon, they oversimplified the game to make it more appealing to non hardcore players. I dont know what age group they were targeting since the average diablo player has played diablo 2 10 years ago and is probably in the range of 18+, I'm guessing they went the easy way like they did with WoW to get more customers by making everything easier.

[yurano]

Both patches 1.04 and 1.05 were rather well received within a VERY critical complainers forum community.

So I have no clue what you talk about.

The overall quality of the game is still subpar. A lot of players who quit near release still haven't come back, despite 1.0.4/1.0.5 and the fact that D3 doesn't require a subscription.

[Deleted]

May I remind you of item duping in WoW? First came to my attention in 3.3 and its still there.

[sacrypheyes]

been stupid enough to buy the game at its release, deinstalled it after a few weeks.
having more fun watching some series for the same amount of used disk space.

same happened with sc2 which is more of a SC:BW 2.0 if anything, just like D3 pve tasted (tastes?) more like a D2 1.14 with close to nothing new :
-graphics are good but not great even though it uses huge ressources to run (ie engine devs did at helluva crappy job at optimizing their stuff)
-servers were (cant bother seeing how things are now, and idc) as stable as ubi's - which is certainly not a compliment
-horrible balance, even within a same class, as you barely got a handful of viable builds if you wanted to get through hell/inferno
-boring boring boring zones, them being "random" just doesn't help
-boring boring boring stupid champions suffixes combos unless you feel like running for 30mn because you don't have the gear/build to beat it.

in a few words : just not enjoyable to me.

[MoanaLisa]

My two cents:

Jay Wilson (now departed): Not a noob but not a lot of experience in ARPG's. Evidence would suggest that he's not a great project manager either. If the intent was to bring a fresh look to ARPG's by having a project leader without a lot of experience, i.e. a 'fresh outlook', then while perhaps understandable, it didn't succeed entirely. Wilson's other games have been generally decent.

Wyatt Cheng: Not a noob either but I get the vibe that he's very conservative and careful. Which in one way is not a bad thing for a game that got off to a fairly terrible start but is bad from the standpoint of anyone who is impatient. That's everyone apparently but there you go. Given past mistakes due to carelessness and lack of playtesting, I'll take slow, careful and steady over wild swings that may be a mess any day.

The rest: Technically the game is solid. Lacking a bit in inspiration and clearly some bad mistakes in not playtesting Inferno to any great degree during launch. For me personally there's not enough reward for playing. Lately I've been playing without benefit of buying anything from the AH and it's a lot better that way although lacking a bit in comparison to other similar games. So the developing team is fine although maybe a bit too small for the number of things they need to accomplish right away. The rest is a combination of a bad launch and how slow Blizzard is at turning games around.

[MaximusRex]

Nearly every change recently made by the D3 dev team has been beyond controversial or way past the expected time, and it leads me to think they are incredibly inexperienced compared to the other game divisions.

Is this valid? Is the team in over their heads trying to please an extremely aggressive AAA fanbase?

I suspect most of it is hyperbole that us hanging on do to the less then stellar launch of D3.

[MoanaLisa]

Nearly every change recently made by the D3 dev team has been beyond controversial or way past the expected time, and it leads me to think they are incredibly inexperienced compared to the other game divisions.

I wanted to put this in a separate post but I'll be short. There have been a lot of comments lately about how PoE is what D3 should have been. Which is fine. Everyone can have an opinion. This one is revealing though in that PoE is clearly a development fork of D2. It's different of course but it's roots are very plain to see. And it's great that it's doing so well. I signed up for the beta a long while ago and like the game quite a lot myself.

Blizzard was after something else with D3 and that was to remake/rethink ARPG's altogether. And it's fine that people that expected something else are disappointed with that. I think the jury is still out on whether or not over the long run that this will be successful. Clearly 12,000,000 in sales in 7 months is a win for Blizzard but I'm sure that Blizzard wants people to play it for years and buy expansions and all of the rest. That remains to be seen. But recent decisions, controversial or not, are not about making it more like D2, it's about fixing their vision for D3. Anyone expecting them to revert the game to something like D2 is bound to be disappointed. It's a different game entirely and it's past time to either accept or reject that and move on.

[Pull My Finger]

Is this valid?

No.

Players should really just stick to playing games. Everyone's trying to be so smart right now and posts like this one is what comes out of it.

[Zeek Daniels]

D3 is a fine game. I played D2 and its expansions. D3 felt to me just like D2 from a gameplay perspective and i liked the fact that i didnt have to put stat points in because i hate having a screwed up build, specially because when D2 came out i was in middle school and was not as into the internet and researching things as i am now. The only problem i had with D3 was its campaign felt way too short when compared to D2. I felt like it took longer for me to get through D2 than D3. It felt almost impossible for me to get through D2's harder difficulties without using some mod in single player (which was fun btw). I think the AH is part of this in the way you can earn items faster than you would normally find them, and thus you are able to progress faster if you have the gold. Trading was part of D2, but i never took part in it so i was strictly using my own drops.

I think if more ppl didnt use the AH they could appreciate D3, but you know ppl would complain about the afflixes they get on their drops and that they never get good drops. So i think the player has also changed his mentality over the years in that we want more more more now now now, and halting our progress with poor random afflixes makes players unhappy.

I think Afflixes may have been a bad idea for D3, i cant remember what the D2 system was tho, may have been the same.