Diablo Immortal feels like a lobby MMO for what it's worth.
Well Diablo mmorpg means that they will have to do better than Lost Ark. Which blizzard cannot do, it's a failed company atm.
My nickname is "LDEV", not "idev". (both font clarification and ez bait)
yall im smh @ ur simplified english
Yeah, you think Tesla is worth more than Toyota and Volkswagen and some others combined? By selling total cars as much as Toyota sells one model? That is not a failing car company? It's not a failing scam/speculation/hype company, but still a failing car company.
Or yeah, blizzard IP is worth a lot (hence the acquisition price), but failing to actually make games with that IP is not a failing game company? I never said "failing IP company".
Do you even understand anything?
My nickname is "LDEV", not "idev". (both font clarification and ez bait)
yall im smh @ ur simplified english
After how Titan failed I doubt we will ever see a new triple A MMO from Blizzard.
And tbh I doubt we will see another triple A MMORPG like they used to be anytime soon. It’s all garbage P2W for the genre.
The only studio I can think of who may one day release another classic subscription MMO is a new FF online from Square.
Diablo IV offer some "big" (opposed to massive) open world like gameplay tho, for what was showed.
I think the MMORPG model is going to be revisited in all sorts of different ways over the coming years. The days of "strictly" MMORPG games in the vein of EQ or WoW are probably numbered. They don't play well with a consumer base that's highly segmented, and very stretched for time - we have more games than ever to choose from, and it's harder and harder to find players who want to invest massive amounts of time into just one title. Much more common are people who play in spurts or clusters. That doesn't work too well with things like scheduled guild raiding etc. but it doesn't have to mean that they don't want to play MMOs.
D4 could be a transition model, potentially. Encapsulated, bite-sized content suitable for ad-hoc completion, semi-open world that offers interaction without too much persistence - sort of an "MMO light" approach. We don't know enough about it to say for sure, though. It could just be a lot more on the D2/3 side of things, and simply shift an external lobby into some sort of in-game representation. Which would be more like "faux MMO".
I think open world is a bit of an outmoded concept, personally. People like to wax nostalgic about exploration and so on, but the reality is that most people prefer objectives over sandbox modes. They want to know where to go and what to do, and a reason to do it. I think a compromise could easily be reached. I'd imagine something like instanced-based gameplay that simulates a KIND of open world, without really being full open world. Horizontally segmented, of course, so you'd have some larger, more open areas for event-based exploration play; medium-sized objective-based areas; and of course compact, focused areas in the vein of dungeons/raids. Probably with varying time commitments from a couple of minutes to 2-3 hours, and a dedicated high-end mode for hardcore players. Variety would be key, and ease of use.
Whether that's an actual reality, though, or just academic rambling about theoretical possibilities... who knows. The next big benchmarks will be D4 and the Riot MMO, and we'll have to see where things go from there. Diablo has its own dedicated fanbase very much attached to the idea of AARPG, and I think they wouldn't want to infringe too much on that. Rather than do a crossover into other demographics with something like World of Diablo, I think it's more likely they'd either do a new IP entirely, or do something like WoW2.
World of StarCraft, though... A man can dream. I've been wanting to play that for 15 years. Might be 15 years more and it'd probably still never happen. Sigh.
Slow down there buddy.
Do you really want people to take apart your post? You make one inane statement after the next, don't throw "do you even understand" around when it's pretty clear you've got your own limitations to deal with.
Ah man thats such a bs statement lol.
Its obvious to anyone that blizzard made a huge error in their announcement of diablo immortal. They where the laughing stock of pretty much the entire gaming world and lately even their direct competitors in PoE are making fun of them openly. But go ahead and die on that hill.
"Hello wearily traveller, I hear you have arrived to fight the forces of hell, but first, can you collect 10 bear asses for me"
Not sure a Diablo MMO is going to have that sort of appeal to me lol.
I love Warcraft, I dislike WoW
Unsubbed since January 2021, now a Warcraft fan from a distance
Bounties are very much this. Heck World Quests in WoW probably come from D3 bounties given that most of the new features of Legion came together with the D3 devs.
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It very much is their problem if their biggest marketing event ends as a flop.
A well worded take, but i'm not sure if you're correct on the count of people not being interested in worlds - on the contrary the integrated immersion might be its greatest draw. However that does require two things that are often complained about:
1. Content should be on demand, i.e. not locked to a limited time, or indeed limited in acquisition method; things should neither be locked behind only time, nor just rng, nor just skill, nor just money.
2. Content should be integrated; if it doesn't interact it's just shit glued together. It should all be competitive with one another too, as there's a common ground all need to compete in.
Obviously these mandate hefty investment into keeping that fine balance betwern genuine choice and balance; if one acquisition method is too convenient it will dominate, and the others will naturally be disadvantaged.
As for the support? Think back to Legion; the old world's reuse, the integration of lore and gameplay; it was nearly a renaissance. And the primary complaints? Lack of pvp vendors, random legiondaries, lack of customisation options for templates.
Consistent world based rpgs are far from dead, they're just neither easy nor cheap to do right. In that sense i believe it is WoW's lengthy past that keeps it afloat even now, and the popularity of its classic versions give some support to that idea.
WoW's primady achievement has always been creating a world, not creating an endless treadmill or forcing certain interactions.
This is a signature of an ailing giant, boundless in pride, wit and strength.
Yet also as humble as health and humor permit.
Furthermore, I consider that Carthage Slam must be destroyed.
That's precisely my point, though.
Legion showed exactly that people don't really want an open sandbox world - they want SPECIFIC things to do. The artifact quest lines are a perfect example of that: they give the ILLUSION of an open world, but what they really are is a personal, instanced scenario. Same with the Invasions: they're separate sub-instances within a zone (through phasing) and they only pretend to be open world; and nobody just walks the wide open fields of Azeroth and suddenly discovers oops there's a Legion (or N'zoth, in BFA) invasion going on I better stop that. Instead it's a specific objective in a designated area, and while you find other people there, it's about as far as it gets from a sandbox.
The nostalgia about Classic's diffuse, haphazard zones with little cohesion or objectives is misplaced. People want something to DO.
Legion invasions could have worked almost exactly the same if you just teleported there from a hub city. You end up in the instanced zone, and do the exact same thing, with the exact same people. Open world isn't needed for that kind of gameplay; in fact it might even be a hindrance.
This is a signature of an ailing giant, boundless in pride, wit and strength.
Yet also as humble as health and humor permit.
Furthermore, I consider that Carthage Slam must be destroyed.
Do you really truly imagine that any of that mess at Blizzcon is going to have a visible effect on revenue? That's all that matters at the end of the month.
Yeah, forum types have obsessed over it since it happened but that was in November of 2018, more than three years ago. Really that isn't even a molehill three-and-a-half years later. Very few on the entire planet who have heard of it care now.
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It meets every requirement for being an MMO. Massive, Multiplayer, Online.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Let's be clear: there's only one criterion that matters here, and it's the "massive". Being online and being multiplayer are laughable criteria - every second game out there fits those.
So what does "massive" mean, then? That's the question. It's not JUST about how many people play it, obviously; it's about how you interact with those people. Is Diablo 3 an MMO? It has multiplayer. It's online. Thousands of people play it. But clearly that doesn't quite fit, because it's only 4-player parties at a time and you don't really interact with the rest.
Which begs the question: do you need an open world for it to be "massive", and how open does it need to be? If instead of a lobby you all hung out in one giant city, for example, would that be "massive" even if the actual content (dungeons etc.) were limited to a handful of people? Isn't that how WoW works, kinda? Outside of the hubs and the current "Timeless Isle"-style theme park zone, there's little going on. You'll run into a person or two if you venture out but why are you even out? To quest? Hardly, that's all taking place in the theme park zone. To gather resources? Maybe. To level? I guess, for a few days in the lifetime of a character.
It really feels like it's a concept kept alive for no good reason.
I'd love an action-based MMORPG with combat something like Black Desert but in the world and context of Diablo. I think it could work but probably steps on the genre niche filled by Blizzard's existing titles.
I would imagine if Blizzard decided to make another third-person MMORPG with modern action-orientated combat in a contiguous gamespace, they would just make World of Warcraft 2.
Diablo Immortal is basically what a Diablo game would function as if it were an MMORPG. Now having different gameplay or perspectives could work!
For all the MMORPGs we have, none deliver on the Serious Sam or Starship troopers level of monster density and terror. That’ll play well with a Starcraft game, and the same for Diablo! Both are ripe for such a system. Sadly this won’t happen in either regard. There is no way Blizzard is going to make a new MMORPG. They clearly have no talent and influence left that wants it. Titan failed and became Overwatch, so… And that was with the old greats of the company who worked on Starcraft and Warcraft.
Diablo Immortal is not an MMORPG. It's a Digital Cassino where you can never win, with a side story.