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Haha, are people going to restart 40 man raiding guilds? Are they going to find old versions of Discursive? 

 

We used to have to hold like BUSINESS MEETINGS to maintain our schedules and roster.

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Yeah a friend of mine used to run a guild back in vanilla through Wrath and it was basically a second job. He eventually had to stop because it was too damn stressful. 

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A hefty and interesting piece on Kotaku today concerning (mostly) the development of Diablo 3 and its sequelizationsz: https://kotaku.com/the-past-present-and-future-of-diablo-1830593195

 

Some of this is familiar ground, but there are some bits in here that were shocking and newsworthy to me. Especially how Diablo 3 was apparently considered to be a big failure by management, who subsequently broke up the development team right before the release of Reaper of Souls. Ironically, that expansion pack would cement D3 as a terrific action-RPG that's still highly playable today. The second expansion pack never even got into development, though patches added new areas that were supposedly, said at the time, going to be part of a bigger package, but distributed freely instead.

 

The fact that Diablo 4 has been in development since 2016 won't shock anyone, of course it is. Interesting detail is how an earlier prototype sought to add more of a Dark Souls style of gameplay. And though that project got canned, the recent D4 is still undecided whether it wants to be isometric or over-the-shoulder, perspective-wise.

 

One last thing: the current D4-project apparently seeks to turn away from the washed-out, desaturated palette of D3 and return to the stark horror and gore that was manifest in D1 and D2. I'm all for that - more because I'd rather see them go in a different direction instead of replicating the last thing than nostalgia or some ill-advised hangover from 'Diablo 3 is all rainbows now!', though. It'll be five years before we get to play it, though, so just go play the mobile game that they initially didn't mind if it would be subpar, since it was aimed at the Chinese market first and foremost. Hey, good for them.

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Yeah, later versions of Diablo 3 being considered a failure does not making me particularly hopeful about the foundations of future Diablo games. It's admittedly my only played game in the franchise, but I've gotten a few hundreds hours of enjoyment out of it at least. That's not to say it's a perfect game by any means, but I'd be hard pressed to identify anything besides writing that it absolutely tanks. Then again, maybe the fact that it failed to constantly extract money from the players is what they're talking about.

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Diablo 3 released right before that sharp turn, yeah. Actually, they did have the real money auction house that undoubtedly provided some revenue for Blizzard, skimming some money off the top out of every transaction, but they quickly canned it because it went against the Diablo philosophy of grinding for gear. That felt like an ethical decision. Though any new Blizzard game will surely include some nickle-'n-diming, I feel they'll err on the right side of things, as they do most of the time, so I'm not concerned about all-too-gross loot boxes and stuff.

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I think it's important to remember that 'failure' means something very different to the game designers and to the management/moneyhat people.

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Blizzard has added microtransactions to StarCraft 2, an 8 year old game, so yeah I think in the future nothing is safe! Even StarCraft remaster had bonus cosmetics at launch, and I think they meant for more cosmetics to show up eventually as microtransactions, so WarCraft 3 Reforged might be the same way. I wonder if Blizzard will introduce paid arcade maps in WC3 Reforged the way they have done with StarCraft 2 (there are only two atm, and both have free versions of the maps).

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