Virex
Anyone remember the outrage about, among others, the lack of LAN support in Starcraft 2?
Yes. And personally I haven't played SC2 since the first month that I got it.
dogstile
Blizzard's getting pretty good at alienating
the fanbase that they made their empire on.
Blizzard is not Blizzard any more. The people who made previous games are not the same people making new games. A lot of those developers and managers no longer even work for Blizzard.
Blizzard is only taking a small cut from the pay to buy auction
house. Seems to me that they are legitimizing gold farmers.
Gold farming will happen. I think it's not unreasonable for designers to design a game to accomodate it rather than be broken by it. Eve comes to mind. There's a sanctioned method for players to buy ingame currency, and a sanctioned method for them to use ingame currency to purchase gametime. It's implemented in such a way that
works, and doesn't destroy the economy.
And incidentally, the concept of MMORPG's in which players can freely exchange ingame currency for real world currency,
both ways has existed in fiction long before MMORPG's existed at all. It's an idea long in the making, and personally I'm not going to dismiss D3 for this particular point.
Though I suspect that Blizzard's real motivation is probably acceptance that RMT transactions will occur, so they simply want to minimize the problems that come with it.
Vherid
I don't really like the idea of removing skill trees
Personally I thought the D2 skill system was terrible.
Graven
There are stats, only they work like in WoW - you get them on items.
I think much will be stolen from WoW. When I last watched some D3 gameplay videos I remember thinking, "Oh, look. That's Grim Batol. Oh, look. There's Blackrock Descent. Some of the scenery looks blatantly stolen from WoW.
As to stats...as a more or less long-time WoW player, I think it's a mistake. I understand why they're doing it, but...meh. WoW has been on the receiving end of massive simplification for the past few expansions. It's been dumbed down considerably. I like WoW, I've played WoW, I've logged well over a hundred days /played of WoW...nevertheless, I'm not thrilled that D3 is taking so much from it. D3 should be a different game.
Really, I'd like to see D3 be more like D1. I enjoyed it much more than D2.
Flying Carcass
real cash auction house and the lack of modding.
They're mutually exclusive. If people are going to be paying real money for items, it doesn't work to have people building their own modules to farm for items to sell.
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My overall conclusion: I doubt I'll but it. I think some of the thigns people are complaining about aren't really a big deal, but some of the things nobody seems to care about annoy me.
D1 was an experience. It was dark. The opening credits had a crow plucking the eyeball out of a corpse, and various rooms were decorated with partially dismembered corpses impaled on spikes in conspicuously sexual positions. D1 was a
horror game. D3, from the trailers, is kind of looking like they're aiming for a Lord of the Rings sort of ambiance. Some of the trailers are largely comprised of flying, overland scenery porn. To me, Diablo should not be a game about travleing the world, meeting people, or being an elf out on walkabout. It was a game I played with the lights out.
From what I've seen so far, D3 looks like it's going to be very generic. Blizzard has a history of defining genres. Dune 2 existed before warcraft 1, but how many of you have heard of the Dune 2 RTS? Warcraft might not have created the genre, but it defined it. Diablo was essentially a graphical roguelike. Games with the same concept as Diablo had existed for decades, but the roguelike community was not exactly mainstream. Diablo took the genre, gave it graphics and turned it into a household game genre. WoW...once again: lots of MMORPG's existed before WoW, but WoW at its peak had more subscribers than every other MMO in history combined. What about modding? I remember making warcraft 2 maps back in 1995. Maybe there were other moddable games back then...but I can't think of any. Again, Blizzard took a concept and made in mainstream. Made it an industry standard.
I don't see D3 doing that. D3 looks to me like a generic rehash of things that have been done before. And ironically, since so many seem opposed to it, the auction house is the only thing I see that might make the game notable.
It probably won't be awful. But...I just personally dont' feel any excitement about it.