Diablo III is for real

[Taelas]

Of course Blizzard has some obligation to suit my tastes. I"M EVENTUALLY GOING TO BE PAYING FOR THE DAMNED GAME, THIS IS A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP. Complete nonsense to suggest that I don't matter.

No, it's not. You are choosing to buy the game. You can also choose not to if you feel the game does not suit your tastes. There is no obligation involved, period.

You could argue that Blizzard has a moral obligation to keep true to the game's franchise, but that's an entirely different matter altogether.

But only some obligation. They have to satisfy the "community" in some broad sense; not all individuals' opinions are equal to one another - you have some hardcore gamers and casual fans.

Quite frankly? No, they don't. They can make the game whatever they want; it's their franchise. If they want to turn Diablo into a generic fantasy game, there's not much you can do about it. Hell, they could turn it into the Amazing Pink Hippy Pony Adventure if they wanted to.

I think that in the calculus of satisfying your customer's needs, hardcore fans should be weighted more, because they act as evangelists which attract flitting casual gamers.

If it's a game that attracts a niche crowd, and the company isn't trying to expand the audience, I agree. If it's a game that attracts even casual gamers, same thing.

Two quick examples from Blizzard would be WoW and Starcraft -- RTS games is a niche of their own, and it's doubtful Blizzard could attract a greater part of the casual gamers if they tried to. WoW, on the other hand, has about a general an audiance as a game can have. There's no need to satisfy the casual gamer; the game attracts them already. In both situations, Blizzard can easily focus on the hardcore crowd, as effort in any other direction would likely be wasted.

If it's a niche game trying to expand to a broader audience, though, it practically has to abandon at least part of the hardcore fans. Fallout is an excellent example -- it is one of the most popular niche RPG-franchises in the market, if not the most popular. Currently, Bethesda Softworks, the company that bought the franchise from Interplay, is looking to expand the franchise to a broader market with the third game in the series. It's doing so by releasing Fallout III on consoles as well as PCs, and by essentially removing two nigh game-defining aspects from the first two games -- Fallout's isometric perspective becomes a first-person perspective with the option of a third-person perspective, and the turn-based combat becomes real-time-with-pause. If you've followed Fallout III news at all, you'll know how that was received by the hardcore crowd -- half proclaimed the end of the world as we know it, while the rest said it was fine.

While Diablo is less niche-market than Fallout is, the possibility remains that Blizzard is trying to expand it to a broader audience.

If I'm going to appeal to Blizzard, I'm going to do so through two fronts - first of all, appeal to the artistry of the design team: that is, argue that the lore of the Diablo series isn't well conveyed by the graphical vision of the team, and that continuing in the same vein would injure the legacy of the same game....

And as businessmen, arguing that if they alienate enough hardcore fans, not only would they be destroying the brand value of having separate IPs, but would be abandoning their market share in the dark fantasy/Gothic horor aspect of the market.

That's not what you were doing, though -- you were ranting that aspects of the game was pissing you off. If you keep it to what you just said here, I have absolutely no problem with it.