07-01-2003, 07:29 PM
There are a couple of things that this event brings to mind.
First, importantly, is the question of when the decision will be made to set a date for End Of Life (EOL) for the Diablo products.
There was a time when software never had an EOL. I can easily scrounge up the stuff to build a 386, and happily install MS-DOS 6.22 on it. It will run ten-year-old software just fine. But, newer software does things that require ongoing support. Win95 hit EOL some time ago, and Microsoft has basically set the EOL for Win98. The support that will be discontinued is drivers for new hardware, patches for new online security issues, and fixes for existing bugs.
Trend PC-Cillin 98 is past EOL, and if I recall correctly, the EOL date for PC-Cillin 2000 was yesterday (30-June).
BattleNet games have an ongoing support cost. Advertising on Bnet may offset some of the expenses, but that does not address the problem of users playing a game that has been bought and paid for, instead of buying a new game. With this in mind, it is almost certain that they will discontinue Bnet support for the Diablo products eventually, and more importantly, prevent alternative private Realms for D2 to be created. It is not enough to pull the plug on Bnet support, they want you to buy a new game.
Diablo (1) isn't much of a drain on Bnet resources, since it only requires a match-making service. Diablo 2/X is a different story, since it requires a full-time server to operate Realm games. Bnet advertising would help offset the cost of operation somewhat, and there is another advantage to maintaining Realms at no cost to the users. It keeps them off EverQuest, and the other pay-per-use games. It's like the loss-leader strategy in retail. Get the customer into your place of business, so you can expose them to your other products, and at the same time screw over your competition.
That is only going to last for so long, however. I'm sure that Roper, Brevik, and the Schaeffer brothers wanted to maintain the free BattleNet indefinitely. With them gone, I expect that the Diablo/2 Realms will only last as long as sales of the game continue to cover the costs. After that, TCP/IP play (Open) will fulfill the promise of "Compete FREE on the Internet" on the package.
Secondly, I have a dream (I had to get that in- yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the first time King gave that speech, in Detroit :). I would really like to see one, final, integrated release of Diablo.
What I mean is a Diablo where you start out in Tristam, and go through the game like the original. Defeating Diablo opens up the Hellfire areas, and finishing that moves to the first part of new content: the destruction of Tristam.
Once your character decides to escape the doomed Tristam (an ever increasing flood of badness will assure this inevitable result), he moves on to the D2 portion of the game. An interesting detail here would be that a newly created character starts out in Tristam, and must complete that part of the game to get into the D2 areas. That would make the creation of "mule" characters interesting. :) Once in the D2 area, a character could not go back to the old, intact Tristam.
Once the D2X part of the game is completed, the next "difficulty" becomes available. But, instead of simply having a re-hash of the same stuff, with stronger monsters, the storyline would actually be a "Nightmare". The nastiest stuff a mortal could imagine will exist in the world, treachery by the NPCs who were your allies, and maybe replace the Fallen in Act 1 with Diablo clones. A REAL Nightmare. :)
Finally, the empty Quest rewards should be filled. The main one that I'm thinking of is the Cube Quest. Passing a Cube to a newbie character is too much of a twink, and having the same cube throughout your character development is unsatisfying. A character that gets a cube without doing the quest in Normal should only have a 1x1 storage in the cube. Completing the task would increase the Cube for that character to the normal 3x4 size. The Nightmare Quest reward would increase the cube size to 4x4, making new recipes possible. Finally, the Hell Cube would be 4x5. In other words, it would actually be worthwhile to do the quest.
I do think that a "Complete Diablo" would give the game another kick in sales. I know that I would buy it.
-rcv-
First, importantly, is the question of when the decision will be made to set a date for End Of Life (EOL) for the Diablo products.
There was a time when software never had an EOL. I can easily scrounge up the stuff to build a 386, and happily install MS-DOS 6.22 on it. It will run ten-year-old software just fine. But, newer software does things that require ongoing support. Win95 hit EOL some time ago, and Microsoft has basically set the EOL for Win98. The support that will be discontinued is drivers for new hardware, patches for new online security issues, and fixes for existing bugs.
Trend PC-Cillin 98 is past EOL, and if I recall correctly, the EOL date for PC-Cillin 2000 was yesterday (30-June).
BattleNet games have an ongoing support cost. Advertising on Bnet may offset some of the expenses, but that does not address the problem of users playing a game that has been bought and paid for, instead of buying a new game. With this in mind, it is almost certain that they will discontinue Bnet support for the Diablo products eventually, and more importantly, prevent alternative private Realms for D2 to be created. It is not enough to pull the plug on Bnet support, they want you to buy a new game.
Diablo (1) isn't much of a drain on Bnet resources, since it only requires a match-making service. Diablo 2/X is a different story, since it requires a full-time server to operate Realm games. Bnet advertising would help offset the cost of operation somewhat, and there is another advantage to maintaining Realms at no cost to the users. It keeps them off EverQuest, and the other pay-per-use games. It's like the loss-leader strategy in retail. Get the customer into your place of business, so you can expose them to your other products, and at the same time screw over your competition.
That is only going to last for so long, however. I'm sure that Roper, Brevik, and the Schaeffer brothers wanted to maintain the free BattleNet indefinitely. With them gone, I expect that the Diablo/2 Realms will only last as long as sales of the game continue to cover the costs. After that, TCP/IP play (Open) will fulfill the promise of "Compete FREE on the Internet" on the package.
Secondly, I have a dream (I had to get that in- yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the first time King gave that speech, in Detroit :). I would really like to see one, final, integrated release of Diablo.
What I mean is a Diablo where you start out in Tristam, and go through the game like the original. Defeating Diablo opens up the Hellfire areas, and finishing that moves to the first part of new content: the destruction of Tristam.
Once your character decides to escape the doomed Tristam (an ever increasing flood of badness will assure this inevitable result), he moves on to the D2 portion of the game. An interesting detail here would be that a newly created character starts out in Tristam, and must complete that part of the game to get into the D2 areas. That would make the creation of "mule" characters interesting. :) Once in the D2 area, a character could not go back to the old, intact Tristam.
Once the D2X part of the game is completed, the next "difficulty" becomes available. But, instead of simply having a re-hash of the same stuff, with stronger monsters, the storyline would actually be a "Nightmare". The nastiest stuff a mortal could imagine will exist in the world, treachery by the NPCs who were your allies, and maybe replace the Fallen in Act 1 with Diablo clones. A REAL Nightmare. :)
Finally, the empty Quest rewards should be filled. The main one that I'm thinking of is the Cube Quest. Passing a Cube to a newbie character is too much of a twink, and having the same cube throughout your character development is unsatisfying. A character that gets a cube without doing the quest in Normal should only have a 1x1 storage in the cube. Completing the task would increase the Cube for that character to the normal 3x4 size. The Nightmare Quest reward would increase the cube size to 4x4, making new recipes possible. Finally, the Hell Cube would be 4x5. In other words, it would actually be worthwhile to do the quest.
I do think that a "Complete Diablo" would give the game another kick in sales. I know that I would buy it.
-rcv-