Diablo III is for real

[nobbie]

I too don't understand how some people can criticize something like the general art of D3 when we've just seen a tiny potion of that, which according to the developers is still not finished yet. The same goes for the demand that Diablo III has to be overall dark - that is nonsense imo, and I hope that the developers make bright and dark sceneries.

[Xbizkitl]

Things, that piss you off?

You know the perfect solution for that, right? Just don't buy the damn game, when it's finally released!

I'm sorry, but this is just ridiculous. It sounds like people demand some lawful right to impose their view on the game's designers. If you don't like it don't buy it! Easy as that.

Sheesh.

The problem with such arguments as this is that you're not sure whether to rebut them, because understanding the rebuttal takes at least as much sense as not making such a silly straw-man proposition in the first place.

And an argument without logical teeth is just a flame. But you know that old adage about arguing on the Internet...

Look, liking a game isn't a binary, all-or-none proposition. Yes, if Diablo III isn't up to many people's high specifications, they will still buy the game. But, to put it succinctly, the changing art direction affects my consumer surplus. The margin at which the game doesn't satisfy (collectively) its users is always important, and if the right appeal isn't struck (to balance those who like the direction and those who don't), some small amount of people will not purchase the game.

It's OK to disagree with me, I have no problem with that, let your voice be heard. But to criticize those with objections because they have objections? Nothing gets me angrier, what a lazy fan community we would be.

And those with the Pollyanna-ish view that Blizzard has done no wrong in the past, has not delivered insipid recreations of past projects need only look at the first iteration of the Starcraft alpha, which Wikipedia rightly described as "Warcraft in Space":

[Jarulf]

Did anyone notice the most amazing feature in the game play demo? You can pick up gold by WALKING OVER IT!

Ahh, that is the way it works in Flagship Studios' game Mythos. It is a nice thing.

However, it is not at all a good thing for items since you typically won't pick up all items or you would fill your inventory very fast and then have to stop to drop items you don't want.

[nobbie]

Ahh, that is the way it works in Flagship Studios' game Mythos. It is a nice thing.

However, it is not at all a good thing for items since you typically won't pick up all items or you would fill your inventory very fast and then have to stop to drop items you don't want.

I assume that this auto-pickup is available as option.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I assume that this auto-pickup is available as option.

Praised be the grandfather of Diablo, Nethack! There you could specify exactly which type of items you wanted to auto-pick up - gold, scrolls, rings, potions, helmets etc. And the graphics were dark and gritty as well! Nothing darker and grittier than gray ASCII letters on a creepy black terminal background... :P

-Kylearan

[Taelas]

But to criticize those with objections because they have objections?

It's one thing to have objections. It's quite another to state that elements of a game's art design, a game that you are not personally involved with in any way, pisses you off. As Arnulf said, that's like saying Blizzard has an obligation to suit your taste.

It's fine to not like the game (or merely aspects of it). It's fine to come with protests and arguments as to what Blizzard is doing wrong, why it should be changed, and even how it should be done instead -- as long as it's done rationally, and as long as you don't expect it to be changed merely because you disagree with the implementation. Ranting that a game's art design pisses you off is not particularly rational.

[Xbizkitl]

It's one thing to have objections. It's quite another to state that elements of a game's art design, a game that you are not personally involved with in any way, pisses you off. As Arnulf said, that's like saying Blizzard has an obligation to suit your taste.

It's fine to not like the game (or merely aspects of it). It's fine to come with protests and arguments as to what Blizzard is doing wrong, why it should be changed, and even how it should be done instead -- as long as it's done rationally, and as long as you don't expect it to be changed merely because you disagree with the implementation. Ranting that a game's art design pisses you off is not particularly rational.

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.

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.

I think most casual fans are AMBIVALENT about the mood of the game. Unfortunately, this characterizes your typical RPG fan - he drinks alot of cheap swill. When Diablo is no longer the flavor of the month, he graduates to RPG "x", characterized mostly by high fantasy replete with faerie and fantasy. I personally happen to think that the mood of Diablo is very unique in this market, and should be preserved as an antithesis to the general style.

Do the established series fans agree? I don't really know, but I do know that a good many of them are voicing their hesitations about the art direction. 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. They're the ones creating Singing Barbs, Spearazons, Trapasins (before it became cool), digging through the MPQ files to figure out weapon speeds and animations.

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.

You can of course disagree with all of this, but using bad arguments like "selfish" or "nitty" is just...dumb.

[Jarulf]

It's a question of processor speed and the load-hit-store. Because of the tile based gameplay and the filter lighting design they chose, each tile requires a value to be addressed to it to associate it with a certain lighting filter. As should be obvious, the faster a character moves the faster the computer has to go through the load-hit-store function for the tile lighting. What happens when the character moves too fast is that the engine will begin calling for data which hasn't had enough time to be written yet and it creates a stall. This leads to dead tiles or even possibly a complete game freeze.

I beg to differ! I can't support this idea at all (including those presented in earlier posts on this topic in this thread). If we start looking at issues such as loading graphics there is no such issue. As Nystul allready mentioned each level in Diablo 1 was loaded completely when you entered it (there is a loading screen as you do). The full dungeon level you are in is created in full at the same time (with all content placed and so on). There is thus no problem of you walking or teleporting into as of yet unknown teritory or an area with data not yet written since no such area of a dungeon exists!

Looking at the lighing issue, it is a non issue. Diablo 1 had a very simplistic such system were each tile has a light value based on the distance to your character (i don't recall if anything else in the dungeon had light arround it not related to your character, I think some unqiue monsters created light on a tile it stood on). Calculating or updating this is a non issue and requires such minimal processor power that it is neglectable. If memory is not completely off, the game had a lightmatrix were each tile had a value (so some 80x80 entries or whatever was the size of dungeons) and the game updated this based on your characters position once when you entered a new tile. Processing this was again, compared to the rest of the game, neglectable. Even done on each frame, it would be at most a few cylces per tile per frame.

Thinking of it, I can tell a few other things that also created light, spells and spell effects!!!! The game is updating the light matrix for each such spell effect going on as well. Try casting lots of lightning spells (chain lightning or charged bolts). THAT will tell in part some of how processing intensive it can be (done on a per bolt basis). Do note though that for each spell effect, the part that would relate to updating the light is still not the major factor compared to everything else being done to the spell efect.

Thus, moving the character arround a bit faster will hav e absolutely no impact. Even assuming we move the character so fast so that it changes tile each frame (remember it works at 20 frames per second so that would be an insane speed faster than actually teleporting arround) it would not affect the over all game speed at all. This would be comparable to casting a very low level chain lightning.

I would say the walk speed is actually an issue of what is handable and usable by the player and what creates a good game experience. Simply, it works well. The "problem" only exists when you want to move longer distances without actual combat in-between. Such as in town or when you have cleared an area of the dungeon and wants to go back to the stair or an not yet visited part. IN the dungeon it is a non issue since you can teleport so the problem mostly exists in the town.

Sure, one could argue that one could have an added dimension of tactics if a character in the dunbgeon could have moved faster to go arround monsters and such, but it would in my opinion also create so much other game play issues that it would be a much worse situation. Having the player move in about the same speed as monsters works out to be a good solution for good game play and difficulty and if you need to move at a faster speed in combat, that is provided to you through the teleport skill.

So absolutely nothing to do with the power of computers "back then".

Teleport was probably a bad argument for me to pursue because it isn't relevant to the discussion. When you teleport it acts as a total lighting whipe.

That happens any time you move to a new tile, be it walking or teleporting.

The game doesn't have to rewrite lighting values for the tiles, it just starts fresh.

This makes no sense. Either it recalculates all the values or it does not. Starting fresh would be the most time consuming anyway but if I recall correctly it is the only way it is done. Thinking about spells and such (see above), it might even be possible that the game recalculate the light matrix on each frame regardless, I don't recall seeing any flag indicating if anything that creates light has entered a new tile or not.

[Jarulf]

I assume that this auto-pickup is available as option.

For the gold in Mythos? No. Items in Mythos are not picked up automatically.

[Quark]

So Fallout 3's producer decided to speak his thoughts on D3's announcement. Here's a guy who took a storied franchise, and decided to scrap the foundations and turn it into what everyone else is doing with an almost-FPS style Oblivion clone, and he's criticizing Blizzard for being "conventional." Every time this moron makes a comment about a game it's saying the game doesn't use first person perspective enough.

[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.

[NiteFox]

So Fallout 3's producer decided to speak his thoughts on D3's announcement. Here's a guy who took a storied franchise, and decided to scrap the foundations and turn it into what everyone else is doing with an almost-FPS style Oblivion clone, and he's criticizing Blizzard for being "conventional." Every time this moron makes a comment about a game it's saying the game doesn't use first person perspective enough.

He's also asked for forgiveness for his outburst.

[totte]

Hi,
Praised be the grandfather of Diablo, Nethack! There you could specify exactly which type of items you wanted to auto-pick up - gold, scrolls, rings, potions, helmets etc. And the graphics were dark and gritty as well! Nothing darker and grittier than gray ASCII letters on a creepy black terminal background... :P

-Kylearan

The horror of that purple & or yellow "c" lurking around the corner!

[vor_lord]

Wow, I almost totally forgot about you Elric. To be completly honest, if you hadn't of posted, I would never have remembered you existed. Anyways, it's nice to see you post again.

Forget the one who brought us the Lurker Lounge Ettiquette? Never!

Nice to see you return, Elric. This announcement has brought a lot of folk back, however brief their stay may be.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Things, that piss you off?

You know the perfect solution for that, right? Just don't buy the damn game, when it's finally released!

I'm sorry, but this is just ridiculous. It sounds like people demand some lawful right to impose their view on the game's designers. If you don't like it don't buy it! Easy as that.

Sheesh.

If I don't like the game, I won't buy it. if you don't like discussion, get the hell off these forums.

--Pete

[Rhydderch Hael]

Hi,
Praised be the grandfather of Diablo, Nethack! ... And the graphics were dark and gritty as well! Nothing darker and grittier than gray ASCII letters on a creepy black terminal background... :P

-Kylearan

Probably because a player is forced to use their imagination when envisioning just what kind of threat is approaching them— fears and horrors tailor-made to the player's own psyche.

"You need light in order to cast shadows." as someone remarked in this thread. I reply with something every game developer should know: "You use fear to fill in the shadows."

There are a lot of shadows the farther you step out of the light.

All in all, though, Diablo 3 sure makes me glad that I haven't been abducted by aliens and shot into the cold nethers of deep space.

[Quark]

Hi,
If I don't like the game, I won't buy it. if you don't like discussion, get the hell off these forums.

--Pete

This isn't discussion anymore. It's browbeating. It stopped being discussion two days ago.

[--Pete]

Hi,

This isn't discussion anymore. It's browbeating. It stopped being discussion two days ago.

People express strong opinions strongly -- no big deal IMHO.

What some of these morons seem to miss is that, in all probability, what is said here will have no effect on Blizzard. Even if they love the game as is and fear that the opinions expressed will change the game, that is so unlikely that it should be a non-issue.

But, ultimately, what I'm seeing is the usual batch of 'don't criticize, don't argue' jackasses who, for whatever reason, get upset when people express dissenting opinions. These brain donors are incapable of original thought and become defensive when exposed to it. So they demand that it stop. I'd rather they just left and found a site of fellow ass kissers to post in. Yeah, a thousand "I love it, too." posts are dull, but since that's all they want, that's all they deserve. Along with crappy games, that is.

Pissed by the non Lurker attitude I'm seeing, I remain,

--Pete

[Tal]

For those who don't agree with the current artistic direction of Diablo III, and the Warcraft-ization of Blizzard's various IPs, here is a petition to sign that hopefully alerts them of our concerns (~2000 signatures thus far).

In fact, through many various Diablo fansites I've discovered there's a fierce discussion going on about that direction, so it's not just "whining" or "nitpicking". These graphics are beautiful and interesting, but simply do not fit the Diablo universe. From what I've seen, "casual" fans of the series are mostly ambivalent, and "hardcore" fans are more sharply divided.

Myself, I rather enjoyed the fact that Diablo is one of the few RPGs you could that was less "faerie" and more "horror", and I'm determined to help keep it that way.

I was a huge fan of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. From the little I have seen of Diablo 3 I feel its a natural evolution of the graphics. I felt a shiver when I saw all of those monsters climbing and swarming over the landscape to the barbarian. To me it was creepy as hell and very close to the jumps I would get in Diablo 1.

[Iolair]

Hi,
People express strong opinions strongly -- no big deal IMHO.

What some of these morons seem to miss is that, in all probability, what is said here will have no effect on Blizzard. Even if they love the game as is and fear that the opinions expressed will change the game, that is so unlikely that it should be a non-issue.

But, ultimately, what I'm seeing is the usual batch of 'don't criticize, don't argue' jackasses who, for whatever reason, get upset when people express dissenting opinions. These brain donors are incapable of original thought and become defensive when exposed to it. So they demand that it stop. I'd rather they just left and found a site of fellow ass kissers to post in. Yeah, a thousand "I love it, too." posts are dull, but since that's all they want, that's all they deserve. Along with crappy games, that is.

Pissed by the non Lurker attitude I'm seeing, I remain,

--Pete

/de-lurking

Not sure if I dare say this, but it's been a long time since I have seen such beauty in a post.
Thank you, Pete. I can see there is still hope, I was beginning to think otherwise by reading this thread.


/lurking