Blizzard and making games accessible

#0 - July 20, 2011, 1:50 a.m.

im just going to try and voice something that i feel blizzard is doing a lot now. im not sure if accessible is the right word for it but ill go at it. Im going to talk about other blizzard games but this is about diablo 3!

When i play retail WoW, i dont like how they tried to make things so "perfect" for players. Talents? they are perfect because you just put them in without thought. its easier for players to have a good build now, but its not as cool as having to make your own build and putting thought into it.

Dungeon finder and cross realm. this makes everything nice and convenient and many people like it. so is starting at level 85 and having all the gear. i feel this ruins what an MMORPG is MEANT to be. there is no world of warcraft anymore. theres a lot of other things, but i dont want to talk about WoW or this will be deleted.

what i want to know is, what are they doing to diablo to add to this? i have a big feeling they are going to do something so the game is even more accessible then diablo 2. D2 was not a hard game, but it was just so fun. i think things like getting honor for pvp and then buying items would ruin part of the game. its about getting items and then putting it on your character to battle it out. ya know?

im not sure if i explained this right at all, so please feel free to add or how you feel. i just want to have a fun game

also im sorry if talking about WoW offended you, its just a recent trend that i have bad feeling about :(

Bashiok

#6 - July 22, 2011, 11:07 p.m.

Q u o t e:
im just going to try and voice something that i feel blizzard is doing a lot now. im not sure if accessible is the right word for it but ill go at it. Im going to talk about other blizzard games but this is about diablo 3!

When i play retail WoW, i dont like how they tried to make things so "perfect" for players. Talents? they are perfect because you just put them in without thought. its easier for players to have a good build now, but its not as cool as having to make your own build and putting thought into it.

Dungeon finder and cross realm. this makes everything nice and convenient and many people like it. so is starting at level 85 and having all the gear. i feel this ruins what an MMORPG is MEANT to be. there is no world of warcraft anymore. theres a lot of other things, but i dont want to talk about WoW or this will be deleted.

Quite right, but on that point I'd say we agree that talent trees in Cataclysm were great in that you really couldn't screw up, but they also removed pretty much all choice. It's something we talk a lot about and hope to fix.

I don't want to talk about WoW here, but I also don't want you to think that the change we made was something we look at and think is the perfect solution.

Q u o t e:
what i want to know is, what are they doing to diablo to add to this? i have a big feeling they are going to do something so the game is even more accessible then diablo 2. D2 was not a hard game, but it was just so fun. i think things like getting honor for pvp and then buying items would ruin part of the game. its about getting items and then putting it on your character to battle it out. ya know?

im not sure if i explained this right at all, so please feel free to add or how you feel. i just want to have a fun game

also im sorry if talking about WoW offended you, its just a recent trend that i have bad feeling about :(

Uh, hrm. I'm sure there are plenty of examples people can come up with where we've changed or removed the more 'hardcore' aspects of the game. Respecs are a huge one, but 99% of people didn't like rerolling new characters when they placed a point incorrectly. "Auto stats" are another, but hopefully we've provided enough info to let people know that we're only shifting customization, and adding more, not removing something meaningful.

In any case, I think all of these types of things (feel free to list the ones I left out) all feed into a feeling of uncertainty. Which is totally reasonable, but when people get their hands on it, I don't think they'll be able to deny it's a Diablo game. And if we screwed up somewhere we're going to work to make it right. Hopefully though we can talk (or have talked) about where you think we may screw up and we can try to make sure our position is known, or otherwise get that feedback and work with it.

Bashiok

#7 - July 22, 2011, 11:15 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Diablo 3 might be a good game but it's going to be easy and casual so even your mom whose favorite game is Angry Birds can beat it. This is just something you have to accept if you want to continue playing games.

ORLY

Bashiok

#17 - July 22, 2011, 11:47 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Bashiok, I think a good amount of people believe d3 will be very easy. And I can't blame them for thinking it. The only footage we've seen is of demos that don't really represent how the game will turn out at all. In the demos, it seems like every class has basically infinite resources and not a big problem with dying - more like what to expect in act 1 and act 2 normal difficulty (which I think exactly what it is). But my point is, the content that's been shown affects how people feel about the game.

Spot on.

We specifically make people pretty invincible in our show demos because it sucks to wait 30 minutes to 3 hours (literally) to get to play for your 15 minutes and die and spend precious time getting back to the action. That same issue doesn't exist for a release product, of course, so we can have actual real balance of progression. Not the god-mode of a show floor demo.

Aside from that I think Diablo II eases people into the game pretty well, my Mom has played it and had fun. We maybe take that easing-in a tiny bit further in Diablo III, but overall we ramp up quickly and to very difficult and beyond through Nightmare, Hell, etc.

Without talking about the beta build too much, difficulty will be one of many things people will get no real sense of before release. But, it's in our best interest and the longevity of the game to ensure that it's challenging for the people that reach it. What would be the point of having multiple increasingly tough difficulty levels if to not ramp up how hard the game is? Of course whether we hit those difficulty marks right out of the gate is another issue.