Or any company. That’s the point. It wouldn’t make profit. They’d have to hire people, like me, to do this. People, like me, would all want high salaries and job security. Or, if it was a contract, not full time, I’d want probably $500,000 and a % of sales. Everyone else would negotiate similar.
Then the game would release, sell maybe a few hundred thousand copies, becoming a loss leader.
Agreed. The only way Diablo 2 would get any further improvements is for someone or a group within Blizzard that has that same level of passion as an artist. They don’t do it solely for the money, but instead for the love of the game/art. Money just happens to be a perk.
Yeah right, Blizzard doesn’t have people like that anymore. They all started leaving when Blizzard sold out to Vivendi back in '98.
It’s just dull. The skills are dull and lack impact, the gear is dull and lacks a cohesive and stand out aesthetic. It’s a mixture of a bunch of popular mechanics from different games over the years with nothing truly unique and iconic of its own. I compare it to the originators of this genre like D2 and PSO and it’s just plain oatmeal
I actually liked PoE in it’s early days. I HATED it when I tried coming back to it.
I don’t think you understand the scope of making a game. It would take an entire company willing to take a loss. No company in the world would be willing to do that. People have to pay rent and bills and eat. Taking a snipe at people you don’t know, accusing them of having no passion because they don’t make what you want them to make, pro bono, is tasteless.
No way josé. Fk a new expansion for D2.
A good patch would cause a disturbance in the force!
Played a d2 mod back in the day, idr what it was called but it added a single 1X1 item and it made the game a whole different experience.
It simply added a random affix to an item
(whites would get 5)
(Magic - 4)
(rares- 3)
(Sets - 2)
(unique -1)
had the rarity of like an ist rune, but was so cool to slam items and get that wtf item
(played for a year, and built a skeleton summon paladin, got a +skeleton +skele mastery roll on my rings, and was decently balanced.)
There were some cases of companies taking big gambles to be fair. Resident Evil comes to mind. Especially RE:7, the studio somehow convinced Capcom to give them the budget to make an entire new engine and completely change the game genre from the 3rd person horror themed action games that they had been making since RE4 to a 1st person pure survival horror game. It paid off as it basically revived the series from a really bad state and the engine they developed became Capcom’s main engine to this day, but it was hardly the most financially easy decision to make and could have backfired hard.
Another example is God of War, Santa Monica studios invested a huge amount of money into the franchise reboot completely changing the franchise direction and if that had gone wrong, that studio would be done for. And of course, Final Fantasy XIV who shut down an entire MMO that took millions to develop and completely remade it from scratch (while still maintaining and updating the original version until the new one was ready to drop) in a last-ditch effort to save that disaster of a game, and it paid off big time.
There was no reason to believe those moves wouldn’t take a loss. Just to discuss your examples, Resident Evil has had so many adaptations and entertainment media that it spans many genres and fan bases. Experimentation with the gameplay loops and genre wasn’t going to be a nail in the coffin. God of War 3 on PS3 flopped big time compared to the first two titles on PS2. Given that, Santa Monica had to branch to a different genre. The open world, exploration with story concept had already been massively popular with the Assassins Creed games. Its also why Horizon Zero Dawn was made. None of these games were risks.
Trying to make an expansion on D2R, with its current player base, and seeing which games in the genre take off… it would require a massive amount of commitment from Blizzard to pull off a project like that. To do the things that the purists of D2R want, it would most assuredly be a loss leader. They’d have to incorporate too many modern quality of life changes to be successful, and they don’t want those in D2R.
A D2R expansion would be a bad idea, I agree. I’m just contesting the point that no game company takes risks.
You missed the part where they developed an entire game engine for it. That’s a huge budget investment for a game in a franchise that was dying back then (RE6 was a huge flop). Especially in the japanese market which is extremely corporative and huge companies like capcom aren’t known for rewarding creative freedom.
In the documentary, they make it very clear that GoW PS4 was their last hurrah and the company was on the verge of closing if that game didn’t succeed. It was also a really hard sell to pitch it to Sony, Sony of America wanted another GoW III style game.
Disagreeing is fine, but I think we are actually agreeing on God of War. With the failure to measure up with the third title, the next game needed to win or the studio would shutter. This meant they couldn’t just do something similar.
It would be easier to take some cashgrab route like a mobile game or something though. A big AAA title is never the “safe profit” option. They’re not cheap to make and their success is never guaranteed (except maybe if you’re Rockstar Games)