True. I know when they announced the cancellation of the 2020 in person Blizzcon, a few forums were frothing at the mouth that they would be charging for the online one. As if 1, they had never done that before, and 2 that would be a bad thing. Blizzcon, as much as people complain about costs, is a break even, net loss event for Blizz. They don’t profit from it and never have. So they would still be within their rights to charge since it still costs resources to put on. But good on them for making it free.
But yes, not sure if other fanbases are like this, people find anything they can to levy criticism, warranted or not, at Blizzard.
This is obviously not unique to Blizzard, but nice job trying to portray them as some sort of victims. If anything they get many freerides by having a huge almost fanatic fanbase that buys any and all of their products on release without a second thought. So while they might get whine on the forums, as every company does, the fans more than make up for it with $, which is ultimately the currency Activision Blizzard cares about the most.
Nothing (engine, gameplay, system, content - wise) stopping them to do exactly this. The game stability and online experience should have been perfectly finished and tested until now.
If they are smart they’ll release an “early access” game than delaying D4 to polish it and please those that want all the content from start. Besides, adding content and improving the systems could be done for an year and the regular player would consider that part of a patch, not something improving the early access state.
The majority of games on Steam endorse the early access strategy simply because it’s the better one - you profit earlier and receive valuable feedback from the player base at earlier stage when there is less chance to make a mess. Early access safeguards you in many ways and when we know Cyberpunk Online is to release in 2022, safeguarding against it is the best any game company can make.
Not really, the majority on steam endorse it because they do not have the funds to keep developing and release a fully polished product (indie devs mostly). This however has never been Blizzards way of doing things. Ironically they released D3 in sort of a halfassed state and it got so much criticism. That probably had more to do with design decisions than the game lacking polish. But if they rush out D4 I see no reason why they won’t risk repeating the same mistakes and I really don’t think they can afford it a second time around given the competition.
To my knowledge, the in person Blizzcon keeps selling out and expanding, so your argument is wrong. Even if Blizzard was on the downslope, their Blizzcon tickets sales do not provide evidence to support your claim.
If you haven’t noticed, almost all large in person conventions have gone online due to Covid-19. It would have been a bad business and public health decision to get thousands of people together where many states are currently experiencing record numbers of Covid-19 cases.
It will be rushed if they squeeze it out within a year, for sure. And who says it will be improved on a regular 3 month basis? We are not talking about PoE 2.0. I have yet to see Blizzard state how they intend to update the game, other than via dropped expansions. Do you have a link to support your claim?
Edit. Or are you advocating for how they should support the game? In that case I don’t mind regular updates, but I doubt Blizzard will go down that path and will probably settle for expansions with some minor seasonal themes.
No, I mean if they release an early access game they can push the new stuff after each Season’s end until the game is finished/polished. That would be way better than releasing a game in 2023+.
Not sold on that, because it would bank on them getting the fundamentals right from the start. And given what I’ve seen from the quarterly updates they are not even close to having decided the direction yet. So releasing it so early will risk the game feeling rushed and unfinished, which is the least thing D4 should want to achieve. May I ask why you feel like D4 must be released so quickly?
Ironically, Cyberpunk was delayed to further polish the game :). I notice a lot of people hyping up this game, but I’ll reserve judgement until I actually get to play it.
Putting words in my mouth again. I flat out said I don’t know if this happens elsewhere since I’m not a part of other game discussion boards mostly Blizzard forums and some general boards. I never painted Blizz as a victim, just called out the player base in general.
Delaying CP yields them more cash due to hype this creates. There were even articles on the net with fans threatening devs…
Now, D4 team may try to play it tricky and get inside info on CP:O development to better tune their own release date, but in any case delaying D4 is a mistake. D4 isn’t some next gen game everyone will buy no matter when it releases.
D4 is an isometric aRPG with great engine and zero player base atm. Its strength is mainly at maintaining a real healthy player base and building upon it until CP:O releases. Then they have to reevaluate since no one actually knows how big it would be and how much replayability it would yield, but my prediction is it would rule Twitch for a very, very long time.
D4 has to be prepared and ready for the blow CP:O would cause on it. This happens only when the game releases in an early access state implementing valuable feedback from its community.
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