Why should I care about Blizzards business strategy? I have paid money to play Diablo 2 remastered and that’s exactly what I demand to play. This is a full priced game and I expect they will commit the resources to give the game longevity, otherwise why would I bother? Blizzards interests are not my concern, I’ve paid for a product and expect it to be serviced going forwards.
I dislike this opinion that I should lower my expectations because of whatever corporate strategy is going on at Blizzard. If I want to be a lifelong D2 player that is my choice and Blizzard should facilitate it and give my what I paid for and ideally exceed my expectations. I can’t stand when fanboys start talking like they are on the Board of the company, justifying lacklustre development because of MUH PROFITS. As a customer I could not care less about their profits, and resent the idea that I should accept sub-standard service because it might affect profit. How indoctrinated and brainwashed by crony capitalists are you to think this way?
I actually agree with your sentiment that you should not lower your expectations to what little companies are delivering.
But yeah, unfortunately, it is to be expected that they would deliver worse service if they don’t profit from it.
And I especially agree with this, in general. So annoying.
Doesn’t seem prevalent in this thread, but it sure shows up from time to time.
Then you have the wrong expectations. Other than restarting the ladder periodically, Blizzard has made NO promises of future content for this game. You’re paying for a game as it will exist at launch.
I’ll toss one more thought out there: Whatever plans Blizzard may have had, have certainly changed with the mass exodus from WoW. That’s millions of dollars of revenue lost every month. They don’t have the money to throw around that they used to.
Sure, they might add a runeword or two or other changes that basically come down to editing a spread sheet, but I’ve expected from the start that other than bugfixes and stability issues, the game at release is how it’s going to stay.
I’m also leaning toward the sunsetting of Bnet 1.0. There’s not much reason to keep that service around once all the games on it have been upgraded to the newer net.
That’s all fair enough, I don’t have to like it though and I certainly don’t have to keep buying Blizzard games moving forward if they aren’t putting in the effort to make their games great.
Christ it’s got nothing to do with it, you don’t even know anything about Diablo IV, it’s a completely different game, it’s OPEN WORLD for a start, and guess what it has? You will love this one… ploot! yay!
No it doesn’t. I mean, pretty sure Blizzard has not talked about what its drop system is so far.
But absolutely nothing indicates it will have the loot system people are talking about for D2R.
Other than that, yeah, the game does not exactly seem to be much like D2.
While D2R wasn’t created for the crowd that doesn’t want any changes to D2. Nor was it created to be the only game that anyone plays except for possibly those that would make the choice to do so.
Like you said it is there to fill the gap till Diablo Immortal and D4 comes outs.
Diablo Immortal on the other hand will no doubt have support for the long haul. As well as D4 having support for the long haul. Meaning both will have new content added. Whereas D2R probably won’t get much if anything new added as it should be.
The one change that I can think of that I would be onboard with them doing is the AI of the hireling. Where it doesn’t get stuck where it stops following you.
Emphasis on “as it should be.” This game is fine and doesn’t need all the ridiculous changes people are asking for. Some of which already exist in game (looking at you infinite respecs…)
I really liked this OP, it makes sense and falls under the line of what I have been saying that the success of the Diablo franchise as a whole was from their D3 sales that also currently have the biggest playerbase. D3 players have been playing for the last 9+ and the fact that there isn’t a release date for D4 and it’s projected to be years away is why their is a new Diablo game in the mean time like D2R, not because of the so called “purists” like they stated.
There hasn’t been any new Diablo games for pc/console for over 9 years and won’t be for over a decade after a new diablo game is launch. A D2 remaster is a great way to sell easy content to close this gap since they are can copy the source code over to save time and money. PC players complained that Diablo Immortal wasn’t coming to PC and after Blizzard responded acknowledging that PC players didn’t want to play a new Diablo on cellphones, this is their response to Diablo Immortals for mobile phones. The initial release date of Diablo Immortals was pushed back from 2021 to 2022. There is a reason why they did this so they didn’t release the game the same time frame as D2R.
Blizz didn’t relased game for years now. ANY game. BattleNet numbers tanked, they have to make D4 right. So they WILL spend money. Their last premiere was Overwatch, back in 2016! That game is already dead. It was five years ago!
Diablo may be make or breake for Blizzard so I can believe that Ressurected is test ground for D4. It kinda make sense considering how D3 turn out.
its not a test graound. they know how love d2 is and they know they came make a hell of a lot of money from a remaster. the thing that drives bilzzard ikeeping the shareholder happy and they do that by making money
Actually, after each quarter report it looks more and more d3-like. And for me, D2R greatly reduced my desire to play D4.
First of all, D2R lets Blizz to avoid D2 community hate while making another D3-like game.
I think the primary motive of releasing D2R is quick profit for minimal work.
If quick profit really was the only motive, Blizzard would have presented a bad looking, bug-ridden mess. The die-hard D2 fans would buy it regardless.
I think it deserves notice that the team around D2R really cares about getting the visuals right while also adressing stability issues (see recent announcements about bugfixes) and building nice but not over-the-top QoL changes.
I thought they canned D4? The head dev got fired and they pushed the release back a long time when it looked almost ready in comparison to D3. My thinking was the execs looked at D2R and D4 side by side and realised how inferior D4 looks and sent it back to the drawing board.
