Given the popularity of Blizzard games in China and the size of the market there, it’s probably a given that D4 will have a Chinese version. This is great – more Diablo players, more money for Blizzard. I do have a few concerns, though.
Many of you are familiar with Path of Exile. It’s a Diablo-like game that was developed by a New Zealand company and is now majority owned by Tencent Holdings. It has a Chinese client. The issue is, in the Chinese version, they sell speed boosts, pets that vacuum up items, resurrections that allow players to bypass death penalties, and other quality-of-life items. Once this stuff is in the game, there’s a financial incentive to design the game in a manner that drives players toward making these purchases (i.e., designing the game to be slower, grindy, have an annoying amount of things to pick up, kill you more often, etc.).
The above scenario creates a problem for Western players who don’t have access to these mtx purchases, nor do we want them in our game in the first place. We end up being forced to slog through a deliberately designed annoying experience, so the parent company can sell solutions to players in another country. We aren’t stupid; we will eventually catch on to what is being done; many of us will likely leave instead of endure a purposefully built frustrating game experience. There are a million other games to play.
What I’d ask is that the Western version of the game and the Chinese version of the game exist as two separate entities entirely, with their own game parameters. If you want to make their (CN) client grindy so they’ll buy boosts or whatever, go for it, but please don’t let that impact the rest of us here. I’m more than happy to buy thousands of dollars of cosmetic mtx (I like to play dress up with my characters), but the moment I feel like the game is being intentionally steered into a worse gameplay experience so you can generate more revenue, I’m gone.