Diablo 4 - What's The Point

That was not the initial comment in which I responded. So put the goalposts back good sir. It was about selling.

These kind of comparison doesn’t mean much. 2000 video game market was very different from 2012’s, not to mention the huge input from consoles and China. Arguably, D4’s situation may be more suitable to comparison, we’ll see how it fares.

Both D2 and D3 were groundbreaking successes, that’s all there is to keep in mind.

And very, very different public reviews
 but anyway, it doesn’t have much to do with sales.

Wouldn’t go that far, but Whimsydale is pretty great.

It is a “secret level”, it kinda is supposed to be different from everything else in the game. Like Cow level is.

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And I pointed out D2 sold tremendous for it’s time. But you still had million 1st year sellers all over the place back then. You don’t have many 10M 1st year sellers today let alone 8 years ago.

But to the original point, you have had plenty of high quality isoARPGs, somenfrom high pedigree studios that haven’t sold well even good ones. PoE has players but chances are those numbers would be significantly less if you had to buy the game. As is the case with most free games.

So no, I don’t think we will see a high selling isoARPG from anyone other than Blizzard.

To note Diablo 2 sold 4 million copies in its first year of sales which was not a feat that was “all over the place” in 2000. Diablo Battle Chest was still seen on best seller lists 8 years later in 2008.

Not that sales is really much of a statement about quality, but both games have had equally impressive feats not replicated by other games of the era in sales.

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Besides making money then the point of D4 is to give Blizzard a chance at redeeming themselves. They can start from fresh and let the terrible design decisions of D3 get buried with the game. I must admit that their quarterly updates have left a sour taste so far but I am still happy that they are working on a 4th game rather than pseudo-updating the 3rd.

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You cant compare sales from 2000 to 2012. Those who played both agree that D2 was a better game. The only thing D3 did better, were graphics and smoother combat. There’s still a whole community of people playing D2
 20 years later that must tell you something.

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i thought i heard their main objective was pvp.

Don’t know why quality is brought up. The question asked was about selling well. There were 16 million plus unit games in 2000 alone. Yes D2 did 4. I’m not arguing it didn’t sell. Just compared to 2000, D3s performance in 2012 was more impressive in a down year for the video games market with all the competition at hand including mobile and free which wasn’t a thing back in 2000.

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While they intend to have pvp in Diablo 4 (probably at the game’s launch), pvp certainly isn’t their primary objective for the game.

Doesn’t really matter if it’s in one or ten years. Many great games made most of their sales long after first year because of word of mouth, this is why D2 kept coming out in the best selling lists over the years. And D2 was also the fastest selling game ever in 2000.

But I fully agree, no other ARPG will sell as well as D3, except maybe for D4 (though I doubt it).

This is an easy answer: Click on things. Things die. Some of those things happen to be piñatas. Then click on all the goodies that fall out of the piñatas.

Yet the only reason D3 was successful is because of D2. Not the fact that many people love the gameplay and find the game fun, told their friends and spread sales by word of mouth. Man, you guys need to get your stories straight.

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Not the only ofc. But it would probably have 75% less sales if it was released by some indie company rather than Blizzard though, probably even less. Their brand pull is huge. Enormous. Far bigger than two decades ago. The market is also gigantic today, and people can afford to spend way more money on games. So many factors to consider when comparing numbers.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder why people are still talking about sales, as if they matter in the slightest. Take any serious website and see them rank the best games to ever be created and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone that puts D3 on the list, let alone above D2. D3 isn’t even the best ARPG of its generation, unfortunately.

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I’m not sure why quality was being brought up, I only mentioned it because other people were.

I’m also not sure why you keep bringing up 1m+ games in 2000. That’s rather dishonest to be comparing Diablo 2 to games that sold 25% as many copies when you’re talking about how many 10+ million unit games are in 2012 for a game that sold 12 million copies in its first year.

Both games were equally impressive in their performance. Diablo 2 was still the fastest selling PC game of all time when it launched.

I don’t know as I would say the “top X” lists are much of an indication of anything either since what some journalist thinks often doesn’t line up with reality.

If we were going by sheer popularity and what people are actually playing, I’m pretty sure Fortnite utterly stomps everything else right now and I haven’t seen it topping too many best of lists.

Then again ultimately at the end of the day it hardly matters what other people think the better game is. People can just play the version they want.

CTRL+F “Diablo III” in those links and you will be surprised to find Diablo III in there.

in B4 those are paid critics, clueless, fake, lack of credibility gaming sites and etc. :slight_smile:

That’s you saying that. Not me.

Yet I corrected it from a misreading. But go ahead and ignore that.

Not me pretty much everyone who can’t wrap their minds around D3 being successful. It always boils down to D3 was only successful because D2 players bought it. Yet, they were the ones that actively review bombed it and constantly, to this day trash trash it like it personally murdered a family member. Yet D2 was successful because it was good and word of mouth.

However if word of mouth is so powerful, then why, after all the crap did D3 continue to sell at record places, and debut on Switch with a million sales in the first month? Surely it had to be brainwashed D2 players because D3 isn’t good and no one else would have bought it right? You cannot have it both ways.

D3 is good. It may not be as good as D2 for some. For others it was better. It did well because people enjoyed playing not because of D2 players.

According to that, OP gear is not a problem, don’t equip it. Problem solved.