Today’s dev update was a start, but they need to be more transparent about console development and reception. Sadly they can’t do console fora because those essentially no longer exist on the console manufacturers’ sites (Sony decided communities were against what they wanted, which is secrecy and control and Microsoft has a habit of just plain doing the exact opposite what their users ask for).
Things like making D3 radically different on console than on the PC didn’t help. Nephalem Glory is a 2x damage buff, and as a result monsters have 2x HP vs. PC counterparts. That makes leveling 1-70 and even early paragon really suck because we can’t maintain that buff, especially on rift guardians where we need it most, as their HP is also doubled as a “balance” to the NG buff. Console players have asked for years to have NG made to work like the PC version and monster HP returned to be identical to the PC counterparts. But not one single reply. Not one. No developer insight, no communication, nothing.
The console fora are just empty voids players scream into. I liked the dev update today, but it was primarily just a rehash of information we already knew. The rest felt like “we’re hearing, but not really listening”. I suppose a vague acknowledgement of the situation is better than nothing, but the lack of transparency is rather appalling. I’m hoping we get a more substantial update after D2R releases.
This is a problem created by Blizzard, not the players. If players knew they had somewhere where they could be heard, and I mean legitimately, not that twisting nether of a console forum we have now that gets nothing from Blizzard at all, then they’d get engagement. And periodic surveys to help gauge the interactions players are having with the game(s) and what they feel about it would certainly help, so long as they went out to every player and not just a select few (or worse, just influencers).
I get most corporations don’t like to communicate. They just want to make something, milk what they can from it, and spread that out to shareholders and/or executives. But it doesn’t have to be like that. For all of their faults, both Square Enix (“Squeenix”) and GGG at least make proper attempts to have back and forth with their players. Yes, they’ve both made some really boneheaded decisions on various fronts, but after the original FF14 crashed and burned and Squeenix had to nix the entire team and rebuild, they learned a valuable lesson: ignoring your players has consequences, not the least of which is destruction of brand loyalty.
Had Squeenix not repaired FF14’s broken reputation, it could have spelled doom for the rest of the Final Fantasy franchise, especially after they released FF XV unfinished, with blatantly cut content that was held back to be used as season pass fodder, and in the end half of the planned DLC content cancelled despite player interest still being very high.
The FF7R (FF7 Remake) situation is just as perplexing. Originally launched on PS4, it gets a free update to the PS5 version, but with a twist: The PS5 version has the original content plus Intergrade, which contains the Yufie sidebar content. The upgraded PS4 to PS5 version does not include that. It must be purchased separately for $20. This is on top of the game as a whole being doled out piecemeal as full priced $70+ games for each segment, future editions which may or may not do what this one is doing with the upgraded PS4 version.
Squeenix for some reason, isn’t listening to those players, just the ones who subscribe to FF14. It has much the same feeling as Jeff Kaplan’s Overwatch vs. D3 for the last few years (Brandy being handcuffed notwithstanding). Right now I think players would be ecstatic, if unfortunately very apprehensive of, actual back and forth. It will take a long time for console players to trust Blizzard after D3 was released on PS3/XB360, abandoned, brought to PS4/XB1 with radically differing mechanics that players found detrimental, and then basically left to rot to the point of not even having bugs properly fixed (e.g., this season’s ethereals not showing up in challenge rift builds, which ended up affecting us very negatively on the PC side I might add). But a start would be welcomed.
On this, I’ll add a sidenote: Online saves for the consoles requires an active subscription to their online services, even if you’re just playing games in single player mode. The relatively high price of those online portals is offsetting to a lot of players (like me) whom already pay some rather exhorbitant prices for internet connectivity itself, to say nothing of streaming, etc. Why MS and Sony don’t offer cloud sync as a basic feature like Steam does I can only attribute to corporate greed since both MS and Sony use the same 30% cut from digital game sales blueprint that Valve pioneered. Valve uses some of that to provide space for most games on their platform (and for FF XV that’s huge, since just one save file for FF XV is nearly 700 MB).
So for this, your beef isn’t with Blizzard, it’s with Sony and Microsoft. They control cloud sync functionality, and paywalling it when they’re bleeding developers just like Valve does without actually giving something back is insane.
Since leaderboards require online subscriptions to access (they’re online), Sony and MS can very easily put a stop to this. Sony does so on the PS5. Saves are locked to the machine and cannot be copied to USB. Sadly the only way to back up saves is to pay for the online subscription for PS+, which is what would be required to enable cloud saves to avoid end user hacking. That’s one of the most compelling reasons this needs to be a basic function just like Valve does with Steam.
Blizzard’s hands are tied with regard to the hacking, and you can blame Sony and MS for that. They have the power to change that situation, but have refused to do so in order to force the games as a service model onto the user in order to access such a system. But because that very system isn’t universal, the games can’t force it on the users, so offline saves are necessary. As such, D3 suffers from services like Save Wizard (PS4) that let players modify their saves, which then infest the online environment.
All of the fracturing really damages Blizzard’s image here, and it isn’t even their fault.
