^^ I’m honestly just curious as to why Blizz has decided this route this time round?
As someone who does not know much about the development side of things I just want to know if this way of communicating is more common nowadays?
More specifically:
is this simply to keep us busy (give us our hit of Crack as the release date is supppper far off?), or are they trying to prevent a gong show that was the release of d3 and the aftermath
will they actuality sift through the mass of posts and shouting of ‘I want this!’ Or ‘fix that!’ And change the game accordingly? Again, I dont know much about game development and personally see this as a daunting task
how likely is the game that we saw at blizzcon going to match up? Obviously this is a tough one, but just seeing how much has changed/been added through the last few updates, is there any point to show US anything when final copy could very well be a 180?
I do personally love reading these, but I just am interested to learn some perspective of those that know more about this!
They’ve already changed some stuff in response to feedback on the forums, and it’s easier to get it done while you’re still working on the game rather than when you’re working with a finished product.
Beyond that there isn’t much of a reason to do it just to keep us busy. The game is still likely years out from release and any hype gained from it would be long gone. At most they get a bit of positive PR by going “look, we’re being transparent and listening to feedback”.
Honestly this is all pretty common in development with the caveat that usually this happens behind closed doors for a big AAA game rather than getting public feedback. There are a lot of changes as developers try things and figure that they just don’t work, or somebody gets an idea that everybody thinks would be much better.
I’m sure the final game will be quite different from the Blizzcon demo but at the same time, not be entirely unrecognizable as the same game. I don’t see them changing the flow of combat around that much since what they have already works quite well.
Players have asked for more communications in droves. It is the most common thing players ask of developers.
Games change a TON between announcement and release. Especially a game that takes years to develop. Keeping players up to date on major changes means they don’t face a huge backlash at release when things are different. It is NORMAL for games to change dramatically during development but sometimes players don’t understand that. Communication helps.
Your questions:
See my first answer as to why.
Yes and no. They are not going to design Diablo 4 based on the extremely divergent whims of various fans. They are going to listen, but they are still going to develop some that fits the Developer’s vision. That won’t be something EVERY fan wants. That is ok.
I would not be shocked if there are dramatic changes to many things by the time it is released. Game systems, end game concepts, etc - all get iterated repeatedly. It is normal for a concept to be programmed, play tested, and tossed.
See my first two answers again. Players want communication. Communication as things change helps shape rational expecations as to outcome.
Reading development news posts will help teach you part of the Development process. That process includes shaping player expectations via communications.
Thanks for your replies! I appreciate it. Tbh I just haven’t seen this kind of communication from bliz b4. I know we get teases alot from blizzcon and such, but it is nice to get the updates
Whether the game changes or not i hope this does become the norm for other developers. Seems like a good way to appease folk - transparent or not!
I could give you another/first-hand-professional (and probably more true to the real reason) answer if you want
It’s convenient for the PR/PO/Management sections (and developers themselves in a way for that matter) to present the what’s new at 3 months periods (up to 5 features per team maximum). That’s a basic consequence cause it takes roughly (if all going well and planned) in 2 week cycles to develop one feature
So it’s 5 cycles of active feature development followed by 1 cycle of regression/testing where the goal is making sure things work as intended before
It is quite safe to assume that 80%+ of what we are shown at Blizzcons and blogs will have changed before release in small or big ways. That was true for Diablo 3 as well.
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And a little bit of feedback gathering.
Each new blog post makes a bunch of streamers to talk about the game.
Most games are developed behind closed doors (not a bad thing). But more open development is fairly common these days, due to 1) Early Access games, where players are buying alpha/beta games and 2) Crowdfunded games, where the developer seem to feel that they “owe” the paying supporters a stream of constant development updates.
Diablo 4 blog posts is far below what you get from those games. Even some larger companies do the blog post thing though. I believe Paradox do it quite a lot for most of their games.
Since it sounds like Blizzard want a Paradox-style monetization for this game (selling lots of expansions/DLC), maybe that is where they have got their inspiration.
Because D3 got a lot of flack and many of it’s early systems got scrapped and redone.
Basically, they’re just trying to save themselves the extra work of “fixing” D4 after launch by getting the feedback earlier, when it’s easier and cheaper to do something about it.
They were memed incessantly for their Diablo Immortal announcement. To the point where non-Diablo fans and non-Blizzard fans became aware of how tone-deaf the Diablo team is. It was reported on nearly every major gaming site how Blizzard was booed at their own event. Think of how bad it looked.
They aren’t doing this because they want to, they’re doing it because they have to.
Yea…crowd control was definitely necessary after 2018 blizzcon debacle. I was also thinking this was an Activision push more than Blizz as it seems out of the norm
i think they are actually scared now
after being bashed for D3 so hard and seeing arpgs with awesome skill systems like PoE, grim dawn, last epoch, they are probably asking us what we want because they dont even know where to start with, making a good arpg xD
Apart from the communication aspect, I think there are two reasons for that:
That it’s a kind of mea culpa towards the Diablo community. Diablo 3 has divided a lot for various reasons. You can see it on the forum with the war between the pro D2 and pro D3. Even though Diablo 3 is generally better than when it was released, it still disappointed the fans enormously. To prevent this scenario from repeating itself, Blizzard is testing the Diablo community’s feelings through these blogs to see if it’s going in the right direction and to reassure fans (and future customers). It must be said that the D4 team must reconcile the Diablo franchise with the fans of D1, D2 and D3. This will be very difficult in my opinion. Personally, I appreciate Blizzard’s openness to communicate more, even if it’s limited to blog posts.
From now on, Diablo is no longer a leader but a challenger. He has a lot of great competitors who are shadowing him: POE, Grim dawn, Wolcen, Lost ark, Last epoch, … and may even have others we don’t know about yet. The D4 team has the heavy burden not to disappoint and to restore the blazon of Diablo that it is by the gameplay, the lore, the atmosphere of the Diablo 4. These blog posts are here to testify to this in the absence of Early Access or Beta.
It is true with opinions, ideas, suggestions as diverse, varied, divergent, see opposite, between pro D2/D3/POE/Grim dawn/…, it is difficult to find each other. The D4 team must still take these opinions into account because they express a trend, a general feeling that most players, without experience in game design, find difficult to express clearly. And it’s this feeling that the D4 team has to tackle. After that, if there are good ideas in the feedback that he incorporates into the game, as long as it adds value, it’s always good.
The Diablo community often forget this, but developers are not living gods, they are humans who are feelings like us and who have a vision of what Diablo is for them. So it’s only natural that they use the community to readjust their vision of the game and align themselves with the community to stay in tune. For me, D4 should not be a clone of D1, or D2, or D3. He must be a kind of fusion of the three (By three they come ), while offering his own functionality and identity.
As with Diablo 3 and other ARPGs, there is a gap between their version 1.0 and the current version. I don’t know if you remember the first presentation of D3 in 2008. Between that and Diablo 3 vanilla and ROS, there’s nothing in common except the graphics, skills and some elements. Diablo 4 will go through the same process and evolve just as much, to the point where it will have nothing in common with what we can see in the Blizzcon 2019 demo.
Here’s the video from D3 2008, as a reminder:
Good question. In my opinion yes and no. As I remember, the cartoonist aspect had been strongly criticized but apart from firing the artistic director at the time nothing has changed. Anyway, in terms of history, it would not have prevented Deckard Cain from being killed by butterflies, since Beta was limited before this event.
Let’s talk about the Beta, it didn’t prevent the primary stats, the damage of the skills depending on the weapon, the trifecta, the cooldowns, the itemization, the legendary useless items, the drop rate depends on the AH, AH itself, … All these problems we discovered at the release of game during the End game.
Skills rune were even introduced at the last moments to replace the rune stones:
The Paragon system had been presented and introduced later, it was originally intended to be limited to Levels 100. It was the community that suggested that it should be infinite and that we know the current problems.
It is precisely because Paragon had become infinite that the difficulty that was limited to 4 levels of difficulty exploded into 50 000 levels of difficulty.
However, if D3 had known the same communication as D4, maybe we would have done something about the PVP arena, the talisman system that we don’t know much about, the runeword system that Diablo 4 took over, the legendary items that could have been closer to the unique ones of D2 or more interesting than at release, …
The D4 team does not want to make the same mistakes as the D3 team. I wish them success.
They update us on features and aspects of the game, so they can get timely feedback during development, so if they are doing something unappealing to Diablo players, they can course correct.
The goal is to avoid making a disastrous game like Diablo 3, which is not appealing to the core demographic of Diablo fans.
As a fan of the franchise from the beginning, its been really nice to see how the game has evolved. I agree with you that the competition is just getting better and better and it’s going to be hard for them to stay on top. Especially since I don’t see how they will ever please both sides (war bw d2 and d3).
But maybe by truly giving fans the opportunity to feel involved will give this game a chance to atleast hit many of the “want lists”
), while offering his own functionality and identity.
