Well Diablo Immoral has been out for a few days and it being banned completely in Belgium pretty much says it all.
The game is pay to win. Full stop.
Is this setting the stage for Arclight Rumble? Is this what we can expect from Blizzard games moving forward?
IF (and this is a big if) these games are successful. Will the lootbox pay to win culture start to get baked in to new WoW releases like Dragonflight?
I don’t think anyone likes Blizzard’s pivot as a whole to mobile games.
They basically took a bunch of favorite IPs of PC games, and forced them into mobile without asking the fans first. “Out of season April Fool’s joke.”
And, surprise Pikachu, most of us PC players don’t enjoy mobile gaming and want nothing to do with it, because it’s the most predatory insult to gaming, ever.
I hope they return to focus on PC when Microsoft takes over, but I won’t be too surprised if they don’t. Corporations follow money, not passion.
Screw Belgium, what they do is their own business. It’s gonna be available in the US, so I don’t care.
I don’t see why it would be, but it’s pretty popular among the casual audience, so maybe.
Not really. They have a flat out ban on games with loot box type mechanics. Whether pay to win or not. There’s no degrees of it.
DI was made in close partnership with some Chinese mobile game people. We knew it was going to be a pay to win garbage fest since then, if not before.
I haven’t looked into Arclight to see if its a similar situation or more fully in-house.
Realistically, any game that’s mobile-first (not handheld – mobile phones specifically) is going to be questionable. It’s not a good medium for gaming as a main focus. It’s almost always a cash grab. It’s oversimplified by default. Controls are never “right”. Because it’s a phone.
Even if Arclight isn’t a blatant P2W Cash Grab (I have no idea), I have zero interest in it. I get why there’s a market for mobile games, but it’s not the same market that Blizzard has existed in for decades. No thanks.
This goes on the same list as “Warcraft 3 Refunded”.
It’s popular in china.
The rest of the world no longer matters to Blizzard.
i dont even believe the “close partnership” part of it. Netease made the game with Diablo assets. you can put DI next to Champions of the Light (a netease game in china), and see they look and play the same. its a reskin of a game that has all the chinese mictrotransactions, we saw this coming back in 2018 too. this is greed and laziness on Blizz’s part.
f2p is dying at the hands of play-to-earn. what’s behind p2w is something worse.
It costs $100,000 to max out your character in Diablo Immoral. If this game proves to be a success then any hope for future games by Blizzard is lost.
the good news is, players will finally learn to stop chasing BIS and just play the game.
Whales will spend any amount of money to try to have a power advantage over others. In Diablo Immoral PvP they will be literal gods due to the power disparity from using their wallets.
so let them finance my game. they’re earned their divinity.
It is too bad, hoped the pay aspect would have been cosmetics. But alas.
It is basically a really bad D3 port with the RNG being worse unless you pour the contents of your bank account directly into Bobby’s.
They need to get their golden parachutes now, before Microsoft comes in and cleans house.
Wait, you’re expecting one bloated greedy cooperation to come in and fix another bloated greedy cooperation? What world are you living in? Microsoft are the guys that have to get slapped upside the head by governments to get them to stop doing shady stuff.
I didn’t realize devs were required to get permission from players before working on a new project. Today I learned.
On the one hand, I think that Diablo Immortal’s success will depend on finding enough whales to keep a sparsely populated game afloat, because the price to pay to win is so huge and up front that most free to play players are going to quit rather than wait 10 years to get geared.
On the other hand, I think the current design philosophy of wow is to continue to try to turn the game into a classic revamp, on the principle that everything classic was perfect.
So removal of the group finder from wrath classic, even though the overwhelming majority of players were planning on playing because of that and have now changed their minds.
Removal of the votekick to try to force new players to “make friends” in game without whose help they will not be able to do dungeons they are given quests to do, as though somehow being forced to carry afk players, carries, and trolls is going to be a positive introduction to the community.
They want to prove that everybody else has been designing games of this genre wrong. This is their last chance to prove that it is wrong to reward players for participating in content, that unless they are the best of the best they should get nothing and play solely for love of the game, in awe of its perfection of design, and in worshipful respect of those toxic top players whose alts are getting carried through dungeons thanks to the removal of the votekick option.
Time to remove casual content, there are still too many casuals sullying your game. Good thing that “casual content” in DF is going to be jumping puzzles and “rock climbing”, which just sounds like another name for jumping puzzles. Which many players despise.
And the rank-locked Pvp gearing system, which devs of the past rejected, telling players it was bad for the game. Yet devs decided to not only implement this failed system, but have doubled down repeatedly, leaving PvP a shell of its former state.
If the game loses as many players as it already has since the start of shadowlands, there would be no players whatever. That’s how many have left, and are left.
Phil Spencer said he wanted to see more players playing wow. I don’t think he meant he wanted to see fewer players.
Blizzard has been doing things horribly wrong in this expansion. They have no one to blame but themselves. But they’re still blaming the playerbase.
Actually, normal business development involves doing marketing research prior to planning, Thus they don’t end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a vanity project they know will piss off a lot of their paying customers. This is how they’ve always done development in Blizzard. They were lucky for a while. They aren’t lucky anymore.
Companies stopped catering to China with games after they banned minors from playing more than 2 hours a week.
It was very obvious in some mobile games like Pokemon Unite - where the IAP design philosophy did a 180 practically overnight after the law was passed.