Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

They will eventually jizz out some should be aborted version of Diablo and you fags will lap it up.

It's as dumb as the star wars routine.

Get fucked, and paying for the pleasure.

Or quit giving them money, and mock anyone that does.

(PoE can be done casually, FYI)

Chris said:

Blizzard's commitment to "quality" is one thing that's killing them, apparently they've cancelled about 50% of the games they've ever developed? That's not some pious act, that's just bad management and poor use of resources. Guess what? The games are turning out shit anyway.

Why can't these popular companies finish their fucking games in a timely manner anymore?

Square-Enix is even worse. It took them 3 years to make FF7, I'm replaying it at the moment and it's crazy how many random minigames it has which must have taken a lot of time to create, I don't understand how their games now take so much longer but have no extras like that anymore...

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Art. FF7 was a bunch of low res prerendered screens with a few wobbly detailed FMV's, and is actually quite a small world. The art in FF15 takes up 20-30gb. BotW is like 1000x bigger than Legend of Zelda, fully 3D mapped and textured. Zelda they basically go into design mode figuring out the next "tool" you're going to have to use to get through barriers or around the map.

For Diablo, it's designing classes. Art is there, but it might as well be squares throwing lines around the screen.

I have no idea what people expected from Blizzard after they were acquired by Activision; it plays out the same way in every single industry.

1. Innovative small company makes a name for itself producing something the market desires.

2. Larger institutional companies lose share to the new innovators.

3. After some time the market shifts to where the consumer now demands some amount of the innovation to be present for any purchase

4. Large companies are not agile enough to respond so they buy the small innovative companies with the hope of integrating the innovation across all product lines.

5. The small company loses all previous agile advantages now that they are part of a large organization and subject to the realities that allowed them to gain a competitive advantage in the first place.

6. A new innovative small company makes a name for itself producing something the market desires and is no longer fulfilled due to the abdication of the previously small company.

All the folks saying "it doesn't take that long to develop", I wonder how many of you have actually worked in software development and have any idea how long that curve actually is? Because I do. Small game, small number of assets, small amount of features and art, 1-3 developers/artists, maybe 6 months. That all scales up unless you sacrifice somewhere, or you have a running IP like Overwatch with small blue/green deployments. But that shit doesn't work with large single player games.

Activision gets away with releasing a "new" game every year by literally releasing nearly the same game over and over. Their new features are actually content patches, and rank resets.

Blizzard has had a 3-4 year content cycle for WOW, with intermittent updates to features, be they art, animations, class design. New areas, "new" quests, new raids and dungeons, new stories, new art, new armor, mounts, etc. But remember this game gets $15/mo from millions of accounts.

Diablo 3 hasn't had a real injection of capital, so development on it isn't exactly top priority. Feature releases aren't going to be prioritized as a new product if they're expected to continue supporting D3 across its existing platforms (PC, XB, Switch, etc) and whatever form D4 takes, when it's not brining in a revenue stream, or has a potential revenue stream.

It sucks having a clear line of sight to their corporate objectives, opex, etc, and historical trends from Blizzard to know that a new game isn't going to come out of the company unless backend support is low, and revenue stream is going to be consistent. See: Hearthstone, Overwatch, and now Diablo Immortal. Warcraft 3 reskin is also a cheap cash injection, where they only update the art and models, same engine, slap a $40 on it, maybe offer minor incentives for other Blizz games like a mount or skin, and boom.

Art is about all Blizzard has these days. Game design and storytelling has been severely lacking, or the storyteller folks are being dedicated to the cinematics that feel somehow untethered to the games they're supposed to be from. You can't tell me Overwatch is in any way an original design or concept, or that they've perfected balancing because I'd say you were full of shit (for better or worse).

Blizzard's market is also heavily saturated, with nearly every game being online, they'd likely sacrifice one of their existing IP's to release another in a similar market. D4 would cut off D3's head, and if it isn't released to a resounding success, high consumer feedback, which is going to be a challenge after the tone deaf retardation of the Diablo Immortal announcement. If ever Blizzard was gunshy, that shit certainly didn't help.

AladainAF said:

I got a quote from Zgames (a contract mobile game developer) to develop an Idle Heroes clone artwork, sound, and all, with a few changes features and 1 full year of community involvement/event support and basic content updates (as well as making 2 video ads through vungle) and they quoted me $400,000 and 5-8 months dev time.

So mobile games certainly do not take long, at all. The problem with mobile games is the constant moving of the carrot through weekly events to keep your players interested in your game because the reality is - the game is mundane, simple, and basic and in 1 week people are done with it. But with a new event a week later, everyones back. Keeping up with that is a lot more work than the development itself.

When I make my games in Second Life, it takes my artists longer to make the 3d assets and my texture artists to do their thing than the time it takes me to completely code the product.

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Short term development is typically on a blue/green cycle, so you're constantly working against a ticking clock to keep the revenue flowing. It works really well in the mobile environment where dev cycles are minimal. Art asset requirements are limited, and actual code work is nearly non-existent assuming a solid code base with a strong and easily scripted foundation. A half mil for 6mo of dev assuming 2+ times that in revenue, it's a no brainer.

It's a whole different animal to produce a $4-500m investment hoping for $1b in sales. Rockstar can pull that off. Similar can be said for your $100-200m COD pulling $400+m/yr.

Modern engines have significantly reduced dev time. It's just expensive to license a good one, and to hire good "coders" (scriogers) with experience in said engine. Blizzard has their own engine that works great on a network, but is admittedly far behind the curve in being able to generate a graphically on par experience with what's out their today. I wouldn't be surprised if they ultimately relent and license out the Unreal engine or one of the others for their next game. Diablo Immortal is them stepping their toe into that deep pool, using an existing, known to work engine and product, while slapping Blizzard's art on top of it.

Deathwing said:

I'm pretty sure Hearthstone uses the Unity engine.

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[citation needed]... Not that I doubt it. Just furthers my point.