Monday 20 January 2014

Not this time Blizzard - Diablo 3: RoS

Looking back, I've bought every Blizzard game at launch in the past decade or so. Be it Starcraft, Warcraft or Diablo games. But for the first time I have a negative feeling about buying one on its first day, and that is Reaper of Souls.


I played a fair bit of D3, though by now the majority of active players have well eclipsed my ~500 hour mark. For all its problems and my sudden lack of interest in the game over a year ago I got my money's worth. I even got my mitts on the collector's edition as a symbol to the many hours I wasted away on D2 as a young teenager. And I'm still happy I bought it, I don't regret my time played with D3 as there was definitely some fun to it.

But there are fundamental issues with the game, mostly in its one-sided itemization. It's a completely different beast to Diablo 2 with its amazing expansion. There are many many many many threads on forums and reddit that discuss the issues so I won't bore you with them here, but it's clear that I'm far from the only one who has a negative outlook on RoS.

I'm not even sure they're going to keep to their current release date, although by now we know that Blizzard has no qualsm with releasing the game and then continue to tweak and change, sometimes some pretty big things, post launch. Patch 1.0.5 and 1.0.8 are examples of this.
I'm very curious to see the public reception. D3v sold many millions of copies in the first week or two but I'm not convinced this expansion will follow suit.
Much like Nintendo, I think they need a shake up that's actually noticeable: in their wallets. Then the message will be crystal clear.

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