Everybody Look Surprised; Diablo III Has Been Delayed Again

I'm in the beta and I have to admit that I'm pretty disappointed with it. I've played through the beta as a wizard, demon hunter and barbarian and the graphics are exactly like WoW in terms of technology. There is NOTHING spectacular or remotely amazing about them. If I had to guess I'd say they were using the exact same old graphics engine as WoW. As far as gameplay goes it's not bad, but it just doesn't feel like a Diablo game.

The comment the guy made that people won't remember if it's late is incorrect, too. Every single time DNF is mentioned there are STILL comments/jokes about it being so late.
 
SnowBeast said:
All of us "old timers" realize this isn't Blizzard anymore. Its activision. Alot of the original Diablo/WoW team or key players are gone. Original Blizzard made games challenging. Some people left and WoW got easier/watered down to where its not really a challenge in anything any more. Christ I was excited as hell to get to level 40 to get my first mount and it took alot of work to get there. Now, its 20????? Diablo 3 will be watered down to make the masses happy, not the original way they use to make games, challenging.

I am sorry my old school friends. "Our Blizzard" is no more. ActiFlurry it is.
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This.

D3 as it stands is no challenge whatsoever. It says something that I got bored part way through my first playthrough of the beta and went and did something else. I had it for two weeks before I could be bothered to complete it.

Someone else mentioned the online thing. If you hate MMOs you will hate this. Early on in the beta it was unplayable at times for me because I had 2000ms+ delays... so every single action would happen more than two seconds after I clicked it. They've since tidied that up and it's much better now, but it's still online. Every single action you do, every single click you make, will not happen until the server registers it... single player or multiplayer.

Honestly, if I hadn't already paid for it I'd be cancelling my preorder.

I really hope they can fix it, but looking at how they destroyed WoW I'm not hopeful.
 
Cobalt35 said:
This.

D3 as it stands is no challenge whatsoever. It says something that I got bored part way through my first playthrough of the beta and went and did something else. I had it for two weeks before I could be bothered to complete it.

Someone else mentioned the online thing. If you hate MMOs you will hate this. Early on in the beta it was unplayable at times for me because I had 2000ms+ delays... so every single action would happen more than two seconds after I clicked it. They've since tidied that up and it's much better now, but it's still online. Every single action you do, every single click you make, will not happen until the server registers it... single player or multiplayer.

Honestly, if I hadn't already paid for it I'd be cancelling my preorder.

I really hope they can fix it, but looking at how they destroyed WoW I'm not hopeful.
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That sucks, I didnt realize the online part was that intrusive. I imagined it to only do a server check when handing out loot.
 
If it's not out this year, then I'm done with it. I have patience, but only so far. Blizzard I know you make great games, however if the game is bug free, runs great, and everyone enjoys it, then release the damn game, rest can be worked out with patches. It's what you did with SC2 to fix balance issues.
 
FUCK >.< Yeah sorry for that last message. That signature button is on the WORST part of my bookmark bar.

To actually contribute to the thread: I have a friend who got into the beta and has concluded "feels like another diablo clone" ... heh I think that's kind of the point. Opening up your wallet to blizz is the important part.
 
John Vuong said:
Who cares, especially Blizzard said you need an online connection to play singleplayer, and I don't support any games that uses that kind of DRM, it does nothing but alienate legit customers. Do not want.
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This is dumb. Everyone has Internet. It shouldn't matter to you if they require it. If it truly bothers you that much then don't even respond to this as I'm requiring you to have Internet to do so.

It's a sure way to ensure people don't pirate the game. Ok people still will with private servers but that won't even be 1% of the playerbase.
 
Every single action you do, every single click you make, will not happen until the server registers it... single player or multiplayer
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Hmm, interesting. I live in Australia where connection to the Blizzard U.S servers ranges from 250ms to 500ms. Ack.
 
I think Torchlight III will come out before Diablo III does. And yes, I do mean Torchlight III, not II which is due out this year.
 
Does this mean they are going to hopefully expand the beta even more or anything? I wish every night for a beta key the next day LOL. (not every day, but close enough!)
 
Eh, the always connected DRM is a bit of a pain, because yeah everyone does have the internet, but I'm also sure there have been times when everyone's internet has been down for a non-insignificant amount of time, while that might not be a big problem for many, it still is a problem.

But seriously, Diablo 2 was so fucking long ago that any juice that I still have left that says "I MUST PLAY DIABLO" is long fucking gone... hell I'm almost out of enthusiasm for SC2 part 2
 
I'm amused people are bringing Torchlight to this conversation. The PC version should have been in development at least another 6 months to iron out bugs and tweak things, or make it longer. I played through the game, but was glad to be done with it because of various little annoyances.

I'd rather a game take some time and get it right, rather than poop something out just to get it out, and then patch later.

I'm also surprised people make the Duke Nukem comparison. That game was *meant* to be out many, many times. I don't think anyone has been expecting D3 every single year for the past 12 years. Duke wasn't intended to be so long with so many failed promises, but at least with Blizzard this is their standard operating procedure to take their time.
 
LonerVamp said:
I'm amused people are bringing Torchlight to this conversation. The PC version should have been in development at least another 6 months to iron out bugs and tweak things, or make it longer. I played through the game, but was glad to be done with it because of various little annoyances.

I'd rather a game take some time and get it right, rather than poop something out just to get it out, and then patch later.

I'm also surprised people make the Duke Nukem comparison. That game was *meant* to be out many, many times. I don't think anyone has been expecting D3 every single year for the past 12 years. Duke wasn't intended to be so long with so many failed promises, but at least with Blizzard this is their standard operating procedure to take their time.
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I believe the problem here is all the old players/big boys (developers), you know the ones who shout the mantra "WHEN ITS DONE!", are not keeping their end of the bargain. At least in the past year I have seen the rage of the people with released products that are obviously NOT done. (See 'RAGE', SC2)
 
I never played WC3 or Diablo, but got into the Diablo 3 Beta because I played WoW for many years. I was initially excited to play something different, but I got bored fast. I finished the Beta at the time and never tried it again.

It was polished, but extremely repetitive. I didn't see what was the purpose of the game other than to hack and slash more enemies. There didn't seem to be a theme to the madness; the story lines were pathetic in my opinion.

The auction house wasn't enabled when I played so no ideas how that would have affected my experience. I can't imagine having an auction house making it more fun to play. I didn't care about the loot as it dropped like water.

As far as the loot went it didn't seem to matter what I wore. I was pretty much invincible the entire time as I was very cognizant of my surroundings and health potions covered up any mistakes that I made during a fight. Maybe the newer Betas are more challenging, but my nearly 39 years old fingers dominated the simplistic game design that was presented before me.

Just my personal ramblings on D3; not hating on Blizzard other than the crappy lag that I had to endure so they could have a RMT auction house. No amount of money can be spent on better servers that will overcome the fact that this is a single player game that is being marketed as an online game.
 
"Everybody Look Surprised; Diablo III Has Been Delayed Again"

False front page news is false.Blizzard has never said D3 has been delayed again. In fact, Blizzard has stated multiple times that they are still on track for a Q1 release.
 
SnowBeast said:
All of us "old timers" realize this isn't Blizzard anymore. Its activision. Alot of the original Diablo/WoW team or key players are gone. Original Blizzard made games challenging. Some people left and WoW got easier/watered down to where its not really a challenge in anything any more. Christ I was excited as hell to get to level 40 to get my first mount and it took alot of work to get there. Now, its 20????? Diablo 3 will be watered down to make the masses happy, not the original way they use to make games, challenging.

I am sorry my old school friends. "Our Blizzard" is no more. ActiFlurry it is.
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Your rose-colored goggles are influencing your memories.

By the time WoW was out, practically all the original Diablo team was already gone, making extremely mediocre games that were definitely not Blizzard-killers.

In fact, by the time WoW hit the shelves, the actual original WoW development team had already moved onto other projects. The people developing WoW's content patches and expansions (even the very first one), were almost entirely different from the original development team.

And, if you recall, which you likely don't, WoW 1.0 was a mess. It was shit. So many things that just didn't work or was not finished. BWL anyone? lol It wasn't until these "new" developers came in and fixed many things that made WoW playable and challenging instead of simply buggy.

As for their non-MMO ventures, SC2 was significantly harder than their past games on its highest difficulty level. SC1 was stupidly easy, as was WC2 and WC1. Diablo II and LoD on Hell was also not very difficult (and if you had any foresight at all, actually pretty damn easy), unless you played Hardcore in which case it was difficulty induced by an unstable network and a hideously coded engine (which was optimized around an API for a GPU whose company went belly under as D2 was released, making the game literally obsolete on day one; Glide for 3dfx cards).

So really, your only point of reference is your time doing hardcore raiding in WoW, which is not oldschool Blizzard at all.
 
The problem I have with online DRM is that not everybody's connection is fast, stable and reliable, unlike mine which tends to go down the gutter during evenings and I experience dropouts as well, which is frustrating and I'm certainty not wasting unnecessary bandwidth on a singleplayer campaign.
 
Neurofreeze said:
Your rose-colored goggles are influencing your memories.

By the time WoW was out, practically all the original Diablo team was already gone, making extremely mediocre games that were definitely not Blizzard-killers.

In fact, by the time WoW hit the shelves, the actual original WoW development team had already moved onto other projects. The people developing WoW's content patches and expansions (even the very first one), were almost entirely different from the original development team.

And, if you recall, which you likely don't, WoW 1.0 was a mess. It was shit. So many things that just didn't work or was not finished. BWL anyone? lol It wasn't until these "new" developers came in and fixed many things that made WoW playable and challenging instead of simply buggy.

As for their non-MMO ventures, SC2 was significantly harder than their past games on its highest difficulty level. SC1 was stupidly easy, as was WC2 and WC1. Diablo II and LoD on Hell was also not very difficult (and if you had any foresight at all, actually pretty damn easy), unless you played Hardcore in which case it was difficulty induced by an unstable network and a hideously coded engine (which was optimized around an API for a GPU whose company went belly under as D2 was released, making the game literally obsolete on day one; Glide for 3dfx cards).

So really, your only point of reference is your time doing hardcore raiding in WoW, which is not oldschool Blizzard at all.
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WoW was complete shit when it was released. BWL, hell I remember Scholomance, BRD and Upper and Lower Blackrock spire being the "endgame" dungeons. When BWL was first released, (like 8-12 months after the game was released) we had to negotiate with other guilds on the server to share dungeon time, if we we're all in BWL at the same time, it would either crash the server or lag us out so bad no one could do anything. The thing was WOW brought so many new things to MMO's (most borrowed or improved on from other games) that it was an instant hit, no matter how shitty it was to start with and Blizzard has kept the content and support coming though the years.
 
RealityCrunch said:
Hmm, interesting. I live in Australia where connection to the Blizzard U.S servers ranges from 250ms to 500ms. Ack.
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I'm in New Zealand, so I feel your pain. They've cleared up the lag issues a LOT since the early days of the beta, but it's still noticeable at times.

My biggest complaint is still that it's dull and pointless. Very much like WoW has become.
 
Pitbully said:
WoW was complete shit when it was released. BWL, hell I remember Scholomance, BRD and Upper and Lower Blackrock spire being the "endgame" dungeons. When BWL was first released, (like 8-12 months after the game was released) we had to negotiate with other guilds on the server to share dungeon time, if we we're all in BWL at the same time, it would either crash the server or lag us out so bad no one could do anything. The thing was WOW brought so many new things to MMO's (most borrowed or improved on from other games) that it was an instant hit, no matter how shitty it was to start with and Blizzard has kept the content and support coming though the years.
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Well, it's hard to fault a company whose servers and maybe possibly the code/architecture couldn't handle the popularity that sprung up around the game. The team behind Everquest could attest to it, but otherwise really you only had D2/W3 from Blizzard to show any scale on centralized servers. That's not to much buggy code or a poor game as much as it is forging new ground and scale.

I'm pretty sure every developer would rather play it safe and open to unexpected demand than to have sunk costs in infrastructure for a game that never takes off and only results in a third mortgage. But that's just my guess. :)
 
LeviathanZERO said:
I believe the problem here is all the old players/big boys (developers), you know the ones who shout the mantra "WHEN ITS DONE!", are not keeping their end of the bargain. At least in the past year I have seen the rage of the people with released products that are obviously NOT done. (See 'RAGE', SC2)
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I agree, and I really don't like clearly unfinished games. But I also understand it's a business and there are investors and higher-ups (like publishers/distributors when you're beholden or outright owned by them) who don't always allow time and effort for a solid product.

Then again, there may be more fundamental problems and the game may never have been good, due to leadership, talent, biting off too much, etc. Who knows. Being in IT, I know most things in technology are not as good as you think they are, once the covers are pulled back, but in technology but also the people/business aspect.

Still from a consumer perspective, it sucks to release buggy games and hope for sales to pay for subsequent patching.
 
This never made sense to me ... it's just another top down dungeon crawler ... so it's the GREATEST top down dungeon crawler ever ... it's still a top down dungeon crawler. The length of time this has been in development, by a AAA developer, is almost incomprehensible.
 
LonerVamp said:
Well, it's hard to fault a company whose servers and maybe possibly the code/architecture couldn't handle the popularity that sprung up around the game. The team behind Everquest could attest to it, but otherwise really you only had D2/W3 from Blizzard to show any scale on centralized servers. That's not to much buggy code or a poor game as much as it is forging new ground and scale.

I'm pretty sure every developer would rather play it safe and open to unexpected demand than to have sunk costs in infrastructure for a game that never takes off and only results in a third mortgage. But that's just my guess. :)
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Thats true, I think I read or heard somewhere about the CEO of Blizzard at the time saying, "we were hoping to have 10000 subscribers a month after the game was released, we ended up having over 1 million". I don't think any game can plan for something like that to happen. To be honest, I think they did great, considering what they were prepared for and what actually happened. 6 months after the game was released, they had like 4 million subscribers or something? I think thats more fantasy land then reality for most all gaming companies. Who can actually plan for growth like that?
 
Pitbully said:
Thats true, I think I read or heard somewhere about the CEO of Blizzard at the time saying, "we were hoping to have 10000 subscribers a month after the game was released, we ended up having over 1 million". I don't think any game can plan for something like that to happen. To be honest, I think they did great, considering what they were prepared for and what actually happened. 6 months after the game was released, they had like 4 million subscribers or something? I think thats more fantasy land then reality for most all gaming companies. Who can actually plan for growth like that?
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True... although if a cell phone company sold more subscriptions than they could possibly hope to service they'd be roasted and probably sued. While Blizz could not have forseen the popularity of the game, they certainly could have prevented some of the problems to a degree by limiting subscription, much like SW:TOR has done.

I dunno... when D3 was finally announced I was seriously excited about it... having now played the beta I'm fainding it difficult to find anything much to get excited about. There are already games out that do everything that D3 does (minus the online AH), and do it better. Maybe I've just changed as a gamer, but I don't think so... I still load up D2 occasionally and play it and still enjoy it. D3 feels like a re-skinned WoW to me and I don't wanna play that again.
 
With the limited game time I have currently plus the amount of games coming out this year I honestly don't care anymore.
 
lol, considering the last videos of anything for this I saw posted were from 2008, I'm so not surprised.
 
After seeing this article yesterday I was so inspired I loaded Diablo II and the expansion back onto my PC after nearly 10 years.

Before I knew it I was level 13 and it was time for dinner. Good times.
 
The heck with Blizzard and the heck with Diablo... I'm over it... With their resources there is no excuses for these types of delays. The gamers WILL care when they finally release this in 2013 and it looks like trash. All of that waiting for a POS.. GG blizzard... Take your Pandas and take a flying leap. Just watch and see... It's console cousin will be released at the same time.. It's about cash for these folks.. Not the games anymore... Look at WoW now.... Nuff said...

/end vent
 
Over the weekend, Blizzard&#8217;s Senior Producer for Diablo III (none other than Steve Parker) announced that he is no longer working on the Diablo III project, and that he is no longer with Blizzard. With a simple, &#8220;I&#8217;m no longer working at Blizzard or on D3,&#8221; Parker went on to say, &#8220;I&#8217;ve had a great five years there, and those guys are going to kill it with Diablo 3.&#8221;
 
Squall_Rinoa89 said:
Not really missing anything in Diablo 3. I'm in the beta for it, having never played any of the diablo's and as far as I see, people complaining about it being like an MMO in a way.

Game feels pretty empty besides a hack and slash which it really is.
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Hrmph. I know Blizz wants to give a wide-breath with beta keys, but how are so many D1/D2 fans left in the dark, and then someone who hasn't played a single one given a key? Not being bitter...ok I'm lying hahaha.
 
With patches we don't have to have perfect games at release date. blizzard wants all of their games to be as perfect as possible.
 
I haven't ever experienced a hiccup in gameplay in the beta, except for when their servers are down and I just simply can't play. Latency shouldn't matter in combat anymore, so no, you don't have to wait for every single click to register. http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/latency-no-longer-a-factor-in-d3-combat It would be nice to have single player mode for the people that can't be online all of the time, but I understand why it's not there.

I haven't really been disappointed with the beta, probably since I take it for what it is, a beta test. If anything, it just makes me want the full game so I can see the rest. As for the people complaining that the beta isn't challenging and that the storyline doesn't go anywhere, did they expect that the beta is the full game? The beta demonstrates the easiest part of the game on the easiest difficulty. It's been stated over and over but apparently still falls on deaf ears. Some of the story has been removed as not to spoil it in the final game (if you want that though, it's probably been datamined.) Those sorts of complaints are akin to someone who picks easy, beats the game, and then complains that it was too easy. Gotta remember that there is Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties after that. If you can blow through Inferno while sleeping at your keyboard, I'd say your complaint is valid. Problem is, that's not available right now.

Blizzard makes stupid decisions sometimes. Sometimes they stick with them, sometimes they fix them. I thought SC2 was good, but just good.. I think that's more of me not being as into RTS anymore though. What irritates me is when people judge a game during a beta when there's plenty more in the full version. It's just ignorant. At least wait till the whole thing is out to bitch about it.

In terms of WoW.. I think a lot of people remember vanilla fondly with rose colored glasses. I remember a lot of grinding, having the server crash all the time, 1000 people queues so I'd have to wait an hour before I could even log in... People complain that the game is dumbed down and too easy now, but they've never set foot into a heroic raid. They complain about optional buffs that make things easier, and then use said optional buffs themselves. I don't think streamlining a game and making everything more accessible to a larger playerbase is a bad thing at all. I'd gladly take the game in its current condition over vanilla any day.
 
Lavacon said:
Over the weekend, Blizzard’s Senior Producer for Diablo III (none other than Steve Parker) announced that he is no longer working on the Diablo III project, and that he is no longer with Blizzard. With a simple, “I’m no longer working at Blizzard or on D3,” Parker went on to say, “I’ve had a great five years there, and those guys are going to kill it with Diablo 3.”
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Kill what exactly? Hmmmm??
 
Redshirt #24 said:
So for those of us who got suckered into, er, paid for the WoW Annual Pass to get this, I'm guessing this doesn't change anything if D3 makes Q2...maybe even Q3. But what if it slips the year entirely?
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Since we already have the game, it's sitting in our b.net account... and it's not just a rental that goes away after the 12 months is up, it won't make a difference if it passes the full year or not. Where it will hurt if it goes that long is I was planning on using the collectors edition 4 months credit to cut my 12 months down to 8 :p
 
Lavacon said:
Over the weekend, Blizzard’s Senior Producer for Diablo III (none other than Steve Parker) announced that he is no longer working on the Diablo III project, and that he is no longer with Blizzard. With a simple, “I’m no longer working at Blizzard or on D3,” Parker went on to say, “I’ve had a great five years there, and those guys are going to kill it with Diablo 3.”
Click to expand...

Maybe they told him to... you know... actually "produce" something or gtfo... so he left.

Paraphrased: "I've had a great 5 years there, but now they actually expect me to work... they killed it."
 
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