Diablo III is in a much better place than it was at launch. Between server issues, the polarising real-money auction house and a loot system hell-bent on trolling players, the third instalment in Blizzard’s action RPG series wasn’t what the world asked for. At this year’s GDC, game director Josh Mosqueira gave a brutally honest presentation on Diablo III‘s fall, and eventually return, to grace.
Nick Wilson at PCGamesN has done an excellent job of pulling out the highlights, if you’re not up for watching the whole talk, which rocks in at around an hour. The tidbits include Mosqueira’s own disappoint with the game’s original incarnation and the loot system’s unappreciated sense of humour:
“A true story: on my live character — my awesome Barbarian — it took me 104 hours before I found my first legendary. And do you know what it was? A quiver. Something was wrong there, and I remember that moment — what happened?”
We know now that the development team overhauled the drop system with “Loot 2.0”, a desperately needed change that encouraged players to once again fight the creatures of evil, rather than declare war on Bunnings’ gardening aisle:
“The game was so hard,” said Josh, “that instead of being these epic heroes, fighting against the forces of darkness, you were a Barbarian smashing pots. That’s right — the best heroes in Sanctuary were farming terra-cotta, because it was more efficient and less difficult than fighting monsters.”
While Diablo IV is probably many, many years away, it’s good to know Blizzard has learnt some important lessons with the third game. It won’t make the same mistakes again, will it?
Diablo III’s Road to Redemption with Reaper of Souls – GDC 2015 [YouTube, via PCGamesN]
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8 responses to “Original Diablo III Encouraged Players To Farm Pottery, Blizzard Admits”
Insert Link joke here…
Yeah, you’d think they’d learn lessons for Diablo 4, you really would. Except that, well, they had almost everything right in Diablo II and didn’t “learn” a thing for the release of Diablo 3. I mean, dumping Brevik and his team was enough of a signal Blizzard didn’t learn a thing. “Hey, people are still playing Diablo II ten years after release, let’s dump the creative team.”
Look at their laughable campaign story lines in SC:II compared to the original. Look at the resurgence of BroodWar in Korea as an esport because of the unexciting and underwhelming nature of SC:II multiplayer.
Look at their hatchet job of a Moba.
I doubt they’ve really learned anything. Start making good games again, with good stories, and people will come back. I just wonder if they actually can. Going down the good old Square-Enix road where games were once instant buys without thought and now every release needs to be questioned.
It was quicker to use the wizard. Lasers everywhere.
Fiiiiiiiiiring my laaaaaaaaaaaasers….
Sorry… I’ll see myself out.
“Don’t cross the streams!” Has been said in many-a-Diablo chat. 😉
i’ve heard several times that diablo 3 is much better now
but i recently tried to play again and there are ZERO people playing vanilla diablo 3 – couldnt find a single person to play with
apparently everyone is playing end game at level 70
but i had stopped playing shortly after launch and never reached max level so now if i want to level up i have to grind away by myself.. no thanks
I made it to 60 with a friend then abandoned it (finished three times normal – hell or whatever). After the story had been done I had little interest.
When I do login he takes his mosf buff character, ramps up the difficulty and has me either wait in town or stay a reasonable distance behind him. You’ll level up insanely quick and the gear you find will actually be worth it for your level.
yeah i had almost finished hell before i stopped playing
lost interest as it just wasnt fun
i played hours and hours of diablo 2, multiple characters through out multiple ladder seasons doing the same thing over and over again and i never really got bored
Yeah, well. We’ll see if they go with always-online like they did for the PC release, instead of an online option, for people who actually ever want to play with others, with an offline option for the rest. Maybe letting people play single-player offline for D4 will mean that the servers actually stay up longer than the average erection.
I disagree that it was hard in the early days, though… there was nothing hard about it, if you actually went to the auction house (not the real money one, that was a storm in a teacup).
I never saw a legendary drop in D3 vanilla for my entire first run through. I barely saw any upgrades at all. It wasn’t difficult, though… until a certain boss which was a gear check, all the trash was laughable. But when I hit the gear check after going twenty levels without a single (I shit you not, not ONE) upgrade, I went to the AH and bought at-level epix for maybe five minutes’ worth of gold-grinding, and then went up until the next gear check without seeing a single upgrade… at which point I went to the AH and bought my way past it again.
It was dismal. Pathetic. The antithesis of what Diablo should be. Tonnes and tonnes of gear and never a single moment of excitement at an upgrade.
The expansion really improved things, but you have to wonder how the game as it was made it out of QA. Especially since Blizzard HAD a reputation for releasing things ‘when they’re done’. Without even bothering to mention the fact that fucking no-one could play it thanks to hammered and crashing authentication servers, launch D3 was not ‘done’.