Blizzard Has a Version of Diablo 3 Running On Consoles 147
skade88 points out comments from Blizzard exec Rob Pardo, who says the company has internal builds of Diablo 3 running on consoles. It's been known for months that Blizzard has been working on something like this, but now we have the first indication of how far along the project is. Pardo said, "We're still kind of exploring it. We've got builds up and running on it. We're hoping to get it far enough along where we can make it an official project, but we're not quite ready to release stuff about it. But it's looking pretty cool." According to lead designer Jay Wilson, we'll start seeing information on "the next big Diablo thing" next year, which probably refers to an expansion.
lol (Score:1, Insightful)
That is all.
Re:lol (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not diablo 3.
It's Isometric world of farmcraft and it really shows the generic cash addicted shit producers that blizzard have become.
Play path of exile if you want a continuation of the awsome that was diablo 2.
Re:lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Play path of exile if you want a continuation of the awsome that was diablo 2.
Or Torchlight 2
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Play path of exile if you want a continuation of the awsome that was diablo 2.
Or Torchlight 2
Nethack FTW!
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Nehack isn't far off, really. Diabo 1 started as a "rogue-like with graphics". Somewhere along the way they discovered that it was a lot of fun to make it realtime, not turn-by-turn, but it still had a lot of the same feel - especially when everything moved at exactly the same speed, so you'd see very familiar patterns when a room would aggro on you.
Diablo 2 divereged far from rogue/nethack, by the simple addition of variable monster speeds, and monster AI. I remember that was my favorite thing when D2 w
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(e.g., running in panic when you killed their neighbor) - I had never seen that before.
That was already present in Diablo 1, although limited to certain monsters. Fallen?
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Yep, it was Fallen and similar creatures....at least in the PSone version.
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No, Adventure or Colossal Cave. On your father's old DEC PDP-8. Which you use for heating.
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The Sacred series isn't bad, either.
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you know that "blizzard" encompasses multiple studios with multiple dev teams, yes?
you know that companies are in business to make money, right? That they don't exist just to give you stuff?
Diablo 3 is a decent game, and continues the story well. It only really has two big problems: no shipping pvp, and replayability. (if you say story, you can frag yourself; people bitched about D2's story too...how quickly people forget what they hated and label it "classic" down the road...soon the same will happen to D3
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"Titan Quest - Immortal Throne" also feels more like a true spiritual successor to "Diablo II" as well. No "online only" requirement in single player, auction house, RIDICULOUS difficulty curve, or other needless mechanic that degrades the overall experience. I will have to check out "Path of Exile" sometime as well. I stopped playing Diablo III once I got to the "hell" difficulty and never went back again.
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We wanted continuation of the Diablo series, instead we got World of Warcraft shoe-horned into the Diablo franchise.
Not anymore than the Blizzard Entertainment scrotum slurping apologists like yourself.
Re:lol (Score:5, Informative)
Dawww look at the little Blizzard "fan" who wasn't around before World of Warcraft. (They've released a majority of their games on both PC and Console...)
I think you missed the point that D3 is a total joke in the first place...
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most of the hard stuff is being done server-side with D3.
In my opinion, that stuff would be easier to port than graphics, controls, etc.
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Starcraft? Diablo II? Only for PC, AFAIK.
WarCraft II was available for some consoles. And it sucked enormously!
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My first Starcraft experience was on the N64.
You can form 18 unit groups in that version! :D
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I'd mod this informative if I hadn't already commented as GP. :)
Really Blizzard? REALLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
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PVP and other "core" features will be in the first major planned expansion. The next expansion will have new maps from previous Diablo games to fight on, and an all new PVP mode!
Wait, this is Blizzard? I thought it was EA....
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Activision, EA, same thing really.
Call of Diablo will be the next expansion.
Company name is Activision Blizzard Inc. (Score:1)
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Don't be an idiot. The people porting it to console likely don't even possess the same skillset as the people working on PvP (one is low level hardware programming and optimization and control design, the other is level design, game design, and scripting). Also, PvP in Diablo games was always tacked on and terrible. At best it just enabled griefing for 14-year-old assholes.
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The people porting it to console likely don't even possess the same skillset as the people working on PvP
So? If they weren't working on porting to consoles, they could have hired more PvP-oriented devs and less console-oriented ones. If there were no opportunity costs in porting, every game would be released for every platform.
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Hiring more PvP-oriented devs may not help anyway.
Brooks's Law [wikipedia.org]
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Brooke's law speaks to the futility of jamming people onto a project late in the game. It has no applicability at all when it comes for hiring people at the start of a project.
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You haven't thought about your viewpoint from a financial perspective much have you?
Well, no, because I wasn't responding to a financial question. The GP was saying that spending time one consoles had no opportunity cost, when it came to developing PvP. That's false.
Whether it's overall a financial win for the company, or whether - over the longterm - both features can be developed more efficiently by doing both is irrelevant to the GPs point and my argument. Assuming limited resources, any feature developed comes at the expense of other features - even if they require different skills.
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Which only goes to reinforce my point - there is a relationship between investments in feature A and feature B. Whether it's positive like you suggest (feature A produces enough money to then produce feature B) or negative like I suggest (cost of feature A precludes timely completion of feature B), the two are not completely distinct like the GP suggested. Also note that it's possible that we're both correct - feature A produces money used to create feature B, but feature B's release was still delayed by th
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Adding core functionality costs money.
Porting to console generates money.
Given the current state of diablo, it's not terribly surprising which they opted for. If you do ever get that core functionality, expect it to be bundled in the first payed Expansion Pack. Hell, it might be the entire XPac. PvP now on sale for $50... you can pay with your Real-Money AH proceeds, from which we already pilfered 15%. Also expect the XPac to include items 1% better than everything currently in existence, just to start
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Adding core functionality costs money but would also generate revenue if the features they added are the features players quit the game over.
How? Those people already bought the game. Perhaps if those people were also buying things on the Auction House, but I would imagine anyone who cares that much about Diablo PvP wouldn't be that type.
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I wonder how PvP could work.
A lvl 60 character has around 50-60k hitpoints (roughly).
I imagine my Barb...boosted to the brim by gear and several war crier... *hit*....you are dead....*hit* you are dead again.
I mean come on. 300-500k damage on critical hit is not that difficult.
Or even better : the demon hunter....I sense an enemy....2 miles far off....*zing* you are dead....of he spawned again....only 1 mile far off...*zing* dead again.
Seriously. I have no idea how PvP could work in D3
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Maybe they'll let you pay a dollar to auto-win?
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Seriously. I have no idea how PvP could work in D3
PvP damage scaling.
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*hit*....you are dead....*hit* you are dead again.
Remember, this is how Blizzard perceives difficulty. It'll be like playing unpatched Inferno all over again!
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Protip: A corporation typically comprises more than one person, and can therefore do more than one thing at a time.
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Pendant: Most corporations in the US actually only have one employee.
*The more you know*
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Lack of PvP is not a deficency.
It keeps the screaming whiney kiddos affected by the "I have a bigger e-peen than you, faggot" syndrome away, directly rerouting them to other games.
Heck, the more I think about it the more I appreciate it.
Other than that yes, game has flaws. Even important ones.
And I don't think porting to consoles will solve them.
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Lack of PvP is not a deficency.
It keeps the screaming whiney kiddos affected by the "I have a bigger e-peen than you, faggot" syndrome away, directly rerouting them to other games.
Heck, the more I think about it the more I appreciate it.
Indeed. PvP is usually a bigger deficiency than the lack of it, because it's almost always implemented in a completely broken way - flavors of the month, overpowered classes, skills, weapons, et cetera. It gets even worse in MMO/RPG-type games, because the very nature of PvP means it affects PvE and vice versa. You cannot balance combat between players and combat between NPCs against each other. It does not work; it has never worked; it never will work.
'sides, most 'l33t' PvPers are stone cold bitche
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Yes, it's a Diablo deficiency.
The fact that you don't know how to filter users is your deficiency.
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You don't like PvP? Don't participate.
In past Diablo games is that that choice was not left up to you, it was left up to the other players in the same game as you. I once heard someone lament there should be a force PvE option similar to the force PvP button because "if the griefers can force me to play their game I should be able to force them to play mine."
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3 words: multiple dev teams.
its not like they focus everyone on only one task.
one group of people can work on ports (in fact, probably one group per targeted console).
one group can work on pvp.
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It will be in your stocking right next to a copy of Half-Life 2, Episode 3.
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Because it would cost more to port then the number of people who would be added becasue they use linux.
They aren't stubborn morons. Calling people stubborn morons becasue linux isn't in their business interests is being a stubborn moron.
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I don't know about the lateste couple of games, but older games were C, C++ and OpenGL, o there wouldn't be much issue porting them to linux. Heck, they've even made OS X ports for some of them, so porting to *nix shouldn't be too much work.
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Getting steam on linux doesnt get the games to magically work on linux. "Just porting" might be kind of a big expense for the return theyre likely to get.
The game still has its flaws (Score:1)
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Have you played since 1.06? All the work has basically been done. It's pretty awesome right now.
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One wonders what Blizzard's excuse is for this. It's not like they're some fly-by-night studio that's under distributor deadlines to "get this out by Christmas or you're all fired." They have the time and the money for development to "take as long as it takes." Instead, they're playing the exact same "release now, patch later" game everyone else does.
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Most likely they actually thought it was a good game. Internal feedback and a beta test aren't the same thing as what happens when millions of people hit it release and get pissed off. I mean it's not like the game was lacking in terms of polish, it's just that what they had wasn't all that fun.
Time doesn't always give you a better product, just look at Duke Nukem Forever.
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Do not speak of DNF again.
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Hey, I really liked DNF! I don't know here all the had comes from: it was a simple corridor shooter with 3-breated aliens. What else did you expect? Admittedly, it missed its chance to be the first "and you drive monster trucks" game, but hey, monster trucks.
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They should have seen it coming, becasue many people told them it would happen. No hind site here, they were specifically told about these issue.
I gave blizzard a lot of cred, and they chewed it all away with Star Craft II and Diablo 3.
They had been one of the few studios I would buy product from immediately and pay full first release price.
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That's becasue the beta system is broken. Not just at Blizzard but in general.
Now it's full of fanbois who wont say anything bad becasue, gosh THEIR thing they are a fan of is always perfect. Until it's patched, then its even more perfecter~
I know many beta tester who either don't post issues they find, or post the issue but still rate the game high.
AS I, and many others, predicted. Alpha has become beta, beta has become a circle jerk, and the 'gold' is beta version 2. Release is the second patch.
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Meh, anybody who expected a bugfree, perfectly balanced game at launch never played a Diablo game, Diablo 1, Diablo Hellfire, Diablo 2, and Diablo 2 LOD were all bugridden and unbalanced at release and for the first few patches. Heck the first three never really achieved any sense of balance and LOD only kindof got there.
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Because Diablo 2 was perfect in all its glory immediately upon release and they didnt release bug fix and balance patches years after release....
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You have me tempted to fire it up again...but it's hard to muster the interest at this point. It's not that I disliked the game (in fact, I loved it at first), it's that it just got very boring very quickly, to the point where I had almost no energy to do anything after beating normal mode.
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110% agreed. Sadly, it's pretty obvious that the game before patch was basically meant to milk people on the Auction House.
The game-as-shipped had massive "stealth nerfs" to everything that wasn't raw damage/defense at higher difficulties (this was later documented in their online manual, but the in-game tooltips still falsely displayed the same values regardless of difficulty). In other words, the only way to succeed was to have the best gear... which unlike play skill, could be purchased on the Auction Ho
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I love the game ever since Patch 1.0.5 addressed the stealth nerfs, but at this point Guild Wars 2 has stolen me away and I've pretty much forgotten it. It was a good 40 hours of having a blast at lower difficulties, though, so I can't say it wasn't money well spent...
Have you only just gotten into Guild Wars 2 or something? I ask genuinely, because ANet really, really appears to be trying to do the exact same thing. There's some sort of divergent development disorder going on, where the content team makes changes to make the game more grindy (which is fine with me, I actually like grind), while the "balance" team makes constant nerfs, stealth and overt, to anything that people are grinding in the pursuit of the first set!
It might be cynical to believe that they're doing
Re:The game still has its flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
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The infernal machine is annoying. Key drop rate is abysmal. 100 runs, one key. And you need 9 of them.... (3x3) Seriously. The infernal machine is not worth it. You need to make hundreds of runs for the nine keys + one plan, buy a ring plan for 2 million gold, kill three times 2 uber-boss monsters at the same time.p>
You do realise that the drop chance depends on the monster level? At level 5 the chance for the key to drop is 50%. Without setting a monster level, the chance is only 5%, so of course that will take ages unless you are blessed by the rng gods....
And for what? One shitty ring that can't be sold with stats that are laughable, terrible, to be polite?
The important stat of that ring is the 35% experience bonus, which you dont get on any other ring (except one, but it's low level with terrible stats). So with the hellfire ring, you will gain paragon levels much quicker. Plus there really is a chance that it roll
Re:The game still has its flaws (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't confuse bad interface design with some grand plan.
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Don't confuse bad interface design with some grand plan.
Why not? That's what Blizzard seem to be doing...
End goal: (Score:3)
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Maybe the worst decision they made was to make the auction available to just anyone. It totally bypasses the
Will not buy (Score:1)
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Given that their password system is case insensitive [techrepublic.com] that seems rather unlikely... they also haven't had major issues with their login servers since release.
If you paid any attention, the need for a Battle.Net account and the DRM was pretty obvious - they didn't exactly hide it, and there was a lot of outcry over it.
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So, your problem with their DRM is that you can't remember a reasonably secure password?
Damn, that same DRM is crippling gmail too!
My bank has the same DRM! And, good god, so does Amazon! And .. and ...
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My bank has the same DRM! And, good god, so does Amazon! And .. and ...
...and I have all those important passwords unique and memorized. I don't want to have to memorize a totally new one for a game I play once in a blue moon.
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all of the applications you have installed on your box should require a unique password
Who said it had to be unique? Most of us have a junk password that we use for things we don't really care about.
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maybe you should become familiar with the windows update process before talking about it?
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Yay? (Score:2)
So at some point in the future console users might get to share in the joy that is the most disappointing release of 2012. And the RMAH scam, but only after paying Microsoft for an Xbox Live subscription for the privilege, of course.
Honestly, Diablo 3 just wasn't that good of a game. It'd have made a lot more sense either without the AH at all, or without the $60 pricetag and with the AH as the monetization tool.
Was fun for a minute... (Score:1)
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They're used to paying $60 for no replay value (Score:1)
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20 hours? That's long for a modern console game.
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20 hours is what I call "a good short" 40 hours is more the average.....some games can easily hit hundreds, but they tend to be RPG's. Time is finite, so for adult gamers with jobs...shorter is better if they want to play more than one game.
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Console games have years of gameplay becasue they're designed primarily to be fun rather than a timesink/content consumption mechanism like a PC game. Consider how much gameplay people got out of Mario or Sonic, compared to a PC game where you just watch cut-scenes for hour after hour until you get bored and uninstall.
It's coming (Score:1)
There was always speculation that Blizzard planned this from the get go, and it shows through the inherent design decisions made. The extremely limited and streamlined skill system (tailored almost perfectly for a buttoned controller), the complete focus on having 4 players (controllers) centred on the action, the auto way pointing and lack of free roaming, the console style matchmaking system, and don't forget that practically every console user has their credit card details attached to their consoles thes
That's big news! (Score:2)
I heard that both people still playing Diablo 3 are *thrilled*.
WHERE IS MY PVP??? (Score:2)
Great, D3 for consoles. (Score:2)
Diablo for the Unix console, excellent (Score:2)
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It's only going to piss off people whose money Blizzard already got.
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The antidote to stupidity is not more stupidity.