Despite its controversies, launch issues and silly online restrictions, Diablo III is a wonderful game, deserving of its success. However, pretty much any long-time Diablo player will tell you that it’s missing a spark; that little bit of magic that’s made Diablo II a favourite for over a decade. applying a dash of hindsight, Blizzard has admitted as much – and committed to working to change that.
Blizzard believes it hasn’t quite done enough to keep players engaged post the credits – saying it’ll do all it can to foster a long-term endgame. It’s a wonderful bit of admission from a developer; it’s unusual for anybody to admit their work isn’t on par with expectations. On the other hand, the game’s been in development for what seems a lifetime – and there’s really no reason it shouldn’t be up to scratch.
We recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. There are still tons of people playing every day and week, and playing a lot, but eventually they’re going to run out of stuff to do (if they haven’t already).
“Killing enemies and finding items is a lot of fun, and we think we have a lot of the systems surrounding that right, or at least on the right path with a few corrections and tweaks. But honestly Diablo III is not World of Warcraft. We aren’t going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it’s not there right now.
There’s a new patch coming soon ((and another, later – implementing PvP) that’ll steer the game towards being complete – but Blizzards ideas for fixing the end-game will only really come in to place quite a bit later.
“We’re working toward 1.0.4, which we’re really trying to pack with as many fixes and changes we can to help you guys out (and we’ll have a bunch of articles posted with all the details as we get closer), and we’re of course working on 1.1 with PvP arenas. I think both those patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they’re not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game. We have some ideas for progression systems, but honestly it’s a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself still a ways out.
“Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but we believed pre-release that the item hunt would be far more sustainable, and would work to be a proper end-game for quite a while. That didn’t turn out to be true, and we recognize that.”
How many of you are still playing? Have you all maxxed out your Witchdoctors and Barbarians, tackled Hell on its highest difficulty….and moved on to something else? Or is the lure of loot still holding you by the genitalia?
Last Updated: July 5, 2012
