Part 3: It's time to talk about Diablo III's story

SPOILERS ahead, obviously.

First, a quick recap: Having first praised the parts of Diablo III that worked, we then went on to discuss D3's genre, and established that it's definitely an RPG, and not an action game.

It's not very effective as an RPG, though, having neutered or entirely removed most or all of Diablo II's genre-defining RPG systems, while failing to replace them with robust collision-detection-based action mechanics. But there are plenty of RPGs that don't have especially strong RPG mechanics, or any action mechanics to speak of. Many of them have still come to be very highly-regarded as examples of the genre, in spite of those shortcomings.

How? Simple: by telling a compelling story.

Sure, ARPGs are generally not story-heavy, and their largely linear plots don't normally lend themselves to replayability for the story alone, but a good story can carry you a good long way into a game, compensating for shortcomings in other areas until you become so immersed in the game that the flaws cease to matter. And the Diablo series has a history of solid lore and story elements. The original Diablo game was chock-full of lore, otherwise known as environmental story-telling; Diablo II's story is generally regarded as one of the best ever for the genre.

This should have been an easy win for Diablo III. Instead, it became one of the game's most-hated elements. Players hated the story so much that Blizzard added an entire play mode that allows them to avoid engaging with the story entirely. And it's weird, because the basic beats of the story, as they appear in the game's gorgeous cinematics, are basically fine. Seriously, they are.

So, what in the burning hells happened? How did Diablo III turn a basically solid story outline into the game's third-most-hated element?

The state of Diablo

If there's one good thing to come out of Blizzard's Diablo Immortal fiasco, it's been the piercing of the near-mythical mystique of Blizzard themselves. People have been believing the hype for a long time now, where Blizzard are concerned, in part because Blizzard hadn't shown many signs of vulnerability, or of fallibility, for years. But no longer: Blizzard have gone from a company that seemingly could do no wrong, to a company that may well be as out-of-touch and clueless as any other AAA publisher, and becoming more so with each passing day, all in almost no time at all.

It's a stunning fall from grace, one that nobody saw coming, and it was accompanied by a stunning drop in the company's share price. With the mystique evaporating, people are starting to ask questions. Actual reporting is starting to happen; reporters are starting to dig beneath the Blizzard veneer. And the results are turning out to be rather surprising, to say the least, even for someone like me, who has know since Diablo III's release in 2012 that Blizzard were rather more clueless and out-of-touch than everyone believed.

Case in point: a sweeping and detailed piece on the past, present, and future of Diablo, penned by Jason Schreier, which involved interviewing "11 current and former Blizzard employees, all of whom spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to press." That's right, folks, it's actual, investigative journalism, finally being brought to bear on one of the sacred cows of the video gaming industry.

So, what did Schreier find? Well, long story short, it's looking like Jonathan Rogers' speculation, that Blizzard hadn't announced D4 yet simply because its cancellation is still a very real possibility, may be closer to the mark than anyone knew.

I'll buy that for a dollar (also, more shade)

With everybody (in the games media, at least) basically assuming that Diablo IV must be in development at Activision Blizzard, and basically telling Diablo fans to just cool it, already, because the game they wanted had to be coming, it's interesting to read this alternate take on why Blizzard may not have announced D4 at BlizzCon, from Kotaku:

In the latest episode of the Front Seat Cast podcast, which is put together by developers at Grinding Gear Games, GGG co-founder Jonathan Rogers said the Path of Exile studio was fully expecting Diablo 4 to drop. Rogers was also surprised at the degree to which the Diablo Immortal outrage had spread into the real-world.

But the theory posited by Rogers from 37 minutes in, which referenced some of our previous reporting on Diablo 4, is that Blizzard hasn't officially announced the game - because they may still be in the position where they need the ability to cancel the project outright, as they did with Titan.

"The thing that I find interesting about it ... why would you not just say you're working on Diablo 4? The only reason I can see is that they actually don't want to commit to making it," Rogers said. "And that implies that they're not sure if they're ever going to release it. But the thing is, you hear that and you're like, 'That can't be true, that cannot be true.' But I guess, you know, that sort of implies a certain amount of turmoil in it's development."

Rogers added that he hasn't heard anything personally to verify that, but he noted - as did the other Grinding Gears employees on the podcast - that he'd seen multiple high-level job postings for the Diablo team. "It kind of makes you just wonder, could there be so much turmoil there that they don't want to even announce they're working on it in case it gets cancelled?"

"The other thing that I also realise is that even if that's not the case, imagine if they announced they're working on D4 this Blizzcon. And then next Blizzcon comes along and they didn't have a proper announcement. That would be a really bad thing. So the implication then there, are they maybe not sure they could reach an announcement a year from now? And that would be the concern that would lead to them not wanting to announcement? Because otherwise you would think they would just say, we're working on this."

Now, Rogers' speculation is just that: pure speculation. He's not tapped in to Blizzard, and doesn't know anything more about D4's development than does anyone else who's commented on it since the disastrous Diablo Immortal announcement. But I've been reading rumours about D4's development being troubled for a while now, with several reports claiming that Blizzard have completely changed direction more than once with the title, and still don't have a firm handle on exactly what a Diablo title should, or could, look like.

Oh, the shade...

It looks like Grinding Gear Games aren't quite done throwing shade in Diablo's direction. After following Activision Blizzard's disastrous Diablo Immortal reveal by announcing that their own Path of Exile would be coming to PS4 in time for the holidays, GGG have now responded to an influx of disillusioned Diablo fans with a post about all the resources that exist for new PoE players.

The post hypes the game's built-in tutorial system (the lack of which was a frequent criticism of Diablo loyalists in the past), and links to a number of the better resources that PoE's player community have compiled to help ease new players into the game, but the coldest cuts of all come with GGG matter-of-factly describing their update cycle, and the frequency with which they engage with their player community.

It's also worth mentioning that we have a 13-week development cycle with significant expansions released four times a year. Each expansion usually contains a new challenge league and many general improvements including new skill gems, unique items, in-game features, balance changes, reworks of existing skills and more! The release of the next expansion is scheduled for the December 7 (US/EU Time). We'll announce its details next week!

In the meantime, we post news five days a week (on New Zealand weekdays) to keep you updated on what's happening in development and in the community!

Would you like some ointment for that burn?

This stands in stark contrast to Activision Blizzard, who not only haven't released any content for Diablo in years, but who still haven't announced any for their long-suffering PC-playing fan base, and whose only response after a week of Diablo Immortal blow-back was a weaksauce, corporate-speak boilerplate, "we hear you." GGG's welcome to new players isn't quite the sick burn that the Warhammer: Chaosbane team inflicted, but then it doesn't have to be: Path of Exile is the industry leader in ARPG right now, and can afford to take a higher road while still making their point.

This is what I meant, when I wrote yesterday that Activision Blizzard's response to their Diablo fans wasn't good enough. I didn't just mean that Diablo fans deserved better, although they certainly do. I also meant that Blizzard was creating all sorts of opportunities for their competitors, while doing nothing to restore the fortunes of a Diablo franchise which could fairly be described as beleaguered, if not completely moribund, by this point.

Blizzard don't just need to do better for the sake of their fans; the need to do better for the sake of their own future.

Not good enough

Blizzard have finally taken the time to respond to their Diablo fans directly, and have apparently chosen to do so in the most minimal and ineffective way possible.

That’s it. After years of disappointment, and days of full-blown fan rebellion, Blizzard have sent their community manager out to say, "We hear you," and nothing else of substance. No apology, no news about future PC content for the franchise, no word from the Diablo developers, or anyone in a leadership position at Blizzard, just PR pablum with zero substance. It’s literally EA’s messaging playbook.

Nevalistis is popular enough on the forums that a few of Blizzard's Diablo fans have responded to this nothingburger with reflexive gratitude, but others aren't nearly as grateful.

Diablo Immortal just became a lot less interesting

One of the more controversial decisions that Blizzard made with Diablo III was its persistent online connection. In a game that was pretty clearly not an MMO, and a genre for which solo PvE is the core gameplay experience, the decision not to allow PC players to game offline was, and remains, only slightly less unpopular then the ill-fated Auction Houses... and, unlike the AHs, the persistent online verification DRM is still in the game. The later console releases, which are playable offline, cemented fans' opinions on the issue of Always Online, with plenty of folks walking away from D3 entirely over Blizzard's refusal to add an offline mode to the PC version.

And now, with their wildly unpopular Diablo Immortal release, Blizzard seem to be intent on including this same, wildly unpopular feature in their new D3 mobile game, too, adding even more headwinds to a title that's already off to a rough start. As reported by ScreenRant, who really are all over the D:I story:

Realistically, the announcement isn't a shocking one. Many of the biggest mobile games on the market require a constant online connection, although that's often as part of a system design that maximizes the need for microtransactions from players. Diablo Immortal is also being designed with a massively multiplayer development philosophy behind it, which means that the ability to meet up with other players in-game is going to be crucial for experiencing it the way Blizzard intended. Battle.net, Blizzard's online social service for those playing the developer's games, is also a likely factor in the decision to make Diablo Immortal require a constant internet connection.

That information could be unfortunate for a company looking to sway the community's opinion on its game pre-launch, however. A lot of fan backlash is over a desire for a Diablo 4 or a remastered edition of a previous iteration, and now Diablo Immortal looks like it's going to be unplayable in situations mobile games are most appealing, like on a long commute. If fans are most often going to be playing Diablo Immortal from the comfort of their own home, that will fuel the argument that a sequel would have been a better decision for Blizzard after all.

Back at the start of this whole thing, I'd written  that I'd be willing to give the new game a chance, if:

1. it were free to play, 
2. it provided an enjoyable gameplay experience, 
3. it wasn't obnoxiously monetized, and 
4. it could be played offline.

So, we're already down to, at best, three out of the four criteria I'd set as the minimum requirement for me to give D:I basically any of my time. No, I wasn't all that interested in Diablo Immortal to start with, but Blizzard have already managed to make the game 25% less interesting. GG, Blizzard! Well done.

I'm starting to wonder if Blizzard aren't actually taking the piss, here. Is this just an out-of-season April Fool's prank? Or is Blizzard just trying to strip what little meat remains on the bones of their actually-dead Diablo franchise? Because I refuse to believe that they can possibly be so out of touch as to not know how unpopular Always Online was, and still is, with Diablo fans. What are they thinking?

That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. I'd really like to know. Seriously, Blizzard, throw us a fricken' bone, already. And by that, I don't mean more meaningless PR pablum; I mean actual, honest, truth. Even a bad answer would be better at this point than what we have, which is nothing.

UPDATED:

I'd actually missed this when it happened, as reported by Kotaku AU:

Diablo has always been a franchise about battling back the seventh circle of hell, sometimes in a viscerally bloody fashion. It's a mature franchise. Diablo Immortal, on the other hand, will be a game Blizzard hopes to target at all ages.

At a group press conference uploaded by 리뷰빌런 하텍 from Blizzcon, Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham and Diablo Immortal principal designer Wyatt Cheng took different questions about mobile gaming, and Immortal more generally.
When asked about the direction of Immortal, Adham said that bringing Diablo to mobiles would help Blizzard expand the franchise - and also the demographic of the average Diablo fan.

"It gives us the opportunity to introduce Diablo to a much broader audience around the world that play games, now many primarily on their phones, and in North America a younger audience, many primarily on their phones," Adham said.

And just like that, I'm even less interested in this game. Diablo's disturbing themes and grisly visuals are really the only remaining element that they hadn't entirely nerfed into the ground with Diablo III; removing even those watered-down tonal and thematic elements in order to "all ages" the game basically means that it will bear even less resemblance to the rest of the entries in the Diablo series. And it's not being done for any artistic or creative reason; this is purely about selling an M-rated series to an E-rated audience, because they can make more money that way.

If Blizzard were hoping to convince Diablo fans that Immortal was anything other than a cynical cash grab, then this news will probably killed that possibility for good. The all-ages crowd that they're appealing to, on the other hand, are also even less likely to be interested in Immortal now, since the illicit thrill of playing the pitch-dark game on their mobile phones was basically the entire sales pitch for that audience, too.

GG, Blizzard. The only other thing that could be done to ensure that Diablo Immortal is dead on arrival, that hasn't already been done, would be to charge up-front for the game, while also adding an oppressive monetization scheme. Considering just how incompetently Blizzard have handled Immortal so far, I look forward to that being the next news about this game.

Not so Immortal, after all?

I have a feeling that I'll be covering this story all week, as Blizzard continue to let their self-inflicted Diablo Immortal wounds fester, rather than doing the only thing they really can to stop the bleeding. Just apologize, guys. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

In the meantime, though we continue to get half-assed efforts at backlash mitigation, like having the entire Blizzard Diablo team revert their social media avatars from the shiny new D:I version to the less controversial D3 logo. Yes, really.

Finally getting it

In my last post about Diablo Immortal, I linked twice to Forbes: First, as an example of clueless, out-of-touch media coverage that was more interested in scoring easy points against gamer entitlement and misogyny, neither of which were the source of the DI backlash; and second, as an example of that same clueless, out-of-touch media finally trying to get a clue, but still failing to do so. Both of those pieces, by they by, were penned by the same author: Paul Tassi, Senior Contributor.

Today, I can add the third link to the media evolution on this story: one of Forbes' other writers, finally getting it. Ladies, gentlemen, others, I give you Erik Kain, likewise Senior Contributor:

Blizzard announced a new mobile game during BlizzCon this year. Diablo Immortal was the big reveal during the publisher’s keystone event and gamers were not happy.

The reveal was not met with applause and excitement. Rather, a collective sigh filled the room, followed by stunned disbelief and then, later, roiling anger.

Gamers were so unhappy that one even asked the studio if this was a delayed April Fool’s joke: A question many deemed inappropriate but which I find not only fitting but quite funny. After all, Blizzard is either joking or completely out of touch to announce this game in this fashion in front of this audience.

It’s not that a mobile Diablo game is a bad idea in and of itself. It’s the combination of many factors conspiring to upset Blizzard’s most ardent fan base. Let’s look at the biggest missteps, overreactions and other assorted problems with this whole fiasco.

Finally. They finally got there. Well done, Forbes; it's nice to see the gaming media remember that actual gamers really do still matter, when it comes to covering the video gaming industry.

The five-point list that Kain came up with shouldn't surprise anyone, either.

Diablo II's producer piles on

I'll admit it... I'm experiencing more than a touch of schadenfreude over Blizzard's Diablo Immortal faceplant. Coming, as it did, after years of arrogant tone-deafness, starting with "aren't you thankful," continuing on through "hazy recollections," "rose-tinted glasses," and "fuck that loser," and culminating with "do you guys not have phones," I'm genuinely enjoying the spectacle of Blizzard's long-overdue uppance finally coming. This is the same dev team, remember, who honestly believed that Blizzard North made the wrong call in not burdening Diablo II players with persistent online verification DRM... in an era of dial-up internet.

I vividly remember when that last one happened, of course, since the news dropped during the 2.0 PTR, and was the talk of the D3 official forums when the news broke. I even commented on it, on those same forums, at the time:

It's very rare for people to give you a second chance to make a first impression. It's even more rare for them to give you a third. Blizzard, you need to stop expecting that customers will keep paying for whatever crap you choose to dole out. Happy, engaged players will tolerate a lot from you, but that's not what you have right now in D3, where something like 90% of your paying customers have already quit once.

That was in 2013. The situation for Diablo fans has not significantly improved since then; the discontent of Diablo fans has deep, deep roots.

Diablo Immortal fallout keeps on falling...

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." So goes the famous quote by George Santayana. I doubt that he was thinking about Diablo Immortal at the time, but his quote applies better to this shit-show than one might expect. So cast your mind back now, to those hazy memories of Diablo III, circa May of 2013.

Blizzard had just release patch 1.08, with the intention of adding co-op play incentives to a game in which mutliplayer, to quote Wyatt Cheng, "felt mostly like a waste of time." But 1.08 didn't just lard D3 with drop rate bonuses for group play; no, no, Blizzard really went above and beyond for this content patch. As a bonus, they included a gold-duping bug which collapsed the Auction House economy completely.

Remember, at this point in D3's development, items were mostly shit, and item drop rates were abysmal. The only place to find decent gear for any character was on the Auction House... where decent gear was suddenly priced out of reach, and inferior gear didn't sell at all, making it impossible to raise the funds necessary to gear up in a market that was suddenly experiencing runaway inflation. Players abandoned D3 en masse, arguing that the game had become unplayable... ironically, as it turns out, because cratering player traffic on servers improved the game's performance immeasurably.

It was in this climate that Blizzard chose to announce that D3's console port, the one that they'd previously sworn they weren't even planning to make, would be released in the fall. And it looked good; it had a smart-drop system for loot which increased the chances of finding halfway decent gear in-game, and a host of other features that PC players had been begging Blizzard to add to D3 basically since the beta. And so those PC players, seeing that Blizzard had obviously done the development work on those features, asked when the PC version would also be getting them.

The answer? That Blizzard had no plans at this time to add any of the console-specific features to PC. And, by the by, pre-orders for the console version were now open. Sound familiar?

Diablo Immortal... Kripparrian called it perfectly

It was back in January that Octavian Morosan, aka Kripparrian, talked about his prediction for what Blizzard would do next with its Diablo property. His prediction? Mobile. His reasoning was that Path of Exile has beaten Blizzard at the ARPG game so thoroughly that a new Diablo game wouldn't be able to compete on PC, but that mobile offerings in the ARPG genre were sparse enough that a Diablo mobile game could pretty much have the field to themselves.

You'll never guess what Blizzard just announced at Blizzcon. As reported by KotakuAU:

Six years after the launch of Diablo 3, and with the franchise getting the bulk of love on the Blizzcon main stage for the first time in aeons, fans were hopeful for even a tease of a new Diablo.

And Blizzard delivered a mobile game. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was swift.

There's no reason Diablo can't, or won't, offer a substantial experience on the small screen. Dungeon crawlers are one genre that has ported over to mobiles well. Having a single virtual joystick and smaller icons for actions is a pretty common setup for mobile games now: you see it a lot in MOBAs, like Arena of Valor or Vainglory.

But a mobile Diablo was not what fans have been waiting for. So it's not surprising that, at the time of writing, the Diablo Immortal trailer had just under 400 likes, with the dislikes approaching almost 10,000. The cinematic trailer has copped the backlash even harder, with just over 600 likes to around 17,000 dislikes.

Nailed it! Congratulations, Kripparrian, you're a damn oracle.