Reposted from my other blog.
We're now two weeks past the launch of Diablo Immortal (D:I). The white hot outrage which was sparked by that game's monetization is starting to burn itself out; meanwhile, general sentiment about D:I itself, and about the Diablo franchise as a whole, has begun reverting to the mean.
That mean average level of sentiment seems a lot less positive towards the Diablo franchise as a whole than I expected, though, and while D:I has made a pile of cash in its first two weeks, that pile is also smaller than I thought it might be.
What in the Burning Hells is happening?
For context, the global mobile gaming market is larger than the console and PC gaming markets combined, so I was expecting D:I to out-earn Diablo III (D3) in its first week of release, but that isn't happening. Don't get me wrong, the USD $24 million which the game has earned is a big pile of cash, especially considering the that D:I was made on the cheap -- the game used NetEase's Hero engine, which was built for ARPGs, and recycled existing art assets from D3, both of which should have kept development costs very low.
For a little more context, though, recall that D3 sold 3 million copies in preorders alone, at USD $60 each, for USD $180 million in sales. Even if only 25% of that ended up in Blizzard's bank accounts, that's still USD $45 million in preorders; the game sold another 3 million copies in the week after launch, and another 4 million units over the rest of that month. That's USD $600 million in sales in D3's first month alone, and something like $150 million in revenue to Blizzard themselves.
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| I looks like I'm not the only person to notice, either. Thanks, Skill Up! |
D:I is off to a slow start by comparison, and we haven't even adjusted for inflation yet. So while I understand the dismay of long-time fans of the genre, and detractors of the abusive monetization models which have become synonymous with the mobile gaming industry, I'm not panicking just yet. I don't think that D:I has succeeded wildly enough to be game-changing.
For proof of this, just look at the desperation on display around Diablo IV (D4), whose developers are doing desperate damage control in the wake of D:I's PR-disaster rollout. It's too bad that their damage control strategy involves arming everybody with the same carefully lawyered phrase about monetization being "anchored by" cosmetic mtx (microtransactions), which all of them clearly memorized and then recited in interview after interview.
Pro Tip #1:
"Anchored by" does not mean "restricted to," which still leaves all sorts of wiggle room for them to sell player power via mtx by simply claiming that those things are not "anchors." In previous years, this might have worked, but Wyatt Cheng (D:I's director) did us a public service by previewing this very strategy just last week, which seems to have immunized gamers against it. In short, D4's devs are selling hard, but very few people seem to be buying.
Pro Tip #2:
Do not preorder any game, and especially don't preorder Diablo IV. Don't even trust the first reviews which come out on launch day, all of which will be reviews of the pre-release/mtx-free version of the game, and none of which will talk about the final form that the mtx end up taking. This is the Ubisoft play book, which Blizzard will absolutely be running with D4; wait for the mtx to actually be added to the game, and wait for the likes of Josh Strife Hayes to do a deep dive into the mtx structure, and then decide if you want to buy in.
All of this means that I was never going to buy D4 at launch, just on general principles. There's also the wee fact that the last game I bought at launch was D3, which... didn't go well.
But my misgivings about the upcoming release of D4 go beyond Blizzard's previous terrible game launches, or their recent turn to the monetization dark side. No, the biggest reason why I've mostly lost interest in D4 deal with what we know about the shape of D4 itself.
Diablo IV really is a sequel to Diablo III, and not a return to the form of Diablo II.
In terms of its underpinning game mechanics, Diablo III was very poorly designed. That's not to say that there isn't any good in the game, because there is, but everything from its basic mechanics, to its story, to its core gameplay loop were either poorly designed, poorly executed, or unfinished, and while the Reaper of Souls (RoS) expansion did rework every element of the game which dealt with how players deal, heal, or mitigate damage (which, in an ARPG, is basically everything), it really didn't address the game's core design flaws. D3:RoS does feel finished, at least, in a way that the basic game definitely didn't at launch, but it's still only mediocre, and not what I'd consider to be even an average example of the genre.
So imagine how trilled I wasn't to learn that Diablo IV really was doubling down on a significant number of D3's terrible design choices. Yes, they've removed the terrible Primary Stat system, but rather than replace it with something good, they've just elected to not replace it, and now items come with Damage and Defense stats instead. This does have the advantage of being honest (if you're going to design an attribute system, then don't have one in the game just for brand service), but it's still not good.
The game's classes are all recycled from Diablo II (D2), because Blizzard are still desperately pandering to D2 fans in the hope that some of them will stop playing Lost Ark and Path of Exile long enough to at least try D4, but I think that's unlikely. And the Paragon System is back, as if D3 and D:I hadn't done enough yet to sour people on the very concept.
And the visuals are... not great? I mean, the graphics engine has obviously seen an upgrade from D3 and D:I -- models and textures are more detailed, lighting and shadows look better, and every slimy object in sight is moist and glistening in a very satisfying way, but the colour palette is just so.... one note.
This is more pandering, by the way. D2 fans hated the art style of D3, denigrating it as cartoonish and overly-colourful, so D4 has only the most muted colours visible at any given time, except for spell effects. Everything is grey, and brown, and drab, and ugly. Tonally, that might really work for Diablo, and it's possible that the finished game will look better than what we've been shown, but what I've seen so far isn't blowing my hair back.
And even beyond the D3-eqsue mechanics, and drab visuals, and boring class selection, the game play just doesn't look to be pushing the genre forwards. This is the most baffling thing that D4's devs kept saying in their not-E3 interviews: that they were trying to push the ARPG genre forwards, merging it with open world, but I've seen open world games, and D4 doesn't look anything like them.
Link could look around the world, see a mountain in the distance, and then GO THERE, and CLIMB THE MOUNTAIN, but D4's heroes are still looking for the ladder up, and clicking on that widget to trigger a climbing mechanic. That's pretty weaksauce stuff, as open world gaming goes.
So D4 isn't Open World, in the sense of open world, single-player, exploration games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. No, D4 is open world in the manner of World of WarCraft.
D4 is trying to be a hybrid of ARPG and MMO, which is almost always terrible for solo play.
I've written about this subject at more length, as well, but long story short, adding MMO elements to basically any game turns it into an MMO. For lovers of MMO, that might sound great, and the Asmongolds of the world seem to be mostly loving the sound of this, but ARPGs are not MMOs.
The last time we saw server player counts on D2, 90% of people still playing that game were playing solo PvE. Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games has talked in detail about how that very multi-player and PvP focused Forsaken Masters expansion was Path of Exile's (PoE) worst-performing expansion ever, because over 90% of PoE players did not care about these MMO activities at all, and actively rejected being pushed into doing them.
If the beating heart and soul of ARPG is solo PvE, while the beating hear and soul of MMO is fighting alongside and/or against others, then shoe-horning MMO elements into an ARPG is a terrible idea: it forces players who do not want to share their playing time others, which is 90% of your player base, into doing exactly that, which is the very definition of a quit moment. This is why Devilian and Marvel Heroes, both of which were designed this way, flopped so hard that they took down the companies that made them.
Oddly, going in the other direction, i.e. adding ARPG elements (such as the 3/4 top-down isometric view, etc.) to an MMO, actually does work: Lost Ark did exactly that, and it's thriving. But Lost Ark is unapologetically an MMO, and was marketed to fans of MMOs. Diablo, historically, has not been an MMO, and D4's dev team is selling the game, hard, to fans of D2 in particular.
This will not end well. What Blizzard have done is create a game which they're marketed squarely at the nostalgic "90%" fans of traditional ARPGs, and then force those players to share a the game world with the "10%" fans who still play ARPGs but would really prefer to be playing an MMO instead, occasionally slapping them in the face with a gigantic World Boss Event which will 100% kill any solo player that is unlucky enough to be the only player in the area when it spawns, because fuck every last one of you introverts.
Devilian did this... and flopped so hard that its publisher, Trion Worlds, went bankrupt. Marvel Heroes did this, and even with the father of the ARPG genre at the helm, and the Marvel license to print money in its hand, also tripped off the starting line, tried to reboot itself twice, and finally flopped hard enough to put Gazillion Entertainment out of business.
Blizzard could still surprise me.
Honesty compels me to admit that my opinion here might be overly pessimistic.
Maybe
the D4 team really are successfully swimming upstream against the
current of Blizzard leadership's borderline contempt for their
customers. Maybe the mtx really will be limited to cosmetic items only,
with additional expansions via paid DLCs.
Maybe itemization will be good, in spite of its apparent over-simplicity, and picking which items to equip will be a matter of how you want to play, and not just which item increases your Damage and Defense stats the most, with green arrows eliminating all decision-making from the process.
Maybe the skill system will be a meaningful means to build different, unique characters, and not a zero-cost, multiple load-out system in which any character of a class is effectively all characters of that class, and choices are meaningless.
Maybe the game will look better in game than it's looked so far on YouTube. Maybe the story will be good, and party play will be optional, and World Events will scale to the size of your group, with mercenaries available to hire which will pad out your solo-player "group."
Hell, maybe the game will launch finished, which would already be better than Blizzard have managed to do in a while. On that glorious launch day, should it ever come again, I will rejoice along with everyone else.
But I will not be holding my breath, waiting for it to happen.
Prognostication time.
Reposted from my other blog.
We're over a year out, so it's a little early for predictions, but I'm feeling pretty confident in mine, so let's do this.
Diablo IV will launch with a Metascore in the 85% range, regardless of its quality.
(For context, 75% is the level of mediocrity; a Metascore of 50% means that your game is too broken to be playable; a Metascore of under-50% means that you've failed to make anything which could reasonably be called a game at all).
Diablo IV's User Score will be much, much, worse than its Metascore.
Diablo IV will launch with only cosmetic mtx initially, and then add the game-play enhancing mtx a week later, once the Metacritic reviewers have all posted their scores and can't change them anymore.
(This could include, but are not limited to: XP boosters, drop rate boosters, World Boss chance boosters, skins that add directly to player character power, and rift keys/crests/whatever which increase the quantity and rarity of drops.)
Diablo IV will sell less well at launch than Diablo III, and tail off faster.
Diablo IV will compete head-to-head with Lost Ark, which it most resembles, and not with Path of Exile 2, which it doesn't.
Having going head-to-overly-monetized head with Lost Ark, D4 will come out second place in that match-up.
Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games will reveal more about the upcoming Path Of Exile 2 during their next expansion/league launch Twitch stream.
One of the things he will announce is their forecast development schedule, including a tentative release date, and beta test start date.
Path of Exile's beta will start Q1 2023, with PoE2 tentatively scheduled to launch in Q2 of the same year.
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