Diablo 3 Kicks Off Season 13, But Does Anyone Care?
Without any new content or a balance patch, what will bring the Nephalem back to the fight?
Diablo 3 has had a wild run. From a seemingly endless development cycle, to the shaky launch and beyond the exceptional expansion, the game has seen more ups and downs than the back seat of your mom's car. As time marches on, the addictive loot-driven action-RPG loses some luster. Despite this, new hope and excitement has surrounded the start of each of the seasonal competitive ladder resets, but with the kickoff to Season 13, it feels less like a new race and more like the horse fell out of the starting gate and died.
In the absence of a major patch or item rebalance, Season 13 offers returning players a pair of armor cosmetics, a new portrait frame (that looks just like the other 150 frames), and another evil teddy bear. The gifted armor sets that new seasonal characters can receive have also rotated, but offer nothing we haven’t seen before.
Understandably, Blizzard is probably ready to put the project out to pasture. It is a single-purchase product that saw only one major expansion (and one new character expansion later on) and and offers the company no revenue for any new resources invested. It costs money to keep the servers up and running (and by nature of the game’s design, it is unplayable without these servers). Unlike their steady cash cows WoW, Hearthstone, or Overwatch, Diablo offers Blizzard no steady income. In its early years, the game had a real money auction house where Blizzard skimmed something off the top of every transaction, but it was shut down due to player backlash.
It may simply be time to say our goodbyes and begin hope that a new Diablo experience may be on the horizon. It is extremely unlikely that a Diablo 4 would be a one-and-done purchase offering now that Blizzard has proven that microtransactions are a much better return on their investment. A rumored Nintendo Switch port of Diablo 3 may help them wring out a few more bucks from the project, though.
Maybe Blizzcon 2018 will give series fans the treat they’ve been hoping for.
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replyChris Jarrard posted a new article, Diablo 3 Kicks Off Season 13, But Does Anyone Care?
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Not I, I've come to learn that I can no longer get into loot games. The cycle of get better stuff to get better stuff to get better stuff just doesn't interest me anymore.
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D3 is effectively in maintenance mode now. It's still better than what most devs do for their games this long after release, but the fans see it as a blemish on Blizzard's modern reputation of continuing to make real patches for their games forever. Thing is, this expectation is actually quite new - aside from WoW, they didn't start treating all their games as a service until Hearthstone, HotS and Overwatch. D3 is from the old school of Blizzard game design philosophy - put out a good expansion, support it for a while longer then move on. SC2 is similar but it got a small lease on life with co-op commanders, and that game is more competitive in nature anyway so it doesn't need so much new content.
The solution is Diablo 4 being made with a more MMO style of development. Build the game from the ground up with cosmetic purchases and the expectation that it needs to remain fun for many years, which probably will influence their progression systems as well. Most people don't find restarting with Seasons very compelling, they want to keep progressing on one character. And make the content more distinct rather than everything feeling like a reskin of the same Rift gameplay.-
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Saying that it's "been patched" is a stretch, they would come out of nowhere to add an event every few years. Other than that it was largely nothing after 2001. D3 on the other hand got quite a few huge patches spanning three years after RoS. I don't think they'll take the game down in the next decade, they'll probably still do a few small patches at least and put seasons on an auto rotation at some point.
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Here it is, Patch 1.08 from 5/18/2001: http://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Patch_1.08
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Sounds lazy as hell compared to what Path of Exile is putting out in new seasons. BTW, new PoE season coming out in 4 days for anyone who somehow missed it.
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d3 had a bunch of seasons early on with a lot of new content. Its really only been this past few where its dropped off
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Well that's too bad. Every game comes to an end. Here's hoping they do the right thing and either keep the servers up, or send out an update that eliminates the online connection requirement (but would impact anyone wanting to do multiplayer/coop.
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Diablo 3 is more fun, tho
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I've seen some folks on my friends list returning for season 13.
Diablo 3 is the game I keep coming back to in between other games, or when I just want to turn off my brain and grind for a while. I can mentally process my work day while killing endless numbers of demon spawn.
I don't typically play the seasons because I don't like to feel time constrained. I may skip weeks at a time but so far I always come back. -
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You should probably click.
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Also gives Blizz the opportunity to introduce big changes to gear without compromising anyone's enjoyment or creating weird bugs. Maybe they nerf a super powerful set bonus (or drastically change the design) and they don't want players who already farmed that set to have an advantage or disadvantage on climbing the ladder. So they do those changes in a new season, dump all the old characters and their old gear into a non-ladder bucket and start fresh.
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Basically a way of periodically resetting everything for players that like to keep going through the same content over and over again.
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Diablo is all about progression, and because character power has a fairly finite limit (aside from farming Paragon levels), the longer you play the more and more difficult it is to find meaningful gear upgrades. Eventually there's just nothing left to do. So Seasons are just about hitting the reset button and giving players an incentive to start over. If you think starting over from scratch sounds boring you're not alone, but the hardcore fans enjoy the excuse to keep playing.
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Newcomers can just do a normal character outside of the seasonal junk. Seasons seem designed for the people who know the game inside and out and want to the race everyone else to max level / power / gear against others on the ladder when it goes live.
And of course used to be about acquiring whatever new season specific loot and set items were added, but that's not happening anymore I guess.
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Blizzard will patch out the "Always Online" requirement eventually right? Or were they that stupid and the AI and/or RNG (Loot) is done server-side?
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considering one of the biggest problems in D2 was hacking/duping related to it not being always online it seems like they made a pretty reasonable choice.
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Originally, they put everything server side and gimped the loot to force people to use the AH in hopes of making their own real money AH loot. Unfortunately the huge pile of steaming pile of shit that they sold everybody generated enough rage that Jay "fuck those losers" Wilson moved on to fuck up WoW and then eventually on to his real passion (not games). They've been doing a pretty good job un-fucking up the game ever since, and have managed to remove the AH (which they said they couldn't do), create an off line mode for consoles (which they said they couldn't do). And aside from all that, playing whack-a-mole with hackers is really impossibe with a game that has an an off-line mode. So no, outside of consoles, I'd be genuinely surprised if Blizzard ever put out another game with an off-line mode.
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Why would they? Game sold like 32M copies as it stands.
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I think the combat is passable in Path of Exile, but the feel is still pretty stiff and clunky compared to something like Diablo 3. Not too dissimilar from how Diablo 2 feels compared to Diablo 3 in some ways.
Doesn't mean it's not any good, though. Diablo 2 is still great. I would say that Path of Exile definitely takes a lot longer to ramp up in speed, skills, and throwing large numbers of enemies at you than a D2. Also feels a bit more disconnected from action to hit than the later Diablos. It's not nearly as satisfying in the feel and feedback department.-
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I dunno. I put a few dozen hours in, plenty fast and powerful at that point but still lacking all over in feel and satisfaction. I gave it more than a chance and while it grabbed me for a time it couldn't keep me interested, really. Something you'll either find a way to like or not. I'll probably try to get back into it after the next update but last time I tried I lasted all of 5 minutes before quitting out.
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I'm with you. PoE scratches an itch for a while but it has yet to grip me strong enough so that I play the whole game through. Its sort of right there with Grim Dawn for me.
That said I do wish Diablo 3 had a broader skill system because yea after 3 years or whatever there is really nothing left at this point.
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I seriously doubt I'll play Diablo 4 if they go the microtrans route like they have with other games. I even noticed they changed StarCraft 2 into a game with microtrans. It's sad that this is what gaming has become. But I understand that money is money and for reasons I don't understand, people are willing to pay for stuff like this. I just hope Diablo 4 will stay pure. But probably no chance at that.
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I THINK they banked a bit on the auction house being popular with players, taking off and giving them continuous revenue.
turns out that didnt really work, so, honestly, good on them they killed it and didnt try to force it.
i think the next Diablo or Warcraft / Starcraft RTS will have to have some sort of attractive micro transactions in there to keep the lights on.
arguably SC2 has this, but the playerbase (seems) to just be too small.
how do they adapt the IP and/or the genres to a sustainable model? how much will they have to change the games? -
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