I remember asking Mike on the Friday dev stream about an year ago, maybe even more, about that topic. I asked when will they add all in-game 3d models so they match the 2d art on the item itself. He answered that this is definitely happening in the future and that they will most definitely do it before they add a cosmetic store. Then he pointed out how it will be a really bad look on the company if they haven’t completed the normal models, but in the same time they sell skins for the same items in the store for real money.
Now, about an year later, they are doing exactly that. They already have a cosmetic store, That store is being extended on 1.0 and still a huge chunk of the unique 3d models are not in the game.
Do you realize how bad that sounds. Such a core, fundamental part of the game not completed for 1.0 is already bad. But selling skins for an item when the normal free model of the same item is yet not in the game…
I truly can’t believe they decided to go that way. If they truly are unable to finish all the models for 1.0, I believe they should at least remove any trace of a gear skin from the shop until they finish the normal models.
Sorry to prompt this but I’m gonna need to see the tape on that because I am skeptical if I actually said that. I remember this and I may have said it could be a bad look but I am really careful not to commit to anything like that.
Have they said that 1.0 is going to add item skins? How do you know that this is not what is going to happen?
I can’t find it, but I am almost certain that Mox said something along the lines of “We would ideally try to implement all Unique 3D models before adding MTX”
He worded this probably much better than I did, so don’ take this as quote.
I think you guys did a large chunk of 3D models with the last major patches and I think somebody from EHG said that there is som more on the way (the ones that didn’t make it for the last major patches).
I also remember, but can’t find the quote, that all weapons should have unique 3D Model with 1.0, only some armours will not.
They said they are going to add more things to the store, and there are already armor skins in there. As for the “How do you know that this is not what is going to happen?” I’m not sure what do you mean by that.
If you are talking about them removing item skins from the store, i don’t know if it is going to happen, I hope they will. If you mean that they may add all the unique 3d models for 1.0. Mike already confirmed yesterday on the stream that it is not happening.
It was a long time ago, sometime between 0.8.3 and 0.8.5. There is no chance I can find the specific moment I asked that question, but nevermind. It is not that important, I didn’t write my post to call you out specificaly, I realize you are there on the spot every week, answering a lot of questions real time.
The important thing is, what the company is doing about this is a really terrible idea in my opinion. I’m not saying this out of hate, I already love the game, I know I’m gonna play it anyway and the models will eventually come. But I’m afraid many new players will have a really bad reaction to this.
Imagine you are new to the game, you are rocking your normal yellow item, you find a very cool looking unique armor piece, you equip it only to find out the model is the same generic armor that you already had. But then, there is a cosmetic store, where you can buy a shinny armor skin… This sounds absurd to me.
I understand where you’re coming from. but what you’re expecting is frankly quite unrealistic. Skinning that amount of uniques by launch is unrealistic. And I am sure Judd and Mike would know, learning from GGG’s experience.
Speaking of which, that’s exactly the same in POE. And while there are some grumble from time to time, I dont think this issue you’ve brought up had impacted the popularity and longevity of POE… there are much bigger fish to fry in keeping players happy.
PoE unique models sucking is a cynical business decision with absolutely nothing to do with feasibility. This is tolerated because PoE is free, so no one seriously expects it to be a complete, 0-bullshit experience.
LE is not free. On release, it should be reasonably complete. Imo releasing with giant gaps in item gfx doesn’t meet that standard and is quite a big letdown.
I’m sympathetic because EHG’s art team has had a mountain to get through, but it’s still a major negative hanging over the release and I hope they are determined to fix it quickly.
This is why I often feel EHG might have made a mistake in going for a box price model. The upfront revenue of $20 - 30 they get… is simply not worth the expectations placed on them vis-a-vis POE.
You would have had a point 20 years ago.
You can now pay 70 dollars for a game, and they will still sell you cosmetics.
FF14 sells you a sub, a box price, AND cosmetics iirc.
LE being live service puts even less expectations of things being there from the get go, it will happen eventually its live service. 1.0 just marks the start of service where they feel its enough quality.
The box price really does throw people off, but its not really any different then an MMO, mmos launch with 1.0 and missing tons of shit, thats just how the industry is.
This isn’t true, though. Just look at D3 and D4. Both were live services, however both lost a HUGE amount of players to a bad start. Some might come back, eventually, slowly, but many won’t give it a second chance.
Yes, as always, publishers are busy limit-testing exactly how much you can piss consumers off before facing consequences.
For games that are competing on basis of overwhelming fidelity and technical quality, or able to spend >$100 mil on marketing, that might even be good business.
There is an enormous disparity between the development and marketing resources of AA games like LE and the AAA games it is frequently compared with. Nonetheless, LE is able to slug it to a significant extent and receive favourable comparisons because players are severely tired of the bullshit they get from triple-A publishers. Burn that goodwill and you really have nothing to work with.
FF14 has an absolute mountain of content in the game you paid for (including endless cosmetic stuff), and then some extra in the cash shop. If LE’s MTX are like that I have no complaints.
Interesting subject, thanks for opening it.
I find the dichotomy amongst “pure” ARPG players fascinating… Here is the paradox: most people around here are very keen to give their character a specific look (see all the threads about customisation, models, cosmetics), while at the same time they are equally keen to ensure the character doesn’t have any kind of backstory or adventures (just as many threads asking for ways to not play the campaign; lack of threads complaining about a “full release” not having a full story).
1.0 without full items models is unacceptable; 1.0 with an unfinished story and no end-boss is absolutely fine.
You guys are weird. 
Don’t get me wrong, I love cosmetics and customisation. I can easily spend 2-3 hours on creating my next BG3 or D4 character, because I know they are going to have a lot of adventures, some very graphic, and I want them to have a personality. In MMOs, I spend a ridiculous amount of time changing my looks, depending if I am going on a raid, staying in a city, relaxing at home, participating in a seasonal event…
But, at least for me, the look of the character has to match what he/she is doing, and his/her personality. In other words, give me first a consistent campaign and some immersion elements (collections, achievements, seasonal events, anything that can put flesh of my husk of a character), then I become interested in cosmetics.
Right now, in LE, I don’t care what my characters look like, because I don’t really see them as interesting persons.
An extremely popular statement. As well as an extremely incorrect one (at least in the way most articles I have seen calculate the “HUGE” drop they try to illustrate.
Neither D3 nor D4 were primarily advertised as live service. It was probably planned, I grant you that, but it was hardly mentioned in all pre-launch marketing (see how many people were puzzled by the concept of seasons when D4 announced the first one).
Both D3 and D4 launched with a full, long, very elaborate campaign. And focused all the advertising on that. All of it.
Meaning that, for both D3 and D4, it was obvious from the start that millions (literally) of people buying it were mostly interested in going through the campaign once, and were never going to get involved in seasons.
They didn’t “lose a HUGE amount of players to a bad start”. At all. They gained a HUGE amount of players (who would never play LE or PoE) at launch thanks to powerful marketing and a great campaign.
Sure, but every diablo player that came from D2 was expecting seasons shortly after launch, so that’s not really true either. Same with D4. The only people that were puzzled by the concept of seasons were people that were having their first diablo experience with that game.
That’s not really true either. Both D3 and D4 had lots of technical issues at launch, as well as a lack of endgame. That’s what drove away lots of players at launch. D3 got back a bunch of player with the Reapers expansion, maybe D4 will get the same with the next expansion. However, in both cases there was a big number of players, especially D2 players, that bought the game, played it for a month or 2 and dropped it for a long time. Some returned after the expansion release, some came back once or twice over the years, some never returned at all.
Probably. But I believe this “big number of players” to be a super small part of the total people who bought the game. The vast majority, imo, just bought it for the campaign and the good looks, and were never going to play seasons anyway.
Obviously, there is no way to get specific numbers for each category of players, so we might have to agree to disagree based on our feelings and what kind of people we hang out with.
D3, yes, I was there on launch day and the servers burst. Unplayable for a while. Plus the controversial real money auction house… The start was a bit of a mess.
But D4? I played on launch day, and every day thereafter for a couple of months. Never had any kind of queuing or lag. Never saw a bug. Finished the campaign 4 times, 3 softcore and 1 harcore, no death by disconnection or lag ever, no skill not working, no cutscenes or quests breaking down. Not once. I am possibly just incredibly lucky, but as far as I am concerned this launch was great.
Yeah, Blizzard never released any specific numbers (which was probably smart of them) so we’ll never really know for sure.
Sure, but these players will play the campaign a few times and stop playing again anyway.
D4’s problem wasn’t so much a technical issue but more of a design one. Some classes (:cough:Druid:cough:) were a nightmare to level up compared to the rest and made the gameplay much less fun. That, along with the issue that no loot drops for other classes (which meant if you changed class you started almost from scratch), sent away quite a few players.
Which is not to say that D4 didn’t have technical issues. There was rubberbanding, especially when you were switching zones. Sometimes you couldn’t leave a zone entirely. This happened to me quite a few times trying to leave the main act1 city by the northeast exit, or trying to enter the church.
Anyway, I think we’re straying from the point. My point was that just because it’s a live service doesn’t mean people will be more forgiving. ARPG veterans will, but the general public won’t.
PoE benefitted from the fact that it was a free game. Lots of people that had bad experiences with the start of PoE could return over time and check it out again, as reviews started to become much more favorable.
LE doesn’t have that luxury. If the launch isn’t a good experience, players will leave bad reviews and other people won’t buy the game based on that. Maybe they’ll buy it again later when reviews shift positively, or maybe they found a new game by then. But the initial impression is very important. You just have to look at Wolcen for that.
Blizzard has no way to know. Nobody does.
How many people bought the game with the intention to play it for years in seasons?
How many bought it just to play through the campaign once or twice?
There will never be an answer. Everyone just speculates based on their own perception and friends.
All my friends are CRPGs or MMOs players. Almost all of them bought Diablo 4, none of them ever had any intention to play endgame, even less seasons. Hence I get the feeling a huge majority of players did just that.
If you have a lot of ARPG players friends who wanted from the start to rush to endgame and dive into seasons, you would get a very different feeling.
No way to know for sure how many people each category represents.
In a way, it does. How much more forgiving, and forgiving of what, I don’t know.
A good example is the story. In my eyes, coming out of beta after 5 years with an incomplete story is just preposterous. Story not finished = beta, regardless of the serial number you put on your game.
But when I mention it, someone always reply that it is fine because it is a live service and things can be added later. Which shows that people are very forgiving of some stuff because of the live service label. Again, what they will be forgiving of is an open question…
I mean, Blizzard doesn’t know the intentions of players, but they do know (or did at the time) how many people are connecting to their servers. They just don’t release that info, probably because the numbers wouldn’t be favorable to them.
Sure, but those are people that have already bought the EA. That have been playing the game for years. That are invested in LE. And the vast majority of early EA buyers are usually ARPG veterans. So they are usually more forgiving about that. Especially because the majority will care more about endgame than the campaign.
Newer players will be less forgiving about that, especially the casual players, I feel.
It should also be pointed out that the way the campaign is done in LE (which is very similar to GD) makes it so that many players can’t get invested in the story. This was already discussed once in a thread recently, but I can’t really follow the story of LE or GD. Something about the dialog boxes just makes me want to get through them. I can’t feel invested and reading all that feels more like a punishment.
I didn’t feel that in D4, though. I read through all the main campaign quests (though I did start skipping almost all the side quests, though). Maybe it’s because there are so many cutscenes that reading a few dialogs don’t matter?
I don’t know exactly what it is but it saddens me a bit, because I’d like to get invested in the campaign at least once. And I feel like many players will feel the same way about it and not care too much about it. Meaning that it won’t matter to them whether the campaign is finished or not because they don’t care about the story.
Or because the information would be mis-analysed and used to make wrong points.
An example I have seen several times (random numbers just to illustrate, I don’t have the data).
There were 20 millions players at launch. In season 2 there are 500k. Therefore, Diablo 4 is a disaster, and has already lost 97% of their players.
Sounds sensible, right? Mathematical, logical, foolproof.
Yet this is completely wrong, pure numbers manipulation.
If 19 millions people bought the game just to try the campaign and never intended to play seasons, the “loss” can only be counted out of the 1 million people interested in seasons. In this example, this would be 50% retention, not a bad result at all.
You can get numbers to say anything, if you choose wisely how to present them. Any politician would tell you that.
Edit:
I completely agree about the campaign not being engaging enough. I don’t think it’s just about a choice between text and cutscenes, I think it is a writing quality and consistency issue.
Diablo 4’s campaign is amazing, both the writing and the cutscenes.
Undecember has loads of cutscenes, but they are very poorly written, and fail to achieve immersion.
Grim Dawn is text based, but decently written and therefore reasonnably immersive.
My personal favorite, Van Helsing, has no cutscenes but incredibly good voice acting throughout.
Overall, I do believe a full re-writing of the dialogues would be needed (once it is complete I guess) to make them more realistic and immersive. Cutscenes would help but shouldn’t be the priority IMO. Note that a lot of dialogues are already vastly improved compared to 0.8, so we are going in the right direction, even if there is still a long way to go.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love cosmetics and customisation.”
My post is absolutely not about those two things.
Literally everything you mentioned does not apply to me. I don’t care about buying cosmetics, visually customizing my character in the beginning of the campaign, gender choice (i have a lot of posts in here about how I prefer gender locked chars because they feel like an actual character) or campaign skips - I like playing the campaign every season of every ARPG.
The game going to 1.0 without them finishing the base models for items is not a lack of customization. This is releasing the game without completing a fundamental part of it, and then giving people the option to fill that void with real money.