Blizzard Talks Diablo III's Launch And Future

@jakob187: Not to put words in Xerius' mouth, but I think he was just trying to say that if you got 50 hours out of it, you're getting ~ 1 hour of entertainment per 1.2$, which is a pretty damn good ratio for anything. Hell, if you played 120, that's more like 50 cents per hour of fun. Compare that to any other entertainment activity, and you're doing pretty good, value-wise.

Your own personal opinions about what the quality of Blizzard games should be are your own, of course. But if I got 50 cents an hour out of a game, I'm usually pretty happy myself.

Diablo III is my most regretful game purchase of the past 2 years. I hope that some day they patch it to the point where it is worth playing.

Cool. I still need to beat hell. More content is always welcome.

what about the guy who died playing diablo 3.....good launch? yikes

marijuana has claimed less lives!

@Sapp: Seconded. Nostalgia overwhelming is the only explanation I can come up with as well.

Fuck this game.

The "well you got hours of entertainment out of it, it can't be bad" argument that gets applied to Diablo III (and last year, Skyrim) can be undermined if you use an example that a lot of GB users can understand:

Trashy daytime TV like Storage Wars or mindless History Channel specials.

You can spend all day watching them because you don't have to think or feel anything while you do. You do it because there's nothing else on and there's a lot of it to kill time with. It's just pumping enough junk data into your head to stimulate your brain. But at the end of your session, you can probably come out of it and still say, "man, those shows suck."

@jakob187 said:

Did I enjoy my time pre-1.03? Shit yes. I enjoyed the fuck out of it. At the same time, I'm looking at this game with Blizzard Goggles: they are a company that makes games which have lasted a DECADE before needing to have a new installment. A FUCKING DECADE, MAN! Name one Blizzard game that doesn't have a life past five years. They are a company that is meant to be quality, and this game is no longer quality. They fucked it up and killed it

Blackthorne. The Lost Vikings. Rock N' Roll Racing. Warcraft. Warcraft 2. Diablo. And if we're counting expansions as 'installments' then.. Warcraft 3. Diablo 2. Starcraft. All of those games are games that were released and then either not touched again (in the case of Blackthorne, Vikings, and Rock N' Roll Racing) or had a sequel/expansion that came out in under 5 years since the release of the last one.. I guess it depends on your definition of "life past 5 years" but I imagine you'll define it in such a way as to support your argument even though it may contradict other statements. I would say that Blizzard has TWO games that had a life for a decade or longer and that would be Diablo and Starcraft and the only reason those games didn't get a sequel sooner, in honesty, was because of money. Blizzard suffered serious financial issues around the time that Stracraft: Ghost failed to become a thing. They wasted so much money on that project. And you also can't say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a life past 5 years yet because it's not even 5 years old yet. YOU may not be playing it in 5 years, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lifespan that long ahead of it.

The people who complain so much about this game are ridiculously self-entitled fools who have no grasp on reality. You can't demand endless entertainment for your 30 pounds/60 dollars, it doesn't work like that in the real world, regardless of how long you had to wait for the game, or what you expect a Blizzard game to be. If the game isn't fun any more after 100 hours, then stop playing, you already got your money's worth. Maybe you'll feel like playing again after they release a patch, or maybe you'll just move the fuck on with your life.

You know what?

I would LOVE IT if @patrickklepek would take the time that he does for some of these in-depth looks at games and what goes on behind the scenes (which I fucking love and is one of the key reasons I come to Giant Bomb) to get an interview or just some talk time with Morhaime about all of the woes with Diablo III...and why Blizzard doesn't list the names of people selling stuff off for auction in the RMAH...and how it is that Blizzard rarely released more than one game every couple years (and more specifically released one game in a franchise every five or more years) to releasing THREE GAMES THIS YEAR? Sure, two are expansions...but they are just as hefty as most full release titles that anyone else is shipping. I'd even be curious to hear how much play Activision has in any of the stuff going on at Blizzard.

I got Diablo 2 a few months ago before 3 came out (mostly because my computer at the time couldnt run 3) and I thought it was great, though very outdated. After trying 3 on a computer that could run it, I just couldnt go back to 2 seeing as how much 3 is an improvement over 2. I only made it past the first act of D2 and will probably never finish it. D3 still has my attention and the harder difficulties and different classes make it worth playing through multiple times! D3 is just so much more satisfying to play than 2 from a gameplay standpoint too. I'm sure D2 was great in it's time, but compared to 3 today, it just isn't easy to get into if you don't have the nostalgia from playing it back in the day!

@Crushed: I guess you can still say "those show suck," but if you spent several hours watching them, and then you talk about them to your friends afterward, does it matter that they "suck"? You still put your time into them, and were "entertained", even if your enjoyment of it was somehow ironic.

I would say that if you chose to sink a significant amount of time into Diablo 3, you were probably entertained by it, at some level.

I'm not saying it's a great piece of artwork, or anything, just that entertainment has use value, and that Diablo 3's is pretty high in terms of sheer output. In a sense, it's the exact opposite of the Dear Ester experience.

"Junk" entertainment is still entertainment if you use it that way. I would not say the fun I've had with Diablo 3 is any lessened than the fun I had with, oh I dunno... Amnesia, or Shadow of the Colossus (insert any gaming experience you DO respect)... it's just a different kind of entertainment.

The problem I have with Morhaime's letter is that the issues addressed are weeks old at this point and the larger issues of duping and an economy in the process of being ruined by said duping have gone completely unaddressed.

@FateOfNever said:

@asmo29a said:

Maybe the fact that there is way more Hack & Slay in D2 than in D3. While it provided a decent challenge, D2 always kept you blasting away tons of enemies all the time, even on the highest difficulty level, which makes it a really satisfying experience. First time Act 2 Inferno in D3, you see a bee or two and maybe an additional couple of cats, and you have to GTFO. At that point, it becomes more of a waiting and kiting game than anything else.

Add to that the fact that you can only have 4ppl in D3 opposed to fun and frantic 8ppl parties in D2 and that grinding Inferno solo is actually more efficient than coop right now..

Then just play Hell? Don't play Inferno? That's an option, isn't it? And what do you get out of D2 Hell exactly? More loot that you don't need because you already beat the game? I'm not saying Inferno is great. It sounds brutal and awful and like it was specifically designed for people that want to smash their heads against a wall over and over again, not for people that want to just steamroll shit. I don't think they ever billed it as that. So why do people think that's the experience that it's going to be? Is it just that Hell isn't challenging enough after you've cleared it once? Was Hell in D2 at all challenging after clearing it once (I legit don't know, it's why I'm asking)?

As I said - D2 provided a decent challenge for a long time without losing its pace. Steamrolling is not quite the right word - you kind of kept killing tons of mobs until you overextended in some fashion and lay on the ground dead two seconds later ;) and there were many, many ways to overextend yourself in Hell.

Hell in D3 is not really even challenging the first time you clear it. Some of the elite packs might get tricky, but you can just run by them. So Inferno is really the only thing that has any meat to it for the hardcore fans. Said fans rush into Inferno, expecting it to play like Diablo since it says fuckin Diablo 3 on the box, and they get stomped into the ground, after which they have to meticulously, patiently grind out one mob after the other for a long, long time. That's not what I come to Diablo for, and I think that is where much of the dissatisfaction comes from.

Add the poor game balance, lackluster skill combinations, boring/bad loot, changes that get patched in one week just to be taken out again a few days later, and the issues with the RMAH to that, and you get a whole bunch of angry people on the internet. Many of them rightly so, imo.

console release? i wanna play this sitting on my couch. offline.

@Homelessbird said:

@Crushed: I guess you can still say "those show suck," but if you spent several hours watching them, and then you talk about them to your friends afterward, does it matter that they "suck"?

Yes.

@jakob187 said:

and how it is that Blizzard rarely released more than one game every couple years (and more specifically released one game in a franchise every five or more years)

What are you talking about? Let's list some dates -

Diablo 1 - 1997

Diablo 2 - 2000.

Diablo 2: LOD - 2001

Warcraft - 1994

Warcraft 2: ToD - 1995

Warcraft 2: BtDP - 1996

Warcraft 3: RoC - 2002

Warcraft 3: FT - 2003

World of Warcraft - 2004

Starcraft - 1998

Starcraft: BW - 1998.

Most Blizzard expansions came out within a year of the launch of the title. Brood War even came out in the same bloody year! Warcraft 1 to the expansion of Warcraft 2 was just a two year difference. War3 was 8 years after the first Warcraft, but the expansion came out a year later and World of Warcraft came out a year after that. Diablo 1 to 2 was just 3 years.

@asmo29a: To be honest, I don't think anything would have pleased the "hardcore fans".

Seriously - how could they even hope to compete with a game that you've played for ELEVEN YEARS STRAIGHT? You obviously are going to think that game is a shrine of holy, untouched perfection - that's why you've sunk so much time into it.

You want to know what I think? I think they did their best to please you guys, but at a certain point, they just had to throw up their hands and make the game for the majority of gamers. Because pleasing you would have been straight up impossible.

I'm pretty sure they figured that out after the nerdsplosion over the art style... which must have been... jesus, was it like 2008? I feel old.

@Crushed said:

@Homelessbird said:

@Crushed: I guess you can still say "those show suck," but if you spent several hours watching them, and then you talk about them to your friends afterward, does it matter that they "suck"?

Yes.

Ok, then:

why?

Good priorities. Main problem is that item hunt thing so I agree with their direction. + legendaries being useful is good! A better pricing system would be better, something like the essence last sale kind of thing, though I understand that it would need difficult algorithms.

@Homelessbird said:

@Crushed said:

@Homelessbird said:

@Crushed: I guess you can still say "those show suck," but if you spent several hours watching them, and then you talk about them to your friends afterward, does it matter that they "suck"?

Yes.

Ok, then:

why?

Because it wasn't that "entertaining," it was just something to kill time with, and just like junk TV, the novelty quickly wore off after the first few hours. Only instead of dumb TV shows, I paid $60 for it.

So, wait. Mr Morhaime is trying to tell the public that Diablo 3 can't have offline mode, even though Diablo 2 had 2 forms of online multiplayer (closed and open bnet) and LAN as well as single player mode. Do they honestly expect anybody to really believe this? Of course it's DRM, that's just laughable.

I listen to old bombcasts and I have never even loaded either Auction House, I also play no more than an hour or two in a day; still having fun.

@asmo29a said:

As I said - D2 provided a decent challenge for a long time without losing its pace. Steamrolling is not quite the right word - you kind of kept killing tons of mobs until you overextended in some fashion and lay on the ground dead two seconds later ;) and there were many, many ways to overextend yourself in Hell.

Hell in D3 is not really even challenging the first time you clear it. Some of the elite packs might get tricky, but you can just run by them. So Inferno is really the only thing that has any meat to it for the hardcore fans. Said fans rush into Inferno, expecting it to play like Diablo since it says fuckin Diablo 3 on the box, and they get stomped into the ground, after which they have to meticulously, patiently grind out one mob after the other for a long, long time. That's not what I come to Diablo for, and I think that is where much of the dissatisfaction comes from.

Add the poor game balance, lackluster skill combinations, boring/bad loot, changes that get patched in one week just to be taken out again a few days later, and the issues with the RMAH to that, and you get a whole bunch of angry people on the internet. Many of them rightly so, imo.

This at least makes some amount of sense. I disagree, to some extent, about the skills (not saying that the skill choices in D3 are super good, but the skill choices in D2 never seemed good to me since you couldn't pick more than a couple, and there were skills that were, and to this day still are, just strictly better than any other skill options, meaning a single class may only have a handful of ways to legitimately play them.) But I can at least understand this idea of the difficulty just not being what you want from the game. I don't think I ever played through Diablo 2 more than once on any given character simply because the jump from normal to nightmare alone was rather steep in difficulty due to all of the resistance modifications that went on between difficulties and I stopped playing that game a long time before I started to really appreciate hard challenges in games. So I can at least get some sense of what part of the comparison is between D2 and D3, at least when it comes to the difficulty, so, thank you for explaining that part of it.

@jakob187: I don't think you realize that you keep arguing against yourself. If Blizzard makes games that last for years, then dismissing a game after less than two months is short-sighted. I am not even disagreeing with you about any of your issues with the game, the level of support, AH fishy-ness (100% agree that AH is ripe for exploitation by Blizzard), playing to the lowest common denominator, etc...

It is one thing to be disappointed, and to disagree with the direction being taken, but it is a whole other thing to rage against Blizzard's failure so quickly.

@Homelessbird: You're correct that those that have put over 50 hours into the game have gotten some enjoyment out of it. The problem however is that this is a Diablo game. At this point, people have been playing Diablo 2 for 12 years and have enjoyed it the entire time. Personally, I stopped after 2 years, but I still got a lot of play out of it. Coming from the previous game in the series, fans have some distinct expectations about what a Diablo game is going to be. I would argue rightfully so, especially considering how well supported D2 was over a long period of time.

I originally was having way more fun with D3 than D2. The Witch Doctor had fixed the main problem that I had with the Necromancer from D2, namely that the pets were so easily killed even by the time you got to the end of normal, and I was really enjoying the new skill system. I hate looking up cookie cutter builds online and like to experiment instead, and not having to invest in a skill tree and possibly getting screwed if what you end up with is lackluster is great for that.

But none of that applies in Inferno. I absolutely have to use abilities that slow enemies in order to survive, and once I got to act 2 summoning my pets is a total waste of time. I'm completely undergeared as the jump in difficulty from act 1 to act 2 is nuts even after they lowered it, and repeatedly grinding act 1 until I finally get gear that isn't completely lackluster is of no interest. What I'm saying is that all the flaws in the game design only become apparent once you get to the end game (you know, the place where anyone playing it any significant time after launch will be). People who haven't put in 50+ hours on one character have had an absolute great time. Anyone putting in more than that wants to tear their face off while playing the game, or has dropped money or gold into the auction house. That's something I personally am not willing to do.

(As a side note, I'm not happy with the constant futzing around with the ways items drop. The barrel change was ridiculous and would never have been an issue if the game didn't have an auction house.)

@Crushed: Fair enough. But what we were initially talking about was the argument of "well you got hours of entertainment out of it, it can't be bad"

It sounds like you didn't get that many hours out of it. If you only enjoyed maybe 3-5 hours of playing, and thought even that was kind of junky, then yeah, you're at a 6$/hr ratio for bad entertainment, and I can see why you're bummed about that.

I was more talking about people complaining after they've sunk 120 hours that it's a bad game. My contention is that if you have gotten 2 hours out of the game for every 50 cents you've spent, it doesn't really matter whether it's good or bad at that point. You've been entertained at above a reasonable cost.

Unfortunately games aren't just weighed on their own, the expectations for D3 are based on D2. The rabid fanbase of D2 are super bummed that D3 doesn't really follow along, it's almost like an entirely different company made the sequel! (Which is kinda actually true!)

@DaveC524 said:

So, wait. Mr Morhaime is trying to tell the public that Diablo 3 can't have offline mode, even though Diablo 2 had 2 forms of online multiplayer (closed and open bnet) and LAN as well as single player mode. Do they honestly expect anybody to really believe this? Of course it's DRM, that's just laughable.

He never said that D3 "can't" have online mode. He said online-only is needed for their vision of the game. That's a big difference. The few times I was disconnected was frustrating, but I wholly enjoyed the game. Old Blizzard games that supported LAN were pirated like crazy over seas, so I don't really blame them for not supporting LAN.

I've put maybe 100 hours into it and I think I am done, but man it was fun as hell. Exactly what I expected, same locations, random dungeons random loot. I even made my money back on the AH

@LaserJesus: Yeeeees... I can sort of see that side of things, and tbh, I haven't played the game past Hell yet, so I can't speak to Inferno mode. I guess I would just argue that there being a problem with Inferno that destroys the game experience wouldn't invalidate the time you've already spent with it, and the option to play non-Inferno modes is still available (although having the endgame content not be fun is indeed a bummer, and that shouldn't be minimized).

The problem there is really expectations - people going in saying "this is gonna be the next game I play for an entire decade."

Unfortunately, there is almost no way that was ever going to happen. You had an almost entirely different group of people designing a different game for a different period in time. That expectation of getting thousands of hours of enjoyment from D3 was ALWAYS going to be dashed.

If you look at almost any other retail experience, 50 hours is a RIDICULOUS amount of value. Look at any Call of Duty game - 6 hour campaigns have become normal.

Fucking more empty lip service. Current customer concerns virtually ignored. Hell, this coulda been in the can for weeks or months, lol.

They either A, don't really listen to their consumers, or B, don't give a rat's ass what they want or think. I'm leaning towards B.

Sure I played for lots of hours, but the game never satisfied to anywhere near the level that I was expecting and hoping(endgame mostly, but also lack of overall content, and based on D2's greatness), and then the blatently rediculous agenda addressed by the patches just sealed the fate of this game for me and tons of others. The RMAH seems to be the main culprit, but it's the bullheadedness and arrogance of Blizzard mostly. Still shocks me when I think about it.

I don't know. D3 is such a fantastic game, but they can't patch what is ultimately my biggest problem with it; the atmosphere.

And I'm not necessarily talking about just the visual style, that's only one piece of it. The overwrought and highly flawed writing, the cartoonish animations, the voiceacting, the auction house, the online intrusions, etc; all of this make Diablo 3 feel like a "videogame", and not an "experience". There is no atmosphere anymore; I don't feel like I'm in an actual, dreadful place like Diablo 2 made me feel.

Everything piece of it just feels shallow and compromised in order to feed into the auction house, the one thing that ruins the whole point of Diablo. It's tragic.

I stopped playing Diablo 3 after two weeks, which is a great failure of Blizzard because I played Diablo 2 for years. It just has too many problems and most of them are design problems that makes it even worse.

I don't know, a completely offline mode seems more than reasonable to me. I know, money. I would have bought it on release tho if it had it.

Diablo 3 did work out for me though - got me to skip it and play Titan Quest for 80 hrs and get me super hyped for Torchlight 2. They're more in line with what I want out of online modes, mods, and story. Yay for more than one option!

@Mr_Skeleton: Actually, I would say that your expectations for D3 are probably your own fault.

Homelessbird, please stop telling people that they can't legitimately think that D2 is better without it being "nostalgia" or "misplaced expectations/"

The thing that bothers me the most about what the CEO said about the online only, was that he only kept going on about how D3 is a game to be played onling and with friends. Honestly I tried online and it seems like people only play it for the harder enemies and loot drops. I tried playing it and all people did was rush to the story stuff. When I played both of my playthroughs I explored EVERY inch of EVERY map that was created! So it isn't just a game to play with friends, its much more enjoyable on my own IMO. I know it's unlikley, but I kinda hope they release a offline mode in one of the patches, but if not it's still fine.

@Crushed: I subscribe to this website, and I'll tell people posting on it whatever I want.

If somebody can present me a compelling argument for why a sensible person might have expected D3 to deliver ten years of enjoyment with no flaws, then I'll certainly consider it.

As other people in the thread have pointed out, everybody seems to have forgotten the changes D2 went through before it ended up in the state we see it in today. There was a lot of unhappiness and fan butthurt to get it to that state. It didn't come out the game that you love so much, it had to go through a number of patches.

Just like this one.

@Homelessbird said:

@Crushed: If somebody can present me a compelling argument for why a sensible person might have expected D3 to deliver ten years of enjoyment with no flaws, then I'll certainly consider it.

@Crushed: Ten years of unadulterated enjoyment is not a reasonable goal, so yeah, if it was that high, I guess they lowered it.

I really like Diablo III. I'm slowly working my way through act 2 with my barbarian and leveling up a wizard during my down time. I've been playing since release. I'm not saying i'll play this game for the months to come, because really, I don't know. There's just so many games coming out. What baffles me the most is simply how people act like drama-queens over this game. As if Diablo III was a total waste of their time, as if it was a completely horrible game. Thing is, there's a couple of bad design decisions, yeah, but it doesn't make the game any less playable.

The Diablo III phenomenon reminds me of ME3's ending drama. Loud mouth-breathers started to cry and scream about how the game was ruined, about how their lives had been rendered completely useless by the ending's lack of Hollywood clichés. And to think they managed to twist' Bioware's arm enough to get their '' MORE EXPLAINED '' ending. Die-hard fans are the worst. They're like abusive lovers ; they want it so fucking bad, and then they'll find a way to complain and dramatize over it.

@Homelessbird: I agree that going in with that expectation is definitely at least a bit naive, but to be expected. I would guess that the most vocally angry people are those that have that "game I'll play for the next decade" are the ones most vocally angry. I wasn't kidding about the wanting to tear your face off part, though. That's pretty much exactly how I felt going through act 1 inferno and act 2 inferno I just said "Screw this, I'm done." I however went in knowing that would happen at some point, as I get tired of grinding fairly quickly. I just didn't expect it to be after a month. The inferno experience has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven't even wanted to try out the other classes all that much.

Really my biggest issue is just really infuriating gameplay at the endgame. It's just excrutiating. The amount of kiting you have to do (on a pet class, no less! I have my own TANK for crying out loud!) is just not fun for me, and the heavy dependence on getting better gear just to survive makes it that much more frustrating when they rebalance the drop rate because people are gaming it with item find gear, making me either have to grind more or pony up real cash money for new gear. And that grinding is even harder when they increase the repair costs to ungodly levels, making it so if I have some real bad luck, now all my stuff is broken and I don't have the money to fix it. Well, guess I can't play anymore! Thanks!

Oh, and another thing that just drives me insane: when the enrage timer runs out on champion enemies in inferno, it gives them 100% reflect damage. And since champion enemies have far more health than you unless you're geared for vitality and any heal that you have is on a cooldown, it pretty much makes them unkillable. I wonder why they didn't just make it so you instantaneously explode into mist when the timer runs out. It'd serve the same purpose.

That got a little more ranty than I meant for it. Normally I'm not the kind of person to take to the internet about things that annoy me in games, but I felt that laying out specific criticisms is important for those wondering why people who've spent so much time playing the game are so upset. The end game is just that frustrating. But I'll leave the pitchforks for the rest of the mob, and I won't demand my money back or anything. I'll just grumble and shake my head at their baffling design choices.

Still love the game and I'm still having a blast with it. 

My biggest issue is the 4 player maximum, and the lack of a server list. If we can't do runs, then its not the Diablo I was looking for, I'll just go to Torchlight II. I got 100 hours out of D3, so at least it wasn't a waste of money, I'm just not going back to it. It only feels weird that Blizzard made a game I'm just going to end up treating as some average filler while I wait for Guild Wars 2 and Torchlight 2.

I played D2 on an annual basis for about a decade.. I played d3 for 100 hours before I was absolutely over it--as in, no desire to play it at all.

What'd Blizzard f up in regards to D3? Two things:

1. There's no more finding fat loots. In d2, you'd do a few hours of mf runs and you were nearly guaranteed to find some badass end-game item (shako, shaft, ss, soj, titans, whatever); you'll find one of those in a relatively fast period. Grind mobs in 8 hours for d3 and what do you get? trash to vendor and buy items on the AH. It's not fun. Seeing meph or baal pop and drop uniques that you KNEW were awesome was a fantastic experience. Right-clicking on yellows for 30 mins so you can vendor them is pretty gay.

2. Your character is never overpowered. In d2, after you invested 50+ hours into a character, you were a badass. In d3, you still get two shotted by every mob. No fun.

@LaserJesus: Yeah, wow. I haven't read somebody describe it that vividly, but yeah - that sounds really unpleasant. I can see why you'd be mad after that experience - especially because (at least for me) the previous difficulties seem relatively well balanced (except for normal, which you could probably push through while sleeping with a few exceptions).

I wasn't going to prioritize it, but now I kind of want to push through Hell and see how bad it gets for myself.

Blizzard really missed what made Diablo 2 special. Most of the changes they are talking about sound good, but all of the changes they have implemented thus far have actually been quite terrible.

First up, gearing is no where near as fun as it was in D2. Because rares are the best items, and getting a perfectly rolled rare is almost impossible, there will ALWAYS be better items to get in every single slot. In D2, as in WoW, there were BiS items for just about every slot for the build you were going after, and getting one of these pieces made all of the tedium that came before seem worth it. In D3 you will farm for hours and hours and end up with nothing but a handful of things to sell on the AH that will get you a little closer to the 10 million gold item that will bump a couple stats by a couple points. Their legendary change will help, but unless they up the drop rate significantly and have a large number of BiS pieces for each character, it won't do much.

The second big flaw is that the level cap is so easy to hit and then you still have a quarter of the game to go at cap, meaning if you are playing in inferno and get terrible drops you aren't even gaining experience to make your character more powerful that way. I don't recall the exact level you finished hell in D2, but I think it was around 60? Leaving you with 39 levels to gain while you were farming for gear, a huge added incentive.

And finally, what makes the end game so fun in D2 and other games in the genre is feeling POWERFUL. In D2, as some classes you could become incredibly powerful without any consideration to gear. In D3, every single ability is dependent on your gear, add to that the fact that Inferno is designed as a challenge, and outside of a gear set that is 100 million gold or more in value, you feel weak. It's also worth mentioning that about 90% of all of the class changes that have been implemented since launch have been nerfs. While they have said they intend on buffing lesser used skills, all they have actually done is nerf the most common skills.

Can't wait for Torchlight 2 to come out on the Xbox. It's gonna be cool. I really liked the first, even if it was a bit repetitive trying to level out my fame in the infinite dungeon. The cat that sold my trash was awesome too, she could summon skeletons.

@Homelessbird said:

@Crushed: Fair enough. But what we were initially talking about was the argument of "well you got hours of entertainment out of it, it can't be bad"

It sounds like you didn't get that many hours out of it. If you only enjoyed maybe 3-5 hours of playing, and thought even that was kind of junky, then yeah, you're at a 6$/hr ratio for bad entertainment, and I can see why you're bummed about that.

I was more talking about people complaining after they've sunk 120 hours that it's a bad game. My contention is that if you have gotten 2 hours out of the game for every 50 cents you've spent, it doesn't really matter whether it's good or bad at that point. You've been entertained at above a reasonable cost.

People who are invested in something have no right to complain? Wow, I'm glad you aren't responsible for anything that impacts my life with such retarded logic.

Go play an unpatched Phil Fish game.