D4 & D2 Resurrected

PoE just broke its concurrent player record with ~267k. D3 is lucky to break 25k.

I guess it depends on how you measure success. D3 has been dead in the water for years now. It pretty much failed. I imagine a lot of Path of Exile's success is due to how Blizzard dropped the ball. And most of the hardcore players left D3 for it.

I'd be more curious to compare about how many people were actively playing Diablo 2 vs PoE. But if they can pull themselves together and make D4 more like D2, and it seems that's what they want, they will easily surpass PoE, both in sales overall and numer of players. PoE just by design will not appeal to mainstream audiences.

Also, it's a bit weird to compare the "success" of one game over another by comparing how many people are playing it, when one of them is free. ;)
 
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I think Blizzard bit themselves in the ass with StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3. Both games were a letdown compared to their prequels.

I used to be a big fan back in the heyday of StarCraft, which I still think is one of the best RTS games ever made, but SC 2 wasn't nearly as good imo, and I lost interest in them after that.

As far as Path of Exile is concerned, I never understood all the love. I found it fairly generic and got bored around the 3rd act.
 
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I think Blizzard bit themselves in the ass with StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3. Both games were a letdown compared to their prequels.

I used to be a big fan of Blizzard back in the heyday of StarCraft, which I still think is one of the best RTS game ever made, but SC 2 wasn't nearly as good imo, and I lost interest in them after that.

I found SC2 a bit better than you, I guess. But the plot kinda went downhill. It was ok sometimes, but nothing close to SC1. This, along with the awful writing in Diablo 3, and I was starting to believe that maybe the great story in SC1 was a complete accident. The melodrama in WoW also didn't help to improve that opinion. I did love WC3 and Frozen Throne's storyline though.
As far as Path of Exile is concerned, I never understood all the love. I found it fairly generic and lost interest around the 3rd act.

Kinda sounds like my experience. The story and world was very generic, and the combat was meh. I could see how you could have endless variations in the passive skill tree, and i think they got a great idea with mixing and matching of jewels for abilities and modifications to those. But somehow, it felt like I was doing all of that just for the "math" of it. Since the actual combat was kinda clunky and the world wasn't that interesting. So I questioned why would I bother optimizing a build, just to grind an uninteresting world. But I can see some people getting over that, and just enjoying the experimentation and optimization of builds for the sake of it. I, on the other hand, need more than that, I guess.
 
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I found SC2 a bit better than you, I guess. But the plot kinda went downhill. It was ok sometimes, but nothing close to SC1.

I didn't care too much about the plot. That's of very little importance to me in an RTS game. What I didn't like was that the single-player campaign was basically nothing but a long set of tutorials. They didn't present any decent scenarios until the last few missions.
 
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I didn't care too much about the plot. That's of very little importance to me in an RTS game. What I didn't like was that the single-player campaign was basically nothing but a long set of tutorials. They didn't present any decent scenarios until the last few missions.

Oh, I very much loved the missions. How each had its own gameplay twist. At least in Wings of Liberty iirc.
 
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Oh, I very much loved the missions. How each had its own gameplay twist. At least in Wings of Liberty iirc.

Wings of Liberty is the only part I've played. I never bothered with the other 2 campaigns after my disappointment with the first one.

Another thing I didn't like about SC2 was the difficulty options. Imo they should have just went with one difficulty like the first game. Instead, they gave us 2 for SC2, and neither of them felt right to me. Normal difficulty is a cakewalk that provides no challenge whatsoever, but I found Hard to be somewhat frustrating in some of the later missions. They needed something in the middle.
 
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Rats, I thought D2 meant Shrine of the Kuo-Toa.
 
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MrLlama, the biggest Diablo 2 streamer who also was there during the Diablo 2 Deep Dive Panel during Blizzconline, has had a private Q&A with the devs, and this is the response he got on the online requirement question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfPRTJZHQw0&t=9m34s

MrLlamaSC said:
You do not need internet connection to play an offline mode. This is huge for me, I'm very about that. You do not need to connect into Battle.net to play singleplayer. So that's really nice.

So, very likely that D2 Resurrected will indeed be playable offline, besides the initial legal copy check they said they would do.
 
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Well, should they tie any of their new games or remakes to their online blizzard or battle net thingie, that would kill any interest I might have. I don't care to have a bajillion launch platforms on my computer, two suit me just fine.
 
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So thanks to few piracy groups you can play Diablo III offline now.:biggrin:
 
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https://wccftech.com/diablo-iv-world-of-warcraft-director-lead-designers-fired-blizzard/

Fucking Blizzard. And fucking Activision for hiding all this shit for this long, and only pretending to clean house when they were caught. And they're not even cleaning house. They're just using the opportunity to gain even more control over Blizzard. When Bobby Kotick starts resigning then I'll appreciate they're really trying to clean house.

Sadly, the Blizzard that once was, seems to be gone. And even what they were, they were for a short time. And this sort of behavior was likely there from the beginning. It seems people in power have a thing for behaving like this.

Anyway, I won't pretend this is just about morals. As insentitive and selfish as this is, I wonder how much this will delay Diablo 4.
 
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Yeah, the douchebaggery is strong with this lot. Fortunately for me, I've never cared much about any of their games.
 
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Yeah, I'd never give those pathetic folk at Blizzard or Activision even a dime of my money. Their online shenanigans and how they treat employees is all I need to know about the demented people that helm those organizations. I'll still with the great old games version of the first Diablo game, and I'll have my stars and garters crossed that the second game makes it there at some point.
 
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Sadly, the Blizzard that once was, seems to be gone. And even what they were, they were for a short time. And this sort of behavior was likely there from the beginning. It seems people in power have a thing for behaving like this.

You're just now coming to that realization? To me, it seems they've been the way they are now for quite some time.
 
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They strike me as being like a bunch of gubers that aspired to being in a frat, but couldn't cut it. So, once they got a sniff of success at work, they turned it into a sort of sleazy nerd-frat. Maximum cringe.
 
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