Diablo III out on 15 May, pledges Blizzard Blizzard will release Diablo III on 15 May. Honest. No, really, it will. No more delays this time. The World of Warcraft developer said the game, which was originally due to go on sale at the end of 2011 and then early this year, will be given away for free to WoW subscribers who've coughed up in advance for a year's access. …
Might be an interesting game but if I *must* play a single player game on-line at all times I'm not desperately interested. That sort of controlling streak doesn't bode well for the rest of the game.
They've picked up some bad habits in the last few years so I think I'll wait and see what others think, and pay a lot of attention to the moaning, before committing money to them.
I played the second one quite a lot, but didn't go on battle.net generally any more than I could avoid it. I reckoned my PCs could take what they got. I was never into PVP or endlessly killing the same monster just to level.
My internet connection's a lot better these days but I can't be arsed with an always on requirement. I don't care what other people think about the game I play, I'd never get the time to scale the heights of kudos that other types enjoy, so the whole locking me into battle.net to make sure I haven't somehow tweaked my character is irrelevant to me.
I don't mind an occasionally on requirement - i.e. if you want to swap between chars or patches it's up to you to choose when you do that. I don't mind that they have certain characters that require always on to ensure the purity of the character for those looking for bragging rights. But it is an unnecessary restriction for a large cadre of players. I had enough trouble with Fallout 3 or Las Vegas where their servers kept dying and kicking me out.
agree since activision got them they have really gone downhill.
Wow's content patches have dropped drastically in quality since. Hell the last "big" content patch added so much content it took me under 1 day to do almost all of it...
Also look at starcraft 2 they gave us one set of missions, where SC1 had all 3 races missions. SC2's Stalinistic control on what maps can be used in multiplayer drove me, and my friends away from playing it seeing I don't feel I should have to get blizzards permission on what I want to throw together to play on with my friends. I for one won't be spending any more money on SC2 when they release the "expansions"(aka what should have been in the original damn box).
Also that must be online for single player has royally pissed me off on several occasions like when my DSL router blew out on a thursday, and it took 5 days for its replacement to get here due to the weekend...
Ok, I'll bite. The original Starcraft had 30 missions in it. Ten with each race if I remember correctly. Starcraft 2 has 29 different missions (with 26 playable on a given walkthrough). Four of the missions involve the Protoss, but the rest are Terran. The 2 games essentially have the same number of missions.
Because the early missions on a given race are really tutorial missions, the missions don't really get good until 4 or 5 missions into a given race. With the Protoss missions in Wings of Liberty, Blizzard were very clever in ramping up the complexity much earlier by doing things like giving you pre-built bases so you can just concentrate on unit control. Overall, I would say about 25 missions on Wings of Liberty are interesting and replayable; compared to about 15-18 missions on the original Starcraft. This means that in all the years I've had Starcraft I've played through the single player missions 2 or 3 times. With Starcraft 2 I've played through the entire mission set at least 10 times, twice on Brutal, and once (on Normal) with no upgrades being used at all.
I, for one, find the fact that blizzard released one race at a time a huge uptick. And I've been looking forward to Heart of the Swarm for an ago. I'll be switching to Diablo 3 on release day though.
FYI, I signed up for a 12 month commitment to WoW some time ago and got D3, a shiny mount, and a beta key for 4.0 (Mists of Kung-Fu Panda). When I read that the date was firm, I checked my Battlenet account and can download the D3 client at any time. So it's not "Paid in Advance" it's simply "12 Month Commitment". Check your facts.
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