What made them so angry ? If you want to know, read the interview with David Brevik, Blizzard North co-founder, and his opinions on Diablo.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/com...gs-on-diablo-3
"Fuck that loser" by Jay Wilson ? Priceless !
Clearly, David Brevik hit where it hurts.
Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH. -- Tei
Site seems to be hammered harder than the whack-a-mole machine at Thor's birthday party.
Quick google shows http://www.thebitbag.com/2012/08/19/...eries-creator/ which sums it up.
Honestly, Brevik sounds a bit arrogant and snide. But it is also hard to disagree: The game sold like hotcakes and people are still playing it, but everything I hear puts it more as "A small scale MMO like Guild Wars 1 was" rather than "An action RPG"
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I'm getting a 'database error' on that article.
Edit: Now it shows up. I guess Brevik is basically saying that the team on Diablo 3 didn't know what they were doing, in a roundabout way. Did they have to throw a fit over that?
Transcript here:
IncGamers: You are very well known in the world of ARPGs, and I am going to ask you, Diablo 3 is probably the most anticipated PC title in 10 years. What’s your opinion on the final product?
David Brevik: Honestly, I think that they did a lot of the things the best they could, it was a very different game than I would have created, the team and personalities, the people, the talent and all the design philosophies of the people that worked on it in Irvine, we called them Blizzard South, those people have their own style and the their own way they like to design. It was very, very different from the Blizzard North.
So I think that when Blizzard South took over the development of Diablo 3 it was inevitable that they were going to create an experience that was in the Diablo theme but concentrated more towards the things that they liked to experience. Including more story and things like that.
When Blizzard North shut down they lost a ton of experience with why the Action RPG works and what about it works. That’s really difficult to recover from. They didn’t have the experience of people that knew it well. This is why you do things with random levels for example, and so when you lose that experience you are going to create a very different experience in the end than we would have created.
IncGamers: Do you think they bought the wrong people in? As we understand, Jay Wilson, for example, his background was RTS. From our point of view it looked like they misunderstood what kept people playing, The type of loot drops, which has been a big issues. One of the other issues is they have not listened to their community, and they have not anlaysed what makes up that addictive Diablo experience. What are your thoughts on that?
David Brevik: Well, the loot system. They made some decisions with the loot system that were very different than the way that we did it in Diablo 2 and I think that obviously the community has been upset with some of the decisions they made. Having all of your powers work off your main weapon and things like that, to having blues that are more powerful than yellows. Eventually the auction house and how that worked, even something as simple as when you equip an item and it’s bound to your character permanently would have totally changed the dynamic of the game.
It seems odd that they have not really responded in a quick fashion to some of these things. I think they are very well aware of the problems at this point and are trying to fix some of this stuff. It’s a shame that they had to learn some of these painful lessons
IncGamers: As you created Diablo, how do you feel about it? Do you feel a little let down that the legacy has kind of been mashed up?
David Brevik: I have very mixed emotions about it (laughs). On one hand I am sad that people haven’t enjoyed Diablo because it’s a love, a passion, and its obvious people still have a giant love and passion for Diablo and they are speaking out about it because they have such love for it. That makes me feel great.
I am sad because people are outraged and, you know, some of the decision they have made are not the decisions I would make and there have been changes in philosophy and that hasn’t gone over very well. I think in that way I am a little sad.
I am also a little happy, which I hate to say, it shows that the people that were involved in Diablo really did matter, and so I am happy that it has come to light that how talented that group was and how unique and special that group was. I am hoping that, as this happens very often in the industry, you see it with Call of Duty and things like that , when the people leave the game changes and it shows how critical people are in this industry.
IncGamers: One of the questions the Gazillion guys asked me to ask you was, where did the name Diablo come from?
David Brevik: I thought of the game when I was in high school and I lived in the east part of San Francisco in a town called Danville and I loved at the base of Mount Diablo and that’s where the name comes from. Once I found out what the mountain name was, I thought that was awesome, I didn’t speak Spanish, so I thought I wanted to use that as a title for a nemesis in a videogame. It’s simply from where I lived.
IncGamers: Well thanks a lot David, you’ve brought a lot of pleasure to millions of people over the years and hopefully you’ll continue to do so.
Last edited by LTK; 20-08-2012 at 02:19 PM.
Just saw this on reddit. It just shows what kind of mindset Blizzard has devolved into and their confidence in their free ride on consumer goodwill built over more than a decade.
I saw the video interview before the story boomed and the website got clogged up, and from my perspective even though Brevik was indeed critical he was also respectful and his opinions pretty much mirrored the fan outcry that Diablo 3 suffered after launch.
Furthermore, there was nothing really mean-spirited in his comments (although you can't deny a smidgeon of schadenfreude in them), which cannot be said about the reactions that came from the Blizzard guys.
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Does it? "Not really they game we'd make" hardly warrants a "Fuck that guy" response.Originally Posted by gundato
"Chris liked Ron Paul"... I think that's the funniest thing here.
ARPS unofficial motto - And then we leave. No heroic stands.
Now we know why Diablo 3 sucked!
Okay...
The point of the link was so that people would know what was going on, since the "real" link is dead as a doornail.
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It's impossible for me to take seriously someone who likes Ron Paul...
I like how the fanbois use "Hellgate lol" to put him down and supposedly make his remarks meaningless.
Sure, it was shit.
But this is the guy who directed Diablo and Diablo 2 and headed Blizzard North. His comments on Diablo 3 are about as relevant as comments on that game can get.
Not quite, it loads once in a while. If you want, I can paste the thing in my post above.
Last edited by LTK; 20-08-2012 at 02:19 PM.
Too bad Diablo 2 was shit as well. So that's 2 to 1.
I was hoping this wouldn't show up here. Do we really need this? It's the equivalent of a 'Madonna doesn't like Lady Gaga's dress' kind of story. I know Eurogamer does this kind of industry drama, but I'm hoping this won't make it to the front page of RPS.
It doesn't foster any kind of useful discussion whatsoever. There are no new points brought to the table regarding anything, and I couldn't care less whether two game devs get along or not. To paraphrase Billy Madison, everyone is now dumber for having read this.
If only they were fanboys and not developers at Blizzard...
Diablo 4: Diablo shrugged.
It's interesting to see how direct Brevik is in his criticism. I would assume a lot of developers don't like the way their game series evolved over the years, but rarely does anyone talk about it. Are there any other examples of a series creator being vocal about this sort of thing?
I actually watched the interview when it popped up on my YouTube feed a couple days ago and thought nothing of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPEKv...=g-u-u#t=5m50s
I already had a fairly low opinion of Jay Wilson (he actually claimed on reddit that D3's story had received positive feedback from many reviewers, which is either delusional or just a lie), but it's nice to confirm that he's thin-skinned and classless as well.
Lara Croft's creator had a few things to say about her "sexing up", IIRC.
Hmm. Here: Ish.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3794621.stm
The two are hard to tell apart, aren't they ?
I think this is valuable. Madonna tries very hard to be a public figure. In contrast, (big) game developers are typically behind a PR department, and it's not uncommon having to ask for permission for writing each forum post. We don't know what developers like Blizzard actually think ! Well, no longer.
Blizzard employees have shown they can't take criticism, they are in denial. Don't count on their games getting better, because if you think you're already as good as you can be... you're probably right. As we can see here, they're not any smarter or polite than regular gamers.
David Brevik's interview is quite polite and he doesn't go into excessive bashing. He was asked for his opinion and he gave one. He was quite specific about things he doesn't like, mentioning random level generation, items, and auction house. What did he get in response ?
- Steven Parker: twisting his words to make a bigger fuss. David didn't even use the word "suck".
- Andrew Silvernail: elementary logic failure, and not giving credit for Diablo1 and Diablo2. He also conveniently omits that Diablo 3 sold so well because of Diablo 2 hype.
- Jay Wilson: a rude personal attack
- Jill Harrington: again, a personal attack against a site that is independent from Blizzard, where Blizzard moderators can't delete critical threads. And she backs up the rude reaction of Jay Wilson.
- Eric Bachour: see Andrew Silvernail
Why bother addressing what David said if you can just insult him ? And why just him, when he was praising the whole Blizzard North team and not taking the credit himself ? Reading comprehension issues ? Also note the interviewer even provoked him to talk about perceived Jay Wilson's ineptitude, but David didn't take the bait.
Last edited by b0rsuk; 20-08-2012 at 03:14 PM.
Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH. -- Tei
The Reddit comments are even funnier than I'd remembered. In chronological order, some excerpts:
We wanted the game to have a greater focus on story, and so decided to have a linear quest flow so we could advance plot and world changes.Agree to disagree? We get lots of compliments on the story and dialogue. It's a hard area to make everyone happy, and a lot of things we do to make goals obvious for some players make them feel over-stated to others. We never tried to make War and Peace, just a decent pulpy story about heroes fighting demons.We answered this question in other threads, but the recap is: we disagree and have gotten mostly great feedback on the story.http://www.reddit.com/user/JayPWilsonWe've commented on story several times now. The majority of feedback we've gotten on story has been positive. I'm sorry your experience varied.
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