To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the news are getting people up in a torch and pitchfork kind of mood. Current announcement trailers have a like/dislike ratio of 1/30, at nearly 300 000 dislikes. Welcome to the Starwars Battlefront of 2018.
The Diablo fanbase, especially at Blizzcon, can be assumed at this time to be fairly heavily committed to PC / console. Telling a heavily PC / console biased crowd that they've come to hear about a mobile title is... one really has to wonder what Blizzard's PR / Community guys were smoking to greenlight that. At Blizzcon? Tokyo Gameshow maybe, or a big chinese equivalent, that could fly, but at Blizzcon? The biggest mobile using userbase you'd find at Blizzcon is going to be at the Hearthstone stage, not Diablo. Thhat would have always ended up in tears, even if prefaced or followed it up with announcing a remaster or new expansion for D3.
As it was, this turning into ragefest that it it should have been predicted the first their PR guys heard of it.
You might not have heard about, or care, but two other big IP got mobile-fied recently and both were utter, utter piles of crap both gameplay wise and with the amount of microtransactions shoved in. The fate of Dungeon Keeper and Command & Conquer is still a sore wound.
Blizzard isn't doing this. They've got a third party (NetEase) partner on board. And while on could argue that this something Blizzard has done before with the Diablo IP* the fact that they're doing this at all is worrying.
Because NetEase in particular is an infamous producer of games which are two things: 1. Heavily monetized mobile mmos which 2. just happen to look "like Diablo but different enough we can say it's not".
And lo and behold the interface that Blizzard has shown so far is pretty close to interfaces found in previous NetEase games. There is also supposed to be some worrying overlap in animation and graphics which suggest that
Blizzard's claims of this being developed fromscratch sound pretty bull.
Blizzard has been caught trying to make the backlash less bad by re-uploading the announcement trailer and deleting comments, which naturally is not the thing to be caught doing when trying to calm an enraged nerd herd.
TL,DR: Blizzard picked the worst place and timing (The last thing announced during the Blizzcon opening is supposed to be the Big One for that Blizzcon) , made a questionable choice in development partner and tried to calm the nerd herd in a foolish manner (They got caught).
*Specifically the Hellfire Expansion for Diablo 1 - but people who are interested in Diablo tend to know that Blizzard was less than happy with the process.
0 komentar :
Post a Comment