In a discussion on diablofans.com a representative from Blizzard talks about the end game situation looming before fans of the series. (By end game situation I mean lack thereof.) We here at BigShinyRobot, like our Diablo. But I can honestly say that driving myself to grind items, and replay the story 3 more times has been near impossible. I feel, like many members of the Diablo community that there is a lack of end game. The game didn’t fail, and isn’t bad, they sold 6 million plus copies after all. The game simply won’t continue to sell out if there is no reason to continue playing. Here are the quotes from the Bashiok.
We recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. There are still tons of people playing every day and week, and playing a lot, but eventually they’re going to run out of stuff to do (if they haven’t already). Killing enemies and finding items is a lot of fun, and we think we have a lot of the systems surrounding that right, or at least on the right path with a few corrections and tweaks. But honestly Diablo III is not World of Warcraft. We aren’t going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it’s not there right now.
We’re working toward 1.0.4, which we’re really trying to pack with as many fixes and changes we can to help you guys out (and we’ll have a bunch of articles posted with all the details as we get closer), and we’re of course working on 1.1 with PvP arenas. I think both those patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they’re not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game. We have some ideas for progression systems, but honestly it’s a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself still a ways out.
A few readers asked more questions, and the next quote begins.
Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but we believed pre-release that the item hunt would be far more sustainable, and would work to be a proper end-game for quite a while. That didn’t turn out to be true, and we recognize that.
and for the final piece.
Haha… oh wait, that’s mean! I don’t know that I’m allowed to release specific concurrency numbers, but we have hundreds upon hundreds of thousands playing every night. Comparing to just normal drop-off post release of a WoW expansion, Diablo III has been very solid, and it’s not even out in China yet.
Amidst server errors for the first few weeks, trouble with the auction house, and lack of end game, do you feel Blizzard fully delivered on this one? I don’t want to dump my opinion too heavily, but I’ll say that since completing the game I’ve only logged in twice.
I want to know what you folks think, did you get what you paid for? Are you angry, or simply done? Or are you still grinding it out and loving the game, comments welcome below.