3 reasons why Diablo 3 will disappoint

Diablo 3 has, according to Sorel Vinterstøvler, been in development for a whopping 11 years!
I expect a game which will make for a paradigm shift in the way pc games are played. If I see anything less I will be disappointed. If the content consists of chasing and chopping monsters for 10 hours a day waiting for that Gold item t drop so I can look cool in front of my Diablo buddies... just doesn't cover it for me.

With all that time in development Blizzard has made sure to give information to the public about content and features in the games. The result is that all the classes have been revealed their visuals revealed, spells, skills, features, weapon types... blah blah. There are literally thousands of hours of videos on Youtube of people discussing Diablo3 specific content.

The result? All the magic is gone! What happened to the adventure of discovering things in the game? Knowing everything about spells, characters, abilities, etc. Some of the things that gave me the biggest satisfaction when playing Diablo 2 included finding out that I could plug a gem into a weapon to make it more awesome and upgrading runes in that cuby thing. That element of discovery and surpise is gone with everything being thrown out there to the public before the release. And I must say there's a good deal of repitition as well; something I accept from games like Titan Quest and Torchlight but not D3.

It is pretty clear that there's been alot of market research done in order to make sure that Diablo3 will appeal to as many players as possible. Nothing new there, I mean marketing is shaping every business nowadays. Look at Hollywood, everyone is producing feel good, shallow, sci-fi/fantasy movies e.g. Cowboys and Aliens, Avatar, Twilight and what have you. It's all about the money. The flipside to that is all products are innovated incrementally. Yes, they are safe investments and we know that people will buy. Just as gaming developers have found out that 1st person shooters sell pretty darn well. There is no radical innovation. Marketers kill product innovation.. People however don't necessarily want what marketers think they want, although they might buy it because there's no better alternative. Luckily there's proof of this: Minecraft and "supposedly" silly Facebook games.

But what does it mean for Diablo 3? Well the good boys an girls at Blizzard obviously looked to WoW for inspiration when building Diablo3. The result is a new graphic makeover for Diablo 3, which is now set in "happy colours" and lots of lighting effects. Yes many people like shiny colours so obviously th world should be filled with it as try to stop the Devil from taking over the world. There are in fact great graphics in Diablo3 with real physics effects e.g. walls crumbling realistically when they are shattered; no one will see discrete strokes of genious however because the screen will be filled with non stop explosions, lasers and what have you.