Personally I think Diablo hype is gone and never coming back. D3 took it in into the realm of fantasy, when they should have doubled down on the whole gothic thing, right as Dark Souls/Bloodborne was getting popular with people.

Well said. People forget how huge Dark Souls/Bloodborne was.

Everyone warned Blizzard that the atmosphere of the game was too candy land for the franchise. Diablo is supposed to be an R rated atmosphere and they turned it into PG.

Could say the same with Warcraft really. WCI/WCII had far better lore when it was darker and more grim. Even if it was simpler in presentation and not as developed back then.

No comparison. Diablo was teetering toward X rated. I was told to remove the game from my house.

Which I of course did not.

Agreed, the first Diablo was VASTLY different from the second one. I remember not wanting the game to be found out or seen by anyone when I wasn't playing it. It felt like having a satanic bible installed on your computer.

Diablo 2 did not inspire that same feeling.

Diablo 3 I barely recognized, but played, despite feeling like "This game kinda sucks... but it's easy... so I guess I'll play a little bit more and see if it improves."

blizz is disneypixar aimed at teens instead of preteens for 10+yrs. open your gullet and drink the ur1ne if ur still following the releases haha

can get a good NUT to those cartoon tiddies in overwatch doe. draws in a lot of radio edit

D2 still had that surreal eerie atmosphere, but it was mostly carried by the soundtrack. The soundtrack was so fucking good.

But in line with what you are saying, with the differences. Yes it was because D2 introduced "relief" points to the franchise, where you felt relief from the dark atmosphere. You had a stressful period and then in Act 2 you felt like Ahhh whew relieved. I sort of liked that.

I expected D3 to follow D2, where you had super dark R rated horror atmospheres followed by "relief" points to play on your emotional strings. Everyone thought the D3 preview was just the "relief points" and that darker more gothic elements weren't being showcased to the public yet.

When that didn't happen, and the so-called "relief points" were actually just the entire game in D3, we did like America and forgot about the whole thing.

While this is true. Diablo 3 has a very different feel from diablo 1 or even diablo 2... I don't think it was a huge factor in causing the drama that followed diablo 3s release. Basically everything was going good for a month or so then --

Plop. Everyone hit the Inferno wall. Only wizards and DH was viable -- and you would kite insta killing mobs for good rare drops....

So that's pretty bad right there from a game play standpoint. But hell, They could work with it. Maybe adjust the difficulty so it transitions a bit more smoothly. Maybe do the greater rift or rift idea that was already out in other games before release.

But here's what really destroyed the game.

Blizzard put in a real money auction hall. Then, they fudged the items that you need as far as drop rate goes. They balanced the drop rate for the auction hall. So that globally in the diablo 3 universe, there wouldn't be too many good items and people could keep selling DH bows for 200 USD.

Then when people bitched about it, the very next patch they upped the cost of repairing your items so that you would slowly lose money playing Inferno. This is after people were already complaining that they were losing too much money playing Inferno.

After that, Jay Wilson got extremely unpopular with the fan base. Once he was caught saying "fuck that loser" about the Blizzard North Developer -- the company basically had to reassign him. Even though it is my belief they really didn't want to and felt sorry for him as the fall guy.

What I'm trying to say is. Capitalism fucked up diablo 3. They found a way to make more money then they were off the d2 model -- charge money for items that only addicts will buy. They didn't care about the fact that it made the game mostly unplayable in the long term.

And nothing is going to make the next Diablo game good anyway -- which is why I'm not that excited about it. Because Blizzard is too big now -- and we have corporate idiots controlling game development. The short term for profit mindset is toxic for games. It doesn't create good games -- it creates shitty ones and we see a whole mass of history showing the decline of good game companies as they get bigger in the US.

I stopped playing diablo 3 when they removed the RMAH. It got rid of any incentive I had to grind and play that shitty game. I don't see how they can top Path of Exile if they want to go for the hack and slash gameplay in the future.

Meh I'll still play it. Good game to play at work while I'm dropping turds. AmIrite?

On another note.. Blizzard was/is still working on another game for the Diablo franchise. So even though they outsourced this mobile game they are still going to release a Pc/Ps4/Switch/What ever the hell you play. One of their old developers said they screwed up royally not giving a preview of the other game they were working on at Blizzcon, and only showed off the mobile game. lol blizz lol

but what Nexii said there hasn't really been anything since Lich King. Maybe SC2

Bliz is a shit company now though. Give it a few more years and we will have WoW mobile lolol:p