Diablo 3 Content Creation Phase

Now that Blizzard feels their engine is solid, it’s time to move on to creating content for the full game. Jay Wilson, Diablo 3‘s lead designer, says the game engine is in an advance stage of completion and much of the art team has moved onto Act 2. Don’t read into that, he said game engine.

Blizzard is obviously not hurting for money, given the success of World of Warcraft and they’ve always taken their time with projects to make them solid products. Blizzard’s name is on the line and they’re brand consists of three major franchises: Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. When you produce so few games you’re expected to do them perfectly.

How do they do it? As Wilson says, “If we haven’t rebuilt something five times it really doesn’t deserve to be shipped. That’s pretty much our policy.” (eurogamer) While a game engine is the foundation for a great game experience, the content is king. Blizzard is deep in the mire of content production so, although the engine might be solid, the final product is probably still far from complete.

End result, expect a high quality product once again from Blizzard.

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Bethesda’s Hines: Don’t Shoehorn MultiplayerBethesda’s Hines: Don’t Shoehorn Multiplayer

Bethesda Softworks vice president of marketing Pete Hines is critzing publishers and developers who shoehorn multiplayer into their games that doing such a thing is “a waste of time” and advises, “Just drop it, don’t bother…it’ll make for a worse game.”

In an interview with Next Gen BIZ, Hines states that using online multiplayer as a tool to prevent used game trade-ins and rental simply doesn’t work, and robs developers of valuable man-hours.

Hines stated:

“(People ask us) for a game like Skyrim or Prey 2, why doesn’t it have multiplayer? Well, our question is always the opposite when we talk to a developer. If you’re doing multiplayer, why are you doing multiplayer? What are you trying to accomplish?

“If you’re doing it just to check a box or because every other publisher says you’ve got to have multiplayer, then just drop it, don’t bother, it’s a waste of time, a giant distraction and it’ll make for a worse overall game.

“We want the best game possible. If that’s a singleplayer game that’s 15 to 20 hours, then make that! Don’t waste your time on features that don’t make the game better.”

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Prey 2 are two Bethesda properties that will lack multiplayer, but one of the tools to encourage games to keep both games will be downlodable content and, even more important, good communications with the game communities and nurturing the fandom for both games.

Beta: Wrath of the Lich King – Initial ReactionBeta: Wrath of the Lich King – Initial Reaction

The long awaited Wrath of the Lich King is here! By long awaited, really, I mean, I waited a long time to get patch after patch of the next expansion to Blizzards best of MMORPG. Although I don’t know the architecture to creating the patches, it seems so dated in methodology. Why must I download 5GB of patches when one can just supply me with an option to pull everything.

The initial download was roughly 1.8GB for what I assume would be “the DVD” you’d be buying in the store. Once I install that baseline it requires another roughly 1.2GB “update” before you can launch the application. Once you launch the WoW executable it must download another 500MB or so of patch data followed by another 100MB of patch data followed by another 500MB of patch data. Then, and only then, can you login and start playing!

My first option was to use the character I transferred over from Scarlet Crusade and jump into the world. Wishfully thinking, I also migrated over my addons to see what would work. After receiving more errors than I can explain I logged out and disabled all the addons. We’ll wait on those.

Within seconds I noticed the date in the top corner, it seems WoW has evolved over the years from a black vortex of time suckage to something a bit more user friendly. An older patch included a clock on the map so you know how many hours you’ve got before the sunrises, allowing you to sneak in a few hours of sleep before work. Now, they’ve included a calendar so you will know just how many days you’ve been up without food or drink. I kid.

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