Who would've thought that Max Payne 3 would have been a better May 15th pre-order than Diablo 3?
The midnight release crowd at San Francisco's Powell St Gamestop on the night of May 14th wasn't the largest I've seen, but the line was still over 200ft long. Fans have been eagerly awaiting the next Diablo installment, and it's been a very long twelve years since Diablo 2 was new. The whole attendance was, of course, for Diablo 3 - except for my boyfriend, who was ignoring the hype and getting Max Payne. I, however, was completely taken in. My faith in Blizzard was rock solid, and I knew that once again they were going to deliver greatness. I was fully expecting a game that would rival other recent PC games - standard setting games like Starcraft II (Blizzard's last big release, and one of my all-time favorite games) and Civilization V (another long running classic series). Sadly, all of the hopes and dreams I had built up over the years would be brutally murdered in the span of a few hours... The first surprise blow from the nasty Error 37, but the final killshot from Diablo itself.
Monday the 14th was a long day for me. I was at work until about 8pm, cheering myself on all day with daydreams of unleashing some very zen wrath with my soon-to-be Monk. When it was finally time, I grabbed some pizza slices and taxied on over to Powell St, where a modest line had already begun to gather outside Gamestop. The chill nipped a little bit at our fingers and noses, but as San Franciscans, we were all accustomed and prepared with jackets and hoods. Somehow, as ragtag a bunch as we gamers are at midnight in public, vagrants are always attracted to the midnight release queue, like moths to a flame. They faithfully provide us with hours of entertainment and simultaneous discomfort. When we can't stand it anymore, we turn our backs and huddle in, continuing our conversations about New Tristram, swapping BattleTags and exchanging our elaborate plans for classes and battle strategies. This fan culture might explain why Diablo 3's pre-sales were so high: they had already reached 823,992 units in the U.S. by May 12th, three days before the release (stats by VGChartz.com). Compare that to 281,597 units, Max Payne 3's combined sales on the same day in the U.S. for both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Like 823,991 other people, I was expecting to come home at 12:15am with one of the best games of the year. Finally, the minutes ticked down... 11:55... 11:59... 12:00! And the civilized rush for our copies began. 20 minutes later, I was in front of my PC, loading up the game... waiting through the install... taking in Deckard Cain's gravelly old voice as he refreshed me of what had happened in Tristram in the past 20 years. The game was installed, the beautiful full screen login page enveloped my monitor - and that was the abrupt end of my giddy anticipation. Like running full speed into a brick wall. A brick wall that is disappointingly devoid of skeletons and demons.
(Error 37)
Facts: Diablo 3 was officially announced in 2008. Activision and Blizzard merged the year before in December of 2007, and since then has had an average annual net revenue of about $4.1 billion ($3.03 billion in 2008, $4.28 billion in 2009, $4.47 billion in 2010, and $4.755 billion in 2011 - full annual reports here). This revenue goes toward the development of "best-selling video games such as Call of Duty® as well as Spider-Man™, X-Men™, James Bond™ and TRANSFORMERS™, leading franchises such as Spyro™ and Blizzard Entertainment's® StarCraft®, Diablo®, and Warcraft® franchises including the global #1 subscription-based massively multi-player online role-playing game, World of Warcraft®." (Activision-Blizzard Website). As a company, Blizzard has been providing massive online services since 1997, when the first Battle.Net was launched for the original Diablo. In the first few hours of its release date, May 15th, 2012, the Diablo 3 servers were overloaded, causing the majority of players to receive errors on login, leaving them unable to play the game. Within the first 24 hours, multiple game-breaking bugs kept Blizzard's customers from playing the game.
So, what we're left with is this: A very successful, experienced studio and publisher, with plenty of time and money, managed to catastrophically fail one of the most anticipated launches of their lifetime as a business. Some might argue that the few hours after midnight were really a very small part of the game's lifespan and impact, and that people are making too much of a fuss about the whole thing. But as one of the loyalists who survived the midnight release, it tainted my game experience a great deal when, after all that anticipation, I finally loaded up the game only to get an unapologetic error code. I went to bed around 3am, feeling helpless and dejected. I woke up early the next morning to give it one more go before work, and thankfully by then they had sorted out the server issues enough for me to log on for a bit. But the damage had been done. I slaughtered the first hordes of undead with bitter resentment rather than gleeful fulfillment. After just recently reading a great article that mentioned showing your early adopters the proper respect (original article, and my response), I now have first hand experience on why its so important. The little things matter to players, and an 'oops' like this will affect a lot of people's overall experience with the game. However, if the servers had been my only qualm, I think I would have forgiven them pretty fast. What hurt me more, as a technical artist, was the lack of polish even after such a long development period.
Facts: Diablo 3 has modest system requirements. It's a fixed camera experience with low poly characters and environment compared to most modern games, and no revolutionary effects work.
"Blizzard games are intended to be accessible... We [Blizzard] tend to spend time on a visual style that we believe will be timeless."
-Micah Whipple, a.k.a. "Bashiok"
Diablo 3 Community Manager
Timeless visuals that don't rely on gimmicks and fancy new technical tricks are a noble goal. It's unfortunate that Blizzard's representatives are using this as a response to the people who criticize their art for being outdated and low quality. Because, if we're being honest, it is just that - obsolete and inferior to today's standards. I spent a little bit of time collecting screenshots, and reviewing them critically with all of the techniques I was taught in my years at the Academy of Art. I also spent some time capturing shots from Starcraft II and Civilization V, for comparison.
My observations:
-At any given time, the screen has very low contrast and range, and three quarters of the screen is taken up by indiscriminate shadows. This is not a subjective claim, but can clearly be seen by looking at a histogram of the screenshot's levels.
-The character is constantly located in the center of the screen, and even with large area-of-effect attacks, the player's action takes up only about 8.8% of the screen (calculated to the pixel). This is a dismal use of space and composition.
-When I am performing my coolest attacks, the visual effects detract from the gameplay and confuse what's going on: like the Monk's warp-to-enemy primary attack, which instantly and jarringly recenters the screen at my destination. Or the area-of-effect kick, which is powerful and awesome, but spawns disgusting little white Arial-font text popups reading "Snared" on every enemy it hits, once again obscuring the action.
-The background scenery is full of shamelessly duplicated billboard sprites, like the classic cemetary tree, which is unacceptable simply due to how easy the problem is to remedy, and how little a billboard impacts performance.
-The camera is locked and allows no zooming or angle adjustment. (Features both SCII and Civ5 have)
-The persistant UI (User Interface) is uninformative at first glance, and the additional UI menus, like inventory and skill management, are invasive and when open, completely obscure and disable gameplay. However, due to the real-time, online nature of the game, these menus don't pause the action.
Diablo 3 is, graphically, everything that used to be wrong with video games, and isn't anymore. It's behind the times. Starcraft and Civilization are just two of the countless games I could have picked that show awareness of basic artistic and gameplay principles that developers have learned about in the last decade. These games are truly mature and timeless, and they don't need excuses.
Now all of this doesn't mean that I'm giving up on Blizzard, or that I'm cursing Diablo's developers. As a gamer, I'm let down, and I feel pretty cheated out of what I had hoped would be a great game. But as a professional, I understand that sometimes stuff happens and it just doesn't come together as dreamed. I'm paying such careful attention because I want to be able to see mistakes like this ahead of time and avoid them in the games I work on. Hopefully some of the issues can be patched and improved upon over the years. But man, it looks like my boyfriend won this round. Max Payne 3 is great.
