Yup. Never could get into the ARPG business.
It feels like Blizzard is a company good at iteration rather than innovation now... which is fine, I guess.
I kind of hope SC: Ghost comes out eventually, just to see if they can do anything different.
What it really comes down to is again that Blizzard rarely innovates, but instead takes existing gameplay mechanics and spends a significant amount of time on refinement and balance. Really your line of thinking only holds true if all games in the same genre are created equally... which, of course, they aren't. There's been a "gap" for Diablo-like gameplay for a long while now that hasn't been filled by anything that works as well. Lots of people were hoping Hellgate London will fill that niche, but that didn't work out...
Maybe I'm just thinking more about SC2, since that's the only Blizzard game that I'm interested in. I was hoping they'd respond to Relic, especially since Relic has declared themselves the best RTS developer in the industry. It just feels like EALA and Blizzard has totally dropped the ball on pushing RTSes forward.
Hellgate's failure does kind of show that Blizzard may be on to something I suppose. Then again, I guess it's because they don't have any competitors in the ARPG or, really, the MMO space.
Maybe I'm just thinking more about SC2, since that's the only Blizzard game that I'm interested in. I was hoping they'd respond to Relic, especially since Relic has declared themselves the best RTS developer in the industry. It just feels like EALA and Blizzard has totally dropped the ball on pushing RTSes forward.
I'm not too bothered where the thread goes.I don't know. I just think the core mechanic of having an economy tied to progress in the battlefield more interesting than one based on how many workers you can get on the field. That alone is a huge difference that just makes CoH faster than the major RTS franchises and forces people to engage as quickly as possible. There were other games that tried the same mechanic, but it just works in CoH.
I don't want to get into a SC vs CoH thing, but I don't understand this "it looks and works like crap, so it plays better" arguement from that Gamasutra article. It's like people who insist on Counter Strike 1.6 with all the graphical settings turned down. Yeah, maybe "high level players" like that... meanwhile, I'll play CoD4 or other games that both look and play great.
And you know, you can totally micro in CoH. In fact, it's encouraged to micro because armor in the game reflects the weaknesses of real world armor. High level CoH play is probably as "micro-ey" as high level SC play with the right players.
But this thread is supposed to be about Diablo.
I think I'm just stating my general disappointment in Blizzard as a whole, but of course, they are in the unique position where they can simply be iterative and succeed.
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