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happydolphin on 21 February 2013
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c0rd said:

Yeah, the hate the game is getting for the reveal is pretty ridiculous. The reality is, people that were disappointed in the game are looking for any excuse they could find to tear down on it. There's no reason to believe Diablo 3's design decisions were influenced by consoles (if you look at Starcraft 2, you already saw the direction their games were going in)

The real problem was that they decided to focus on their narrow story experience. It's more cutscene heavy, intrusive, less freedom, which leads to worse replay value (especially so when the story is crap). This influenced most of their questionable decisions (like max 4 players, no way you can fit more than that here, boss fights being the best example).

Other than that, the arguments for it being designed for a console first are terrible. Let's go through it:

"The reason only 4 players are allowed into a game is for 4 controllers."
There's no reason to limit the game to 4 players just because the console can't handle more (and even then, PS3 can handle more).

"The reason you have 4-5 skills on your bar at once? Very easy to use an Xbox/Ps3 controller to use skills."
The skills were limited in order to force you to choose a specific playstyle. If you could use more skills, there wouldn't be any builds.

"The reason no runes / complicated item mechanics exists. Simply wouldn't be fun for console gamers."
The "console owners are stupid" argument, is nothing more than the annoying, elitist PC gamer mentality. There's nothing stopping something like runewords from being in console games.

"The reason you can't host a named game? Auto join for console users"
I'm assuming this guy hasn't played Starcraft 2? Battle.net 2.0, it sucks, but it's not new to D3.

"The reason for achievements in game? It's popular among console / COD fans."
It's popular enough that it's in just about every game now (Steam games, WoW, SC2)

"The reason for passive skills? Perks like Call of Duty uses. Everyone unlocks perks and uses their favorite ones."
Associating passive skills/stats with "dumbed down console gaming," pretty stupid when every RPG features them for good reason - playstyle/build diversity.


Blizzard "dumbing down" their games has nothing to do with console gaming, and everything to do with, well, trying to market to the lowest common denominator. I do think many of their decisions are stupid, but this started with Starcraft 2, which is certainly not a console game.

Anyway, more importantly, there's nothing about the console version of Diablo 3 that couldn't have also been done with Diablo 2. In short, whining about a console port is dumb.

That's WIFOM. lol

Odds are, the reasons you say are due to an elitist PC mentality are much more likely due to a consolisation of features to be more accessible. Also, how would the PS3/4 support more than 4 players in a room?

The 4-skill thing just makes sense, but you could find another reason if you want to I suppose.