Greatly irritated with Diablo III pricing

So the big news of the day is that Blizzard have finally announced a release date and opened pre-orders for Diablo III. I’ve been waiting for this moment enthusiastically since getting into the beta a few months ago, but my enthusiasm rapidly dimmed when I clicked through to the pre-order page.

The last thing I bought from Blizzard was WoW’s Cataclysm expansion. It was the first time I’d bought a direct download from them, after getting boxed copies of WoW and its first two expansions from local stores. And I was delighted that – despite the behaviour of some in the industry – Blizzard charged me the same price as people in other territories, rather than trying to charge what the market will bear.

Well, that policy of not screwing over Australian consumers has now officially been abandoned. Despite the strong Aussie dollar, Blizzard’s pricing now bears no connection to their costs, nor to exchange rates: it is purely price-matching local retailers in order to maximize profits.

Suggested price of $59.99, actual price of $84.10.

The ironic thing is that this is going to cost them money, on my sale at least.

Publishers love digital downloads because apart from the small expense of bandwidth, it’s all profit. Far, far more profit than selling boxes wholesale to retailers. They could have had $US59.99 out of my wallet right now if they hadn’t gotten greedy.

But instead I’ll be purchasing Diablo III through an alternative avenue, which will net Blizzard a lot less money.

Amazon are selling boxes for the recommended retail price of $US59.99. Shipping is expensive, though: $16 for standard or $25 for priority courier to Australia. Still, it works out to a similar price to Blizzard’s rip-off price, and you get a physical box not just a code.

Not much point, though, when JB Hi-Fi are selling it for $A79.00. Yes, I can get a physical copy (either in store or with free shipping within Australia) for less than Blizzard’s rip-off price. Hard to think of a single reason to buy directly, isn’t it, when JB Hi-Fi can manage to pay rent, staff, make a profit for themselves, and still undercut Blizzard by a dollar?

And of course, there is always the option of buying just a code from a code-vendor. Some people are reluctant to go down this road, since some of these vendors seem not quite reputable, but if you want to do it, OffGamers are taking pre-orders for Diablo 3 keys for $A57.87.

It all makes me a bit sad. I’ve been delighted to buy directly from Blizzard in the past, it made me happy that my money was going directly to the company that developed and published the game, rather than a middle-man. But I’m not prepared to pay a lot more money for a lesser product in order to do so.

So I played a bunch of games over the last 5 months

First of all, let me get the 2011 Awards out of the way.

Worst Blogger: Me, for posting five posts all year, all of them in August, for no apparent reason.

I’ve meant to write a bit about some of the old and new games I’ve been playing over those five months, but I always want to write massive walls of text like I did for Runes Of Magic and Atlantica Online, and I never feel like I have quite enough free time. So instead, I’m going to try to bang out a paragraph or two about a few new games, a couple of old games, and a couple of betas.

Without further ado, here is the last five months in gaming!

Rusty Hearts

I picked up this free-to-play title in order to complete an achievement and get another entry in Steam’s Holiday Sale Gift Pile competition. I’ve slagged off Perfect World in the past for making an excessive number of excessively similar games, but this ”gothic themed beat-em-up” is actually quite a different kettle of fish.

Set in a Transylvania distorted by a heavy filter of Asian sensibilities and dialogue translations at the “martial arts movie subtitle” level of quality, the story is some preposterous tosh about heroic vampires that try not to drink blood and a village menaced by the shadow of Vlad’s castle. Gameplay is you versus swarms of enemies, smashing them to pieces with grand sweeping blows – it actually reminded me of some classic arcade games like Golden Axe. But then combine that with traditional MMORPG mechanics like levelling, skill cooldowns, “! over the head” quests, etc.

I’ve certainly gotten my bit of fun out of this. Steam says I’ve played for 17 hours, and I enjoyed them. I’ll fire it up again next time I’m in the mood for some bash and slash, and I’d say it was well worth a download if you think that sounds like fun.

Spiral Knights

Another free-to-play game I picked up for the Holiday Sale Gift Pile competition (by the way, I didn’t win anything worthwhile at all, just some discount coupons for games I had no interest in buying). This is a cutesy action RPG, I guess you’d call it somewhat Diablo-esque in style, with its view from above, running, dodging, kiting, shooting, etc.

I did spend a few more hours playing this after completing my competition achievement, so I’d have to say it was at least OK, but it didn’t grab me in any really meaningful way. I don’t regret the download (it was fairly small, well under a gigabyte iirc), but I don’t really see myself launching it again.

Uncharted Waters Online

This one was mentioned on a forum as an example of a shamefully overlooked “AAA sandbox MMO”. AAA is an exaggeration – it’s at a level of polish I’d say was roughly on par with Atlantica Online. It’s not bad but you’d never mistake it for a genuine AAA commercial title from a major studio. But with that out of the way, I’ve got a lot of good to say about this game.

Set in a sort of mashup of 15th and 16th century history, you play a sea captain, sailing ever-finer ships as you travel the world exploring, trading and fighting. You know what game it actually most reminds me of? EVE Online. You have a similar mix of non-combat activities (trading, exploring, manufacturing). You can learn to fight by hunting NPC pirates, and then venture into “hostile waters” to either hunt player pirates, or become one yourself. Your capabilities are heavily defined by the ship you are currently captaining. And you have that real sense of distance – travelling takes quite some time, and there are no hearthstones to magically take you back home again!

There are three main paths in the game – Adventure (exploring and discovery), Trading, and Battle. I’ve been dabbling in them all over the last week and am not sure which one I most want to follow, because I’m enjoying all three. Luckily the game allows you to develop your choice of skills, with a class system that allows you to switch classes, and where your current class really only defines which “favoured” skills advance more quickly than others. You’re certainly not locked into any one path.

Anyway, I’d like to write more extensively about the adventures of Banquetto the Portuguese chandler at a later date. Maybe I will even manage to do so.

The Lord of the Rings Online

This continues to be a bit of a “go to” game for me. I picked up the “Rise of Isengard” expansion – foolishly paying full price at release, since it went on sale before I got to the point where I was actually high enough level to visit the new lands. Anyway my Guardian main is now level 68 and questing in Dunland, and LOTRO continues to be a perfect “pay as you go” title for me. Sometimes I’ll play heavily for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I won’t even launch it for a month or two. But when the mood takes me and I do play it, I always enjoy myself.

Guild Wars

I did ease off on Guild Wars quite a bit, after playing heavily throughout June to August. However I had a few more good sessions which led to me completing my “Legendary Guardian” title – doing every mission in the three campaigns (58 missions in total, iirc), with bonus objectives / Master rewards, in hard mode. I’m actually pretty proud of this, since a number of the missions are regarded as being rather rough to solo. This was an achievement which made me feel that I had actually achieved something, in terms of testing my skills, and having to improve them in order to succeed.

I have 19 points in my Hall of Monuments, just one more needed to get another Guild Wars 2 title and pet. I could get that in the blink of an eye just by going to Kamadan and buying a miniature off someone. And if the mood takes me to go for the “Ascendant” title in GW2, I can probably get up to 25 HOM points just by splashing around some of the cash in my stash, on more miniatures, armour and weapons.

EverQuest II

So when EverQuest II merged their free-to-play “EQ2 Extended” model with their regular EQ2 model in December, I decided to take another look at it. Thought it might be fun to dig up the level 30-something Brigand I played for a month way back when. As it happens, I couldn’t actually track down the details of that account, so I just started a new character.

I got all enthused for a few days, and even dropped twenty bucks to buy the latest two expansions when they had a “triple Station Cash” sale on. And then I got sick of it for exactly the same reason I’ve gotten sick of EQ2 the last couple of times I’ve tried to play it: the combat is boring boring boring. By far the worst implementation of the “tab target, autoattack, buttonbar full of skills” MMO combat system I have ever seen.

Once my new Guardian got to the point where I had more than a full button bar’s worth of marginally different attack skills, all on 10-30 second cooldowns, I knew it was time to stop. Again. Oh well, enjoy the twenty bucks, Sony.

Diablo III Beta

Yes, about a month ago I finally got an invite to the D3 beta!! I wrote up some impressions over at the D3 forums, but here’s the conclusion I came to after playing through the (very short) beta with two of the five classes:

I have zero doubt that we're onto a huge winner with Diablo 3. I can't wait to get home from work and play the other three classes, and I really can't wait for release!!

It feels good. It feels really good. I have a few concerns regarding linearity and difficulty, which may be premature since the beta is so short (just part of Act 1 of the game), and I have some other concerns about the lack of reason to replay with new characters, compared to Diablo 2 which – for better or for worse – did force you to start fresh if you wanted to pick different skills.

But the day this title goes on sale, I will buy it. No doubt, no question, this is a release day purchase for me.

Path of Exile Closed Beta

Given my excitement about Diablo 3, it’s ironic that just a few days ago I got an invite into the closed beta of the earnestly D2-influenced indie title Path of Exile!

Now, there’s a lot of angst on the D3 beta forums from fans who see every divergence from D2 as a personal insult. It’s clear that what they want is Diablo 2, with ten years newer technology behind it. Well, they’re going to get their wish. It’s called Path of Exile.

I’d been following this game with some interest, thought it looked cool, and expected (being an indie title and all) that it would be pretty rough visually and technically, since small teams generally find it impossible to match the polish that a major developer can bring to the table. According to my beta NDA, I’m allowed to post “general opinions on the game,” so here’s one: I was completely wrong about that. This game absolutely oozes polish and the graphics are simply stunning.

The minute-to-minute gameplay is incredibly closely influenced by Diablo 2, right down to the near-identical health and mana balls. The character progression is quite different, but it’s identical to D2 (and very different to D3) in one important way. Let me quote from the developer’s Beta Manifesto:

We do not want players to be able to completely respec their entire character easily. The game is designed to be fun to play, so if you want to play a Bow character rather than an Axe character, you’re meant to start a new one.

Now that’s the Diablo 2 spirit!

This is another game I’d like to write more about, although I’ll have to take some care to abide by the beta agreement – I’m allowed to discuss “publicly available information” but not “unannounced information”, so I’d need to investigate what exactly has been made publicly available.

That is quite a treasure you have there in that Horadric Cube

I have been an avid gamer all my life, but as a gamer, I have been almost entirely focused on MMOs for something like seven years now. Right from the first day I played Horizons (and what a poor first MMO that was!), I've been hooked by the online worlds. Not long after that, World of Warcraft launched, and any chance of this interest not sticking was gone. WoW is the MMO that I have spent by far the most time playing, starting on release day in November 2004, although my subscription has been off and on as I have taken a number of lengthy breaks in between expansions.

But before I encountered a massively multiplayer game for the first time, my consuming obsession was Diablo 2. I played it a lot. Single-player, multiplayer, softcore, hardcore. I theorycrafted builds, pored over drop rates, did my own parsing of the game's datafiles, wrote some tools, all sorts of stuff. I was a serious D2'er for a couple of years there. So, needless to say, I've been quite keenly anticipating the upcoming release of Diablo 3.

And last night, wow, what a bombshell of a news release there was, in the form of Blizzard's announcement that D3 would have an auction house where items can be bought and sold both for in-game gold, and for real cash.

While goldbuying is a scourge of modern MMOs, the black market in D2 was all about selling items directly. Back in the day, before Blizzard cracked down, you could search on eBay and find all manner of items for sale. Once that avenue was closed, RMT went to the same sort of sites as currently sell MMO currency. Just now I googled for "Diablo 2 items" and straight away found many results, the top sponsored link selling various items for prices ranging from a buck or so to a staggering $100+ for some items!

So given this market, Blizzard have decided to take a leaf from Sony's Station Exchange, enable and moderate the trade themselves, and - of course - take a little cut from each listing. Now that's a fascinating idea for a revenue stream other than the currently common subscription and cash shop models!

Here's why I think this idea will be popular

Diablo 2 was the ultimate casino game. WoW pales in comparison. You kill a boss in WoW, you know he's going to drop, say, two epics from a table of 10 possible drops. Kill anything in D2 and it could drop anything. In the highest level zones, literally any mob can drop any of the most valuable items in the game. Sure the odds might be millions to one against, but yes, that imp could drop a Zod rune.

And on top of that, the stats on the items were random too. Sometimes to variations were minor - the much-loved Windforce bow only had one variable stat, 6-8% mana leech. One in three chance that when one dropped it would have 8%, and be "perfect". But The Grandfather had 150%-250% increased damage - a massively important stat, and the odds were 100:1 against getting a perfect one. That's if you ever saw one drop. Elite uniques like that were extremely rare to start with.

So if D3 follows a similar pattern, I expect to see perfect instances of rare items sell for large sums of money. Which means that every time you play, it will be like being given a lottery ticket. When any piece of loot that drops could be a perfect elite unique that sells for serious cash, you better believe killing bosses will get your pulse racing.

Here's why I think this idea is cool

Obviously, "subscription vs. free-to-play" has been the debate of the last year or two in the MMO world. I've had a lot of fun with free-to-play MMOs such as Atlantica, and with subscription-turned-F2P games like LOTRO. But one thing that has always bothered me is that in a subscription game, the developer and you are partners. They want to entertain you enough that you'll keep playing and keep paying, and you want them to entertain you because, well, that's what games are for.

But in a F2P game - the developer wants to entertain you, sure. But just keeping you playing is not enough. They need to keep you paying, too. And therein lies conflict between player and developer. They need to make playing totally for free kind of frustrating. They need to make you wish that you could be more powerful, or less restricted.

This is the point where someone usually says "why aren't there more buy-to-play games like Guild Wars?" And sure, as a gamer, that's great, but it's tough for a developer to provide ongoing support and content without a revenue stream.

This auction house idea? It has the potential to make the game generate a massive revenue stream for Blizzard, whilst the players can buy the box and play for free. Or, they can buy the box and then spend a fortune buying stuff from other players. Or, they can buy the box and then recoup the money farming and selling. But the relationship between Blizzard and the players is once again one of "we need to keep you having fun so you keep playing."

Here's why this idea worries me

Diablo 2 was always something of a cheat's paradise. Maphacks, teleport hacks, townkill hacks, duping.. it had the lot. And WoW also has had no shortage of teleport hacking, with all the underground miners and so on you see about the place.

Combine that with the amount of account hacking going on these days. Everyone knows people who have had their accounts jacked. I get dozens of spam emails every week trying to phish for my WoW login.

Now combine all of the above with a means to cash out ill-gotten gains with Blizzard not only facilitating it, but profiting from it! And good luck relying on your players to report cheats if the game is instance-based rather than persistent world, and thus none of your honest players are ever in the same gameworld as tele-hacking farmers.

I'd like to think Blizzard have the ability to counter all this, but honestly, I'm not sure they do.