Posted by Daeity
On Thursday, October 27, 2011
- "The Players Wanted It". I love it when Blizzard says this. Apparently, the reason for the new Pet Battles system is because players wanted it. Blizzard also said the same thing about the cash money auction house: players wanted it. Online only requirement and no mods for Diablo 3? Player want this because that's how it was in Diablo 2. Paid faction changes? Players wanted it. Create both factions on a PVP server? Players. Real ID? Players. Removal of Real ID? Players again. Character naming restrictions? Players. More restrictions? Removal of restrictions? Pandas? You get the idea. It's all completely true though.. it's like those commercials where they say, "Doctors agree that this is the best medical product." All they need are two doctors, who can have a doctorate in basket weaving, to promote the product. Players really did want these changes.. even if it was just 2 Blizzard employees who asked for it. Whenever they say "players want this", it's really "the business wants this." Why are the things that players REALLY want never done? Vanilla servers come to mind, and it's been a major discussion since TBC when there was no technical barrier.
- Bethesda has been denied their appeal in attempting to stop Interplay's development of the Fallout MMO. I'm actually hoping Interplay wins this battle, but not in the way or for the reasons you might be thinking. They have both been pretty sneaky on both sides, but in my opinion, Bethesda has been far more cruel during this war. I think that the Fallout MMO development progress has actually been very slow by Interplay on purpose, and they're really just holding the IP hostage. Bethesda's lawyers wrote that "Bethesda would be unable to recover in the event that Interplay enters bankruptcy." If this is true, then they should just purchase the entire Fallout IP directly from Interplay. (Interplay, of course, will be asking for a tremendous amount of "screw you" payback.) After all, Bethesda is not permitted to create any new Fallout game after their next standalone installment; the IP will automatically revert back to Interplay as per their original contract. I suspect that Bethesda is even more desperate now that RAGE (the possible Fallout replacement developed by id Software) wasn't received too well. What they should do is just make Fallout 5 a game with heavy next gen expansion characteristics, so that the universe can keep being expanded with new graphics engines and content in each expansion pack (or DLC). They just need to outlast Interplay. And, they should also buy the Wasteland IP from Inxile (for a much reduced price) and use that as their next gaming franchise line.
- Part 3 of that PC Gamer article came out. There was no more information on Titan, and no clarification of the first article which implied a possible Titan direction. Disappointing.
