Today
on Headline RePLAY: Diablo III's item hunt
end-game isn’t enough, Nintendo won’t charge for internet access for the Wii U
and a Final Fantasy VII re-release on
the PC.
Diablo III is all about the hunt for the
perfect item drop(s), however Blizzard concedes that it’s just enough for a “long-term
sustainable end-game.”
“We
recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable
end-game,” said Community Manager Micah “Bashiok” Whipple on the official
forums. “But honestly Diablo III is
not World of Warcraft. We aren’t going
to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There
needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it’s not
there right now.”
Bashiok
reveals that Blizzard does have plans to “give people things to do” and “get
them excited about playing” with fixes and changes via patches (1.0.4) and Diablo III’s delayed PvP arenas;
although these are not going to be a “real end-game solution.”
“We
have some ideas for progression systems,” continued Bashiok, “but honestly it’s
a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could
envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself is still a ways
out.”
On
the suggestion that Diablo III was
released before it was ready, Bashiok admitted that the development team
underestimated how sustainable the item hunt would be.
“Hindsight
is 20/20 I suppose, but we believed pre-release that the item hunt would be far
more sustainable, and would work to be a proper end-game for quite a while,” he
said. “That didn’t turn out to be true, and we recognize that.”
Nintendo
promises not to charge consumers for their “ordinary online services,” much
like how Sony handles PSN, although the company cannot guarantee it for “deep”
experiences.
“We
cannot promise that Nintendo will always provide you with online services free
of charge no matter how deep the experiences are that it may provide,” Nintendo
President Satoru Iwata told shareholders, “but at least we are not thinking of
asking our consumers to pay money to just casually get access to our ordinary
online services.”
“We
have a wide variety of consumers,” Iwata elaborated, “from the ones who
enthusiastically play video games to those playing more casually, who are not
always interested in them but try to play a game only when it has become a
public topic or play it just during certain periods, like a year-end season and
summer vacation.
“We
therefore believe that services which ask our consumers to obtain paid
memberships are not always the best.”
If
you missed the dozen other Final Fantasy
VII re-releases over the past few years, Square-Enix is offering it again
for the PC with some added… features.
The
re-released PC version includes 36 achievements to unlock with online profile sharing,
a “character booster” that can increase character stats and Gil and cloud save
support.
Final Fantasy VII for the PC will
exclusively be available on the Square-Enix store. No release date is announced.
|Source:
Square-Enix
