In true Nintendo style they even admit they plan to keep doing the thing that doesn't work then bitch about how it's the customers' fault they lost their monopoly when they stopped putting out any effort and competitors edged them out.
@Antarte: Dude, you're claiming turn based games that can be played exclusively with a mouse with only a left click are too complex to be played on a gamepad and are somehow ruined in the porting process when they come over with 100% of their content intact.
@Antarte: Look, you've got an agenda, that's fine, but don't pretend you're interested in a discussion where you might change your mind. All I said was I'd buy Diablo 2 on consoles and you had to sperg out. I'm out of patience with you.
Stop blaming bad business practices and incompetent development on consoles. Every community has a fit and falls in it every time their sacred cow gets ported somewhere and all it does is prove they're elitists and snobs being that they refuse to allow someone else to experience their game unless it's their way.
@Antarte: You totally missed my point. The games were translated to console without losses, they worked fine and they play fine. In many cases these are occurring with modern releases today, still, without compromise. Consoles aren't the cause of the casualization, it's diversification of audience and incompetent developers. Treat the cause, not the symptom.
@Antarte: No, Blizzard didn't have to, Jay Wilson did, like he does everything he works on.
And I stand that consoles have nothing to do with casualization. Blizzard is just casualizing everything, look at WoW, they've taken it waaaaay beyond Diablo 3's casualization level and that has nothing to do with consoles, it's just what they do. Titles like Doom, Quake 2, Morrowind, Civilization, and even the original Diablo have made their way to consoles eventually without any notable loss in quality beyond visuals AND with no original intent to see console release.
Another aspect is all of the people who actually designed Diablo 1 and 2's systems are gone from Blizzard and working elsewhere now, they worked on Torchlight most notably. The industry has had a massive talent drain over the past 10 or 15 years and I would say that in many cases games aren't being casualized to attract a console audience or even a wider audience, it's just that the many developers are incompetent from a design standpoint now.
@Antarte: I don't care what you classify it as or what you think of it. You're completely off the rails at this point, I never even expressed myself as a Diablo 3 fan, I started this off by saying that consoles are not to blame for Diablo 3's relative simplification and that is still true. Consoles have never been the source of simplification, developers and more often publishers pushing for a diversified customer base have caused that. ARPG's in the vein of Diablo always have and always will be a niche product and the examples you gave are just that: niche. Games have been coming to console a lot longer than Diablo and they never had to simplify anything before, not until the consumerbase spread and games became mainstream. Some parts of gaming are still niche and true to their roots but the publishers don't care about you as a long time fan, they want more people buying it and they want the community to expand, but it's not happening really with ARPG. The result: they'll just stop making them.
For example of niche status by comparison of communities, Grim Dawn has a total of about 13,000 user reviews on Steam, meanwhile the critically panned and probable commercial FAILURE that is No Man's Sky has nearly 75,000 reviews, albeit almost entirely negative, but even something that is completely hated on from all angles sold dramatically more in dramatically less time. They're apples and oranges but the point is that Grim Dawn is incredibly niche.
How about we compare some like for like communities then: Path of Exile's Reddit sub has 93k subscribers, Diablo 3 which has undeniably wider market appeal considering its multiplatform nature, larger more recognized name and huge marketing campaign has.... 93k subscribers in its sub. I wonder how much crossover they have?
Meanwhile the Destiny sub has over 306k, Sid Meyer's Civilization 201k, etc. etc.
@Antarte: You're doing it again. Go look at any site that organizes games by genre and see what you find in any given genre, see how much of it you disagree with. In every case of disagreement the only response to it is "too bad". You don't get to decide what people on the whole think a given genre is.
I never said it was good or that I agreed with how things are changing but they are and there's nothing you or I or anyone can do about it. The traditional ARPG is largely dead and whining about how Diablo 3 simplified it is neither the root cause nor a solution.
@Antarte: Mostly it's your opinion on a genre that's evolved without you. 'RPG' now just means "you level up and have gear and stuff" while the "A" just means "it's not turn based". Most of the games you've been referring to as ARPG's could probably be more accurately described as Diablo-likes in the same way that there are Rogue-likes.
So far as the minutiae of their hiring and such, I don't think I care enough to get into it at this point.
Xylymphydyte's comments