All That's Past is Prologue

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard's legacy of an RTS game developer has unduly influenced their World of Warcraft expansion design.

Oh, not that WoW is going to turn into an RTS, despite what a subset of the player base might want, but where --or more precisely who-- the emphasis is on in an expansion.

Compared to some RTS games, such as Age of Empires, Blizzard's RTS design incorporates leaders into a story and makes them the central part of the story the Warcraft and Starcraft games told. Sure, you're there as the player, but the story revolves around these central characters. 

From Starcraft Remastered, you can
see that the leaders are incorporated into the
mission design and not just cutscenes.
From resetera.

Not only did the polish and gameplay set Blizzard's RTS games apart, but the stories they told influenced their design of the Diablo games as an action RPG with a defined plot.*

From Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Screencap from Ars Technica.

Blizzard's second last RTS game, Warcraft III, went all in on the story and leaders, where more RPG elements were added into the RTS design than ever before, more tightly integrating the story with the RTS game itself. 

So Blizzard did something unexpected, they pivoted and created an MMO that doesn't have any of those central design tenets.

***

The release of Vanilla World of Warcraft was not only a departure from Blizzard's RTS core, but a change in design emphasis. Sure, there are faction leaders and other important personnel around throughout Azeroth, but the game design didn't revolve around them. There wasn't a main story in the same way that other Blizzard designs had, but a bunch of smaller stories that were strung together with quest chains. Instead of a tightly integrated story with an emphasis on the leaders as main characters, the player was the main character in a vast world with minimal emphasis on the heroics of the few people in charge.

I guess that wasn't bound to last, because a decentralized game world wasn't in Blizzard's DNA. 

It took a few expansions, but by Wrath of the Lich King WoW had pretty much returned to the Blizzard fold in that the leaders and a central story were tightly integrated into the game, and it's been that way ever since. This is what Blizzard is most familiar with developing, and your job as the player is to basically facilitate the story that the faction leaders are involved with. Like or hate the story, this is the pattern that formed in the Warcraft and Starcraft games, and that is what Blizzard knows best. 

People --myself included-- rail against the so-called lobby-based nature of Retail WoW, but when you consider it is the spiritual successor to the earlier RTS and ARPG games that built Blizzard's reputation, it's not a great surprise. When you throw in the lobby-based story found in shooter games such as Call of Duty, Blizzard is providing what they believe gamers expect out of a game. 

In the same manner that turn-based isometric RPGs are tightly integrated into Larian Studios' business, what we are seeing out of Retail WoW is in Blizzard's. It would take a monumental effort to break out of that design philosophy, and I'm not altogether sure it would be a good idea for Blizz at this point to do so. As much as I prefer Classic Era, Blizzard's fanbase doesn't expect that decentralized, non-story-driven design out of them. They expect lobby-based story beats with an emphasis on the faction leads and the other chief protagonists. If anything, the leveling process in the game world is the anachronism here: it's a nod to an era when Blizzard broke out of what they did best as a company to try something new with different design parameters, and Blizzard can't bring itself to shed that vestige of it's old MMO design. Instead, Blizzard uses the leveling process to move the story from the introductory phase to the "why" of group content at the end; it's not an end in itself, as it was in Vanilla WoW, but in service to the endgame, which is where the real story in Retail WoW begins.

No, I was NOT going to put that line from
South Park in here. If you want it, you can go
find it via a quick search. From YouTube.

It is kind of funny in its own way that the Retail WoW player base argues about details in expansions such as systems, whether the group content is any good, or the quality of the story, but they have simply accepted the larger design philosophy as-is. What you see out of Blizzard now is what you will get, because they have no incentive to try anything truly new. Even Season of Discovery isn't that new; it's just a reshuffling of the cards, as it were, but keeping the same basic design in place. Since Blizzard is now the "MMO and Action RPG developer" in Microsoft's stable**, they are most likely destined to stay in their lane and only work on those items. If you've a dev team that wants to try something new, don't expect to find yourself under the Blizzard arm of Microsoft Game Studios; you're better off going independent.

*Yes, I know, I'm not that fond of the plot in Diablo. There's a lot more "action" and a lot less "RPG" in the Diablo games. That doesn't mean there's no plot, however; "no plot" is more akin to playing Gauntlet than Diablo, despite the mechanics' similarities.

**Apologies to The Elder Scrolls Online, but Zenimax/Bethesda is known for first person RPGs, not MMOs. In my opinion, it wouldn't surprise me if ESO eventually gets moved under Blizzard because "they're the MMO developer" for Microsoft. Never mind the game world or the corporate culture; there's always a bean counter somewhere who wants things to align perfectly under their proper silos.

Speaking of Mother's Day...

This arrived in my email inbox last night:

Pretty sure my mom doesn't look
like this, even in the morning.

I looked at the full ad --I cut off the rest of it when I took that screenshot-- and just kind of shrugged.

That's nice and all, but the thing is I tried Diablo II Remastered once last November, and I haven't touched it since. I'm glad that it was basically free (courtesy of a gift card the kids gave me a few years ago), because I was disappointed in how little the game resonated with me. 

And that was supposedly the "best" Diablo out there. 

When I played D2 through the beginning zone, I kept remembering commentary that D2 was supposedly the best storytelling that Blizzard did in Diablo, but you could have fooled me. It was "kill this" and "do that", and I kept wondering whether I should have known any of these people before in the original version of Diablo. 

***

I couldn't quite describe my experience with Diablo until I saw this YouTube video recently by Day9TV, chronicling his experiences of trying Retail WoW for the first time.*

When Day9 was saying "I am so confused!" I nodded along, thinking about trying to figure out Diablo 2**, and replied "Yep, I know where you're coming from, man." If you're not part of the ecosystem, trying to figure things --including story and people-- out is really daunting. The question becomes "Are you curious enough to try to push through your confusion?"

Maybe I ought to give Diablo II another try, but if I can't really get into that game, playing D4 is probably out of the question. The concept of re-running the same game with a harder difficulty simply doesn't appeal to me, so I'm pretty reliant upon gameplay and story to resonate with me. If this becomes a "oh, it's not great now, but 50 - 100 hours in it gets good" scenario, I'll pass. 

*When he mentioned watching characters from Frozen yelling at each other, I chuckled. I figured he had to be talking about Jaina, given that she does kind of have that Elsa look about her. Not sure about the other person, tho.

**Or Age of Wonders 3, Elder Scrolls Online, ArcheAge, Pillars of Eternity, Black Desert Online, or any number of games where I'm just starting out and the info dump or expectations of understanding is quite large.

Elf Needs Food Badly

It's kind of weird, really, that the Steam Autumn Sale came and went and... I just kind of shrugged.

Oh, plenty of games were on sale, and quite a few in my wishlist, but I just wasn't interested in buying anything. I mean, that's good for my bottom line (particularly given just how many car repairs I've had to make this past year), but when push came to shove, I just didn't want to buy anything.

Yes, I did have Baldur's Gate 3 on my wishlist, but a) it wasn't on sale, and b) I just don't have the time to devote to playing it. Even if I gave up playing MMOs and all other video games to play BG3, I just don't have the hours in a day to play the game to the extent I want to. 

There's also the matter of me wanting to go back and finish BG1 and BG2 once more before delving into BG3, just for continuity's sake. 

Yes, I am that sort of player. I mean, you do read the blog, don't you?

***

Some months ago I stumbled on an old Blizzard gift card the kids gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, and given that Blizz was running one of their sales at the time, I used said gift card to buy Diablo II Remastered. I figured why not? I was essentially getting the game for free, so it made sense to try the game that people still say was the best in the Diablo series out before delving into Diablo 3 and Diablo 4.

So.... Does that count as a new game purchase, despite the gift card itself being at least 2 years old?

Eh, whatever.

Now that I think about it, that's the exact same reaction I had when I played it for 4 hours some weeks ago. 

Your character is your character, just like if you were playing Gauntlet back at the video game arcade*

"Warrior needs food badly!"
From the WMS Gaming channel on YouTube.

And if you don't like your character's appearance, well... That's tough luck.

Believe it or not, there's a screenshot there.

Hmm... Now that I think about it, from what I can tell there's not much more story here than what was in that old Gauntlet game back in the day.

Or The Bard's Tale, for that matter.

Back when the name Electronic Arts
meant something good. Yes, kids, that
actually was a thing: EA being a good company.

I did discover that if you died in D2, you lost all your gear and you have to run back to get it. Which can suck. 

But in the end, there's really not a lot of "there" there. Run around, kill things, take their loot, use it. Rinse and repeat.

So.... Gauntlet, anybody?

*Boy do those two things take a body back to the 1980s!

Twenty Three Years Later, The Argument Goes On

Back in the year 2000, when most non-gamers thought of computers, they thought of the Millennium Bug. Or maybe the Dot Com Bust, which began in March of that year. 

But for us gamers, the year 2000 was more well remembered for two games that released within a few months of each other, and because they both kind of fit into a similar game type their fates became intertwined: Diablo II and Baldur's Gate II.

Released on June 28th, 2000.
From Wikipedia.

Released on September 21st, 2000.
From Wikipedia (again).

The fact that the game that released first, Diablo II, was an Action RPG and that Baldur's Gate II was more of a "traditional" RPG was kind of lost in the discussions that followed, as the fans of the two games devolved into two separate camps as to which game was superior.

I know, the concept of both games being good was kind of lost on people --myself included-- as I found myself being the Baldur's Gate fanboy among my gamer friends at work. 

And yes, I will freely admit that I was outnumbered in the arguments that followed. Part of that was simply because I lived with D&D for so long --and dealt with so much crap for it back in the 80s-- that a good, well-designed D&D game was always going to get my love. That what my friends loved the most about Diablo II, that you could use gems to customize your gear, wasn't why I played Baldur's Gate II. BG2 had story, the setting, a familiar system, and honest-to-god romance storylines in the game that blew me away. In an early prelude to my love-hate relationship with gear in MMOs, my friends' preoccupation with gear wasn't what drove me to play either of these games.*

***

The irony is that here, in 2023, we're back to the Diablo vs. Baldur's Gate arguments with the releases of Diablo IV and Baldur's Gate III within a few months of each other.

Just like before, D4 released
first, on June 5th, 2023.
From Wikipedia.

And BG3 followed suit later,
on August 3rd, 2023.
Can you guess? Yes, it's from Wikipedia.

One thing is certain: I won't be playing either game any time soon. I've got other games to play, and once I settled all of my bills for the month, I had other spending priorities in mind. 

I mean, I'm sure both games are nice enough, and they likely scratch the itch of their respective fanbases, but at this stage in my life I can afford to wait. 

That being said, if people want to make arguments here, go for it. Just play nice. It's been quite a while since I've had to wield the ban hammer on someone other than a spammer.

#Blaugust2023

*Although having also played a Paladin in my early D&D days, I'll freely admit that Bioware adding Carsomyr, an actual Holy Avenger, to the game was highly inspirational. No, I didn't play a Paladin in BG2, but my heart soared knowing it was out there.

Okay, now that the Town Hall is Over...

Blizzconline 2021 has come and gone, and for a change I paid attention to it.

Being able to watch the livestream for free does help (a lot).

In the past, you could pay to watch the livestream --or you could even pay to watch the activities on DirecTV (honest!)-- but even then, I'd only read the commentary from WoW Insider/Blizzard Watch or from my fellow bloggers. So when the "Do you not have phones?" comment blew up, I wasn't around to watch it live.

So yeah, I was a bit concerned about how this remote oriented con would work out, and whether the con would skew more toward one of Nintendo's quarterly updates, or something straddling an authentic in person con experience.

For the record, I was fine with either, as long as Blizz didn't a) shoot themselves in the foot with another "do you not have phones?" comment, b) shoot themselves in the foot with another "tough gamer moment" comment, or c) shoot themselves in the foot by trying to bow and scrape to the Chinese market.

Basically, don't shoot yourself in the foot.

Oh, I get it about China and the CCP: it's the 2000 lb. elephant that will trample anyone who gets in their way. When they can make one of the richest people in China, Jack Ma, vanish, you know they don't mess around. 

And by comparison, Blizzard --and most other gaming companies-- are the tuna out there for the orcas to feed on. So if you want China's market, you have to play by China's rules. The last BlizzCon, and the events leading up to it, made that abundantly clear. 

This time around, however, a global pandemic took center stage and China receded into the background.*

***

I've been working from home for so long that I've forgotten that it takes some time for people to get used to it. So when Blizz people started talking about how they had to get used to conferencing and collaborating remotely, their issues simply did not compute for me. It was only about a minute or two in when I realized that "jeez, they've never done remote work before!" 

Once you get used to it dealing with work from home becomes second nature, and if you've a boss that is flexible in your work habits then you can take time out to be the kids' taxi or make it to a game and then come home and get more work done.** But using collaborative tools like Teams or WebEx can take some time to get used to, and a graphic designer ready setup in the home is probably a whole other level of complexity that I never had to deal with.

These were the sorts of challenges that Blizz confronted, but it seems that they've gotten used to it.*** I suspect that the transition took longer than Blizz' management expected, particularly in terms of work output, but on the flip side they now have a workforce that isn't tied down to Southern California property values. I'm not exactly sure if they'll take advantage of that, but you never know.

***

Work from home foibles aside, I found the info sessions I watched informative but not overly so. I knew going in that the nature of the con meant that the extra time spent getting dynamic feedback from the crowd as well as the natural give and take wasn't going to be there, so that meant that the info sessions themselves were going to be shorter. That wasn't an indictment of the process, it's more of the way it is when you design a presentation: you have to give enough time for the crowd to react and respond before you can continue, and in a virtual environment you don't have that.

The part I was most interested in was BC Classic, and I wasn't disappointed. I felt that Holly spent extra time reminiscing about the old days in order to establish her bona fides, which given the nature of her coming from Everquest I felt it was necessary to pacify certain parts of the WoW community who still think of her as "the EQ person". Still, the info about items such as bosses, classes, and when you can roll a Draenei/Sindorei were spot on. Among those of us who were watching from the Myzrael-US Discord server, we were all in all very happy with the info provided. Could there have been more? Sure, but I suspect they're still aiming for a May release and don't want to get locked into that timeline if something shakes out in the beta.

The "You are not prepared!" was a wee bit dated, but as someone pointed out in our BWL run Saturday night, Illidan is NOT prepared for US.

***

Now, for an old time gamer like me, it was nice to see the repackaging of the old Blizz games, including The Lost Vikings. And the reworking of Diablo II. 

I realize this is the era of remastering games --see the upcoming Mass Effect Trilogy remaster as an example-- but if it is done well then it is a welcome benefit to gamers around the globe. The PC environment especially has changed so much over the years since ME or D2 were released that even without the graphical remaster the code would have likely required a rework to operate properly in the era of RTX 30 series video cards.**** The real kicker is whether the remaster is redone in such a way as to anger the fanbase (Warcraft 3), a reimagining of the game (Final Fantasy VII), or a a faithful but purely upgraded graphical version of the game (looks like D2 and ME for now). It does look like Blizz learned their lesson on Warcraft 3, but we'll see when the remastered D2 comes out.*****

One thing I do appreciate is that the Diablo IV development team is providing regular updates and details of the game's progress, so you know what's going on. Frequently this is too much of a black box --Schroedinger's Cat aside-- and you have no idea as to the details. But that the D4 team is spending the time to communicate with the fans as well as their thought process behind certain developments is a very very GOOD thing. I understand that some of the items the dev team are working on are going to be hidden --story, for one thing-- but understanding details of where they are in the process without throwing out dates is fantastic. The one thing I hate is when the suits announce a release date, because software development is not like building a widget, there will be major setbacks and reworkings that need to be addressed, and that's just your average Monday morning. Assigning a date and expecting a dev team to meet it is a potential disaster in the making, crunch notwithstanding.

***

So in the end, I enjoyed this Blizzconline. And yes, the RPG player in me enjoyed getting a chance to see Matt Mercer and the Critical Role crew in a Diablo esque game on Saturday. 

I am glad that the con went as well as it did, because I'd argue that a hybrid of the strictly in-person con and the online version is the way of the future. Hell, when Metallica came on my wife wandered over from watching the television and said "Hey, Metallica!" 

"Yeah," I replied. "They're playing for Blizzcon."

"Wait, this is live?"

"Well, at least it was done strictly for Blizzcon, but...."

"But that's so cool!!"

Now, if I can get her to watch the intro about how gamers were impacted by Blizz' games over the years, because that was an advertisement for not strictly Blizz' games, but gaming in general. That could have come straight outta GenCon and not missed a beat.

*But not totally gone from people's minds. Kind of like saying Beetlejuice three times and --voila!!-- Michael Keaton appears.

**Yes, I have been the kids' taxi for a long long time.

***I'm perfectly happy working from home. What I've discovered about working at the office is that I spend a lot of time socializing and a lot less time working, so when I need to get things done I don't go into the office. I know quite a few other people in my neck of the woods who think the same thing, and they're content to work from home too.

****I discovered that when I went to install LOTRO on my oldest's new laptop. It still looks for old DirectX 9.x, which you can't download anymore, and the failure to install was driving me crazy.

*****It just occurred to me that there's likely a certain amount of the Mass Effect fanbase that is going to buy the remastered version primarily because of the upgraded graphics in the sex scenes. Oh well.

The Slow Creeping Onslaught of the Bean Counters

Jason Schreier has been busy, following up the Diablo mobile game announcement at Blizzcon 2018 with an indepth article about Diablo, and by extension, Blizzard itself.

The Past, Present, and Future of Diablo dropped on Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving in the US, so it is understandable if you happened to miss it then. But go and read it, then come back here.

I'll wait.

***

Pulling the Diablo expac from development speaks volumes to me. It tells me that upper management was feeling the pressure from the lousy D3 release, and they didn't have confidence that the first D3 expac would right the ship. That was a big departure from Blizzard's previous behavior, where they were willing to wait and work on something before it was good enough to release.

As much as Titan was considered a "failure" by many internally because they never got it across that goal line, it does provide a big peek into Blizzard's thought process. Because Blizzard had the WoW money coming in --as well as a lot of customer goodwill-- Blizzard could afford to throw money at something that ultimately became a "failure", although the release of Overwatch from the ashes of Titan proved that Blizzard could still make a fantastic game from the leftover pieces. I realize that people would argue that Blizzard could afford to do that because of the WoW money, but that ethos was baked into Blizzard's culture from the get-go. The WoW money only allowed Blizzard more space to try to make a failure work.

However, once Activision Blizzard struck out on their own, there was bound to be a culture clash from the two entities as to which vision would ultimate win out.When A-B was part of Vivendi, this sort of clash wasn't necessary because A-B was a small part of the Vivendi conglomerate. When A-B went solo, however, they couldn't afford "poor sales" like they could in the past. So how would this end up?

Well, we do have a previous merger that provides look into the dynamics of how this would work out, and ironically enough it involves two major computer companies, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard.

***

In one corner, there was Compaq; the maker of the first PC clone that challenged the IBM for dominance in the PC space. In the other was HP, which built its reputation first on lab electronics and calculators, and then later on PCs. The two were big players in the PC market, and when HP's Carly Fiorina first announced the merger the business analysts weren't so sure about how the merger would work out, suggesting that the companies didn't complement each other very well. However, in spite of a revolt led by Walter Hewlett, son of one of the two founders Bill Hewlett, Carly got her wish and the merger happened.

The two corporate cultures, however, couldn't be more different. Compaq was very much a "fly by the seat of your pants" outfit that would throw products against the wall to see what would stick and then patch things to make them work, while HP was more ingrained in a slower, methodical, make-sure-it-works-before-releasing style of development, based on openness and trust, the legendary HP Way. (Does this sound familiar?) Perhaps bruised by the revolt and stung by the criticism from analysts, Carly used the merger to throw out most of HP management and replace them with Compaq people, leading to the eventual loss of the HP corporate culture within its own company.

With Activision Blizzard, we are seeing a similar fight appearing. Activision is very much a "release every year with some changes but with a formula that doesn't vary very much" type of outfit. Blizzard works on things until it is perfect enough to release. Alas, the signs don't look good for Blizzard in the long run, as the killing off of the second D3 expac was the first unofficial sign that Blizzard's management was starting to feel the "what have you done for me this quarter?" that seems to infest publicly traded companies the past 3-4 decades. The end of the article, where Blizzard's new finance person has started talking about "cost cutting", is another ominous sign that Blizzard's management is starting to lose its battle to remain independent from direct control by Bobby Kotick's and the bean counters from the Activision side of the company.

***

In my personal opinion, I think it's time for Blizzard to spin off and become a privately held company. They may not need to do it to develop games, but if they want to develop games the way they've always done it, they'll need to be free from the influence of an alien corporate culture (Activision) and the pressure to perform by shareholders (publicly traded on the market). The freedom to fail is a powerful thing, because it leads to risk and innovation. If a company becomes risk adverse and settles for churning out products that vary little from year to year, they may make money but their dreams become smaller, concerned with focus groups and earnings per share and not rocking the boat. If Blizzard wants to continue to dream big, they need to control their own destiny.

Quick Weekend Post -- D3 Cosplay

I don't often post things such as cosplay on here very much, but I do keep tabs on various cosplay items. (Having kids who want to dress as, say, Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor or Tauriel from Hobbit Part Deux will do that.)

Anyway, I came across this cosplay of the Diablo 3 Crusader, and I thought I'd share the love. Click on the pic to be taken to the full post.

EtA: Updated the link as it broke.

Various and Sundry in July

The summer doldrums are in full swing.

Outside, the heat has climbed into the oppressive levels, with the humidity to match.  Con season is in high gear, with SD Comic Con this week and less than a month until Gen Con, with PAX Prime at the end of August.

And right on cue, an update on the Pathfinder Online sandbox MMO surfaced:

Not a lot to find interesting; there's background and there's some buildings, but only a few seconds worth of actual figures.  The concept of a sandbox fantasy MMO is interesting, so I'm wondering about the details that weren't shown in the video clip.

***

Another thing I've wondered is whether the next gen consoles will push MMOs away from PCs and into the console format.  Blizzard could be getting some valuable development time in that regard with porting D3 to the XBox360 and PS3, but the major stumbling blocks are XBLive and PSN.  Without the cross platform connectivity, that seems to ensure that MMOs' major selling point (the massively multi part) will be balkanized.  However, I would never bet against Blizzard being able to figure something out in this regard.

***

Heard around MMOs:

In Age of Conan:

[In Eiglophian Mountains, a female toon wearing almost nothing runs by up the mountain path]

Female Toon (in Gen Chat):  Wooo!  I'm invisible!
Me:  Is this Order of the Stick or something?
Third Toon:  Is [toon name] naked again?
Me: Yeah, just ran right by me.  Because, you know, a frigid mountain climb goes better without clothing.


In World of Warcraft:

[In Alterac Valley]

Warrior:  We need a tank here by Drek!
Mage:  WTF, man.  You're marked AS a tank.
Warrior:  Oh.  Whoops.


In TOR:

[On Taris in Gen Chat]

First Toon:  Where is it?
Second Toon:  What?
First Toon:  That wonderful Tarisian beachfront property that the Black Sun sold me!  They said the view was breathtaking!
Second Toon:  Can I have what you're smoking?  I can sure use some.


EtA:  "is"..  "are"...   I are a writer, right?

Where's a Tourniquet When you Need One?

Rohan over at Blessing of Kings has been pondering the differences in WoW's endgame between extended players (dedicated raiders) and transient players (occasional raiders and non-raiders).  While I acknowledge the differences between the groups, Rohan's suggestion to use the LFR tool --and make those fights easier-- doesn't sit well with me.  I couldn't put my finger on why until I saw the WoW login screen mentioning the Diablo 3 beta and I read Spink's post on the Diablo 3 Character Builds.

Blizz is losing some of its subscriber base, and I suspect it is the transients that are leaving in greater numbers.  Why?  Because of the changes Blizz has come out with lately:  the Call to Arms feature and the upcoming Looking for Raid tool.

Who benefits the most from Call to Arms?  The people who run instances.  Who are the majority of people running instances not named Zul these days?  Not the extended players; they've moved on.

Likewise, the LFR tool is targeted at a very specific group:  the transient who wants to be an extended player but can't due to other issues (can't raid when their guild has raid times, etc.)  It allows these transients to become extended by bypassing the old raid pugging mechanism with a minimal amount of fuss.

But what about those transients who want an endgame of their own, separate from extended-style raids?

That's where Diablo 3 comes in.

Diablo 3 is geared toward transient players, while WoW is designed for extended players.  Trying to create a separate endgame for transient players in WoW is like the proverbial square peg in a round hole, it just won't happen because the design philosophy is different.  In WoW, the entire point of endgame is the raid, and anything else is just not happening.  If you want to have a transient endgame, Blizzard has a nice software product just for you:  Diablo 3.

Sure, extended players will play Diablo 3 too, but the main target for the game are those transient players who want an endgame, something that WoW won't satisfy.

If Blizz can keep departing transient players within the Blizzard product line by selling them on Diablo 3, then Blizz'll be fine with that.  It all comes down to money, and as long as the money stays within the family, then things are good.  Blizz won't have to worry about declining subscriptions with WoW if Diablo 3 is a smashing success and people pay gobs of real money for items to use in the game.

Besides, there's always Titan.


EtA: Corrected a grammar issue in paragraph seven.