This is what i think…

I think there are 2 reasons for this. The first, because they do not want to charge monthly for these types of games and figure we, as blizzard fans, will buy all the expansions. plus maybe the battle.net 2.0 fee that we might have to pay might not be enough for their greedy pockets. A trilogy for SC2 and a a couple expansions for Diablo III will do the trick.

The Second reason is because they are SOO far behind in the process of these games and know fans are getting a little upset for the wait, they figure HEY! why not release an unfinished game to speed up the process and while everyone is buying and playing those games we can be working on the other half of the game.

Seems about right to me….

DeusEx, why so negative? I don’t mind paying a bit more for a game with twice the amount of content as D2. Consider unlimited hours of free play you get opposed to paying monthly fees. Battlenet won’t be a subscription service. Also, Diablo III won’t be an unfinished game when they release it… expansions are just that, they expand on the game giving you more characters and an expanded storyline.

A Diablo III trilogy, like Starcraft 2 would be great! They could bring back some of the D2 characters (think this has been confirmed already) and add some new acts that complete the story line regarding the other demons, like how LoD dealt with Baal.

I agree on DeusEx’s positive comments, or a positive angle to it =)

Battle.net 2.0, and especially the massive amount of resources they put into stopping cheats with the newer games will have to be funded from somewhere. Even if that is a low cost compared to original pack sale, they would still have a lower profit than some other company that don’t give a shit about post-release updates and hacking.

You are is probably right that they feel they have released quite few products during these years, and a batch of even 3-4 expansions work fine with an RPG like Diablo, and they would spend all their time on CONTENT instead of programming a physics engine, or all the more “basic” things a new game need.

There is a difference though. They don’t need to release an “unfinished” game, it’s just significantly bigger than games traditionally are with expansions. I bet that Diablo III without expansions will have more gameplay in it that the released version of Diablo II! The expansions will in turn bring even MORE material in, and we could also see a return of our beloved Diablo II classes (go Paladin!).

Content > Programming

That’s my opinion!

what i meant by unfinished is the storyline. the deeper the storyline goes the more content there is farther down into the game. i think it puts less stress on them and makes them money in the process. 165million dollars a month isnt enough for blizzard apparently. dont get me wrong i am still going to buy and support them but because of fans like me that blizzard has i think they feel they can do what they want and get away with it.

I think the real “unfinished” aspect is the editing. IMO, d2 was only about 60% done when it was released. The number of glitches, bugs, or w/e you want to call them is just alarming. I mean, I heard that the spell inferno has a problem where the warmth synergy doesn’t get counted, so you’re wasting your time even using it. That’s an entire skill we could potentialy be using that is almost never going to get used. IIRC there was a huge problem with def when d2 first came out that rendered that mod useless. How can mechanics that are so vital get overlooked? What’s the problem? Why don’t they edit the hell out their games? The number of glitches we’ve had to struggle through is in the dozens.

I have a different take on release dates: I want them to spend like almost 2 years after the game is ‘finished’ to play it constantly and look for bugs that need to be fixed. Expansions should just, well, expand on the game with new chrs, stories, levels, etc.

DeusEx your comment, “165million dollars a month isnt enough for blizzard apparently” is fallacious.  You are getting this number by multiplying 11 million active WoW subscriptions by 15 dollars a month.  Firstly, the majority of WoW players are in China, none of whom pay by subscription.  Second, the roughly five million westerners who do pay on a subscription plan do not all pay 15 dollars a month.  Many pay less through longer term subscription periods.  Lastly your comment implies that the revenue WoW generates is pure profit.  The amount of overhead required to run the servers, staff a development team to create new content, staff community managers, GMs, billing and technical support agents and all the other ancillary people and functions necessary to run WoW is significant.  How about you give Blizzard a chance to demonstrate their intentions instead of extrapolating from a ten minute interview about a game that is probably more than a year out?

Whatever they plan doing, it’s only good if they speed up their releases. Annual expansions sounds fine. What is depressing is the time it takes to develop presumably good games like Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2.

What I’m finding amazing here is that nowhere in any of the above quote do I see Mike say that there WILL be at LEAST TWO expansions to Diii. He says that “in and ideal scenario” that that’s how it would be done, but didn’t elaborate anymore on it.

To say then that this means that there WILL BE more than one would be a bit presumptuous, I would think. Now, I can easily foresee at least 2, but there’s nothing official yet, which should be the main point here.

Now, onto another point. I, for one, would prefer the wait to get a completely fleshed-out product than be getting some half-finished paper-weight that I have to keep upgrading and paying for. That just seems like a ploy to make a ton of money off of the backs of their most adoring fans. This idea, to me anyway, would be a terrible disservice to those of us that have been so loyal to them over these past 15 years.

CD

I never “noticed” any bugs with D2 classic which is more than I can say for most games. In most cases it’s actually better to release a game with some minor, unknown bugs in it than to spend another year going over the game with limited programmers. Once the game is out, the thousands of hardcore players are going to pick up these bugs a lot quicker than Blizzard can. After they’re found, Blizzard programmers can spend their time more efficiently on fixing them rather than looking for them - what’s more, they’re released in a free patch.

Blizzard have yet to release anything “half-finished” that I know about, so it’s best to just wait for them to finish the game before you judge them.

What some people don’t understand is that yes, Blizzard wants to make money (who doesn’t?) but unlike a lot of corporations they care about their customers and fans, so essentially we get what we pay for - not something that is incomplete, or buggy. In the case of Diablo, we actually get more than we pay for because we don’t have to subscribe. Even for the fully supported online gameplay, we don’t have to pay fees.

If the future D3 expansions fixes bugs in D3, you can bet they will release an individual patch for D3 which will fix the bugs - so you don’t have to buy the expansion if you don’t want to. But with all the extra content you would be crazy not to buy it.

@ Stillman:
Well, compare D2 with many other games. I’m pretty sure that they spent a lot more time polishing before release than others, and Blizzard is known for patching stuff that other developers would skip, several years after release. I agree with you on spending time after release polishing, but I don’t want them to wait 2 years before starting to plan an expansion. They do this with WoW, patches and expansion development goes side by side, and I’m sure they don’t need 40 men over 2 years to weed out the bugs. Fixing bugs will be parallel to the expansions.

@ Collateral Damage:
The “ideal” comment is about the speed of the expansions, not the number of them. That comment is probably also somewhat related to WoW and faster wow expansion releases.

I agree that I’d like a completely fleshed-out product, and we HAVE been waiting for many years now. I’ll probably be very happy with Diablo III, and then even more happy as we get an expansion, then another, and perhaps even more.

My point is that we haven’t seen any Diablo content in years, and making several expansions would in my opinion be a good way to spend dev time. More content, less of the hardcore coding.