Blizzard Community Manager, Bashiok, has been discussing Diablo 3's endgame on their official forums. Posting on the "Endgame Solutions" thread, he's admitted that "the item hunt is not enough for a long sustainable end-game." Players have criticised Diablo 3's repair costs and difficulty spike at higher levels, saying it becomes something of a grind.
Diablo 3 scored 90% on PC Gamer. Tom described it as a "phenomenally good game, immediately fun to play and enduringly compulsive, albeit for very different reasons than the rest of the series."
"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. That didn't turn out to be true, and we recognize that," said the community manager in a later post . Diablo 3's in-game and real-money auction houses have been controversial additions since they were announced, forcing players to go shopping before they tackling Sanctuary's highest level beasts.
"Diablo III is not World of Warcraft" admits Bashiok.
"We're not going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months," he continues. "There needs to be something else to keep people engaged, and we know it's not there right now."
Interestingly, Bashiok references Diablo's unreleased PVP component as a possible solution to the lack of late game. That's due to hit in patch 1.1 which doesn't yet have a release date.
"We're working toward 1.0.4, which we're really trying to pack with as many fixes and changes we can to help you guys out (and we'll have a bunch of articles posted with all the details as we get closer), and we're of course working on 1.1 with PvP arenas" said the Blizzard employee.
"I think both those patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they're not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game. We have some ideas for progression systems, 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 still a ways out," he continued.
Are you still playing Diablo 3? Does it feel like there's something missing?
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