A friend who I follow on Twitter mentioned the Portent’s Content Idea Generator. I’d never heard of it before, so I decided to give it a try. This blog is the result of the title it generated for me.
It was totally random that I ended up with a title with the number 16 in it. That works nicely with my Day 16 post for #Blaugust. Those of you who are also working your way through #Blaugust might want to give the generator a try. It’s better than being stuck for ideas.
1) PVP
Ever since there was the first whispers about Diablo III coming into existence, there was a call for PVP (player vs player). There clearly was a group of players who passionately wanted PVP in Diablo III. A Battle.net post (written by Jay Wilson and posted on March 9, 2012) discussed an update about PVP.
Today, we wanted to let you know that we’ve made the difficult decision to hold back the PvP Arena system and release it in a patch following the game’s launch. After a lot of consideration and discussion, we ultimately felt that delaying the whole game purely for PVP would just be punishing everyone who’s waiting to enjoy the campaign and core solo/co-op content, all of which is just about complete.
People were upset that the game wasn’t going to include PVP at the start. They were angry when upcoming patches didn’t include PVP. Some brought the subject back up again around when the Reaper of Souls expansion was going to be released. A recent forum post on Battle.net is titled “I stopped playing D3 because PVP doesn’t exist”. It’s still a big deal!
PVP won’t happen in Diablo III. I think if Blizzard really wanted PVP in the game, they could have found a way to add it to the Reaper of Souls expansion.
2) Offline Play
Shortly after Diablo III was released, there were people who were upset because they did not want to have to get online in order to play the game. This group of players intended to always play solo and had no interest in ever joining a group for a co-op game. It’s entirely possible to make your game private and refuse to invite anyone into it. You don’t have to play the game with other people if you don’t want to. The option of offline play is never going to happen, though.
3) Kadala Gives You the Loot You Wanted
Kadala is probably the most hated NPC (non-player character) in Diablo III. You give her the blood shards you collected, and hope that she will give you something good in return. It’s always a gamble. Blood shards aren’t good for anything else, so you may as well spend them and see what happens.
Kadala says “Anything could happen.” You gamble your blood shards hoping she will give you that one awesome ring, or that one last set piece you need to complete a set. Instead, Kadala gives you some yellows that don’t help your character at all. In a game where the ability to find a specific piece of gear is already randomized, Kadala’s additional random item generation can be extremely frustrating. It often feels like Kadala will never give you the loot you want.
4) Unlimited Blood Shard Carrying Capacity
Wouldn’t it be great if your character could hold an unlimited number of blood shards? That would end the problem of being at maximum carrying capacity and having to return to town and spend some blood shards just so you could pick up the ones that are on the ground. Right now, the only way to increase your blood shard carrying capacity is by doing Greater Rifts.
Unlimited blood shard carrying capacity will never happen. I don’t think Blizzard wants people to save up thousands of them before giving them to Kadala. If they allowed for that, it would cause another problem. Kadala will fill your bag with junk, and you would need to go sell it before you could spend more blood shards.
5) eSports
Blizzard has gotten into eSports with most of their other titles. There have been eSports events for Starcraft, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. Blizzcon 2014 had a World of Warcraft Arena Sport Championship. Diablo III will never have eSports attached to it. I don’t see how the game could have any eSport potential until Blizzard adds PVP (or something else that puts players into teams that oppose each other).
6) Deckard Cain Returning
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Blizzard is not intending to return Deckard Cain to Diablo III. I remember hearing someone from Blizzard say at Blizzcon (either 2013 or 2014, I forget) that bringing Cain right back into the game would make his death meaningless. (I’m paraphrasing). Based on this, I believe that the return of Deckard Cain in-game is not going to happen. Instead, Blizzard is letting Cain live on through The Book of Cain, Diablo III: The Order, and in a section of The Book of Tyrael.
7) The Return of the Auction House
It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that Blizzard removed both the gold Auction House and the Real Money Auction House from Diablo III. At the time, the main idea was that people were “farming the Auction House” instead of farming in-game for the loot they wanted. The result was that it made the game less exciting because once a player purchased the loot they were after, they weren’t going to find anything better or more desirable in-game.
Blizzard got a cut from the transactions that took place on the real money Auction House. The other Blizzard games have micro transactions built in. You can buy yourself a nice mount to ride on in World of Warcraft, purchase a new Hero in Heroes of the Storm, or buy a bunch of packs of cards in Hearthstone. How will Blizzard make money from Diablo III?
The plan seems to be for them to do it via micro transactions. They have already started dabbling in it, but didn’t have immediate plans to bring it to the Americas. The micro transactions seem to be for cosmetic items, only. The return of the Auction House, where players could buy weapons and armor, will never happen.
8) A Replacement Archangel of Wisdom
Malthael was the Archangel of Wisdom, who kind of freaked out after the Angiris Council voted to allow the Nephalem to continue to exist. If you’ve played through the Story Mode of the Reaper of Souls expansion, you know that Malthael has met his end. The player kills him off.
The game doesn’t have a history of filling vacancies in the Angiris Council. Tyrael started off as the Archangel of Justice, and resigned when he chose to become mortal. That job is still vacant.
For a while, Tyrael, as a mortal, tried to fill the role of Archangel of Wisdom (after Malthael had disappeared and before it became clear what he was up to). It turned out that it just isn’t possible for a mortal to live and work in the High Heavens (what with the lack of bathrooms, beds, and food).
So, now we have two vacancies in the Angiris council. Blizzard would have to create brand new characters to fill those two positions. I can’t see any reason why they would bother, unless an upcoming expansion required the Angiris Council to be filled and functional again. Doing so would throw off the current content of the game, and potentially the lore behind it as well.
9) Flying Mounts
In the past few months, there has been a big argument regarding flying mounts in World of Warcraft (WoW). Or, to be more specific, the lack of ability to use flying mounts in certain zones in the game. This type of argument will never erupt regarding Diablo III because there are no mounts at all. Technically, the Crusader’s Steed Charge is a skill, not a mount.
Diablo III just isn’t the type of game where having a flying mount would work. The game isn’t designed to accommodate anything other than the “default” camera angle. The indoor “dungeons” have low ceilings, and I doubt a flying mount could do more than run in that setting.
10) The Return of Leah
There are those who find Leah annoying, but she is among my favorite characters. Some have wondered what, exactly, happened to her after she turned into “femme Diablo”. Some of the NPCs speculate about what might have happened to Leah’s soul in that moment.
I’ve mentioned in other blogs that some characters die and become ghosts (or return as zombies, wraths, or other monsters). This is not going to happen with Leah. The main reason is because she never had a soul of her own. From the moment of her conception, she and Diablo were one being. The return of Leah will never happen, not even if Diablo comes back again.
11) Trading
When Diablo III was launched, players could get into a game with their buddy, and drop a bunch of loot on the ground. The buddy could pick it up and immediately equip it (if he or she was the right level for the gear). This function enabled players to share the items their character had “outgrown” with a friend who had a lower level character. The same function could be used to initiate a trade between any two players.
Today, you can’t do that anymore. A player can’t find some gear, wait a few days until his buddy is online at the same time he is, and hand the buddy that gear. This is kind of frustrating for players who enjoy helping out their friends. I suspect that there must have been players who were abusing this function, and that trading is gone for good.
12) Time to Level Your Non-Seasonal Characters
There have been 3 Seasons in Diablo III so far, and Season 4 will be starting soon. Blizzard has been good about giving players a warning before a Season comes to an end. They have also made it clear exactly when the new Season would begin. This gives everyone enough time to finish whatever they were hoping to do in one Season and start preparing for the next one.
So far, there hasn’t been much of a gap between one Season and the next. I’ve got a Wizard that hit Level 60 right before Season 1 started. I’ve been meaning to get him to Level 70, but haven’t had the time to do so. If there’s a Season going on, I focus on my Seasonal character. Will we ever have time to level non-seasonal characters again? Signs point to “no”.
13) Character Customization Like in WoW
The transmog system in Diablo III is fantastic. You can use it to change how any weapon or piece of armor looks. Unlike WoW, players don’t need to hold on to all the cool looking gear in order to be able to use it for transmog. The game automatically remembers what you have already picked up. Buy some dye and change the colors of your gear. This allows players to customize the overall look of their Diablo III characters.
That being said, you can never play a blond Barbarian, or a Monk with a purple mohawk and a nose ring. Diablo III will never have that kind of character customization. It doesn’t really need it. One reason is that the interface in Diablo III is different than in WoW. You barely see your character’s face in-game anyway. Does it matter what color her hair is?
The other reason why Diablo III won’t ever have Wow-like character customization has to do with RP (role play). Plenty of people want to get into WoW and become their character. This concept doesn’t seem to appeal to most of the people who play Diablo III. It’s all about the loot!
14) Diablo III Mobile
Hearthstone can be played on your computer, your phone, or your iPad. Gaming is starting to go mobile, and this is a trend that will continue. While Diablo III has moved to console, I can’t see how it would work as a mobile game. There’s never been the slightest suggesting that Blizzard even wants to bring Diablo III to people’s phones. Do you really want to be on a bus, or at a restaurant, with some guy shouting about Treasure Goblins and frantically pushing buttons on his phone? Mobile Diablo III is not going to happen.
15) Diablo I Mobile
Diablo III may be too complex for phones. The original Diablo game, however, might be simple enough to play on a phone or tablet. The game was released in 1996, after all. As much as I would love to see Diablo I released for mobile, I don’t really think it is going to happen. Right now, you can buy Diablo II from the Blizzard store, but Diablo I is nowhere to be found. It feels like Blizzard is trying to separate itself from that title.
16) A Subscription Fee
A bunch of players recieved Diablo III for free after signing up for the World of Warcraft Annual Pass in 2011. The pass itself cost $14.99 a month, which was the same as the monthly fee for a WoW subscription. Those who were already playing WoW, and wanted to continue, would be paying that amount anyway. In addition, they got Diablo III for free.
Players who didn’t do the Annual Pass had to purchase the original Diablo III. Later, people had to buy the Diablo III: Reaper of Souls expansion. Come up with the amount of money it costs to buy both, and you are all set. There’s never been a subscription fee in Diablo III, and I highly doubt that Blizzard will ever make the game subscription based.