Why didn't Diablo III spark ARPG craze?

My friends, whom I (admire deeply) some examples...

World Of Warcraft (12-20 million) + subscribers = Intense focus on MMO's and copypasying World Of Warcraft formula for years

Halo (10 million+) = Almost all FPS designed for consoles (to the dismay of pc gamers)

Call Of Duty 4 (12 million+) = All games turning into (mostly) over-scripted throwaway 4 hour SP and multiplayer with RPG leveling system

Diablo 3 (3.5 million in 24 hours - 12 million+ in a year) = Nothing. Fuckall happened.

Strange. Why?

what exactly did you expect to happen?

Because they did it with Diablo 2

It's an incredibly boring game with essentially no gameplay beyond preying on addictive behaviors by spamming increasingly more nebulous loot at the player.

Torchlight 2?

Path of Exile?

This might just be me. But it felt like hours of auto-attacking to get gold.

Sadly, 12 million people bought it. Thus, the world disagrees.

Two games isn't exactly a craze.

ARPG games were still being released before DL3 and are still being pushed out now. dont see why you expected something more.

Sales drive the industry. It's very simple my friend. And no craze exists or existed before Diablo 3, no "oh oh oh , they existed before, oh oh oh, Diablo 2 ohohohooh" nonsense please. Barely a handful of noteworthy titles.

D3 hardly reinvented the wheel for the genre, all it really did was kill itself with a shitty online structure and busted loot. It's mostly fixed now, mind you, but far too late into the game's life.

Those other games were huge for their respective genres, making big changes and improvements to established formulas. Even if they weren't truly innovative, they were still progressive, and D3 was regressive.

ARPGs though have been pretty huge since D2 and there have been numerous Diablo clones since D2 came out. If you're looking for the craze creating game, it was either the first or the second.

People that played D2 bought D3

So it didn't create a new craze around it

Because it's a pretty niche genre and it is already pretty full of games. Path of Exile, Torchlight 2, Diablo 3 + Expansion. That's quite a few games that were just made.

Because Diablo 2 existed...

The EverQuest maniacs I raided with in WoW had nothing for praise for what the game did for the genre. Meanwhile the Diablo 2 players who played Diablo 3 thought it was shit and just wanted to go play LoD. Just like how StarCraft players were generally just pining for Brood War after SC2 came out.

The PC demographic typically doesn't fall for the Halo/FF7 "baby's first genre king" thing.

Path of Exile, Torchlight 1-2, the Sacred games and then there's Diablo III itself which sold like 15-16 million copies. Diablo III on PC alone has sold better than any PS3 or X360 exclusive. Including Halo, Gran Turismo, Gears etc..

People also bought the Borderlands games despite them being just as bad (if not worse due to the awful humor).

Most of those 12 million sales were made because Diablo 2 was so good. A lot of those people bought the game and were immediately disappointed. That is why the expansion 'only' sold 3 million.

Diablo's always been a mediocre Series.

Can't really expect it start a craze.

Cuz it sucked.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7979929385

https://www.change.org/petitions/bring-diablo-3-to-the-consoles-playstation-3-xbox-360-and-wii-u

http://www.diablofans.com/forums/diablo-iii-general-forums/diablo-iii-general-discussion/18043-petition-to-put-diii-on-consoles

Dat begging for a "mediocre series"

Because Blizzard ruined it by adding the auction house turning the game into a shitty grind-fest; probably to cover up the shitty predictable story.

Yep. One of the highest selling and fastest selling expansions of all time.

What a flop.

What craze would you expect? Isometric Action RPG genre was popular before D3 and still is.

It seems clear people are hungry for a ARPG craze.

According to what? Diablo 3 sales? Dude, the third title was an extremely anticipated sequel almost as StarCraft 2. Did we see RTS craze after SC2 launch? No, the genre continued like always.

The same would happen if Generals 2 or Warcraft 4 got released. They'd sell millions of units, but there wouldn't be any kind of "craze" for the genre.

I'm actually happy there is no "craze" for these kind of genres because Call of Duty is a complete piece of shit, and on the other hand, I hate MMOs.

It seems clear you're a craze-y.

Factually based fact.

Out of all those, Diablo III turned out to be the weaker title of the genre due to its broken loot system (early on that is) derailing any momentum the game could have had.

After playing POE for an extended amount of time (finished a play through and now a second char) Constantly having to reshuffle gems is just a pain in the ass. Likewise, while Diablo 3 had launch lag problems the de-sync issue has existed in POE for years and probably will never be sorted. Overall, Diablo 3 in it's current state is quite clearly a better game regardless of what da haters be claiming.

Because:

• It happened way back with Diablo and Diablo II
• Diablo III sucked balls at launch
• It did start a craze: Path of Exile, Torchlight II, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot.

Diablo III launched when there were TONS of ARPGS. It didn't spark a craze because it came out in the middle of a bonfire where everything had already been lit.

As others have said, it didn't start the craze because the craze was already in full effect (greatly fueled by it's predecessor Diablo II). Frankly, Diablo III doesn't really bring that much new to the table and in many aspects was a step back in the genera. Also, can't really read much into its sales numbers because of it being a freebie with a year sub to WoW which muddles things.

@uninspiredcup:

Becasue D3 - Sucked at launch!!! Where have you been? It focused on making blizzard and making people who play the game most , to make money...instead of having fun. You can blame the now fired Jay Wilson and his wow cronies for that shit. Seriously it was a bad bad game. The loot was never good. It was always based on you bjuying something from someone else. The classes and skills were all the same, there is no difference at high levels.

Now this stuff may be different now that the auction house and loot 2.0 is out, but I won't buy it until I can play it on my ps4... I have it on pc, but there is better games there..

And it did sort of spark a slight resurgance!

Path of Exile

Grim Dawn

Torchlight 2

All came out after D3 and were better games..

We havent had a ARPG since Sacred 2 and titan Quest, years before that. It was a win for me as it's one of my favorite genres. I got 3 good games to play outside of D3..

oh uh looks like we have a Blizzard fanboy here... Diablo 3 was made for morons who don't like to think! Making a build and dealing with stats is part of the genre.... not including stuff like that is a good way to piss off 90% of your fanbase, minus the blizzard apologists who will praise everything they do. Same with the people who only played wow during the last 10 years, when so many better more interesting and prettier mmos were on the scene. I just don't understand certain people's devotion to blizzard.

Nope. Only just bought Diablo 3 over a week ago.

Seems to me you just throwing a little bitch fit because my opinion doesn't agree with your (undeserved) ego. Anything but the sign of an intelligent person. Likewise you are attacking me, not the game. Grow up please.

My friend, I had very little interesting in Diablo 3 until a deal popped up on my local source of video game titles. Given that, coupled with the fact POE was played in direct comparison, it's about as objective an opinion can be humanly formed. It's a really great opinion, far better than yours.

@uninspiredcup:

Well if your not, then my apologies.. but my information still stands, even if it doesn't include you. I have many friends who will worship anything blizzard does, no matter if it's shit. It drives me nuts. These same people praise wow, and it's graphics and won't try any other mmo. Same thing with Diablo.

No bad blood my friend, it seems we got off on the wrong foot, mainly due to you implying I was a ****. When it comes to Blizzard fanboys I completely agree. Having posted on the Blizzard forum after purchasing this week, to complain about the tiny size of the UI, requesting UI scaling like Torchlight, I was bombarded with young people obnoxiously telling me it's not Blizzards fault and it's my fault for having poor eyesight (no joke).

However, POE is simply not as good as game as Diablo 3 in it's current state. Regardless of more "depth" everything else around it just simply, clearly isn't as good. On normal mode I died more times due to de-syncing rather than enemies actually killing me. Whatever problems Diablo 3 had, they no longer exist when I played on American servers. De-syncing in POE will apparently never be fixed. And the problem lays on their end of the connection, not ours.

That's not to say POE is bad, it's very good and I'm enjoying my time with it. To the point that I re-rolled. And indeed will do so with D3.

You might as well ask why TLOU didn't spawn a story-heavy third person shooter craze. Originals that aren't easily copied tend to not be copied at all. It doesn't take more than a team of monkeys to make a FPS game however.

Because it's not original, adds nothing new to the table and only sold 6 million copies.

Diablo 3's big time.

The customization in POE is outstanding. Crafting class builds with the vastly dynamic skill tree, and then combining that with gem configurations, especially the strategic use of gem linking and trigger gems - it all creates so much flexibility and diversity when building and playing. It's incredibly rewarding.

And I don't know what MrCup means by all this "de-syncing".

I think WoW, Halo and CoD4 all introduced significant changes into their respective genres whereas Diablo 3 didn't really feel like it did all that much to move the genre forward. I guess Diablo 3 is better compared to CoD: Black Ops or Halo 4.

Because the devs said it themselves...they tried to be greedy and fucked up...instead of fighting monsters to get loots..its sitting in Auction House waiting to buy loot. :P

That is the problem. Diablo 3 was a terrible game at launch. It is admittedly much better now, but because it was so bad at launch is why it didn't start an ARPG craze. And like I said earlier, most of the people that bought the game were immediately disappointed and gave up on it. That is why the expansion only sold one fourth what the original game did.

All expansions sell about 1/4 (in reality much less). Nothing is out of order here my friend.

It requires 10 million sales for that to happen.