Diablo 3 will be coming out on the 15th. To those who wonder what this Diablo thing is and why people play it, Diablo’s appeal is a hardcore type of player versus environment (while Starcraft’s appeal is more of a hardcore type of player versus player).
All is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun. Many World of Warcraft players are frustrated because they believe they are Great Players but are held back because the other 9 or 24 people in the raid ‘suck’. So Diablo 3 has a special appeal to them because now they can unveil to the world their greatness unfettered by their awful raid members.
For those who don’t know, Diablo 3 has four acts with multiple difficulty levels: Normal – Nightmare – Hell – Inferno. What I’m seeing from many Diablo 3 fans is that they are chomping at the bit to go to Inferno… likely for the vanity reasons mentioned above.
Blizzard did a slick marketing move. They are tweeting, saying, hinting of how ‘hard’ Inferno is. A forum dweller will gush, “Did you hear!? Blizzard said their internal team could not beat Inferno!”
And if we could do a mind probe of that forum dweller, we would see him dreaming of only he (and maybe a few others) beating Inferno, getting worldwide recognition for it, having a parade in his honor, with many naked beautiful women throwing themselves at him because ‘he beat inferno OMG’.
If anyone thinks Blizzard is going to release content that their own teams have not completed or tested thoroughly, you’re a sucker for the marketers. “But they said their internal team hasn’t beaten it!” Right. One team. If you listen closer, they said they made a special strike team to test the Inferno content. The Blizzard strike teams tend to be made up of average joes who happen to work at Blizzard (by average joes, not meaning they are average or else they wouldn’t be working there, but meaning average in terms of their gaming skills. The Bnet website manager or the chef at the cafeteria were not hired at Blizzard for their ‘uber’ game playing skills. Strike teams meant getting a ‘down to earth view’ from gamers (inside the company but outside the development team). And a big reason why they wouldn’t be able to finish Inferno is because they have no time with it along with the constant changes to it.
What does ‘hard’ mean, though? It can be relative. Here are various ways a video game can be ‘hard’:
Ignorance
Level 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers is hard if you are new to the game. The game became much easier when you realized you can avoid the goomba. So hard can mean ‘ignorance’ of how the game works.
Grindiness
Was Dragon Quest I a hard game? It was a game of grinding. You killed monsters and leveled up, bought new gear, and could kill monsters easier. The more you grinded, the easier the game got.
Reflexes
Donkey Kong’s difficulty is only in the sense of doing two simple things at the same time (jumping over barrels is easy, climbing ladders is easy, doing both at the same time is not). In a similar way, space shooter and FPS games tend to combine simple elements and force the player’s reflexes to survive.
What was hard about Ikaruga’s hard mode? It required some crazy reflexes to pull off.
Silver Surfer is pretty hard for a NES game.
Reflex hardness is only possible if it is a one hit kills type situation like a space ship shooter.
Reflex hard also means faster and faster and faster like all the classic arcade games. Tetris got ‘hard’ in this way that your reflexes couldn’t keep up with the falling blocks.
Broken
One way a game can be hard is by being broken. Battletoads, which would have become a huge hit if not for this, had level three broken because the difficulty was just too much. Overtuned is another way of saying broken. The developers should have caught this absurd change in the game’s difficulty before the game shipped.
Blizzard said that Inferno would be nerfed if a part of it had a type of ‘broken’ difficulty (meaning the expert gamer would go, “WTF? This is broken, not ‘hard’.”).
Puzzle
When you play an Aonuma Zelda and get stuck, all you have to do is google your situation and get the answer. The puzzle is solved.
Cheats
Common in strategy games, the game is made hard by having the computer cheat and play by different rules than the player. Since Diablo 3 is a PvE type of game, it remains to be seen how the game could ‘cheat’.
So how will Inferno be hard?
There may be more ways how a game can be ‘hard’, but you get the idea. But how will Diablo 3’s Inferno be hard?
For sure, it will not be hard due to the game being broken (because Blizzard said they would fix it) or because of reflexes (Diablo 3 is not an arcade game). Click clicking doesn’t give enough precision as a joystick or a WASD would do (which Blizzard removed and does not allow).
We do know that Inferno will be ‘hard’ in the sense of grindiness. Jay Wilson, the producer, says players must go grind Hell in order to thrive in Inferno. Grindiness is a matter of time, not actual skill.
The other way Inferno will likely be hard is in the puzzle sense. Players will attack different mobs and bosses with different builds and classes. Soon, the easier ways will be known, and everyone will watch the youtube videos of them.
“But there will be people who won’t use outside resources to tackle Inferno.”
These people remind me of the math teacher everyone had who said, “Do not use your calculator! Use your head to solve the problems!” The students would reply, “Why do I need to do that if this calculator can solve these problems for me?” The true business pioneers would get the nerds to do their homework for them. Think of the “friendship” between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for example.
So will Diablo 3’s Inferno be hard? No. Was Starcraft 2’s Brutal difficulty hard? No. Once the right strategies and unit combinations were found, brutality became simple. I expect Inferno to be the same way with the addition of much grinding to get the adequate gear.
And for those kids who dream of a parade and babes for beating Inferno on hardcore mode because they are always held back at WoW due to their fellow raiders having to go outside routinely: go get a job.
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