I feel kind of bad for all the staff involved in this mess. They just wanted to live the dream, make the game they've wanted, but in the end it became another Ion Storm mess. Still tho, you commit to a gimmick launch date, even though your beta testers are telling you all sorts of shit, you pay the price. These guys had the heart and the talent, but not the business or the patience. They should have started small, releasing some simpler but solid and fun games, instead of reaching for the stars on their first project.
The killer was the whole BS subscription model, they got so much hate and bad press for it that I'm sure it hurt more than helped in the long run. What a terrible idea. At the very least, I'm sure that if Blizzard even considered having a subscription model for Diablo 3, they've long since abandoned it due to this.
can someone explain further, fill me in, on how shitty the game was [at least at launch] and how mismanaging Roper was?
And is all this mostly Flagship's fault?
> Bad Support
> They made HGL only thinking of the money (not surprising I guess)
> Terrible color schemes
> Terrible in-game art direction
> Immersion-breaking stuff all the time like in-game Ads, stupid voice acting and silly quest texts/jokes
> Unbalanced Gameplay
> An enormous amount of glitches. It's as bad as Daikatana. Terrible memory leaks, their solution on the forums was to buy more RAM, each extra gig would provide another hour of playtime!
> Uncreative skills. You don't feel excited to level up. The Marksman skills are so unfunny, boring and USELESS that you play the whole game simply using the basic attack.
> A terrible plot
> Terrible monsters. There is a jumping creature that has dozens of glitches all by himself, and it's not fun to kill.
> Incredibly bad business model. They said it was a mistake to want to introduce everything they did in a game. The game screamed I'M A MONEY MILKING WHORE.
> Advertised as a MMORPG but it's not a MMORPG. Which means, since it's FSS, that it DOES have all the drawbacks of a MMORPG but none of the advantages. Drawbacks include meeting a hundred players you can't play with every time you have to repair your stuff. Since it's not really a MMO because the game is instanced and parties are limited, that means their only purpose is to create a massive drop on the frame-rate of your computer.
> The game is the same from the beginning to the end. There are like 3 Dungeon Tiles only and even then you'll be seeing mostly the same, same tileset. Also all outdoor areas use the same tileset which gets boring very fast, because it's ugly.
> A long delay between patches and new content.
> distinguished mentally-challenged community that mostly refused to acknowledge the game problems and excluded themselves from the outer world.
> distinguished mentally-challenged community managers and devs that refused to listen to the very small part of the community that acknowledged the game problems and suggested good, comprehensive fixes.
> The most dumb dev. cycle I have ever seen. In one of their patches, they introduced (I believe it was either christmas or easter) a seasonal event where you could get new, pointless items, but only if you were a subscriber. The problem is that there was a bug where the drop rates were absurdly high. Also, you don't click on items to get them, you auto-pickup by walking. That means that simply by killing a dozen monsters your inv. would be full of crappy seasonal items you don't want. And that horrible bug is only for the people who paid.
Needless to say, they blew all their chance at goodwill pretty early.