Blizzard's been saying "no" to many feature requests in the past couple of days, some of which are desirable, others less so. Sp3tSnAz has already made the initial posts regarding these topics, but I'd like to chime in on this one...
No Guns
Jay Wilson suggested not awhile back that the next announced class would be certain to make some fans of Diablo ‘very angry'. Speculation about the next class went up like fireworks with everything from gunslingers to mechanized robots being suggested by anxious fans in Diablo III's various forums, to which Blizzard's community manager, Bashiok, has posted a response:
Well, you have to realize that it's been 20 years, and in technological terms that can be a very long time. We're trying to create a world that's not static, its filled out, and with that it's an advancing world. With that amount of time, and also the loss of the Arreat Summit much of the remaining barbarian culture has focused on... nah I'm just kidding, there aren't any guns.
Cheeky! But he's not fooling anyone. I'm still adamant that the next class will be a rifle-wielding Sarah Palin who wears the skins and furs of her fallen enemies.
No Spellbooks
Spellbooks featured strongly in the original Diablo as being the only way for a character to learn new skills. Each character, regardless of class, was limited in his spellcasting abilities simply by the amount of spellbooks he or she discovered in the course of the game. This of course resulted in much imbalance and added not a small amount of tedium to the game as a whole. In short, it wasn't very well implemented; more suited to its roguelike predecessors rather than action RPGs of which Diablo was the first of its kind. Bashiok speaks:
That came back in Diablo II too eventually in the form of rune words, and I don't think it really worked out too well in the end. I do think it actually could be designed and implemented properly; balanced, etc. but...
For me the more important question though is what impact does it have on the class you're playing and also our knowledge of the Diablo world? Is a class nothing more than someone who read from a book, or is holding a specific item? No, they're very specific and very iconic figures (heroes even) from very distinct styles and backgrounds. The characters we play are these concentrated images of their cultures, beliefs, etc. Everything they do resembles who they are and where they're from, and what does it mean to then piecemeal that out to any one who just happens to throw a couple runes in to an item.
It worked better in Diablo (1) I think. Conceptually it was a bit easier to digest just because of the basic pen and paper underpinnings, and the heroes were far more generic. It was also far less obtrusive.
In Diablo II though, for me anyway, it always undermined the uniqueness of playing a specific class, and also what it meant to be that character. Aside from everything else it caused.
Ouch.
No DX10
Overhyped, poor-performing and completely unnecessary, DirectX 10, a technological advancement originally hailed as the bringer of Next-Generation Graphics has since been trumped by ingenuity and clever, engine-based innovation in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Newly minted titles like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning have even dropped their support for DirectX 10 in light of the problems and performance issues it delivers. With only high-end games like Crysis and World in Conflict featuring it in its full form, DX10 has very little to showcase.
A number of complete failures like Hellgate: London and Age of Conan to which poor performance and unnecessary lengths of QA were wasted upon can be owed entirely to their implementation of DX10, it would not surprise me if Blizzard decided not to opt in for its use, either:
We haven't announced any final support for DirectX versions/system requirements. I'll say that right now we're not using any DirectX10 features, but we potentially could.
It seems unlikely that DX10 will ever make it in, especially since they plan to release Diablo III on the Mac as well as the PC.
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