Blizzard and its pot of gold Diablo III

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   December 31st, 2012   |  

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Diablo III can be aptly regarded as a pot of gold for Blizzard Entertainment, a company that has established itself as the leading brand when it comes to role-playing games (RPG) for the PC.

After doing wonders with the World of WarCraft franchise, the company returned to a franchise that had helped it in gaining prominence during its early years, Diablo.

Despite the first and second Diablo game making a solid impact, Blizzard did not make haste to milk the franchise to its fullest, something that Ubisoft is guilty of with its Assassin’s Creed franchise.

Instead, the company waited a good many years and kept testing the patience of the fans of the series, making them grow more impatient and hungrier than ever.

Much to the relief and joy of the anxious fans, the third instalment in the Diablo franchise was released in May 2012. As expected, the game instantly became a hit, setting a new record by selling 3.5 million copies within the first 24 hours of its release.

Diablo III launch did not go as smoothly in some regions as it did in others, with the Battle.Net servers becoming overloaded due to a traffic that was way beyond what the company had expected.

The digital buyers of the new game faced a few issues as well, such as facing a level cap and being unable to advance beyond a certain level.

Showing its capability and competency to deal with the most testing of challenges without consuming too much time, Blizzard managed to sort everything out and got the game working smoothly. Frequent updates and patches were released to ensure that the players continued to get the best-possible experience from the brand that takes pride in connecting to its consumers like no other.

Successfully launching the game and maintaining a smooth experience for more than 10 million users around the globe was not enough to satisfy Blizzard and thus it remained busy trying out new things with the game to come up with ways to keep the experience on offer fresh.

Work is still being done to port the game to consoles, though that hardly seems to be the priority of the company. Instead, it is working on enhancing the experience for the PC users of Diablo III by introducing new modes and giving even more reasons to the players to return to their Battle.Net account every day.

The company had been working on a Diablo III Team Deathmatch mode for the past few months, but the project has been stalled for now. Game director Jay Wilson conceded that the mode had not turned out to be what they had expected, primarily because of the lack of depth and class balance issue.

While the Team Deathmatch mode has been shelved, players can expect the PvP duelling option to arrive soon with the next patch.

So far, Diablo III has been a success story for Blizzard, but it remains to be seen whether the company remains focused on it for another few years, or if it attempts to begin another chapter by reviving another of its prolific franchise, WarCraft.

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