Bethesda Softworks’ Ashley Cheng, the Producer of Fallout 3 stated his disappointment of Diablo 3’s announcement on his http://www.ashleycheng.com/2008/06/when-ship-runs-out-of-ocean.html in a post entitled "When the ship runs out of ocean."
These are his exact comments: "Diablo III announced. Nice. It looks pretty amazing, especially the gameplay video. Loved the destructible environments."
I must say I am disappointed that Blizzard has stayed on the conservative side in terms of design with their updates to Diablo and Starcraft. Diablo will be interesting since World of Warcraft has a lot of Diablo-like qualities. I have no doubt, however, that they will be incredibly fun, addictive and polished games. Blizzard is the top of the class when it comes to game development - nobody does it better.
In fact, World of Warcraft is currently banned from any computer I own due to its highly addictive qualities. Its easily one of my favorite RPGs.
I know they are working on another Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. I hope its World of Starcraft."
It’s certainly a nice attempt to backpedal on his negative comments about the game by citing World of Warcraft’s addictive nature, but one can only surmise that his reference to the Diablo 3’s so-called "conservative" design is due to its lack of a first person perspective, as is often touted as a ‘feature’ of the upcoming Fallout 3; a ‘feature’ that nobody even asked for.
Bethesda calls Fallout’s design outdated, while converting Fallout 3 to the same basic design they’ve been using since Arena in 1994.
Update: Ashley has shared similar thoughts on his Twitter account posted last year, when Starcraft 2 was announced:
"starcraft 2 looks great, wish blizzard deviated more, try ground control/battlezone first person gameplay. more thoughts on blog later."
It certainly sounds like he wants Starcraft 2 to be played from a first person perspective. One must ask: Why reinvent the wheel?
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