Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 196: Seventeen Difficulties

“I don’t believe that either. If Diablo sells over five hundred thousand copies, no. Ten thousand copies, I’ll eat my monitor!”

“I’ll eat my USB drive!”

“I’ll eat my coffee mug!”

“Why don’t you guys just go for one hundred million sales? That way you guys don’t have to do anything. What’s the point of going for eight hundred thousand if you don’t want to eat anything anyways.”

“I’ve written down the names of the posters, I’ll be going after you guys when Diablo makes it.”

“Look at the brain dead Chen Mo fan.”

“So what if I’m a brain dead Chen Mo fan. Think about it, haven’t all of Chen Mo’s games done extremely well?”

“He really has lost his marbles! You can keep singing the songs of praise, I’ll be taking my leave.”

“Calm down, Chen Mo’s not some kind of god. He did RTS and casual games previously, all games that require insane innovation to get those results. Now he’s working on RPG games which are mainstream, a third person one at that too. There’s no way he could save it no matter how many innovations he has!”

“Have you guys even seen the videos before talking? It looks quite fun in the videos.”

“It didn’t look fun, so what if I hate third person RPG games!”

“Alright, we’ll see when the sales come now. I’ll be going after every single one of you when he reaches eight hundred thousand sales!”

—

There was a lot of discussion among the industry professionals too.

“Chen Mo’s new game is about to go on sale, anybody keeping an eye on that?”

“Diablo? I thought we went through that already, niche audience for third person games and scary games. It’d probably get around three hundred thousand sales in the first month, what else is there to say.”

“There were leaked recently, there are cinematics too. I heard it’s really high quality.”

“High quality RPG games are all over the place. I might believe if you said he’d make more innovations with casual games, but RPG games have been done time and time again, there’s no way he could innovate anything new.”

“I just like to remind you that everyone who underestimated Chen Mo has been proven wrong. Are there any other games that are releasing soon?”

“There are actually quite a few games releasing after Chinese new year, but most of them are online games, so there aren’t too many conflicts of interest with single player games. Then again, so what if there was a conflict of interest, it’s an RPG, could Chen Mo really whip up something new again?”

“Right? You could tell from his idea of Diablo. He’s even making it in third person, that idea is from a few years ago.”

“I think he didn’t even do mark research, how else would he go so off script?”

“I don’t understand either. It’d make sense if he made a simple game to test the waters, but isn’t he stupid to spend so much money on cinmeatics and a high quality game?”

“Maybe he was inspired by that Warcraft RPG game because there were so many players. Maybe he thinks third person RPGs still have life in them.”

“Well, he’s thinking too much. How many players does that RPG map even have. That Holy Land game that was quite popular recently probably has at most a few thousand concurrent players. You have to be silly to make a game for a few thousand players right? What’s the point of targeting that tiny group.”

“Geez, we’ll just have to see how it goes, that’s really all we can do.”

—

Diablo started selling among the cloud of doubt.

There were a few other MMORPGs released at the same time, but they didn’t affect Diablo’s sales much if at all. Single player games that sell copies are less affected by competitors, so the only deciding factor of Diablo’s sales was its potential playerbase.

Most of the players on the computers in the experience store were playing Diablo, some of them even had a few players watching.”

“I got the bounty!”

“My goodness, look at the attributes on this!”

“Not bad, it’s better than what I have now, I’ll equip it.”

“My four hours is up soon, and I’m not done yet!”

“Hurry up, it’s my turn.”

In two weeks time, most of the the players in Diablo were now hardcore players who couldn’t stop themselves.

Although Diablo was quite content rich, it wasn’t a lot of game time.

There was a conquest in the game called ‘Speed Racer’, unlocked by completing all five acts within an hour on the highest difficulty.

Of course, this one of the extremes, but was possible to beat the game on in a few hours.

New players would have some trouble beating the game as Chen Mo increased the difficulty, but it would be at most ten or so hours as the game was designed to be beaten by everyone.

However, the players would discover that there was a choice of difficulties, Expert, Master, and Torment!”

Moreover, there was Torment one through thirteen!

That means that there are a total of seventeen difficulties in this game!

Many players who beat the normal difficulty would enthusiastically try out master difficulty, but would be absolutely destroyed by the mobs.

Many were shocked to see this. What was the point of Torment 1-13 when Master was already so difficult, wouldn’t the small mobs be capable of destroying worlds?

Moreover, the increase in attributes given through level ups weren’t much, so grinding levels weren’t all that beneficial either, so how could the players keep gaining strength?

As they played on, the players finally realised, it was through equipment!

They realised the game was more and more complicated as they delved further into the game. In some cases, characters were a few times stronger when they had the proper equipment!

Moreover, the chance of good equipment dropping increases with difficulty. Players got really excited when they got equipment that were orange or above, sometimes even taking screenshots. They lost the excitement the more they played, but they couldn’t stop themselves from playing more.

It wouldn’t feel right if they didn’t grind some rare gear.

Moreover, more and more players started developing and exchanging builds and strategies based on abilities and special equipment.

“How to deal more damage”, “output order”, “ranking various equipment”, “techniques for grinding gear” started replacing discussions like “story”, “how to play”, and “game quality”.

The staff who doubted Chen Mo finally understood the intentions behind the design.

The players were really confident in the game, waiting for its release to give the other players a big surprise.