duckroll said:
But it is. Building a system into the game which fucks over any portion of your fans for zero benefit is a terrible idea. It's bad for business, and it has no positive impact whatsoever.
Here's a question: Why can't the game offer the original game in the package, AND have options to start a new game from either WKC1 or WKC2, or to import a clear save? Can you think of a single possible benefit to this? Seriously? What are they gaining from locking anyone out from playing WKC2?
The benefit is that they don't have split up the games or create a tutorial. If they allowed you to start at WKC2 without playing the first then they'd have 2 options:
Option 1) You lose pretty much all progress and things revert to level 1 and you start all over again. They also have to put a tutorial and all those things for those that started out with 2.
Option 2) Make up a level for the character to start at and let people pick the skills or whatever it is you do in this game. Again, they have to have a tutorial, and people would be picking skills and things that they have no idea about since they didn't play the first game at all.
In both of these scenarios they have to make some sort of tutorial and/or make the game much easier at the beginning to get new players up to speed, and the first scenario loses all the progression in the game. They just wanted people to be able to really add onto their started character, almost like an MMO or something.
Try and think of it like this: How big of a pain in the ass would it have been for Blizzard to make Act 5: Lord of Destruction playable straight away by itself. It's weird, people would gain much the story from just starting there, they'd have to retailor it for new players, and to top it off they've basically created a shortcut to whatever level you are supposed to be in that act. Remember, WKC has that online questing mode, so if you started at WKC2 you'd basically gain free however many levels without having to do anything. Not really fair to those that already went through that shit.