Having been on the inside of the Diablo II expansion beta, I can tell you that Blizzard North did NOT live up to all of their promises. The expansion shipped on a hard deadline before it was ready, then they patched it once and dumped it. A lot of features stank -- like charges on items, something STILL not fixed -- and others did not get enough attention or were geared toward greed: especially uber items trying to suck in the item-hunter/trader addicts.
Diablo II did patch to 1.10 and that's great. They did a lot of good things there. But it was nearly THREE YEARS after the expansion first shipped.
Firaxis's record is MUCH MUCH better. Civ3 got patched numerous times and they didn't stop patching it until it was in good shape. In fact, that's the most impressive patch effort I have EVER seen. In my experience, no other game in Civ3's category in terms of how much patching it needed has ever gotten all the way to "wow, this works as promised now", but Civ3 did.
Now Civ3's expansions are another story. PTW tried to slap on multiplayer to a game not designed for it and they didn't get it right. However, they did get multiplayer working well in C3C, just that (much like Diablo II!) the expansion added a lot of goodies designed to sell copies but NOT designed to play well.
Look where that has left them, with fans like you out here unhappy. ::shrug::
And yet Firaxis did not make the second expansion. That got farmed out to a third party: Breakaway Games. Breakaway did a lot of things right, but no new AI code (or at least none worth its salt) got written for these new features, so players can exploit them to the max while the AI just stands there.
Since Firaxis, and not Breakaway, will be designing Civ4 (at least the core game!) I have high hopes for it. Why shouldn't I? Civ3's core game delivered sixteen months of intense, sometimes even addicted action for me. That's a long run for a discerning, demanding player like myself. Few games can match that. Diablo II didn't last that long for me. More like eleven months (which is still good, to be fair). I have to go back into the mid 1990s to find games like Descent and Diablo (the originals) that kept me entertained for multiple years, or games like Half Life that were so incredibly much fun, it didn't matter that they had a short run.
What will Civ4 hold? I don't know. But this much I do know: I'm pretty sure it will hold enough to be worth my money.
- Sirian