The Lead Designer of the console version of Diablo III, Josh Mosqueira, is now the Game Director for the entire project.
Some insights he shared about the future of Diablo III:
In the year since Diablo III launched, we've made good strides, but there are still things we can improve and new surprises in store for everyone. As Travis mentioned earlier, itemization is one of our big focuses for Diablo III moving forward. We want items to feel more meaningful, and we want players to be excited about the next loot drop. Our goal is to make the loot experience more enjoyable for ALL players. This includes reducing the amount of loot that drops while improving the overall quality, introducing targeted Legendaries, and giving players ways to directly customize their character's armor—both visually and mechanically. We're also looking into ways to reduce the impact of the Auction House. While we think the feature does provide a lot of value, it shouldn’t feel like the end-all-be-all force driving character progression.
I think the choice is great, Josh’s past work means he is a very experienced developer who understands the trend of modern video game development, and judging from what we already see in the console version of Diablo III, he already put a lot of his insight into it and made it already a better game than its PC counterpart imo. I talked with him a lot back at PAX East 2013, really enjoyed and learnt a lot.
I actually played those White Wolf card game Rage waaay back in the day before I got into Warhammer 40k. Fresh blood with a concept of good game design is a good direction I hope.
On June 06 2013 09:34 Savage88 wrote: Alot of words with absolutly no conclusion.
I think they made some definitive statements here. They mention they want the drop rate reduced but with better items. They mention they want more ways to customize armor, that's pretty definitive as well. And reducing the impact of the AH is definitely a tricky question, but that is clearly what their thoughts are on. Maybe you could make all items bind-on-equip, or maybe that doesn't work. I don't think they could make a strong statement about how they plan on fixing that at this point.
Its nice that they want to change stuff etc, but as we all know, this will takes ages, and what the biggest problem for me. patches and changes in d3 always take AGES, compared to other titles out there like PoE for example.. 8/
Console Lead--> Overall game lead. Lol good to know where the overall focus of this game will be in the future (Next Gen Console ftw) Wouldn't be surprised if the next D3 expansion is developed around the Next Gen Consoles and then ported to PC instead of the other way around.
I always enjoyed LotRO persistant weapon system. I think it would port over pretty well to the aRPG genre if done right. I am surprised they haven't introduced an image transmutation system though. Why can't we use the image of another sword or armor instead? It's not like FFXI and .dat's that you could change around - you'd still have to acquire the item in the first place.
Anyways, if D3 can fix a lot of its issues via expansion or just patches I might think about coming back.
Makes me wanna think they will fuck up the items as they did with the attack speed nerf(was a good decision but most people had to basically reequip). And all people that play casually that already got some decent items will be fucked over.
Just make loot interesting like D2 and I'll be happy - right now loot till lvl 60 seems so meh its not even fun I miss lowlvl setitems, runewords and alot less gems - and for the love of god make bosses drop stuff worth picking up even after you've killed them once. I take they want the player out in the world and not run endless bossfarms - but isnt that the same as running elitepacks? Just less emphasis on some pretty cool bossmechanics compared to the RNG that is elitepacks...?
On June 07 2013 02:12 Calliopee wrote: Just make loot interesting like D2 and I'll be happy - right now loot till lvl 60 seems so meh its not even fun I miss lowlvl setitems, runewords and alot less gems - and for the love of god make bosses drop stuff worth picking up even after you've killed them once. I take they want the player out in the world and not run endless bossfarms - but isnt that the same as running elitepacks? Just less emphasis on some pretty cool bossmechanics compared to the RNG that is elitepacks...?
RNG of elite packs is way more fun than the same thing over and over, though if you do anything enough, it always feels that way sooner or later. I'll never quite understand the uproar over D3. D2 was baal->Sigon's for the hundredth time, though I only got to do ubers once, where I experienced watching people with gear kill stuff while I ran away from bugs and other mobs i couldn't touch. Sorcs either had infinity, or had to skip 1/3 of the mobs in the game. So fun that was >.>
D2 had some strong points, like with Rune Words and elite items, but it also had its weaknesses. The best thing it had compared to D3 was boss fights in the normal world, and not having to do quests after initial clear. However, I think you should still have to do them your first time each difficulty (unless you don't wanna finish Inferno act IV anyway, especially alts that don't need the infernal plans).
The fact that D2 was fun even though all you did was Baal runs repeatedly tells you that something fundamentally was different versus D3, which got boring after two weeks. These fundamental differences have been dissected at length already in other threads.
On June 07 2013 03:17 Yacobs wrote: The fact that D2 was fun even though all you did was Baal runs repeatedly tells you that something fundamentally was different versus D3, which got boring after two weeks. These fundamental differences have been dissected at length already in other threads.
Do you know what the real difference is? D2 uses an age old formula that hasn't withstood the test of time, because the modern MMOs took it and expanded on it . D3 doesn't deviate nearly as far from the formula as people like to claim, in fact it's more or less the same thing but with an Auction House (which admittedly does change the game quite a lot, but not the core gameplay which is grinding for loot).
Nothing will save Diablo from being sub-par. I had my fun with it when it came out, but it is like any crap game (see: CoD) it gets old fast and then you move onto the next release. Sad.
On June 07 2013 03:17 Yacobs wrote: The fact that D2 was fun even though all you did was Baal runs repeatedly tells you that something fundamentally was different versus D3, which got boring after two weeks. These fundamental differences have been dissected at length already in other threads.
Do you know what the real difference is? D2 uses an age old formula that hasn't withstood the test of time, because the modern MMOs took it and expanded on it . D3 doesn't deviate nearly as far from the formula as people like to claim, in fact it's more or less the same thing but with an Auction House (which admittedly does change the game quite a lot, but not the core gameplay which is grinding for loot).
ARPGs are a strange beast in 2013.
They kinda missed a few of the fun parts though, specific loot tables so people had a goal that drove them to kill bosses over and over instead of killing random elite pack #123412. They screwed up in a similar way on items, prior to the legendary remake everyone was looking for random rare #31234 that has Crit/CritDmg/ASpd/Allres/MainStat/Vit.
It's slightly more fun now that some legendaries are worth hunting for but they really need to make items interesting to make people stick around.
If the item remake doesn't kick ass i'm probably going to stop playing D3. It's been a rough ride from launch until now and even though they've been improving every patch it's really time for them to stop taking baby steps on improvements and do something impressive.
If anyone remembers the mess that was an auction house that couldn't actually search for possible affix rolls (number too big) or combinations (not enough affixes) due to brain dead programming and the lagging hell hole that was the first couple months after launch or crafting that was straight up pointless, no ubers, no pvp, no paragon etc etc
D3 has moved forward but it's been a long fucking time to get to a respectable game.
On June 06 2013 16:39 Partha wrote: Console Lead--> Overall game lead. Lol good to know where the overall focus of this game will be in the future (Next Gen Console ftw) Wouldn't be surprised if the next D3 expansion is developed around the Next Gen Consoles and then ported to PC instead of the other way around.
I assume you've never seen the post that happened way before d3 was announced for console that said exactly why and how everything was designed for consoles. The small maps, the limited number of skills, the party only being at 4...etc. The pc version was basically a beta.
I just picked up D3 this past weekend after having not touched it since paragon levels came out. Here are some of my thoughts on what needs to be addressed in general:
1) Build variety still sucks. Each class seems to have 2-3 major capable builds available, most of those builds even include at least 1 or 2 of the same actives and same passives. With 18 passive skills and over 100 active + rune setups, this is quite sad.
2) Crits and crit damage are WAY too important. The best stat in the game as far as dmg is concerned is crit damage, it is just completely unrivaled in the amount of damage it gives, it's fucking insane. And getting 50-80% chance to crit is not only necessary for many builds to work, it causes crits to not even seem all that cool anyway. Attack speed is a decent secondary stat, but raw damage seems almost unimportant, they really need to reduce the lop-sidedness of their damage layout.
3) 2H weapons suck. Fix their damage, make them not suck.
4) The WoW effect: Levels 1-60 seem like a giant waste of time. The game is so completely different past level 60, I really wonder what they were thinking when they put the flow of everything together. You scrape by the early levels with <100 resist all, trying to maximize your DPS, hit 60 (where upon your hp and resists quadruple and your damage gets an extra 0 added on the end) and then endgame begins. Your skill selection changes radically, every item is immediately outdated, and you have to learn how to play your character all over again. I understand having a "newbie zone" of sorts, but running through the game three times before finishing my build is just silly.
5) Itemization sucks. I brought my wizard from 20k dps to 70k dps in the course of 1 day. I am sailing through MP4, and once I kill diablo, I really don't care to play this game anymore because any decent upgrade will literally cost more than I spent on my entire gear set. I spent around 700k building my gear set into decent shape, by my estimates, the gear I am currently wearing would have cost around 150m when I quit before. It's not worth trying to play the game and build up my character any further because just about any upgrade to my current set would cost at least 1 mil if not 2-10. There really is no "next step" to keep me interested.
D3 has a lot of stuff going for it, but there are just too many giant holes in the way the game flows and it's not a lot of fun to play when you're stuck in one. I hope this new guy brings a fresh set of eyes and changes it up to keep me interested, because for now, I'm not.
I've said it before and will say it again. The main overall reason D2X was a better game (yes the final version after they added all the runewords, uniques, set items etc.) was that you could make ANY build viable, IF you got the right NICHE items. 1. First 100h of gaming So first you got a normal, cookie cutter build, hammer din, blizzard sorc, etc where items for this build were cheaper, easy to find yourself, more frequent in drops and could be dropped in easy farming places. 2. Next 100+ h gaming You start getting bored of your build and want the items for the cool, niche difficult builds (which are very item depended; READ "SPECIFIC UNIQUES OR RUNES" NOT GET A ITEM WITH 5% MORE CRIT CHANCE OTHERWISE SIMILAR). First you need to be able to farm the places where these items drop, so you grind some more to get stronger, and do those baal runs or pindle etc. Then you start grinding for items to trade to your runes, the set items you miss or the specific unique that makes your lightning, zealadin work, your WW IK set barb etc. even at the hardest places in the game. 3. next 1000h + You grind for that sick PvP gear that wont ever work against monsters but kills all other PvP.
What I am trying to say is, they new Blizzard team working on D3 completely missed what made D2X the fun it did. I am currently playing PoE instead of D3 and while that game has it weaknesses (mainly netcode and targeting issues) they did eveerything right with items and general loot. Everything is good for something and there is a vast amount of builds that only works with those sepcific items you grind/trade for.
Personally I do not agree that D3 shortcomings can be blamed on the auction house (it just made the bad item design even worse, but the bad design would be there regardless). The auction house would have been OK with the right item design.
On June 19 2013 22:45 Burrfoot wrote: All the ideas are still there, they will just be added slowly thru patches and xpacks.
this.
and keep in mind that we are still playing the beta. (for the console release.) even though this fact could be considered outrageous in its own right.... it still means there is hope for this game.
On June 19 2013 22:45 Burrfoot wrote: All the ideas are still there, they will just be added slowly thru patches and xpacks.
this.
and keep in mind that we are still playing the beta. (for the console release.) even though this fact could be considered outrageous in its own right.... it still means there is hope for this game.
Why they didn't make loot good for a game like Diablo in the first place is beyond comprehension. I went into Diablo 3 completely blind not wanting to be spoiled and realized in a short time how effing boring the items were. Then add the fact that I found ONE legendary up to act 1 inferno and it was crap didn't help.
On June 20 2013 01:55 nihlon wrote: Why they didn't make loot good for a game like Diablo in the first place is beyond comprehension. I went into Diablo 3 completely blind not wanting to be spoiled and realized in a short time how effing boring the items were. Then add the fact that I found ONE legendary up to act 1 inferno and it was crap didn't help.
Keep in mind: Before Diablo 3 was released, Blizzard thought it was going to take 1+ years to kill Diablo on Inferno difficulty.
Not only did they terribly underestimate the ingenuity of the modern gamer, they chose the single shittiest mechanic to lengthen that time as much as possible, by choking out viable end-game gear through shitty drop-rates and randomization.
Go figure that a year later, they're trying to revamp the usability of their junk drops. Having 99% of the items be useless is fine by most longtime ARPG players, but that doesn't make it a good mechanic.
I actually believe that their decision to copy WoW and marry the loot progression to a single number (your primary attribute) is underestimated as a reason why the loot grind was/is so bad.
On June 19 2013 22:45 Burrfoot wrote: All the ideas are still there, they will just be added slowly thru patches and xpacks.
no. they just made a game for casuals, thinking hardcore ppl would like inferno cause its tough. Jay ''Fuck that loser'' Wilson and his team took the customers for morons ( pvp, inferno, drop rate, mass VIABLE builds (lol)).
let them reap what they have sown with that xpack ( i.e. not much )
at the very least this game needs a ladder and a new season for a clean start. Then also remove auction house from the ladder.
And then they can take a look at torchlight 2 if they really dont know how to make a fun arpg by themselves.
The console guy doesnt sound so bad, he allready managed to keep the auction house away from the console. That must have been a pretty hard fight against coprorate moneysharks.
I've said it before and will say it again. The main overall reason D2X was a better game (yes the final version after they added all the runewords, uniques, set items etc.) was that you could make ANY build viable, IF you got the right NICHE items. 1. First 100h of gaming So first you got a normal, cookie cutter build, hammer din, blizzard sorc, etc where items for this build were cheaper, easy to find yourself, more frequent in drops and could be dropped in easy farming places. 2. Next 100+ h gaming You start getting bored of your build and want the items for the cool, niche difficult builds (which are very item depended; READ "SPECIFIC UNIQUES OR RUNES" NOT GET A ITEM WITH 5% MORE CRIT CHANCE OTHERWISE SIMILAR). First you need to be able to farm the places where these items drop, so you grind some more to get stronger, and do those baal runs or pindle etc. Then you start grinding for items to trade to your runes, the set items you miss or the specific unique that makes your lightning, zealadin work, your WW IK set barb etc. even at the hardest places in the game. 3. next 1000h + You grind for that sick PvP gear that wont ever work against monsters but kills all other PvP.
What I am trying to say is, they new Blizzard team working on D3 completely missed what made D2X the fun it did. I am currently playing PoE instead of D3 and while that game has it weaknesses (mainly netcode and targeting issues) they did eveerything right with items and general loot. Everything is good for something and there is a vast amount of builds that only works with those sepcific items you grind/trade for.
Personally I do not agree that D3 shortcomings can be blamed on the auction house (it just made the bad item design even worse, but the bad design would be there regardless). The auction house would have been OK with the right item design.
Wow you're absolutely right! That was thrill of d2x, you could build some incredibly whacky and fun builds that were viablr with the right items.
I think item design is really the core issue. They don't really do anything besides give you flat stats. They don't add as much utility as they did in d2.
Look at Enigma for one, it gave teleport! How cool was that?
Enigma was so cool because teleport was awesome in d2/d2expo/d1. For some reason its made into a decently long cool-down in this game...same with a lot of other skills...there weren't super long cool downs in D2/D2expo why introduce them now?
I've said it before and will say it again. The main overall reason D2X was a better game (yes the final version after they added all the runewords, uniques, set items etc.) was that you could make ANY build viable, IF you got the right NICHE items. 1. First 100h of gaming So first you got a normal, cookie cutter build, hammer din, blizzard sorc, etc where items for this build were cheaper, easy to find yourself, more frequent in drops and could be dropped in easy farming places. 2. Next 100+ h gaming You start getting bored of your build and want the items for the cool, niche difficult builds (which are very item depended; READ "SPECIFIC UNIQUES OR RUNES" NOT GET A ITEM WITH 5% MORE CRIT CHANCE OTHERWISE SIMILAR). First you need to be able to farm the places where these items drop, so you grind some more to get stronger, and do those baal runs or pindle etc. Then you start grinding for items to trade to your runes, the set items you miss or the specific unique that makes your lightning, zealadin work, your WW IK set barb etc. even at the hardest places in the game. 3. next 1000h + You grind for that sick PvP gear that wont ever work against monsters but kills all other PvP.
What I am trying to say is, they new Blizzard team working on D3 completely missed what made D2X the fun it did. I am currently playing PoE instead of D3 and while that game has it weaknesses (mainly netcode and targeting issues) they did eveerything right with items and general loot. Everything is good for something and there is a vast amount of builds that only works with those sepcific items you grind/trade for.
Personally I do not agree that D3 shortcomings can be blamed on the auction house (it just made the bad item design even worse, but the bad design would be there regardless). The auction house would have been OK with the right item design.
Wow you're absolutely right! That was thrill of d2x, you could build some incredibly whacky and fun builds that were viablr with the right items.
I think item design is really the core issue. They don't really do anything besides give you flat stats. They don't add as much utility as they did in d2.
Look at Enigma for one, it gave teleport! How cool was that?
Very true, I had a pvp teleporting stabbing necro called OJStabs'em. twas fun. then you had bvb duelers with all str, or the straight up d/a/e sword/shield zons.
On June 28 2013 03:59 FromShouri wrote: Enigma was so cool because teleport was awesome in d2/d2expo/d1. For some reason its made into a decently long cool-down in this game...same with a lot of other skills...there weren't super long cool downs in D2/D2expo why introduce them now?
this game was made by "professionals" who only care about maximizing profit. I really hope nobody buys the expansion or console games. I didnt buy HOTS because of d3.. I guess it wont change much but it makes me feel better
EPT
I miss lowlvl setitems, runewords and alot less gems - and for the love of god make bosses drop stuff worth picking up even after you've killed them once. I take they want the player out in the world and not run endless bossfarms - but isnt that the same as running elitepacks? Just less emphasis on some pretty cool bossmechanics compared to the RNG that is elitepacks...? 
. D3 doesn't deviate nearly as far from the formula as people like to claim, in fact it's more or less the same thing but with an Auction House (which admittedly does change the game quite a lot, but not the core gameplay which is grinding for loot).
