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I'm excited for many aspects of diablo3. I loved the fast paced dueling of diablo2 as opposed to WoW's slower paced and control based PvP. WoW was kind of fun as well for awhile but I feel like an apt comparison would be like comparing SC micro vs WC3 micro. WC3 micro was very slow with a lot of control (like melee vs dryads or entangle/slow/poison etc etc for example) while SC is very fast and ends immediately with bad positioning/decision making.
I particularly liked the amazon vs sorceress dueling relationship. Both were very fragile while putting out insane levels damage which allowed for a very thin margin of error. I thought it was fun.
In this e-sports era, I'm very curious as to how blizzard will approach PvP for diablo 3. Diablo 2 dueling was very fun but I don't think it would have been good for competitive play.
Overall, I actually enjoyed D2 classic much more that LoD personally. I liked how a level 90 was incredibly rare to find. Even a level 85 was uncommon actually. Leveling was a challenge and required a lot of time and effort. I remember a character named something like 'Wok" who was something like a lvl 95 barbarian? who remained #1 on ladder for the entire time D2C was relevant. I don't believe there ever was a max leveled classic character before the release of LoD. I actually switched over to HC mode during LoD because the game's PvM aspects became so much easier. Everyone could get to lvl 99 in under a week.
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On October 26 2010 11:13 im a roc wrote:Show nested quote +On October 26 2010 10:44 Elite00fm wrote:On October 26 2010 10:41 ricerocket wrote:
Seeing as how much more popular D2 was than D1... I think you are out of luck. You don't think a lot of D2's popularity came from the success of D1? Honestly, I think the only reason D1 was popular for more than a few months was because of Battle.net which first came out with Diablo. I think Diablo 2 had substantially more replayablity (due to the things like runewords, talismans, and charms that made for increased character customization) and it was able to maintain itself for much longer on it's own virtues than D1.
The reasons you're listing are things that made D2 un-replayable for me post-LoD (have to agree with poster above me that vanilla D2 was much more fun).
Here are some things that kept me away from playing D2 more:
1. Large, open areas.
Seriously, why even include them? It's like in porn where you have this interludes with poor attempts at plot in between the action and all you want is just fast forward them.
Basically, they made you run (and sometimes quite a lot) to get to the relevant point/dungeon where important stuff was. And on top of that, for reasons unknown to me, they also added "fake locations" which look exactly like the place you want to get to, but at the end of the dungeon you find out it's not it...
The game would be much more interesting and faster if they skipped this open areas and fake stuff entirely. Creators probably call it content, I call it bullshit. Whenever I created new character and tried to play the game again, if I were lucky I got as far as the beginning of Act III. There, I entered the jungle, remembered how much running around awaits me and uninstalled the game.
If you don't believe me, just get a stopwatch and check how much time you spend (waste) running around before you reach places of interest. It's making me sick.
2. Runewords.
They took away all the joy from finding unique items, since runeword items were a lot better and often easier to acquire. Why?
3. Talismans, charms and other bullshit.
Before that, you really had to put some effort into creating your character. Along with it being hard to find a good unique/rare to use you basically had a much less powerful character who had to overcome all the same difficulties.
4. Act V.
Which was boring as fuck, with (again) a lot of running around some desolate places without much sense of purpose.
I want a dungeon crawl, not another Diablo Marathon.
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The reasons you're listing are things that made D2 un-replayable for me post-LoD (have to agree with poster above me that vanilla D2 was much more fun). Here are some things that kept me away from playing D2 more: Show nested quote +1. Large, open areas.
Seriously, why even include them? It's like in porn where you have this interludes with poor attempts at plot in between the action and all you want is just fast forward them.
Basically, they made you run (and sometimes quite a lot) to get to the relevant point/dungeon where important stuff was. And on top of that, for reasons unknown to me, they also added "fake locations" which look exactly like the place you want to get to, but at the end of the dungeon you find out it's not it...
The game would be much more interesting and faster if they skipped this open areas and fake stuff entirely. Creators probably call it content, I call it bullshit. Whenever I created new character and tried to play the game again, if I were lucky I got as far as the beginning of Act III. There, I entered the jungle, remembered how much running around awaits me and uninstalled the game.
If you don't believe me, just get a stopwatch and check how much time you spend (waste) running around before you reach places of interest. It's making me sick. Yeah Act 3 was pretty bad. Definitely the worst one. Dunno if you played mutli, but you just run in a straight line until you end up in Lower Kurast =/. On N/NM the quest rewards weren't worth going into that jungle. I agree that some zones should have been smaller because 99% of the people circumvent 99% of it anyway. Show nested quote +2. Runewords.
They took away all the joy from finding unique items, since runeword items were a lot better and often easier to acquire. Why? I hate hate HATE the most popular runewords like Engima, Insight, Stormshield(?), Heart of the Oak etc. etc. Fuck that shit for breaking the game. But on the other hand, there are some pretty cool (not too powerful) runewords that add more variety to the thing you can wear. They provide a fun alternative to the usual things. Not all runewords were a bad design choice. Show nested quote +3. Talismans, charms and other bullshit.
Before that, you really had to put some effort into creating your character. Along with it being hard to find a good unique/rare to use you basically had a much less powerful character who had to overcome all the same difficulties. I hate end game in LoD. Everyone basically stacks charms until their inventory is fucking full. It's complete bullshit. Even I did it =( and I hate myself for it. Another bad game design choice IMO, not implementing a cap for this shit. Show nested quote +4. Act V.
Which was boring as fuck, with (again) a lot of running around some desolate places without much sense of purpose.
I want a dungeon crawl, not another Diablo Marathon. Yeah act 5 had the biggest zones. You could run for 5 minutes in a straight line, and still not end up on the other side's border. Ridiculous. But overall, the game is fun, and that's what really matters. The item hunting, the char building, playing without MH/bots, without using that motherfucking piece of trash called site that uses forum gold for currency. When you get a few friends together, not use any of that and just play with them, it becomes fun =). Using items you found or got from those friends, trying to get to uber tristram without twinking your char with bullshit, it is fun. Hardcore is fun too.
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give me a reset stat/skill option and prevent another trend of hammerdin overloads in all my runs and i'll be happy
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I just hope they'll increase the party size from 4 up to at least 5 (to make it possible to have at least 1 char of each class in 1 game).
I'm also worried about skill spam. All the vids I've ever seen of D3 had incredible skill spam. I hope that was just buffed up for the demos, and this won't be the case in retail. I wanna swing my axe/sword/staff a bit too.
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I want a big ass dungeon in which i'm going down, down, down and soem more down again.
Actually i could also deal with going up... But i want a friggin dungeon crawl.. Not a walk in the Park with some interruptions.
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I was talking to a friend last night about Diablo 3. I think we both decided that we didn't like the cinematics in that the heroes seemed nigh untouchable.
The first Diablo didn't have you looking or feeling like a demi-god.
I think Diablo 3 is setting up a presentation of the player's character really not having anything to fear.
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On October 26 2010 20:24 Hanners wrote:
I was talking to a friend last night about Diablo 3. I think we both decided that we didn't like the cinematics in that the heroes seemed nigh untouchable.
The first Diablo didn't have you looking or feeling like a demi-god.
I think Diablo 3 is setting up a presentation of the player's character really not having anything to fear.
I felt the same thing going from D1 to D2. You never really got the same feeling of hopelessness in D2 that you got crawling through the dark cathedral while surrounded by bloodthirsty demons like in D1. I hope they take it back to the real dark feel that D1 had.
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On October 26 2010 20:24 Hanners wrote:
I was talking to a friend last night about Diablo 3. I think we both decided that we didn't like the cinematics in that the heroes seemed nigh untouchable.
The first Diablo didn't have you looking or feeling like a demi-god.
I think Diablo 3 is setting up a presentation of the player's character really not having anything to fear.
I'm sure hardcore will always be scary, which was the only way I ever wanted to play diabo 2 anyway.
I don't think blizzard will fuck the difficulty up, they seem to like catering to a wide range of player abilities. Especially recently, they are doing a great job in that category.
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The worst part about d2 was the rampant botting and hacking. I played the game a lot but didn't trade much, it made it very clear to me how rare the rare stuff was. The extreme influx of powerful items from illegitimate sources skewed the players' perception of the game.
A winter when I didn't have internet at home I played the game on singleplayer, leveling my zealot and doing lots of mf runs (with cheap mf gear) trying to get gear to advance in hell difficulty. Playing the game like that means actually playing the game and it was so much more fun than joining a multiplayer game, getting boosted, leeching experience and trading for items.
I hope Blizzard will find ways to make Diablo3 a challenge on harder difficulties, even with a good team setup. They absolutely need to make hacking and botting a no go, either by binding items like in WoW or by putting lots of effort into stopping hacks.
About the posts above me, I don't mind big maps, imo that's part of the game experience. Fighting through endless ranks of hellspawn is kind of what diablo is about. I agree that it's a design issue when you want to run past it instead of fighting your way through. The djungle in act3 was bad in that regard, there was just too much randomness in the layout and those waypoints didn't help at all. I always felt like I needed to do spider cavern, flayer dungeon and reach lower kurast in one run and it wasn't a good feeling.
Runewords got that bad because of the rampant hacking. The design idea wasn't bad but the powerful runewords were stupidly common. It's as if you could train Thors from barracks or get Shadowmourne from doing a daily. The hacks removed the depth from the game and runewords were the most obvious offender.
The charm mechanic was messy, for some reason they wanted to make inventory space a commodity.. when I played the game a lot I didn't mind but it's a weird design choice. I did enjoy the flexibility that charms allowed for, but it was clunky and of course duped charms were the norm.
Like many others I gave d2 a swing in 1.12 with the new ladder season but I got put off pretty fast. Seeing bots with runewords one week into the season was disheartening.
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On October 26 2010 19:44 kalimari wrote:
give me a reset stat/skill option and prevent another trend of hammerdin overloads in all my runs and i'll be happy
Also, finally get rid of TP's. Just put a 'Return to Town' and 'Continue Exploration' buttons in the UI, which would work exactly as TP. After all, the end effect is the same and it doesn't really matter if your character travels through portals or just walks back to town (with entire journey part being cut of course).
No need to take up inventory space (especially that TP's were pretty abundant) and waste developer/designer time on creating portal animations and stuff like that.
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I never really got into the whole b-net aspect of D2, but I actually prefer D1 by quite a bit. Single player wise, D2 took way too long for the difficulty to ramp up. In D1 I actually felt scared to get surrounded. Enemies felt much tougher. In D2 enemies were spammed rather than buffed as you progress. I think it's more exciting defeating six really hard enemies rather than mowing down dozens of easy enemies. The atmosphere was chilling in every level. The sound was dark and creepy, and the pace was perfect.
I think a lot of mechanics were broken in D2 too. Runewords and sets were a really fun concept, but they were nearly useless in single player because of how rare those items are. Yet, in multiplayer because of rampant botting and hacking, those things lost their novelty because they were so common. Rare items completely broke magic items, and because of how common uniques and runewords are in multiplayer, rare items themselves were useless and broken. I remember in classic Diablo, I would anticipate identifying magic items, because high level magic items were useful well into the late game (never played higher difficulties on B-net due to hacking however). Low quality items is a completely pointless mechanic since magic, rare, and unique items can't be low quality. Crafting was another pointless mechanic which was never used.
I actually preferred how in D1 everything was a commodity. Everything down to the light healing potions could be used. Shops didn't feel pointless aside from repairing. Unique items really felt unique. In D2 there were so many uniques that nothing felt special about them. It took Blizz forever to make potions actually useful. I remember antidotes/thaws doing nothing but curing your status state for a very long time. I like the idea of weapon ammo, but due to the abundance of it, it was yet another useless mechanic. As a 'zon I never actually felt strapped for arrows. there was no magic ammo too which would have made ammo that much more interesting.
In D1, I actually felt rewarded doing the side quests, there's nothing as disappointing as opening up a reward chest in D2 and seeing a bunch of blue low-level items drop out.
Outdoor areas felt big, and were designed poorly. I think in D3 if they're going to make large outdoor areas, they need to either hire some fantastic level designers and make sure to make them static. If they decide to go for randomly generated outdoor areas, they need to put much more work into the scripting for the random level generator to make outdoor areas feel more organic.
Not to bash on D2 too much it was still an amazing game, and in some ways it was vastly superior to D1. The class customization was brilliant, everything felt so open-ended. I particularly liked how there could be so many different styles for one character. I liked playing all different styles of a zon for example. Playing the game focusing on bow/spear/jav as separate characters was so different from each other. I loved the really varied cast of characters and their personalities, and the wide range of environments, dungeons and monsters too. The cube added so much depth to the game. I loved the modding community. I got my full enjoyment out of the game through several well made mods which balanced the game and mechanics better than Blizz did.
In the end, I feel that D1 was much more of a survival horror rpg, it was scary and difficult at any level. D2 felt more like an adventure rpg with horror and difficulty as a secondary feature. Because of the really slow ramp up in difficulty (I never actually felt challenged until Nightmare) I felt like the only thing that punished players in D2 were really bad character builds rather than bad gameplay. It seems like D3 is heading further down the adventure path and it looks like the it's shaping up to be close to WOW mechanic-wise. I can't say enough how much I hate the health/mana orb feature. Sure it frees up the belt for skill casts, but I feel like it's pushing the game more towards rewarding you for mowing through lots of monsters with skill spamming rather than slow crawling like it was in D1.
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It's quite amazing how much Blizzard screwed up the Demon Hunter trailer. What a piece of stereotypical would like to be-cool crap, Blizzard really fails at delivering good style recently (as they screwed up all of SC2 campaign atmosphere already). It makes me worry a little bit about Diablo.
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actually i like the deamonhunter quite a bit!
with 2 crossbows it seems to be some fun. also the spells are nice and cool animated. im usually not a player who plays chars with bows. i prefer throwing spells or having big axes but i definetly try out the deamonhunter
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On October 27 2010 00:08 ()rain wrote:
actually i like the deamonhunter quite a bit!
with 2 crossbows it seems to be some fun. also the spells are nice and cool animated. im usually not a player who plays chars with bows. i prefer throwing spells or having big axes but i definetly try out the deamonhunter
I was really hoping to finally get the proper male ranger-like character. My hopes are being crushed with every new class they reveal 
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On October 26 2010 23:51 GP wrote:
...
In the end, I feel that D1 was much more of a survival horror rpg, it was scary and difficult at any level. D2 felt more like an adventure rpg with horror and difficulty as a secondary feature. Because of the really slow ramp up in difficulty (I never actually felt challenged until Nightmare) I felt like the only thing that punished players in D2 were really bad character builds rather than bad gameplay. It seems like D3 is heading further down the adventure path and it looks like the it's shaping up to be close to WOW mechanic-wise. I can't say enough how much I hate the health/mana orb feature. Sure it frees up the belt for skill casts, but I feel like it's pushing the game more towards rewarding you for mowing through lots of monsters with skill spamming rather than slow crawling like it was in D1.
Some emphasis mine.
What in particular mechanic-wise makes you think D3 is like WoW? The only thing I noticed from the demo which might be said to be WoW-like was the new cooldown on potion use.
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On October 26 2010 23:51 GP wrote:
In the end, I feel that D1 was much more of a survival horror rpg, it was scary and difficult at any level. D2 felt more like an adventure rpg with horror and difficulty as a secondary feature. Because of the really slow ramp up in difficulty (I never actually felt challenged until Nightmare) I felt like the only thing that punished players in D2 were really bad character builds rather than bad gameplay. It seems like D3 is heading further down the adventure path and it looks like the it's shaping up to be close to WOW mechanic-wise. I can't say enough how much I hate the health/mana orb feature. Sure it frees up the belt for skill casts, but I feel like it's pushing the game more towards rewarding you for mowing through lots of monsters with skill spamming rather than slow crawling like it was in D1.
I never played much D1 so I can't comment much on that. However, I'm really liking the idea of the health orb drops. This will actually make the game more difficult. I'm sure the game won't be hard until nightmare / hell again, but once you reach that point, I feel like it's going to be much more difficult. The reason for this is that you can no longer potion spam. Potions are rare and are also on a cooldown. The orb drops are there to just keep you moving quickly after you've defeated some enemies. Actually killing them I feel will be quite difficult in hell. This will be evident especially for boss fights...once again you can't just spam potions or have a TP up and waiting to escape at the sign of danger. I think these two mechanic changes are brilliant and should allow for a more challenging experience. Also, don't compare this to WoW...there are very few similarties besides the fact that they are both RPGs. There are a few mechanics that WoW has that are actually good, so who cares if they are used (though health orbs dropping isn't one of them).
Also, I'd like to mention that sure, I guess there will be a lot of skill spamming. But this an action RPG and that's how most modern action RPGs do things, and that was obviously evident for D2. Skill spamming is not necessarily bad though. Just because you are spamming skills, does not necessarily guarantee that the game will be easy. Spamming skills just allows you to make the best use of your builds. Very few people simply want to shoot a bow with a normal arrow, and Blizzard realizes this and thus will scale the game in terms of difficulty towards allowing you to spam skills.
I don't think you should worry though. I expect this game will be quite challenging in Hell, and hopefully bots / duping are non-existant which will make amazing items rare thus making the game more challenging and rewarding.
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On October 26 2010 19:59 Latham wrote:
I just hope they'll increase the party size from 4 up to at least 5 (to make it possible to have at least 1 char of each class in 1 game).
From my understanding Blizzard has said that D3 coop will be ideally with 4 players, but not limited to it, so there will be the 8 player feature. What they mean by the 4 player is that there will be no difference in efficiency of gaining experiencing time wise between 4 and 8 players, where as D2 you needed 8 players to get the most efficient experience.
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Potions are back? Wtf. Potions inherently ruin a game like D3...
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On October 26 2010 20:24 Hanners wrote:
I was talking to a friend last night about Diablo 3. I think we both decided that we didn't like the cinematics in that the heroes seemed nigh untouchable.
The first Diablo didn't have you looking or feeling like a demi-god.
I think Diablo 3 is setting up a presentation of the player's character really not having anything to fear.
Basically this. How many people still remember playing D1 for the first time and thinking "Butcher? this guy don't sound so bad" and then "OH GOD MY HEALTH" and then you learn to move slowly and engage only on your own terms (ESPECIALLY if you were playing the warrior).
D2 on the other hand you mostly just spammed click moving forward while annihilating every enemy that ever entered the screen, which is fine, that was fun as hell, but move too far in that direction and you end up with basically Torchlight. It's a mostly atmospheric complaint, but still valid.
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EPT
