One of the saddest things for me at this Blizzcon (aside for the obvious lack of enthusiasm from the crowd) was the Q&A at the end of the panel where they, in a painfully obvious attempt to dodge the "is this an out of season april's fool's joke?" disaster from last year, had one of their own developpers read the questions from Twitter instead of the questions from the audience...
I remembered the early Blizzcons with Morhaine and Metzen, the super-hyped crowd, and my heart sunk a little. I thought of the geeky red-shirt guy asking a weird WoW-lore qestion that Metzen couldn't even adress and jokingly direct it to another dude "Yeah, Josh, what's up with that?" I didn't even know I was still that attached to Blizzard after all those years of not logging on Battlenet anymore (since RoS basically)
As for what is wrong with Diablo 3, in my opinion, since I haven't seen people mention it in the earlier posts : they completely and utterly destroyed the player's agency as to what build he plays and what items he uses with that build. If you want to use skill X, you're gonna have to use Bracers B because they give skill X 500% more damage, and then cube Weapon W because it reduces the cost or cooldown of skill X... it's such terrible design. When I played D3, I didn't feel like I was building my character, I felt like Blizzard built my character before I created it and I just had to go through the motions of finding the items they had always intended me to use, and I had no choice in the matter if I didn't wanna be stuck on Greater Rift 12.
Diablo 2 did it way better, you had lots of choices when it came to your gear, you could craft rings, gloves, boots, you could use a 2piece set bonus if you wanted, or some unique items that would just fix a problem your build had, you weren't bottlenecked, you had long term goals which didn't entail just finding the same item 350 times until you found a primal ancient one with the right stats on it.. and PoE does it way better still.
I have very little hope that they even know that this is the main problem D3 had, let alone will be able to fix it. The items they mentionned (I forgot what they're called) with "4 legendary affixes" on them made me die inside a little... But I'll keep an open mind and check in on it every now and then.
D2's item and crafting system wasn't as ground breaking and perfect as some in here make it out to be imho. I mean it's ok to look at D2 through nostalgia glasses and all, but lets be real here for a moment... D2 was in no way perfect and even frustratingly grindy and too random sometimes, but that's just my 2 cents on that matter.
When it comes to D3 I'm pretty sure, they know by now, D3 ran into a dead end with build variations. Which is why they're bringing rune words back. I just hope they'll turn their current system into the best thing it can be. In its current version, there are condition and effect runes, you can combine and they are planing to implement more iirc. But at this point it seems more like combining D3 rift gems into something, that fits your build best. Hopefully it will offer more variety and won't just result into 2 or 3 working combinations and the rest won't be as obsolete and useless as many of the D3 gems are.
I'm glad they're scaling down the importance of sets, since they kinda took the fun out of actually finding your own play style, but rather forcing you to play a certain way. What I really liked is, we can finally move freely around the 5 zones("acts") and also the possibility for several Expansions. So we'll maybe even get to explore Sanctuary in its entirety some day ....probably by 2047.
Q: With D4 coming out on consoles and PC, will there be cross play on all platforms?
A: Nothing to announce, but they're interested.
Also WTF scaling...
Q: Difficulty and scaling? Will zones be different or more like normal/nightmare/hell
A: Scaling is important, they want monsters to get tougher as you level but they want players to feel the power of new upgrades. It's tough to balance.
1. Please remove the stupid "skill damage comes from the weapon" thing... Gear should enhance your skills, not determinate their damage. 2. Also the runes system is crap, it removes ALL the replayability. You get all the skills because... why bother in create new characters and trying new builds that feel different. 4. Bring back attributes, another thing that adds replayability and makes different builds feel different. 3. I hope they improve the storytelling a lot, and treat the characters as they deserve. They managed to butcher Tyrael's character in 1 hour or gameplay. Diablo 3 was so tedious and stupud, it felt painful to go over and over it if you wanted to play again or level another character. This is the thing I'm more sceptical about, they haven't written a good story for the last 10 years or so.. 5. I don't mind about the MMO stuff, as long as they build a great Singleplayer experience. And that means write a decent adult storyline.
I think in Diablo 3 they made A LOT of decisions that totally killed replayability: all skills given, no attributes, everything depends on the gear, shitty story, etc. IT really felt pointless to strat again once you leveled all the characters to 60...
I feel like all the old-school developers left Blizzard or don't do their job as they used to. I don't have too much hope tbh.
Q: Difficulty and scaling? Will zones be different or more like normal/nightmare/hell
A: Scaling is important, they want monsters to get tougher as you level but they want players to feel the power of new upgrades. It's tough to balance.
I mean how else are you going to do Open World where people choose which act to do first? If they want it to be non-linear they have to scale up the zones so one won't be too tough or too easy depending on the order you choose to do them.
Absolutely not a fan of the whole open world, monster scaling idea. I don't think I've ever played a game where monster scaling worked well. All it does is ruin the sense of progression.
Mild scaling can work okay, but mostly it's just annoying. To me, The Witcher 3 found an elegant solution. Your route was linked to your progress, but you were free to fight against stuff above your level, even though it became really tedious against monsters more than 3 lvls above you.
I like linear APRGs. Pure, and simple. Progress = leveling up, choosing skills, finding items - which is why I think that Diablo 1 was the perfect game. All killer, no filler. You descended into hell and became more powerful with every step. In the end you killed the big bad and that was it.
I hate modern live service open world microtransaction bullshit bingo games, especially if they're designed around the grind. (Destiny 2 comes to mind)
On November 05 2019 15:52 thePunGun wrote: D2's item and crafting system wasn't as ground breaking and perfect as some in here make it out to be imho. I mean it's ok to look at D2 through nostalgia glasses and all, but lets be real here for a moment... D2 was in no way perfect and even frustratingly grindy and too random sometimes, but that's just my 2 cents on that matter.
When it comes to D3 I'm pretty sure, they know by now, D3 ran into a dead end with build variations. Which is why they're bringing rune words back. I just hope they'll turn their current system into the best thing it can be. In its current version, there are condition and effect runes, you can combine and they are planing to implement more iirc. But at this point it seems more like combining D3 rift gems into something, that fits your build best. Hopefully it will offer more variety and won't just result into 2 or 3 working combinations and the rest won't be as obsolete and useless as many of the D3 gems are.
I'm glad they're scaling down the importance of sets, since they kinda took the fun out of actually finding your own play style, but rather forcing you to play a certain way. What I really liked is, we can finally move freely around the 5 zones("acts") and also the possibility for several Expansions. So we'll maybe even get to explore Sanctuary in its entirety some day ....probably by 2047.
We are not looking at it through rose tinted glasses. It was a superior system. Period. The issue with not grinding at all, is what you get when you play D3. The grind is a part of the 'ooooo spiffy' part of rpgs that many older players actually like. The crafting system was very good. Yes it took effort/time to get a really good craft, but that is basically the point of it. Just becuase you reached level 90 should not mean that you get a godly item within 10 (insert you favorite number) crafts. Also, if you took the time to actually understand how the affix system worked, then you could get better things more quickly. Players that came late to the game generally never bothered to get into the mechanics of how crafting worked at all. They put on the Enigma, and thought it was the win button.
I think the discussion here is between different audiences. What is your three core pillars that makes a good diablo game?
For me it would be something like exploration, combat and progression. Thus the end game grind doesn't appeal to me since all three pillars break down when grinding. Combat gets dull and repetitive, you don't get new areas, lore or bosses and there are a lot of hours between progressions. I am one of the players that quit after beating the final difficulty and doing a few cow levels in Diablo 2.
It seems like not many people mention it, but for me what makes many of the old legendary (Diablo 1/2, Baldur's Gate etc..) games truly epic is the music.
I mean, stay awhile and listen to this masterpiece:
This in my opinion is what really creates the atmosphere in the game. But then you also need the graphics and writing to live up to that. Blizz please don't fuck this up.
Q: With D4 coming out on consoles and PC, will there be cross play on all platforms?
A: Nothing to announce, but they're interested.
Also WTF scaling...
Q: Difficulty and scaling? Will zones be different or more like normal/nightmare/hell
A: Scaling is important, they want monsters to get tougher as you level but they want players to feel the power of new upgrades. It's tough to balance.
I mean how else are you going to do Open World where people choose which act to do first? If they want it to be non-linear they have to scale up the zones so one won't be too tough or too easy depending on the order you choose to do them.
I think it is obvious that Blizz is going to go the Destiny 2 route before opening the world to players(finish the story before being able to party etc.). That way Clans don't blitz level their members in order to get worlds first etc.
One of the things I love in D2 is the ability to build and play characters that use up to 16 skills. It's even much more than that in Wow. But D2 has more complex mechanics, for PvM especially. Console controlers don't really allow this level of complexity for this type of game. Unless they do some effort to just adapt console control schemes to the level of complexity that is achievable on keyboard/mouse for ARPG [which means it would probably just be sub-optimal to play with a console controller, similar in the end to RTS or FPS]. There is room to make a even more amazing game than D2 in many ways imo.
I’m not a huge Diablo fanboyand it’s gradually trailed off, but cautiously optimistic that this might be a decent playthrough. Might be a good ‘adult’ game to start doing coop runs with my kiddo if it launches in a year or two, hope they add a bit more character building back in but ESPECIALLY nail the atmosphere.
I was a youngling at the time and it was also my first ever online game but even going back again Diablo 1 absolute nails the vibe it’s going for in pure atmosphere terms.
Diablo 2 stepped it up in most other ways for me but I still feel it doesn’t quite have the gritty gothic vibe quite as well down as the first iteration, and Diablo 3 just shed that vibe entirely.
Ultimately I don’t have nearly the time to play games as I once did and also I don’t think they can ever really recapture my experiences I had in childhood anyway, just hoping for something decent and solid to spend a bit of time with.
On November 06 2019 09:58 Wombat_NI wrote: Diablo 2 stepped it up in most other ways for me but I still feel it doesn’t quite have the gritty gothic vibe quite as well down as the first iteration, and Diablo 3 just shed that vibe entirely.
I agree same opinion about the atmosphere/writing/art direction stuff.
For gameplay I think D2 is far better than D3, I'm interested in better than D2 (more open end game, more customization, more complexity, more balanced pvp, and more features. Also no bots etc. Fixes like less incentive to rush etc there is so much you could improve over D2 tbh).
On November 06 2019 05:44 Yurie wrote: I think the discussion here is between different audiences. What is your three core pillars that makes a good diablo game?
For me it would be something like exploration, combat and progression. Thus the end game grind doesn't appeal to me since all three pillars break down when grinding. Combat gets dull and repetitive, you don't get new areas, lore or bosses and there are a lot of hours between progressions. I am one of the players that quit after beating the final difficulty and doing a few cow levels in Diablo 2.
I would personally agree with your stance, iirc my brother and I basically did the campaigns with each class together and did the cow levels and had a blast with discovering new stuff as we went. Once it went into repetition we lost interest and went to other things.
Which was still a ton of playtime, but very little compared to other Diablo fans (or at least the vocal ones) who seem to enjoy the grinding and doing repeat runs etc, doing loot etc.
I’m not sure what the breakdown is of people who just enjoy playing through the game in various ways and those who enjoy the grinding elements. I’m sure there’s more of the former than one would think judging from any online discussion about Diablo though
I think grinding is ok so long as its not repetitive. That's how I feel about it as a player, if the most efficient way of grinding at some point is going to be running a single place a thousand times because that's where the best stuff drops, I won't be happy about that. But if I can go in a lot of many different places and choose which ones to go to, get challenging difficulty there, and get not just one specific but rather many different possible progression pieces in each places, then that's good. D2 has this to an extent with the bunch of lvl85 areas, but since there aren't that many of them it doesn't necessarily feel as varied as what you get while progressing through the whole game before you reach endgame. Plus, if your character is really strong in D2 you will not really get a good challenge in these areas, it may become easier than going through normal when you have no gear, if you're high level and have some amazing gear. The XP ladder doesn't cut it then cause for competing with players you'd just want to grind through easy areas to get XP for as many hours as you can, and it gets worse when you're actually competing with a lot of bots and char geared by bots etc^^
But anyway I think you can do interesting "grinding" going on so long as it's not actually repetitive, predictable and easy. If you make it hard, unpredictable and non-repetitive, involving lots of choices and open playstyles etc, then it doesn't even feel like grinding anymore and it's a good progression system instead. That's how I think of it anyway. Coop elements, versus elements, and ladder-like elements but this has to make more sense than the XP grind that is the endgame of D2 where you're dealing with easy combat in a few lvl85 areas because the top gear is too strong (1.10 items etc...) and there are too few places to go to that are at the top difficulty. One of D2's biggest issues is also the enormous incentive to rushing mindlessly because a few simple builds are very strong and you can easily skip the whole game by spamming some spells around and its nearly mindless lol (balance issues with some skill builds, synergies, and some cheap very strong items such as 1.10 runewords etc, issue of playing with many characters in a single game reducing the difficulty dramatically since 1.10 too cause its only +50% health of monsters per player instead of +100% etc)
I mean picture instead of running a hundred times through the same place, you can get more bonus going on if you keep a little custom quest going without resetting your game, kill some boss of your choice, then you get some piece you can use in a place you choose which makes the monsters stronger in this area then if you succeed something else happens that gives you some other options to follow up in that game etc. It doesn't have to be, go to A3 mephisto teleporting bug him in a corner and spam a spell so he dies and you just rolled very efficient dices to get most of the best items then repeat the same so many times until you get enough you're so strong nothing can nearly kill you anymore lul
three pillars I would go with balance, depth and complete features or customization, combat mechanics and open endgame i would really add make it hard : P but avoid one-shot stuff tbh trading is a pretty major pillar in my mind too, using in game items of course. Ingame and "out of game", like bnet interface out of a game session. Crafting could be one etc basically hard to name just 3 things as pillars
Something relatively small that bothered me about D3 is how enemies are highlighted in a red border when the mouse is over them. To me, it's redundant, visually clutter and adds to breaking immersion. Unfortunately it's in the D4 gameplay too. Not sure how others feel about it. I also wish we could toggle on/off other player's nameplates.
On November 06 2019 10:46 Xxio wrote: Something relatively small that bothered me about D3 is how enemies are highlighted in a red border when the mouse is over them. To me, it's redundant, visually clutter and adds to breaking immersion. Unfortunately it's in the D4 gameplay too. Not sure how others feel about it. I also wish we could toggle on/off other player's nameplates.
Can you disable the flying damage numbers in D3? I really don't like that. It's even worse that these numbers seem to get thrown completely off balance.
About char progression : no need for exponential power growth stuff, that just breaks balance completely doesn't it? Makes irrelevant anything you were doing before, when you get a little bit more power. Horrible for pvp? Doesn't it make most of the endgame easy? Instead, it would even be possible, although a bit crazy, to make progression of a character actually weaken them at the end a bit or something, to make the game harder for which you'd get more rewards or some ladder points or whatever xD just some ideas. Endgame progression could involve weakening some parts of your character or sacrificing some stat points for other points or for getting access to some special rewards or areas etc. I mean ideally you want to get more challenge at the end but still be playing a RPG too, risk and reward stuff, but open ended and you can make your own playstyle there, be creative.
On November 06 2019 10:46 Xxio wrote: Something relatively small that bothered me about D3 is how enemies are highlighted in a red border when the mouse is over them. To me, it's redundant, visually clutter and adds to breaking immersion. Unfortunately it's in the D4 gameplay too. Not sure how others feel about it. I also wish we could toggle on/off other player's nameplates.
Can you disable the flying damage numbers in D3? I really don't like that. It's even worse that these numbers seem to get thrown completely off balance.
About char progression : no need for exponential power growth stuff, that just breaks balance completely doesn't it? Makes irrelevant anything you were doing before, when you get a little bit more power. Horrible for pvp? Doesn't it make most of the endgame easy? Instead, it would even be possible, although a bit crazy, to make progression of a character actually weaken them at the end a bit or something, to make the game harder for which you'd get more rewards or some ladder points or whatever xD just some ideas. Endgame progression could involve weakening some parts of your character or sacrificing some stat points for other points or for getting access to some special rewards or areas etc. I mean ideally you want to get more challenge at the end but still be playing a RPG too, risk and reward stuff, but open ended and you can make your own playstyle there, be creative.
I'm not sure. I stopped playing before it would have become an issue. I don't like that screen clutter either.
EPT
lul
