2681

I’m talking about where you choose to assign your skill and attribute points in Diablo 2 when you level up. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

As for randomness, it seems just as random as D2 to me. There are some “setpiece” areas that will always be the same, but the majority is random.

That’s good to hear. I’ve read that Diablo 3 does away with random levels outside of dungeons to give the world a handcrafted feel, but I think that lowers replayability.

Skyrim came out almost exactly 2 months ago, and while the buzz has dropped a bit, it’s still a pretty big deal.

Skyrim’s days as a forum, twitter, and news site darling are numbered. The winter deluge begins at the end of this month with Final Fantasy 13-2 and SoulCalibur 5, and continues through February and the first week of March with Twisted Metal, Kingdoms of Amalur, PS Vita, Max Payne 3, and Mass Effect 3. More big games are scheduled to release in the months leading up to summer.

Skyrim DLC announcements and releases will temporarily renew interest and discussions, but not to 2011 levels. In other words, people will stop talking about Skyrim so much once it’s been out for several months. Diablo 3 will receive the same treatment unless it’s released at the beginning of summer when no games are due for months, which is within the realm of possibility.

It’s not a crazy argument if it’s what you like. I think Diablo 3’s character development system is ideal if you prioritize balance and long-term character viability in a massive online ecosystem, but it’s less interesting to me. I prefer making difficult, mutually exclusive choices about how I’m going to develop my character into something relatively unique, then living with the consequences. If I mess up too much, then I’ll learn from my mistakes and start over again, which is perfectly viable in the procedurally generated world of Diablo 2’s Sanctuary. I wasn’t even playing by the time respeccing came to D2, but I think a good respec system is a fine way to let players correct inefficiencies without taking away the sense of building a character over time. What Blizzard has done with Diablo 3 is take respeccing to its natural extreme, but a significant part of what makes this kind of ARPG what it is has been lost along the way.

2682

I really haven’t followed the D3 development that close so haven’t got caught on any hype (or not) but after this post, i want to play it now!

2683

Every class has between 20 to 24 main skills, each of which can be modified by 5 runes, and you have to choose which six skills you’ll take with you every time you leave town. There’s an insane amount of character customization.

Obviously some builds will be analyzed and proven more effective than others. The guys at Blizzard specifically addressed that, and their answer that’s perfectly OK. Their goal is to ensure that all the weird off builds like melee wizards are viable and capable of beating the entire game on inferno difficulty.

2684

I’m in the same boat as Luke M in that I feel they’re sacrificing a lot of what I liked about Diablo 2 in order to make Diablo 3 more forgiving and accessible. However, I have to say stusser’s doing more to get me excited than three play-throughs of that beta last year. :)

-Tom

2685

Yeah, to you. Not everyone likes having to “live with their choices” in a video game, though, simply because of the time involved in fixing those mistakes. If I’m dozens of hours into a character and realize I’ve made horrible choices for abilities I thought would be good and/or fun, I want to be able to fix it without having to give up and start over.

2686

Ideally, RobotPants, videogames are tuned so that there aren’t any mistakes. A lot of patching went into Diablo 2 to tune the skills in this regard. But even with the new tuning, there are still a lot of difficult choices. Not because one choice is a mistake and the other choice is correct, but because they lead to different types of gameplay. Many of us who play RPGs like having to make – and commit to – those difficult choices. I freely grant that maybe Diablo 3 still has that with the stuff stusser is talking about, but I didn’t see any sign of this in the beta, and I’m concerned Blizzard is tailoring the game to people who think difficult choices are a bad thing.

-Tom
2687

stusser and I seem to be of like minds.

However, while the skill system to me seems fine (ever growing skills you just accumulate as you level and modify with runes), I DO wish I could allocate my stats so that I’m doing SOME sort of point allocation. I just like to allocate points, I guess, it’s the math nerd in me. :)

Still, Diablo III is one of my most anticipated games this year, so I’m pretty well fine with all the gameplay concepts as we’ve been shown them.

Excited to see what the fuss is with the un-announced changes to the gameplay and rune systems though. Should have that and a release date announcement soon.

2688

Yes, stusser does a fantastic job of selling Diablo 3 with his post about how runes tweak spells.

Knowing that I can encounter a character build in the game or read about it on a forum and copy it exactly with my character, and buy my way to the loot I need for that build, kills some of my enthusiasm.

My posts are all about how Diablo 3—at least from what I’ve read—doesn’t appeal to my unique ARPG tastes, so I’m not sure what you’re adding by saying this. I understand why people like to experience as much of a game as possible in one playthrough, but that’s not where I’m coming from. My fondest RPG memories are from games that force me to specialize and become a relatively unique character. That doesn’t appear to be what Diablo 3 is about anymore.

If I’m dozens of hours into a character and realize I’ve made horrible choices for abilities I thought would be good and/or fun, I want to be able to fix it without having to give up and start over.

Respec.

2689

I disagree. I thought Diablo 2 was very punishing for players who wanted to utilize a certain playstyle past Normal difficulty. It was very tough to be of a certain hybrid build without requiring grinding level ups to stay ahead of monster difficulty. That italicized caveat is pretty important.

I remember having a frost Sorceress who was absolutely not viable past Act 3 Nightmare. My old tactics of slowing/freezing people while I ran around with the “fire-feet” trailblazing spell and also blasting with chain lightning hit a difficulty wall that I could not get over, and part of the reason for that was because of how many points I used to hybridize my damage. It would have taken me hours upon hours upon hours of grinding that Act just to level up enough to get the damage needed to pass it, and while you’re leveling up the enemies are just getting harder anyways.

Now, of course, that’s a balance issue more than a game mechanics issue, but I’d rather not run into that with Diablo 3. To me, a good “tough choice” is figuring out how to defeat a well-designed threat that can reward any gameplay style build.

The only difference between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 in this regard is that Diablo 2 came out when the internet was still fairly young, before there were dozens of sites showing exactly what the best build was. People didn’t grind very specific item drops to “specialize” their character. And while you want to celebrate the individuality of your character, others want to perhaps finish the game without having an unfair challenge thrown into them for choices they made dozens of hours previous.

My posts are all about how Diablo 3—at least from what I’ve read—doesn’t appeal to my unique ARPG tastes, so I’m not sure what you’re adding by saying this. I understand why people like to experience as much of a game as possible in one playthrough, but that’s not where I’m coming from. My fondest RPG memories are from games that force me to specialize and become a relatively unique character. That doesn’t appear to be what Diablo 3 is about anymore.

He was responding to your opinion, which you posted. What I find interesting is that you thought your Diablo 2 character was unique. A game should be about the ride, sentimentality about a unique digital creation that is really just a couple numbers off from what everyone else is using doesn’t have a place in good game design.

2690

Where is the “tough” in that choice?

2691

A combination of manual dexterity with a dash of intuition.

2692

Yeah, diablo 3 is very much a post wow blizzard game from the sound of things.

As others have said, diablo 2 was… punishing. You could spend 50 hour leveling through the game only to reach hell (or whatever they called their top difficulty) and find out your character is suddenly useless.

Then there was the fun of taking a summoner to diablo and having him instantly kill all of your summons, making every point you spent in skills useless.

Then there was the fun in that many of these tuning patches would completely break characters. The common answer to a patch making your character useless was reroll, but to me, if i have a level 70 or whatever, that represents a lot of time lost due to no fault of my own.

Diablo 2 was chaos when i played and even going back years later it never got better in this regard. Maybe they have finally calmed the waters a bit today, but i’m sure i’m not alone in having nightmares of blizzard’s Wheel of Balancing. SO in a way, easy respec makes blizzard completely rebalancing the game every other month somewhat easier to take.

There is no tough choice in it. Gamers these days don’t want to think about basic strategy at all. People want to play a pure mage when it clearly states intelligence is the main stat, pour all of their points in to strength and then complain when it doesn’t work very well.

Now, diablo 2 did violate some of these rules though. If you don’t read up or experience hell difficulty for yourself, it isn’t hard to do something that won’t work, without it being your fault.

On the other hand i don’t have any sympathy for people who saw the new synergy system and ignored it even knowing the great bonuses it gave. Some things will always work better together and it is impossible for developers to change that without making everything the same. Just like chocolate & milk tastes better than chocolate & mustard.

2693

D3 has plenty of difficult choices, you just aren’t committed because respeccing is easy. This allows you to easily play your character in dozens of different ways. Compare that to D2, where you had to commit to a playstyle before you really understood it, and faced a high hurdle if you changed your mind. Before respeccing, you could easily permanently gimp your character, too.

Same deal with allocating attribute points-- the Blizzard devs specifically addressed that also. In D2, there was one “proper” way to allocate attributes, and if you didn’t do it correctly, you would have extreme difficulty progressing past nightmare difficulty. D3 is designed so everybody can progress through nightmare, hell, and then to the “endgame” in inferno. Optimized builds you read about on the web may have an easier time of it, but everybody should be able to make their way through inferno, even weird builds like melee wizards and ranged barbarians.

2694

^which is good, in case you’re having trouble deciding.

2695

I’m with stusser on this. Several characters that I created just because certain skills sounded or looked cool (and they were!) became completely unplayable in later Nightmare Acts or Hell. Some builds absolutely could not scale up with difficulty and forced you to reroll the character after many hours of playtime. An example of this was my Thorns paladin. I pumped every skill point I could into Thorns because I loved reflecting damage. Then I discovered that the Aura was nearly useless in Nightmare and Hell. My chief weapon was taken out of my hands, and I couldn’t replace it (respecs came along relatively late in the D2 life cycle). Same with stats–any point put into strength beyond the minimum necessary for your end game gear was a wasted point compared to spending it on vitality, and so on.

This was the origin of cookie cutter flavor of the month builds–the fact that you could flush anything but a cookie cutter build down the drain after wasting a lot of time with it. D2 provided the illusion of character design freedom, but reality was a punishing straightjacket. You had to know exactly what you were doing before you ever spent a skill or stat point if you wanted to succeed against the end game content.

2696

The endgame content in D2 sucked, too. You just ran Baal over and over. That’s where the concept of inferno difficulty comes in, an entire difficulty tuned for maximum level characters, so you can play through all the content in the game to progress rather than the same map over and over.

D3 is just polished beyond belief. Every single feature is the product of dozens of iterations. It shows.

It’s also super fun (sorry Tom), even though we’ve only really seen two hours of gameplay in the beta, and haven’t had the chance to play around with 3/4 of the skills, passives, runestones, or seen much of the story.

2697

I think Blizzard’s PR dept. needs to hire you. I have D3 coming for free from the WoW annual pass thing, and while I’ve of course had interest in it, it wasn’t as much interest as I now have from the past page or two.

2698

The opposite situation, one that diablo 3 has a decent chance of running in to, is that it doesn’t matter what skills you pick because there isn’t any synergy and they had to idiot proof it so someone could pick to be a melee wizard.

This is basically modern blizzard. They are deathly afraid of someone making a bad choice so they just polish off the individuality of every aspect so that everything is the same.

2699

Sorry, but you’re not going to convince me (though I’ve been fine with the way Blizzard is handling attribute points since they announced the change years ago). I stand by what I like. I think respeccing would address the complaints everyone has with the genre while delivering a game I think I’d like more.

2700

You’re talking about synergies between skills, things like fireballs igniting oil slicks, whirlwind+frostbolt making an ice storm, etc, right? Or even D2-type hard-coded synergies, like having fireball (but not using it) increasing your fire damage by X%. The devs directly addressed those criticisms too.

Intra-skill synergies sound cool, but they restrict players’ freedom to spec however they want, because skills without such synergies are obviously less performant.

Going back to the melee wizard example, their main ability is magic weapon, a self-buff that makes weapon attacks hit harder.

One simple synergy might tie into ray of frost, a ranged ability that a melee wizard would normally never use, where your magic weapon attacks with ray of frost equipped would also slow your target’s attack speed.

Sounds great, right? Thing is, now you need to add similar synergies benefiting magic weapon to every single skill. If you don’t, every melee wizard will be absolutely required to take ray of frost, even though they’ll never actually cast the spell, just for its synergy. You’ve effectively removed a skill slot for melee wizards.

And melee wizards are just one wizard build. When you take runes into account, you can wrap your entire playstyle around any non-situational skill. You can make an entire wizard build around Disintegrate too. Do you want to add synergies for Disintegrate to all 20+ skills? What about Arcane Orb or Electrocute? It very quickly becomes unmanageable.