3321

You didn’t hear? All 600 of the fired Blizzard employees were on the D3 dev team and they fired them because the game sucks so much so they fired them for sucking.

3322

I heard it sucked so bad that they actually hired more people just so they could fire them for sucking.

3323

“Um, Mistah Morhaime, sir?”

“Yes, what is it New Hire 378-XJ?”

"Well, sir, it’s just that, uh, well, your ad in the paper–I read the papers, you see–it said that this job would involve programming, and, well. . . err. . . "

“Come on now, XJ, I’m a busy man. I’ve got piles of money to light aflame, so spit it out!”

“. . . Well, sir, I suppose it’s just that all I really seem to be doing is sucking, you see, and not very much programming at all.”

“All you do is sucking, peon? Really now.”

“Err, yes sir. It’s what they’ve had me working on since I got brought in a week ago.”

“I don’t see you sucking now, XJ.”

“Well, err, no, sir, because I thought I might talk to you for a bit.”

“…”

"Err, well, you see. . . "

“…”

“Sorry, sir, very well.” Zipping sounds

AND, SCENE

3324

3325

This response sucks. If the stats are shitty, make the stats good, don’t remove the ability to customize them as you level. I haven’t checked out whether there are actually stats in the game now (can items still adjust them?) or if you just get more HP, resources, etc as you level, but he’s just not answering the question, which is really about why there isn’t customization you can do at each level.

This video talks about the similar change to skills and mentions there being some attributes that help increase the power of skills. So… uh… why can’t we put points into attributes?

As I said before, I think the skill selecting customization sounds really cool, but I really dislike the idea that you will frequently get nothing for leveling (that is, you will unlock stuff you have no intention of using).

3326

Yes, there are still attributes and you do still desire equipment that bumps the attribute(s) you are looking for.

I enjoy clicking on a little + sign next to a number as much as the next guy, but honestly it’s a fairly empty task and I don’t miss it.

3327

While I’m unsure if I’ll love or hate these changes, I will give Blizzard credit for being willing to mess with core aspects of the ARPG gaming paradigm.

A lot of people complain about Blizzard not being innovative enough. I think its really more that they innovate in subtle, fundamental ways like this that center more around the mechanics of the game. They, in effect, try to engineer “fun” and “addictive”.

Innovation doesn’t always work (particularly for any given individual), but Blizzard is certainly not shying away from innovating.

3328

I remember Warcraft 3 being very innovative with neutral creeps and hero leveling and loot, just the entire way that “RTS” played was very different from other RTS games at the time. Hell, it was pretty wildly different from Warcraft 2 even.

3329

lrn 2 VHS, noob.

3330

Bashiok has been discussing the entire issue of builds and character customization in this thread; some of the salient points he made:

You will not be farming bosses. Bosses won’t drop the best loot, they won’t even drop really great loot. Part of Inferno and our intent with getting people out into the world and hunting and killing lots of different things is putting the best loot on rare and champion packs, and the great thing about rare and champion packs is they have random affixes. They’re like a box of chocolates. Murderous, snarling, blood-soaked chocolates. You’re not going up against a boss where you know “Build A” is the best way to minmax against it because it has abilities and resistances X, Y, and Z. What is the best build vs. an “Arcane Enchanted, Teleporter, Frozen, Knockback” skeleton pack? Got that figured out? Cause it’s not going to be the best against the next pack you come across, and you’re going to want to kill that one just as much.

You might have a specialized build that is super strong against some of these things, and not against others. Your focus is going to be on the balance between taking on all of these possibilities and surviving, and it’s that balance that makes for a ton of interesting options and variance.

The one question mark for a lot of people, and maybe even us, is what stops someone from seeing a pack, backing out (or dying) and swapping out to be better equipped to handle it? We agree that shouldn’t be the best way to play, but know it’s something we can solve pretty easily, even if it’s just making the swapping cooldown longer in later difficulties.

In any case, his point was that you could absolutely make the best build against one type of enemy, and that build could completely fail against another. It’s not D2 where you pump all your points into one ability, we’re going for some depth in our combat, but it’s your choice of tools (and there are a lot of them) that will define your character versus another.

This seems like a decent way to handle it, although it won’t please those who really do like the idea of making permanent decisions for their characters. I find it rather remarkable just how willing Blizzard is to ditch the previous design entirely – they basically had the design meeting and decided: “You know how everybody spent the end-game of Diablo II killing bosses? Yeah, we don’t think that’s fun enough, so we’re going to make sure it’s not worth trying to do this time around. Let’s have them go kill random groups of mobs instead!” It’s a big leap from a design standpoint, to shift something that fundamental to the end-game; hopefully it works well, to give the same or better feelings of rewards, when taking out those random packs as opposed to bosses.

3331

It does basically confirm the fears of the anti-hotswap crowd, though. Everything he said sounds distinctly like the game is inevitably balanced around the notion that characters can respec. Maybe not for every encounter, but that you will run into monsters who are massively outside of your capabilities, those monsters are the ones that you really, really want to kill in the end-game, and the only way to go about doing so is TPing back and swapping out skills.

This, like most other things I’ve read in the last 6 months, does not entice me greatly :/

3332

I don’t know how you get that impression, when he specifically says that this is a potential problem that they can easily solve. Why would they call it something that they might need to fix, and then balance the game specifically around not fixing it?

3333

Why would they dump the best loot in the game onto monsters that can random into build-breaking immunities/attributes and expect people to play it any other way?

I mean, I think it’s nice they note it’s problematic, but their game design sort of inevitably encourages it.

3334

That sounds good to me generally. It’s more like a roguelike where you’re trying to adapt on the fly to the environment.

If it turns into stop, TP back, respecc, kill monsters, repeat that sucks. But there’s any number of ways to remove the incentives in that gameplay loop.

3335

I don’t read that as designing groups to break builds. Rather, he is saying that it is fruitless to design builds that are highly optimized for a specific enemy, because the enemy keeps changing. Therefore you have to design builds that can handle a variety of situations. If your build is a one-trick pony, then yeah you can run into enemies that will stomp it hard. But I really don’t expect champions this time around to be immune to 3 or 4 damage types.

If they put, say, a 5-minute cooldown on the swapped skills by the time it reaches Inferno, it will be more efficient to bypass a troublesome group that really has your number than swap skills (and hope you have the gear to synergize with that).

3336

I thought Amazons were the most interesting class from a build perspective, because they had a number of skills that were useful/optimal at points invested greater than 1 but less than Maximum. So it felt like there wasn’t 1 or 2 best builds that people have complained about for other classes in this thread.

3337

Oh come on, don’t get him riled up again!

3338

Blizzard Italy supposedly leaked the release date: April 17th. Jay Wilson was asked on Twitter whether he could confirm or deny that date and he basically said “no comment”. Usually, they would just say the usual “You’ll know when we know” or they flat out say the rumor is wrong. Guess we will find out as soon as tomorrow.

3339

Oh, man, don’t get my hopes up like that.

3340

We should know something early next week, sounds like. I suspect mid-April is fairly accurate.