You failed to actually mention the reason you want trees to self-fuck.
Sure, let me dredge up the mountain of posts in this thread.
MikeJ
3483
We must have easy respecs in order to align our gaming experiences with the dominant digital age themes of impermanence and reinvention. To do otherwise could induce a psychic strain resulting in mild nausea and excess gas.
What do I win?
I did exactly that, once. My Thorns paladin was tremendous fun in Normal, very difficult to play in Nightmare, and completely worthless in Hell. After transfering some gear to a reroll and deleting him, I never again designed a D2 character on my own. Instead, I hit the forums and found builds that could actually experience the entire game. Throwing 30+ hours into a character that’s destined for the trash heap is not something I can afford.
idrisz
3485
this is me playing a game.
Am I having fun? fun obtained, entertainment success!!!
fun factor lacking, then grumble grumble grumble and complain on the internet.
I simply accept the fact that I’m not an singly unique entity on this planet, I probably will never be the best at anything, so i’m settling for good or pretty good.
There are times I wake up in middle of the night in cold sweat wondering how come I don’t have every single legendary weapon in WoW, and thinking WTF have I spend all my times doing in WOW, then I remember that I killed deathwing in a LFR and I sleep better.
I don’t get the hate against respecs, I really, really don’t. I’ll use Dragon Age as an example again. Did anyone really enjoy arbitrarily picking skills (based on a small text blurb) and having no way to change that later if it didn’t work out? Let’s say I want to pick a fairly exotic bunch of abilities instead of the usual “fireball iceball lightningball”, I could easily find myself gimped later on and have no way to change it. The only way to rectify this becomes to replay the whole fucking game, which is just an exhausting prospect. It encourages you to follow some cookie-cutter build you cribbed from the interwebz, whereas with respecs the punishment for making a non-optimal “fun” build that you later want to change, is minimal.
I want to try a Dragon Age build with goofy telekinetic powers and support powers like the buffs and debuff trees. I really do. But I’m not going to play through the whole game again to do it. Let me try it for a few hours. Then I change it up again if I like to.
Leaving out respecs is a fundamental design flaw. It works only for the absolute hardcores who will play through multiple times. It’s just stupid to ask someone to make early decisions that will have vast consequences later on, with minimal information and NO hands-on experience, and no way to change these decisions. It gives the player a feeling of paralysis.
Me, earlier.
As for skill trees with respecs, you might as well not have skill trees, right? It’s just a forced annoyance of going and moving around the points. I think an early blog by Jay Wilson was like yeah, people would dump points into this skill, and when they hit level 11 and wanted to try “Disintegrate Laser of Doom” they would go and respec and dump all their points into the shiny new skill.
You felt strongly enough about it to comment yet again, though :)
Actually, I’d argue that you are unique - or at least as far as we can perceive.
If you don’t think you can be the best at anything, then I’d also argue that’s not true.
Being the best at something is more about the desire and the belief than it’s about actual ability (though you need some of it).
But again, I can certainly appreciate the argument that you don’t want to invest what it takes to be particularly good at a computer game.
What I can’t believe, however, is that you would want to play a game for many hours - and you wouldn’t mind sucking or being utterly nondescript when cooperating or competing with others.
That… I would call being in denial and defeatism.
The skill trees are also idiotic because of the stupid, dumb way they encourage you to play the game. By which I mean - the way I started playing D2 after a while, would be to NOT put my points in anything (and hoard them up). Then painfully eke out levels from 1-20 or 30 with a single point in Icebolt and a Staff of Fireball +2, and then dump my points into Frozen Orb, Meteor, and other high level badass skills when I got past a certain point.
Synergies were created to address this problem. And so we had a new problem- very little actual option for variance. Put points into low level synergy skill 1 & 2, put points into high level skills 3 & 4, and you’re done. Build finished, no more points.
Same thing in Torchlight. I put a few points into the early ranged class skills to get me by. Turns out those skills are the rinky dink low level skills, and some of them were pretty bad. Eventually I got Exploding Shot of Ultimate Destruction, and most of my points in the low level skills (past the first one), were just completely wasted points.
Aren’t you talking about moronic implementations of skill trees - rather than skill trees as a whole?
We had this exact discussion already.
I was kinda hoping for new angles :)
D2 is from 2000 and it’s the first ARPG with skill trees. How great could it be?
Torchlight had an extremely short development cycle - and it’s basically a shitfest in terms of depth and mechanics.
Synergies were created to address this problem. And so we had a new problem- very little actual option for variance. Put points into low level synergy skill 1 & 2, put points into high level skills 3 & 4, and you’re done. Build finished, no more points.
Sure, it wasn’t ideal. But while it did lack variety WITHIN a build - it did help make several builds viable, and thus introducing MEANINGFUL variety. Before, there was more variety - but only very few meaningful combinations.
But that’s not how I would do a skill tree today - not at all. I would never make low level skills redundant by replacing them with other primaries. But, I gave examples of this earlier in the thread.
Yes, and we went over how some of these problems are inherent to the skill tree concept, and trying to fix them while retaining skill trees, is like trying to win the 100m sprint in a hoop dress.
Why didn’t you use the official unofficial Torchlight mod that added respec potions?
I think you’re saying that I failed to convince you that the handful of crappy examples we know aren’t the only way to go about it :)
That said, I think I mentioned that skill trees is just one design iteration of making players choose and commit.
Each class had maybe 9 end-game viable skills in Diablo 2 and you’d probably end up with at least 2 or 3 maxed or near-maxed. There was no way to be somewhat unique, unless you wanted to make an obviously suboptimal character. And you can still pick crappy skills that nobody likes in Diablo 3.
I disagree. Fundamentally, requiring out-of-game resources not to waste dozens of hours of your time is at best highly questionable design which should only be embraced if it serves a higher purpose.
Anyway, there are certainly ways to do a skill tree without being awful, but requiring players to dump planning into it before they play the game if they want to complete the game with a character is a great way to vastly limit the appeal of your game.
KevinC
3496
The problem is, DKDArtagnan, that people like us look at games very differently. D2 kept me entertained for years and I had a ton of fun plotting out characters, trying them out, and seeing how well I could do with them. A character that didn’t work well past nightmare wasn’t a “failure” to me as long as I had fun with the mechanics along the way. It was usually a success given that it spawned more ideas for me to dink around with. It’s not because I have infinite time that I like that kind of thing, it’s because I like being able to pick up an older game and still have fun and try new things. Planning and experimentation is fun for me!
I think the games industry serves a locust mindset now. The majority of people want to devour a game, complete it, and then move on to the next juicy morsel in what time they have. They don’t want to dink around with builds or, heaven forbid, not succeed. They want to beat the damn game so they can get back to their backlog.
All in all, I think arguing the point is… well, pointless. People have different tastes, play games for different reasons, and find different aspects of games entertaining (or not). For me, I think Diablo 3 will be fun for a playthrough but it won’t remain entertaining nearly as long as Diablo 2 did. It may not be my cup of tea, but luckily there are other options. :)
I think the “in seconds” part is important to his position. He’d rather people have to spend 12 hours of leveling to copy a build, rather than just a few seconds to try something out.
No thanks, personally. I like how Diablo III works with the skills systems.
Yikes. That’s weird. It worked fine all the times I used it.
The skill trees did give the illusion of being unique, but that doesn’t mean it was true. I’ll give you that choices are harder when there are more of them and they can’t be undone. If that’s how you want to play, that’s fine, but not everyone wants to play that way, as is evident in this discussion. I think the important thing here is to wait until you try D3’s system before writing it off completely. Just from the time I’ve spent in the beta, I have a hard time believing anyone who likes this type of game in general won’t love the game a lot when it finally releases.
