Well, it’s a little different. Choosing a difficulty level to play is different from staying in one place in a campaign. We never did that. The only time we ever repeated content was if we had to quit for the night before reaching the next checkpoint. That’s just how Diablo 2 worked. Sure, I suppose we could repeat content, but in a linear campaign that you’re trying to finish three times on 3 difficulty levels, that seems outside the natural flow of the game. Choosing an easier difficulty level (Medium vs Hard) is not outside the natural flow of the game. It’s a decision you’re consciously making ahead of time.
We’re not disagreeing. I’m talking about playing a hardcore character up to level 70. I agree there is plenty of variety after that. But that’s the boring part that’s always the same.
But the Season’s Journey requires you to play on the high difficulties to complete the objectives. If you aren’t doing that, how is what you’re doing any different than sitting in Act 2 hell or doing Pindleskin runs? I mean, most of Adventure Mode is completing the same content again and again it’s just more fun than it was in D2.
I don’t agree that the run up to 70 is always the same. I mean, you can choose to play the same way and perhaps if you are just focused on getting to 70 you will just do what’s familiar so you can get there faster. You don’t have to play the same build on the way up, though; there are plenty of options that are different and ways to have a very different character. Just because you can then change your character completely when you reach 70 doesn’t mean there are fewer options on the way up, it just means you can choose to always play the same way.
If you wanted to be restricted to the skills your eventual build will use, why not just restrict yourself to them? Once a skill you intend to have in your final build is unlocked, you have to slot it. Once a rune you intend to use is unlocked you have to slot it. Would that make the journey more fun? Does the game have to enforce it for that to be fun?
I usually died before then, so it wasn’t an issue. (Unless I played on a lower difficulty to get to that point, in which case it was boring).
True. But it’s the only thing that provides variety in the game. You reach level 34, and a couple of new things unlock, so I want to try those couple of new things, so I switch to them. It’s just a really strong lure, because it’s what’s providing the variety in the gameplay up to level 70.
Yup, that’s true. In D2, though, there was no such thing. Instead of getting new toys you were interested in every level or every couple levels, you got them at a few specific points and that was it. Otherwise you were saving your points to put them into the skills that unlock later. By level 34 (or probably earlier, depending on how many level 30 skills you needed) your “build” was fixed and you were simply adding points to try to getting it working as strongly as you wanted. Imagine D3’s skills mapped to a D2 skill tree. How would that increase the variety of play on the way up?
D3 has a ton more skills, and they can be used at any time. Remember D2 you had to map your rightclick, that was the only skill you could use until you remapped it with a separate key. It was really very primitive.
If you assigned skills to the function keys, F1 through F8, then the mouse wheel could be used to scroll through those as your “right click” ability. That’s the only way I played, since we figured out how to do that at launch.
So one skill on left click (or sometimes attack) and 8 skills on the right click.
I used the function keys for direct mapping, but it’s basically the same thing and very primitive compared to D3 expecting you to use multiple skills in each engagement.
This article has raised my expectations. This isn’t a Diablo 3 retread. It looks better. You can switch between skills and weapons more fluidly. The skills look impactful and the character customisation options sound deep:
Also, a world 10-20 times the size of D3’s should mean a lot of space to pepper interesting/challenging encounters between the trash used to farm loot.
The overworld is open, persistent, and shared now, so it needs to be much larger to fit multiple players. My guess is it won’t be procedurally generated for that reason. Or maybe it will, and a set number of players will share each very large procedurally generated overworld. But then it could get confusing if you log off, then come back the next day to a different one.
Don’t really see it as any more confusing than the first time you come back to D2 and see all your map progress vanished and everything looks different.
I think this is going to be a very fine line to tread in terms of open world vs. instancing.
Imagine that it’s purely dynamic - you are placed into an instance when you log in, you can travel across that instance as much as you’d like, including in and out of hubs, PvP zones, and world event zones. When they need a new instance, they procedurally generate most of the world (except the hubs and certain other static areas, which are then slotted into the appropriate locations between procedural zones). As people log in, they balance them across the different instances, adding more when the populations reach a soft cap and shunting new logins away from the smallest one when populations drop below some soft floor. So if there are, say, 750 D3-sized zones that are open world in D4, and if people are spending, say, 40% of their time in a hub / off-map dungeon and 60% in the open world, and if 25% of people in the open world are concentrated in the PvP/world event zones, then with 100 people per instance there would be a 6% chance of seeing someone else in your open world zone. That means that if your typical play session moves through 25 zones (the equivalent of doing all the bounties in all acts), you would have about an 80% chance of encountering someone during that time (and would encounter an average of 1-2 other people per open world play session). You can push these numbers around a bit and end up with different sever pops, but I think 100 people per instance is quite low if the instance has to generate 750 zones plus hubs, world events, and dungeons. That said, it does likely save them some cloud resources if you compare it to a private 50-zone instance per player.
If you aren’t assigning people to a single full-world instance on login, then you are either splitting the population across server shards (please, no), or you are only instancing the areas people are in. That would allow you basically just roll some dice about whether to put someone into an occupied instance or a new one, but is also means a) all areas have static borders (this might be fine), b) when you leave and area and return it may be different (this would be a big mess even if kept the previous instance open for a bit and gated sections of the world between hubs), and c) it is very unlikely you will meet the same person out in the world multiple times.
I’m not sure there’s a different solution than the PoE one that actually works here.
I guess the real question is “why?” I mean, I’m fine with always online so that you can trade with people in the hubs, with running across big battles that other players are also fighting in, and with having PvP zones (especially ones where players align for or against Lilith and duke it out alongside creeps and siege engines and so on). Why would I want someone else to randomly wander by and mess up the zone I’m clearing?
Torchlight Frontiers, following the Mythos idea, does it similar. There are a small number of players you see in the regular questing areas and more in town areas, but dungeons are all private.
It is cool and works fine. Depending on the size of the area and parties D4 could tweak the numbers of possible players and keep the large overworld static and dungeons all random and it’d work just fine.
