Oh, is that in the remastered version? I haven’t tried it, but that sounds like a system that would work for me.
It’s in the remaster, but it was added before that. I believe it was in the infamous Patch 1.10 that came out a few years after the game and it overhauled the game a lot by also adding reworked skills that gave you incentives to invest in lower level skills.
It was added to the original in patch 1.13c. Back in 2010, but way after I stopped paying attention.
Or you could just let people respec if they want or don’t respec if they prefer to grind out a new character. No one is forcing someone to respec if that isn’t your thing, why punish those who don’t want to have to grind to make changes to their character?
Because the game tends to be designed around whatever system they have in place.
If you design a game you can convert libraries to axemen, it’s going to be expected and balanced around the fact that you do so.
I don’t know, just seems like a manufactured gold sink to me.
I just know if it’s hard to respec then I won’t play this game as much. I played a ton of D3 because I only had to go through the dumb story mode once, and I could change out my skills as I found cool gear so I wasn’t really stuck with anything. If I’m asked to grind out 3 different rogue builds to try out different stuff in the game then I’m out.
Which is fine, maybe D4 won’t be the game for me. If I wait until it comes to Gamepass it won’t cost me anything anyway.
Yeah I would absolutely hate that. It’s probably why I never played much D2 after finishing the campaign.
And by “that” I’m referring to how it works now, not at release which was much worse (I did play at release.)
Obviously lots of people adore D2 and everything about it so I’m not putting this forward as an example of poor game design, although it was rather of its time.
Let’s say that there are enemies that are easy to fight without crowd control, enemies where resistances matter less, enemies where cc breaks are essential, etc. If you have completely free respecs, then the expected behavior is to swap your skills to be able to handle the enemies you will face, or else every region, dungeon, challenge, etc., has to contain a random mix of these enemies to make swapping and not swapping relatively balanced tactics. If respecs are not free, then the design can have more ups and downs for players that stress their build, because they will want to be able to handle many of these challenges or will have to choose to avoid some of them.
Basically, your argument is simply not true: in a game with unlimited free respecs, players are not free to choose to confine themselves to a single build (unless they want to intentionally make their experience more difficult as well).
That level of optimization is only required at very high levels of play. I played a fair bit of D3 and got into greater rifts in the sixties and I never had to change my build to suit a specific challenge.
Also I believe they just didn’t allow players to respec inside the only competitive content— GRs.
There’s a difference between free respecs and respecs you can do at any time. I’m totally cool with a system that prevents you respeccing for a particular fight (provided fights aren’t designed around particular builds, obviously), but a game that makes it prohibitively expensive to respec at all, or one that just puts a progression blocker in because you fucked up and chose the wrong skills, is not one I have much interest in playing for very long.
I don’t know that I agree that libraries->axemen conversion is the right analogy, or at least I don’t see it.
A 4X has a defined end — an ARPG doesn’t, it’s a series of smaller games (clear this dungeon, clear this rift, etc.) (and importantly, you can’t respec during a rift / dungeon clear — only outside it, since that’s the game unit)
It’d be like you had to decide when you bought a 4X game that you could only play one nation or only use one kind of unit.
Also, an ARPG is not a competitive game — you’re competing against yourself, not anyone else. You can just not respec if you don’t want to, and others who prefer to do so can without hurting your gameplay in anyway.
D4 is a hybrid MMO and I do expect there to be real competition, not just solo running greater rifts. That doesn’t excuse prohibitively expensive respecs though. WoW has free ones.
In D3, the runes you unlock for each skill, and really, the skills themselves, are not really upgrades as they are sidegrades in many respects. True, you don’t get the full menu until endgame, but you also are not operating at a real disadvantage in terms of sheer power of skills. Many endgame builds use skills you get early on, with runes that are not at the end of that chain either.
In D3 you unlock more choices that allow you to tune your character to fit your needs. It is built around gear, and when you get new gear you need to be able to change which skills and modifiers you run with. If you want people to stick with a build (character abilities, skills, etc.) you have to reflect that in the game design. In D3, some skills/runes are useless for you because they don’t match your gear. In another game, some gear might be useless because it doesn’t match your skills. There is of course some overlap, but it seems like a pretty clear distinction.
Which is better I leave for others to argue. I like either approach as long as it is well thought out.
You’re competing monsters, bosses, etc. I don’t see how that’s any different than competing against an axeman, zergling, or any thing else. There’s a challenge to overcome and you have tools to overcome that challenge. For me, the interesting part of games is developing a plan, making choices, and then trying to execute said plan against various scenarios.
Sorry, I don’t get how that’s a comparison. You make a decision on what nation to play for that “unit” (a campaign), you have to make a decision on what to build for that unit (a turn). That comparison only seems to work if I said “When you buy Diablo 4, you can only pick one class and you’re forever stuck playing it”. Which I’m not suggesting.
Do you want to be able to just pick Legendaries at will when you want them, or do you want to have to find them? Do you want the ability to convert your L78 sorcerer to a druid for a particular fight with a button press, or do you prefer to level up and experience the game with each class? Honestly asking.
Heh 👀
Again, though, just preventing respeccing while inside a dungeon means that you have to design all dungeons to be mostly balanced against all builds (or else you are forcing people to respec to match the dungeon). Giving respeccing a cost just like every other change you can make to your character has a cost means that you can balance classes across the dungeons and therefore have dungeons that really challenge your build in different ways.
So free respecs does affect the experience, because it affects game balance, just like having the ability to reroll stats on weapons for free would affect game balance. You could choose not to reroll the weapons, but you would be putting yourself at a big disadvantage. In fact, being able to get random weapons drops for free would make a lot more goddamn sense than being able to completely overwrite the shit your character knows at the drop of a hat. But that’s an RP concern not really a gameplay one.
I think people are making far to big of a deal over this. Rerolling a new character is more fun if there are different choices to be made as you level. Seasons will encourage you to reroll often. The cost of respeccing will be maybe a little higher than the cost (in time) of rerolling from scratch only if you so thoroughly change your skills that you need a full respec. For most purposes, a limited respec will work fine and will be reasonably priced even at high level. People who like to swap their skills constantly will just have less money to spend on rerolling item stats, really, but that will be fine because they won’t really know what item stats they want to commit to.
No, classes are a meaningful distinction / appropriate friction in my eyes.
But skill points?
Imagine if once you equipped a piece of gear, you couldn’t ever take it off, or had to pay an “unequip fee” every time you wanted to change what gear you had equipped.
Does that make the game better?
I’d argue no. The appropriate friction for gear is acquiring it, not constraining how often you can change it. So too for abilities — acquiring the ability is the gate (by leveling), constraining how often you can change which skills you use is unnecessary friction.
Personally I enjoy games that reduce friction and let me explore the possibility space. Others may have other preferences — for things like respecs, I see it better to have free respecs because it enables folks who want them to have them — and those that don’t want to easily respec simply don’t have to!
It’s not like my being able to respec hurts your ability to play the game without respec.
(And for what it’s worth, to your original question, I’d be fine with a game where you could freely swap clases so you only have to level up once — I’m fine with each class requiring it’s own leveling, since it’s a nice intro / progressive disclosure to the class instead of just getting dumped into all the complexity at once, but I wouldn’t be averse to it)
You… you do have to pay this fee. The cost is finding another item that is better or at least moves you sideways, which takes a lot of time at high levels.
Except that you have access to all abilities at level 30 and the level cap is 100.
And this is a bad thing? I should say, I don’t particularly mind replayable partly randomised/procedural content (eg D3 GRs) being unwinnable with a certain build. And I certainly don’t mind “challenging” a build. But if you’re building progression blocking content that can realistically only be beaten with certain builds, and those builds can only be respecced to by starting over again or grinding an equivalent amount of time, that’s just bad design and incredibly disrespectful of the player’s time.
This may well be true. I’m not making any comments about D4 here. I’m reserving judgment until I see how it works in practice (and until the inevitable rework after six months). I will say, though, that levelling a summoning necromancer, I basically couldn’t finish any of the dungeons for the first 20 levels or so because none of the bosses had adds. Not a dealbreaker, because it wasn’t mandatory content, but still needlessly frustrating. Just give them some adds!
Finding items is an organic part of the game, though. It’s not like there’s an artificial system stopping you.
I can see your point though — skill points could also be an organic part of the game. Though the UX and evolving gameplay norms mean that it’s expected to be able to change your character’s skill. So adding friction feels more artificial there.
I just don’t personally see the value in locking them in or making them more expensive to swap. And making them freely swappable doesn’t hurt the “I don’t want to respec” playstyle. It doesn’t make choices less meaningful if other people can change choices. Also, it has the advantage of respecting player time — having to farm gold to afford a respec is meh. (Whereas finding items is part of the core gameplay loop!)
All that said, reasonable people can disagree here. Great games can take many different approaches. That said, d4 is in the enviable position of trying to please a very wide and diverse fan base — given that, I think making respecs easier is the better play here as opposed to their current view which seems to be “it’ll be faster to level up another character” (though they seem to have walked back from that a bit?)
Ultimately other factors will drive the success of the game — easy respecs or expensive or no respecs.