Yeah, I’ve played a lot of all three of these games, though not terribly effectively I have to admit! Like them all, though.
There will most likely be a Switch 2 by the time this comes out.
Same here. All 3 ARPGs are good in their own ways (Diablo 3, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile). For me, the one I can’t do Hardcore on is Diablo 3. Since you control your own difficulty in Diablo 3, I just don’t see the point of Hardcore. If I want my character to always survive, I can just play on a difficulty level lower than what would normally get them killed. In Path of Exile, I’ve never been able to get through Normal difficulty with a hardcore character. It’s just too hard. In Grim Dawn, I’ve actually managed to get through it on Normal difficulty with a hardcore character. It’s hard, but you learn over time which areas to be careful.
I played hardcore a bit in D2. I think it made it pretty interesting. Even playing at a level where you wouldn’t normally get killed, there were unexpected spikes, or other people you were playing with could do something stupid. Usually there were dozens of times you came close to death before you actually died. My most exciting time in D2 was PvP hardcore.
Of course, the biggest killer of D2 hardcore characters was the 4th Prime Evil: Laaag.
FYI, Path of Exile changed their difficulty levels - there’s no longer a Normal/Harder/Hardest level. Now there’s 10 acts, and when you reach the end of Act 10 you’re level 70.
And the first 3 acts are pretty easy, but there is a big DPS test in the 4th act that almost always kills my characters (the Innocence fight). I can’t tell you how much most of my PoE toons hate that fight.
In D3, the key for me is that I play Hardcore exactly like I would softcore, doing the same basic things, though of course with attention to survivability. The point isn’t to simply not die, the point is to see how far you can go without dying, playing like you would normally. The rush comes from the risk. I simply get very little enjoyment out of non-hardcore Diablo 3, as I can’t get interested enough in the end game really.
Oh yeah, I played Diablo 2 only in Hardcore, except for my very first character on the weekend of release. Me and my friends finished the game that opening weekend and were very unimpressed and thought we’d never play the game again.
But then one of my friends wanted to try a different character than the Necromancer he’d been playing. And he saw the new Hardcore option, and he called us over and we decided to try it out. And we ended up playing the game for thousands of hours after that, always trying to beat it in Hardcore. Diablo 2 hardcore is amazing. Diablo 2 softcore is really boring (to us).
The part that bothers me about Diablo 3 hardcore is that each character’s progression is always the same. It’s not like Diablo 2 hardcore where I can always try something different. Oh look, this time I died because I didn’t have enough fire resistance and my character wasn’t doing enough damage by Act 2. Ok, I’ll develop my Amazon a little different this time. In Diablo 3, that’s not an option. The loot might be different, but I’ll unlock the exact same skills and runes at each level for each character. It’s just not interesting to replay again and again with the same class character like it is in Path of Exile, Grim Dawn and Diablo 2.
Agreed. Feels like there’s too much homogeneity. I get that they’re trying to make it more accessible to the casual crowd but there are certainly other ways to do that.
Well, it makes sense in softcore. Once you’ve made a Barbarian, there’s no reason to ever make a Barbarian again, so the aim of those early levels is just to introduce all the variations of skills to the player. So it doesn’t matter that they’re always unlocked in the same order at the same levels. You’ll only ever have to create one of those characters. If you want a Barbarian that uses different abilities, all you have to do is change them. In softcore, that all makes perfect sense and is a consistent design philosophy. The only time it becomes boring is in hardcore because you aren’t really meant to repeatedly create new Barbarians and always unlock the same abilities, usually in the same areas of the game as you’re playing through the story each time.
Easily D3s major shortcoming for me as well. One reason I loved GD so much, is the endless combos of classes, especially with mods.
I understand how it works, but I agree that there’s too little variety in Diablo 3 characters. It seems like they could have a system where there are branching skills such that you have to make choices - but have a mechanism in place where you could easily re-spec, or have some sort of escalating cost, or make it free until you hit 50 or whatever. These kinds of systems aren’t rocket surgery.
Part of the fun of these games is tinkering with builds and doing weird stuff. Not really possible with D3 (or maybe it’s achieved through “interesting” loot drops - and I’m not sure there is all that much variety in those).
There is variety! That’s precisely where it is. If you haven’t already, you should play through a season. Just doing all the objectives of the season will grant you a powerful set. The way your character plays and the skills that set will enhance will totally make that character play different from anything you’ve played before. And this is true for every set. Every set gets a unique build for that character. It’s actually pretty fascinating.
The problem I have is that the variety is curated by Blizzard, if that makes any sense? The builds are pre-designed. The sets are set up in a way that you use a particular build and there’s not that many sets. You can mix it up a little with legendaries, but it doesn’t do much for a tinkerer like me.
Yeah, the builds are definitely pre-designed. I don’t think there are any dynamic builds on Diablo 3 that a player would come up with on their own. But maybe we’re wrong. Maybe if you play long enough, you come up with one or two.
Yes, this was a major criticism for me. No more coming up with a wacky plan and building a character just to see if you could make it work. Now, they did leverage this “flaw” very nicely with the seasons (for instance with some of the challenges requiring specific setups) but that didn’t hold my attention as long as I thought it would.
You’re not wrong, for sure. Most of my HC deaths are due to bad spawns and being trapped, not any theorycrafting errors.
Anyone remember rechargeable staves in Diablo? Those were the days.
Sure, and in D2 hardcore you could just sit in Act 2 Hell until you were 70th+ so you could survive Duriel. You can always choose to play safely and not die. The challenge in D3 is to be able to play on high Torment levels and do grifts and complete the season challenges. If you aren’t doing those things when you play hardcore, then you aren’t really trying to “win” in hardcore.
It really isn’t - you very quickly unlock more skills than you can possible slot in, and the gear you choose complements certain skills better than others. I think the idea that the progression is the same is just an illusion caused by thinking of the skills as “progression”. Once you reach 70 (which is quickly), the gear decisions you’ve made and continue to make have a major influence on how your build works. Sure, an amazing drop can throw a wrench in the works and maybe shift you to a different build, but that’s just like respeccing in games where it isn’t free to do so - it costs you the time and energy to go after the relevant equipment.
This is a spot where I think D4 can really shine, if they are motivated to solve this issue. One of the best ways to make starting a new character feel rewarding is to give choices at the start that really define a character in cool ways. Dungeons of Dredmor hit this nail particularly accurately with its array of skills that all evolve in crazy ways. Imagine if in D4 you put points into your skills and gained passives, procs, or accompanying effects of the skill with each point. So you have, say, 6 skill slots and can only put points into the skills you’ve chosen, but some skills result in more than one power usable from the skill bar (for example through the barbarian weapon-swaps or the druid forms or even something like how the Necro can raise minions and also direct them). Skills add passive abilities and procs that trigger other times than only when the skill is used, in addition to modifiers like secondary effects or “unstoppable”, and just generally get more powerful by being enhanced rather than simply doing more damage.
Their current plans seem to be to do this stuff using items and have the progression of skills be more linear. That might also be ok if they get the item progression right, but I think the missing element in a lot of people’s heads (even those who love D3) is the inability to look at the possibilities laid out before you and make a plan when you make a new character.
I think this is mostly true only at the very end of the game - the way you get to the point of unlocking the new set is much more organic and you can cobble together some interesting stuff, but they give you fewer tools at those lower levels. Once you’ve got the season set pieces all assembled, you play in a unique way that’s a fun reward for completing the season, but IMO is pretty much the end of the progression (at that point it’s just diminishing returns tweaks to squeeze out a little efficiency). The place where the fun experimentation is and could be enhanced is on the road to those endgame builds.
You can come up with them, but they will never be “meta”. The best and most fun build I made in D3, was to equip every piece of gear I could find that had an AOE on it…moonlight ward, plague legs, poison helm, etc. I did this on a mage, and it was actually really really good, right up until the damage didn’t scale to higher rifts etc. When the DPS from this set was just at that sweet spot, it was so much fun, could literally just run through levels and everything exploded.
I think one of the problems in D3, and with Blizzard in general in all of their games, is that they have too wide a gap between stuff that’s amazing, and everything else. D2 was notorious for this as well, your zon sucked until you either got a Buriza, or a Titan spear, anything other than a handful of items was vastly inferior. I think if they reduced the gap between top tier and everything else, and tuned the game accordingly, it would really open it up to a lot of experimental builds.