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Diablo 3 - Reaper of Idiots

Joined
Jun 12, 2015
Messages
91
shihonage

You have a very selectively embellished memory of D2. Might be the reason why you go on these lazy and critically non-relevant rants.

Town portals do NOT exist in Diablo3. Instant single-person teleport is just the extension of Blizzard's anti-social "one man army" mentality when it comes to Diablo3. You're a rockstar, fuck everyone else. In Diablo2 they were one of the mechanisms which encouraged interaction between players.

This 'mechanism of interaction between players' invariably boiled down to typing 'tp pls' and meeting up with another player. And now in D3 you type 'safe?' or don't even bother and click on a player's banner, saving time for both parties. Oh, the audacity of those filthy devs.

Leveling up is NOT in this game, as a meaningful process that requires player agency. Much like the rest, it's part of the streamlined autopilotarded vision.

It can be argued that D3 has more more player agency in its levelling process than all the competitors. While you no longer put points in skills and attributes, you have choice in freely juggling active abilities, which directly shape combat. The problem is that most of the interesting item interactions are locked behind level 70 mark (and the fact that levelling in all of these games is done horribly, but at least D3 has Adventure Mode).

Saying that certain mechanics which allow for town downtime are useless because "they keep you from playing actual game", is highly subjective. This just means you think like Jay Wilson does, who believes that "the actual game" is when you're clicking on monsters and getting loot. You could as well say we should remove professions from WoW because you want to play "the actual game". Remove inns. Maybe even remove the distance between various places because you really really want to get to the core experience of "the actual game", which, according to you, is endless combat. Diablo2 designers understood the game as being more than that. Nothing in game design is an accident, because it all takes too much work.

Being more than an action game with a fun character and item progression, where the whole point was allocating skill and stat points along with getting the most particular type of items for maximum damage output? What kind of meta-game have the players been missing on all these years?

Guild Wars 2 has shit combat.

Guild Wars 1, you dummy.

It means that if they didn't have such interbleed of usable items, they would have to pay more attention to what drops for mages, how often, and what damage it does. The way it is now, they just plan for a "generic class", then add a sprinkle here and there for those pesky mages. It's a lot easier.

Disregarding inane rp-in-an-action-game talk, the point to be made vis-à-vis multicharacter weapons is the lack of interesting item stats. At this point D3 is designed into a corner: because the skill system is so free-form, all the balancing and meta-shifting has to be done via skill damage manipulation, whether through direct skill value change or by tweaking supporting items. However, all things considered, the endgame (which is the goal of all the work put into the game) is quite entertaining, and all the builds play very differently.

Just level a barbarian and a mage to 70 (which would take no more than an hour, if you use 'player cleverness' and 'mechanisms which encourage interaction between players) and compare any of the playstyles between the two, and then try two mage builds for good measure.

Or stay needlessly offended by a game that's in a good shape at the moment but somehow didn't manage to recreate your idiosyncratic image of its predecessor. Comparing it to Fallout 3 is telling enough.
 

UglyBastard

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2014
Messages
821
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...s-Ben-Brode-Talks-Hearthstone-And-Power-Creep

"We keep those cards incredibly simple to be that very slow learning curve for new players," Brode says. "We want some of the Basic Cards to be bad, really bad, to make that feeling of progression even stronger."

Do you play Hearthstone? Your initial wording regarding "bad starter packs" is a bit misleading.
PACKS are always completely randomized, including the beginner recommended "classic" edition (which is actually the best). Newbs getting worse packs would be a scandal because those cost money/currency. Everyone gets the same chance with those.

There is a fixed set of 50 or so cards that every player gets for free when they start the game. Among those are extremely powerful cards played in the competetive environment as well as complete garbage. His point is actually "kind of" valid because filtering the powerful out of those free basic cards is part of the learning experience.

Granted that Blizzard prints truckloads of filler trash in their expansion to artificially inflate the amount of packs that you need to get exactly what you want, they still don't rig the content in such a way that it deliberately gives beginners worse shit than other players.
Being forced to invest something (time/money) to be completely competetive is the nature of all CCGs.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
It's why the recently admitted that they deliberately make Hearthstone starter packs unusually weak, to encourage people to get wired into power progression in a deliberate, calculating way.

You got any source on this?
Or are you just referring to some basic cards being bad?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...s-Ben-Brode-Talks-Hearthstone-And-Power-Creep

"We keep those cards incredibly simple to be that very slow learning curve for new players," Brode says. "We want some of the Basic Cards to be bad, really bad, to make that feeling of progression even stronger."
I'm no fan of Ben Brode but you're taking that completely out of context. The basic cards are the ones you're given for free. The game is largely unplayable without the cards you get from packs but that's hardly related to addiction.
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2007
Messages
4,548
Does anyone have a link to the Diablo 3 Dark mod?

I could not find it when I searched for it.

Also, is it worth it for the single-player campaign?
 
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Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,105
Josh Mosqueira has been confirmed for leaving Blizzard. You know, one guy who who apparently turned Diablo 3 around for a lot of people with the expansion and game seasons.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/d...its-blizzard-hunt-for-his-replacement-begins/

That explains why they're hiring for such a major role.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=16000J8

Requirements
  • Knowledgeable and passionate about Diablo games
  • A minimum of 5 years’ directing video game development
  • Shipped multiple AAA products as a game director or creative director
  • Outstanding communications and relationship-building skills
  • Recognized ability to guide and inspire large development teams
  • Able to work well in a team environment and communicate effectively with all development disciplines: programming, art, design, sound, and production
  • Exhibited ability to coach and mentor employees at all levels of an organization
  • Great sense for what makes a game fun to play
  • Unrelenting self-motivation and initiative
  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience

Get in and save Diablo, guys. :obviously:
 

shihonage

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Bubbles In Memoria
Nobody "turned Diablo 3 around". They removed auction house and improved loot, while a dozen catastrophic design problems remain which are unfixable and the game will be forever just a shitty Diablo clone made by amateurs.
 

Zerginfestor

Learned
Joined
Nov 11, 2015
Messages
251
Location
Wasteland.
I don't even see the point in playing Diablo 3 anymore. To try new builds? The item set focus and lack of skill point investment just means your build can only focus on usual set items, and usually a 2-handed weapon for the huge boost in damage. For me, when I played Diablo 2, it was to make builds and to duke it out in PvP (which became hysterical with some of the shit people pulled back in the day). Without any sort of competition fighting, you're only resorting to going through the same fucking rifts, over and over again, just to get a chance that your Legendary ass-splitter feature-length Dong you were carrying will be switched over to an ANCIENT Legendary, and for what? To do the same shit all over again?

Worst part is that there ARE hilarious spells in the game that have huge potential into being badass, but for some reason, they fucked up royally on them, prime example of this bullshit is none other than Toad of Hugeness in the Hex spell (which should've been it's own goddamn spell and different affixes for different Toads), and Piranha: Bogadile. Bogadile affix could've been a competitive affix against Piranhado, if it wasn't for the two dumb effects it has, one being the Bogadile only affects one enemy in the pond (The very size of it's maw takes up the goddamn pond), it should've hit everything that was in the damn spell, and the next issue which kills the spell is that enemies chomped by the Bogadile are PULLED IN with it, meaning players cannot attack it until it pops back up, wasting precious seconds for one goddamn elite unit. To this fucking day, the spell hasn't been updated to be more reasonable. Toad of Hugeness on the other hand has been updated, but it's still fucking useless, the way it was updated was fucking stupid, and the set items that were focused on this skill are just HORRIBLE. Personally, cool spells being useless like these two are one of the reasons Diablo 3 just sucks balls.
 
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aris

Arcane
Joined
Apr 27, 2012
Messages
11,613
Diablo clone? I understand that you're emotional, but :roll:
 

shihonage

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Diablo clone? I understand that you're emotional, but :roll:

Yeah, Diablo3's ineffectual dungeon randomization, retarded character classes, intrusive method of telling of a convoluted story, the neutering of the art style, castration of co-op synergies, reduction of player agency in general, the blur filter you can't turn off - it's all just imagined by my emotions.

What Jay Wilson did to Diablo is the same thing "NU id" did to Doom is the same thing Bethesda did to Fallout. It's all just arrogance and ego triumphing over humble research and willingness to understand what made the prequels great. It's all about "pouring out their creativity" using an existing franchise as their personal chamber pot.
 

Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
8,511
Location
The Desert Wasteland
I don't even see the point in playing Diablo 3 anymore. To try new builds? The item set focus and lack of skill point investment just means your build can only focus on usual set items, and usually a 2-handed weapon for the huge boost in damage. For me, when I played Diablo 2, it was to make builds and to duke it out in PvP (which became hysterical with some of the shit people pulled back in the day). Without any sort of competition fighting, you're only resorting to going through the same fucking rifts, over and over again, just to get a chance that your Legendary ass-splitter feature-length Dong you were carrying will be switched over to an ANCIENT Legendary, and for what? To do the same shit all over again?

Don't worry, Blizzard has their best man working the problem right now:

 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
I love this guy, how he manages to keep his job at Blizzardvision, EA, Valve at the same time is beyond me.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
When's this shit going to be $20 for the deluxe edition?!!?
 

Castozor

Scholar
Joined
Nov 12, 2014
Messages
151
Knowing Blizzard not for a long while unless maybe to draw people in for their new X-pac. Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 are still $10 even today on their site.
 

nomask7

Arcane
Joined
Apr 30, 2008
Messages
7,620
Has anybody tried playing this without skills (other than passives) and without any health regen whatsoever? I played through act 1 like this on normal. I used Templar as a companion with healing every 30 seconds. A lot slower tempo, suddenly the campaign is atmospheric, interesting, well-balanced and quite challenging. The balance seems so good I wonder if they, somehow, for some reason, intended this to be a viable option for players who didn't like the idea of skills and health regen.

I do have one proper character doing adventure mode on Torment V combortably enough, and yes, that's nicely balanced as well, but playing through the campaign with a fresh account even on expert is (somewhat) challenging only at times and only if you always restart the game session after dying. You couldn't call it anything except boring. Yet my odd experiment described above seems nicely challenging. It's weird.

Also, goddamn I hate those generic magic abilities of elite monsters. Ugh. They're such a lame and displeasing way to increase the difficulty of an encounter. And itemisation is rather a bore until you start getting more of those legendaries with unique abilities (a minority even in the class of legendaries).
 

shihonage

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Except last time I checked (a few years ago), they broke Diablo2, so everything moves twice as fast, animation timings are superfast, everything just behaves weirdly. And since it was in multiplayer, this means they adjusted servers to match? I don't even...

... and of course they didn't even implement an upscaled support for resolutions higher than 800x600.
 

Coma White

Educated
Joined
Jul 9, 2016
Messages
375
Location
Malachor Depths
Except last time I checked (a few years ago), they broke Diablo2, so everything moves twice as fast, animation timings are superfast, everything just behaves weirdly. And since it was in multiplayer, this means they adjusted servers to match? I don't even...

... and of course they didn't even implement an upscaled support for resolutions higher than 800x600.

Believe it or not, Blizzard has recently been patching the game -- as recent as this year in fact. The community is still very active. Last I heard, the sentiment was that Blizzard is working on optimizing the game for modern setups.

I don't know if it's true or not. But the game is still very playable. It really is perfect hack-and-slash IMO.
 

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