Auction House Online: The Game (Diablo 3) is a MASSIVE decline

Yeah, not a fan of making players go through the game 3-4 times just to get to the "fun part." Especially if it's on a per-character basis, that's just lame. It worked with Diablo and Diablo II because those difficulty levels were balanced to the character levels you'd be in those modes, but Diablo III isn't giving me that impression so much. We'll see, I guess.

Truth be told though, I'm looking forward to Torchlight II and Path of Exile a lot more.

and GRIM DAWWWNNNN

 

What about Grim Dawn? I mean why do you not look forward to it?

 

I forgot to mention it and hadn't gotten around to editing my post because I had to go to the bathroom. True story. I have since corrected this most grievous error since you pointed it out.

 

I have to agree, dislike that part too. Why cant I simply start the real game right away? They must be damn sure of themselves and their game if they assume we are going to play it a few times at least. Or its REALLY short which is unlikely.

In D2 I never even finished nightmare. No, wait, I once did, after many tries.

 

Are you drunk/wasted/comatose/typing random text while watching kpop and headbanging your desk?

 

D1 had a pretty good difficulty at all times. D2 at least let you turn on P8 and race through normal difficulty in a few short hours to be ready for nightmare.

 

It's not that unlikely that the game will be short... Areas are a tad smaller than Diablo 2. And obviously they say that the game "is not meant to be played on normal", so they probably made it shorter. They say that the point of that game is loot anyway...

 

Except for a very vague similarity in the color palette and the item drops, which is again is similar to diablo 2, I would say that is quite inaccurate. For all the complaints of diablo 3 having tpo "cartoonish" graphics, torchlight does the cartoonish graphics tenfold more.

 

He was referring to Torchlight II Beta.

 

If the game is reliant on loot drops, it's gonna suck. I would like a system of higher difficulties seeing a dramatic decrease in phat l00t drops. I never understood the appeal of more l00t = better, but then again I like games like Gothic and Risen where armor is very rare and requires hard game progress to get it.

 

appeal has nothing to do with it

the game has been created around loot to fuel constant runs and auction house transactions for epic armor hueuheuheuheue

 

Being familiar with much of your writing, I wonder if you could indulge me the answer of this little silly question: Imagine, the admittedly unrealistic scenario, that EA were publishing these games, forced absolutely no changes on them except for giving the games a lot more funds, and EA otherwise had the exact reputation as they have in the real world. Do you still think you would look forward to these game?

 

It's freaking Diablo. It's all about loot drops and clicking stuff until it dies so you can get more loot drops that lets you click things to death faster. You may not see the appeal but that doesn't matter when it comes to designing a good Diablo sequel; they better do.

 

Assuming EA had their same reputation, that would include messing with stuff, rushing projects out the door, treating developers poorly, cannibalizing studios whose games fail after they make huge changes recommended by the people on top (who keep their jobs, of course), and so on... why wouldn't I be pessimistic?

 

Hmm, indeed you are very right. I get a hunch however sometimes on the codex that many games are principally loved for its "indiness" or "old-school-ness" and hated for its "tripple-A-ness", without looking in isolation at what the game brings to the table. It's maybe unfair though, especially in your case, as I know you from your articles as very reflected and I find that you generally argue very thoughtfully, even though I disagree with much that you write.

 

Which is why I never got too far in either Diablo game. Now with attributes gone it's probably gonna be even worse. =]
Oh well, back to playing Scourge of War. Enjoy fellas.

 

Axe to grind much? They've already said (and fans data mined info to back it up) that the monsters gain more abilities, will actively have more agressive AI, the bosses will gain new modifiers, and in inferno you won't be able to out level the content like you could in diablo II. The monsters are always higher level than you and the resists will take that into account.

 

They've said it takes about 20 hours for a run through the normal difficulty, assuming you explore about 80% of the levels and aren't just racing to the next boss. We'll see though: in my experience, game length estimates are ALWAYS inflated.

 

Makes one wonder WTF have they been doing for the last 10+ years as the game is pretty short... They're probably gonna split it like Starcraft 2 though into multiple expansions.

 

A game should never be about its duration. That's a horrible misconception that still sticks around since the early days of the gaming industry, an leading to many games consisting mostly of filler tasks, which makes playing the game feel more like a job than being entertained. I finished Limbo in a little more than 2 hours. Still, it is one of the best and most memorable games I've played, because the developers did not cram its game with 100+ hours content, just for the sake of putting that as a bullet point on the game package (a quite common practice for CRPGs in the late 90s early 2000, I remember). There was only the content that needed to be there, and the content there was, was executed well.

And now, the excess funding of wasteland 2, leads to all kinds of new areas and characters and portraits and stupid shit. It's a wasted opportunity, because those funds could go into making the pre-existing areas more unique and interesting, pre-existing character more 3 dimensional. And if that ended up in a 20 hour game, fine, would much rather do that then to waste 100+ hours on another RPG with 80% grind. I fear that wasteland 2 will end up being just that though.

 

I think they fucked up a bit in splitting the content between difficulties... especially such an important thing as Monster AI!

Oh well, mods will fix- Waaaaait a minute!

 

But that's how it worked in D2 and many other games

 

I completely agree.

When I heard that Legend of Grimrock was only 15 hours, I thought that was terribly short, but in actuality it's perfect. There's no filler at all, no grinding, just a straight up 15 hour puzzle/exploration fest. It's perfect length.

You can look at a game like Wizardry 7 and say it's really long and awesome, but it's padded out by requiring a ton of walking that is painfully slow, especially with the slow combat. Just walking across the world. And resting takes literally minutes of real life time. I'm not saying the game is bad, and it's actually one of my favorites ever, but it's clearly padded in length by just making everything slower moving.

JRPGs are really bad for this too, especially because the fanbase demands that the games take a long time to complete no matter what that means. So the developer's main tactic is to introduce a shit ton of grinding to pad out the length of the game instead of actually adding more content that is fun. For example, the Dragon Quest series often has speed bumps where you have to grind for hours to get strong enough to defeat certain bosses.

I don't think that adding new areas to a game like Wasteland 2 is necessarily bad. As long as it's new content and quality content then that should be perfectly fine.

If D3 is about 20 hours for a Normal playthrough, that's about the same as D1 and D2. The whole design of the game involves playing through the same content multiple times anyway, with different characters and difficulty levels. The real question is whether or not the content is FUN, not about how long it is.

 

Long CRPGs tend to have a lot of trash mobs and damage sponges, funnily enough so does the D3 beta.