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

I replayed SC1 less than a year ago. The story holds up. It has excellent characters and although I wish everyone had listened to Aldaris, I don't know what you are talking about in terms of quality. StarCraft 1 is miles above SC2 in story. SC2 has amazing mission design. Which is nice, but not a good excuse.

 

They tried to make it less of an elementalist an more of a harry potter blaster / arcane / time control caster. Red explosions were purposefully removed for purple ones, probably so the demon hunter gadgets could be full of fiery explosions.

 

You get stat choices through gems in armor slots. After you've exclusively placed your primary stat in those for a few hours I'm sure you will see why they didn't find stat customization a compelling choice. The only reason I'm using some +vitality gems right now is because I don't have enough flawless rubies for weapon + helm + 4 armor sockets.

 

Got my hands on it too, something no one mention is when you install , it send you on NA servers by default, i couldnt see nor add my friends, and had to figure myself why .In option,region selection ,it was written europe server but i was on NA ones....11 levels of sorcerer to the trash bin, i had to restart on EU servers. Now with friends and with lag.
Game is extremely easy, i never die, the only way i die is answering someone on chat.They should have allowed harder modes from the beggining , i dont remenber diabo 2 being that easy,, i am slaying every bosses on the first try without loosing much if any health.Its ok , rather fun, but meh..
The mandatory online stuff is just to forbid piracy, it adds nothing to the game except crippling the latency and gameplay, but who cares of it if it sells millions ?It will definitvely sell millions.

Diablo 3 is the future ,mainstream, easy no frustration ,no challenge, good for all audience, and no piracy possible, we will get more and more of that.The new xbox will get all its game by direct download and i am sure diablo 3 is the perfect example of the kind of future games(except the once in a blue moon good indie) we will get now on pc, its a new milestone .

 

Fear not brothers!

 

Get to Act 2 and start dying.

 

Hacking the game to create expensive items would be impossible even with single player available, barring exploits that could occur with or without online-only play. Online only is in place because otherwise offline people would be able to cheat through bosses instead of buying stuff. Now Blizzard can directly nerf classes or buff enemies and watch as players need to purchase more equipment to win.

What? Nearly every SC2 mission except the final ones boil down to spending 90% of your resources on the unit they just gave you which the mission is designed to be beat with. Or just spam marines, because they easily beat most missions even on the hardest difficulty.

The other problem with SC2's story other than how bad it is is how non-existent it is. Seriously, 95% of missions are basically irrelevant sidequests. Its painfully obvious that things are being dragged out into a 2-expansion format. SC1 would have compressed the same amount of story-relevant elements into half of a single race's campaign.

 

The Wizard certainly is more geared towards arcane shite than the "traditional" spells of Diablo 1 & 2... which kind of makes sense when you think about the lore of the character, but not so much when you're considering how fun the character ought to be in terms of gameplay. I truly do wish that they'd added some sub-types of the runes themselves, such as a multi-purpose rune which you could use to morph your Magic Missile into either a Firebolt or a Frost Bolt.

As for impact... Yeah, some spells are boring, but I still find Disintegration to be quite "meaty" in terms of visuals and in terms of "feeling". Still... could be better.

All in all, I'd dare say that the most "gameplay-oriented" character class would be the Demon Hunter... which kind of sucks since I don't play that kind of character.

 

So is it true that they removed single-player? You can play on a private or public server, but you MUST be on-line?

 

It is apparent that in order to have an enjoyable game, one has to purposely restrict their usage of skills, avoiding the derpy ones like Demon Hunter's chaingun or Wizard's laser.

2/10

 

Have you just awoke from a particularly lengthy slumber?

 

I try to ignore anything Bobby is involved with. What, are you seriously giving me shit for NOT being interested in Bobby's shit games?

 

No, Just slightly puzzled how anyone could have missed all the shit about always online DRM and waves of resulting butthurt.

 

Played for a couple of hours yesterday, D3 will likely and sadly be the last Blizzard product I buy (barring some major incline) , If this is the future I'm just not interested anymore.

 

I kept getting bad information that there was a single player mode but you needed to be online for a DRM check or something, not that there was NO single player mode and the only difference was private or public servers. I saw many sources claim that the single player mode just needs you on-line. I then had other people tell me that there was no single player mode.

 

How the fuck are you 60 and in Hell, last ACT? Did you take days off of work?

I've been playing as much as I can since I bought it and I'm... in Act 1, normal.


(jelly)

 

jasede's level discrepancy just reminded me that you can't do the old /players 8 trick anymore to sort your grindan out like a true pro gamer because of that online thing

...can you?

 

So much for finishing the game in four hours; I'm level 9 on both my characters and 3-4 hours each.

 

Yeah man, it took me dozens of hours to finish ME3 too. Don't believe those naysayers when they said the game is short, it is as short as they want to make it to be.

 

I dunno - so far I am quite enjoying this - more than D2 which never really did much for me (loved D1 though). The main reward for me will be the unlocking of new tilesets, monsters and character powers (I've never liked the Diablo loot system and it deosn't seem to have changed much here).

I like the more interactive environments and the spell effects are quite good. Also you can't just spam the same kind of attacks for every enemy, which is what I remember doing in D2 because you could only usually be effective if you invested your points in a few areas. Yes it's annoying to have to log in online to play SP but I guess there's not much that can be done about that. The leveling process seems a bit too automated but I guess that's too make sure the great unwashed massess don't get stuck with "dud" characters.

 

I'm in act 3 and having fun. Unfortunately judging by the fact that I'm getting achievements for finishing dialogues with different characters, it seems like act 4 will be super short and shitty, just like Diablo II. Kind of annoying, I was hoping act 4 would be just as lengthy as the others, but it seems like they ran out of money/original ideas/etc. or wanted to save stuff for future expansions.

Truth be told I would have enjoyed maybe 5 acts that were slightly shorter. Act 2 was pretty good but act 1 got monotonous very quickly and had way too much stuff completely disconnected from the story... act 3 is decent but it seems very linear in comparison to the others, no exploration so far. I think more locations to see rather than a few additional tilesets would have really helped break things up better. They went to a lot of trouble expanding the lore and we see very little of it.

If I have one big complaint with the game outside of mechanics and story, it's the way it drags you from one place to the next. Diablo, for me, was always about the feeling of being alone, whether that's in strange and hostile lands or in dungeons and caves. There's some of that in Diablo III, but there are too many cutscenes, scripted sequences and too much character interaction for my tastes. The size of the world is also such that I don't really feel like I'm trekking into dangerous, unexplored realms of a very deadly world. In Diablo II, all the really dangerous and horrible stuff happened far, far from town, in places no sane person would ever go, and it gave a much better sense of impending doom.

The feel really is very similar to an action game, not an RPG. The fact that you can't go between acts within the same game, the lack of branching paths, etc., they honestly probably wouldn't have lost much to just arrange things in a typical mission-to-mission structure. I really liked stumbling upon random dungeons/quests/etc. in the open wilderness (especially in act 3 of Diablo II) and that seems almost entirely gone once you get past act 1.

Also here's an IRC conversation where I ramble on about the game mechanics to myself.

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<eric> also the game feels too cold and manipulative for me.
<GDwarf> What's really sad is that since people are putting up with it, 'cause it's Blizzard, everyone else will do it
<GDwarf> And people won't complain
<eric> I mean in terms of mechanics.
<GDwarf> 'Cause they already put up with it
<eric> the loot treadmill is just a bit too obvious.
<eric> the presentation of everything is a bit too meta.
<GDwarf> If this doesn't go bad fast, it's going to become the de facto standard
<eric> like YOU BEAT X QUEST, NOW YOU GET TOWN PORTAL/CRAFTING/EPIC MOUNT/ETC. for no reason.
<GDwarf> Until a really big title completely crashes and burns
<eric> and then there's the combat.
<GDwarf> Which will take at least long enough for an entire generation of games to be unplayable after the publishers don't want to support them anymore
<eric> which mechanically speaking is... too simple.
<eric> at least right now.
<eric> everything is a function of DPS.
<eric> which is a direct result of two things.
<GDwarf> Unusual for a Diablo title
<GDwarf> But fits with how they coded WoW
<eric> a) your weapon and b) your primary attribute.
<eric> b) is of course influenced only by gear.
<eric> because there is no way to influence attributes otherwise.
<eric> except leveling which happens automagically.
<eric> and I mean, it works.
<eric> but it's too... obvious
<eric> and seeing stuff like "deals 200% of DPS as cold damage" is weird for a skill.
<GDwarf> Very WoW-esque, then
<eric> again, I understand how it works, and using percentages is actually good because it avoids the problem of having to balance every level of every skill etc.
<eric> but then you get into gameplay.
<eric> and the "flow" is very... I don't know
<eric> it's not really fun.
<eric> it seems more designed to keep you occupied.
<eric> as in.
<eric> staying alive is basically about a few things.
<eric> (since taking damage is unavoidable for the most part)
<eric> a) protection skills/spells
<eric> b) health orbs
<eric> c) healing potions
<eric> and the cooldowns of each of these seem balanced with enemy output specifically to make sure you are always going to be using one of the above.
<eric> and being too slow or mis-timing usually results in death
<eric> and again, they all kind of fit together in such a way that you are always mashing keys in sequence.
<eric> but it's not really fun, as I said, just... it's stuff to do.
<eric> it's not tactical at all once you've selected the right ability load-out.
<eric> (I refuse to call the builds, they're Call of Duty kits)
<eric> I also totally refuse to believe they couldn't have made manually assigning attributes work.
<eric> and in fact the lack of that really hurts customization more than they probably realized.
<eric> it's not just about "I can make numbars go up!!1"
<eric> it's also about things like, say.
<eric> I'm playing a Wizard. you could set up attributes like this:
<eric> 1) strength determines equipment I can wear and how fast I can move (heavier armor = slower movement)
<eric> 2) dexterity determines how quickly I can cast spells and how often I dodge
<eric> 3) vitality can be things like elemental resistances and max health, plus maybe some natural armor
<eric> 4) energy can be mana, mana regeneration, spell damage, etc.
<eric> Blizzard said that in Diablo II those were "broken" because everyone just got the minimums they needed for the best gear and pumped vitality.
<eric> so their solution was to just turn it all into equipment and get rid of the "middleman"
<eric> but that "middleman" could have had way more influence in gameplay if they had actually used their heads.
<eric> but my guess is, that was too complicated for the casual mass audiences who play MMOs.
<eric> so they decided to just go with cooldowns and constant button-mashing rhythm instead.
<eric> and leave the complexity not to planning etc. but to the item slot machine.
<eric> anyway fuck me, I'm a nerd

 

I really agree with the lack of feeling "alone". I sort of miss it, even playing only co-op.
It's nice to be out in the jungle/desert with your bros.