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

[Mrowak]

Ok, bros - so Diablo 3 is the first game in my life I bought because of the bad press. Yes, I am ashamed to support Kotick's empire and all that... only to see myself if it's this bad...

Boy is the beginning even more drab and slower than in Diablo 2. You'd think that action hack&slash would have some action to spice things up... But hell no - all I get is some bloody mook you kill from safe distance. The peak of tactics now is hurling 3 arcane balls (I play a wizard) - 10 paces back - hurl another three - rinse and repeat. Why the game can't be engaging from a get go? Why must it be so mind-dumbingly boring?

 

[shihonage]

You just rolled a 20 in your *summon Lyric Suite* spell, but i'm not in the mood to derail this thread, so i'll just say that you're a fucking moron and your shit is all retarded.

I read the novel. It was mind-blowing.

Then I watched Solaris from start to finish in its native Russian. It was a pretentious slog of extremely-drawn-out variety, the kind that raised the question - at which point does a "reintepretation" cross the line into being an insult to the source material?

The same question that comes to mind upon playing Diablo3...

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

There is no source material to Diablo 3, it's a chimera.

 

[circ]

You just rolled a 20 in your *summon Lyric Suite* spell, but i'm not in the mood to derail this thread, so i'll just say that you're a fucking moron and your shit is all retarded.

I read the novel. It was mind-blowing.

Then I watched Solaris from start to finish in its native Russian. It was a pretentious slog of extremely-drawn-out variety, the kind that raised the question - at which point does a "reintepretation" cross the line into being an insult to the source material?

The same question that comes to mind upon playing Diablo3...

Still better than Soderbergh. Hoo boy.

 

[Kraszu]

Boy is the beginning even more drab and slower than in Diablo 2. You'd think that action hack&slash would have some action to spice things up... But hell no - all I get is some bloody mook you kill from safe distance. The peak of tactics now is hurling 3 arcane balls (I play a wizard) - 10 paces back - hurl another three - rinse and repeat. Why the game can't be engaging from a get go? Why must it be so mind-dumbingly boring?

To not scare off new players. -that is response that Blizzard gives to complains about difficulty.

 

[made]

Out of curiosity, i fired up Titan Quest, which i kept in my Steam library, and the difference is substantial. I mean, in the sense that Diablo 3 is a much better game in almost every sense, except for the lack of a skill three.

Really? I've played both and I honestly don't see how D3 is supposedly superior. Gameplay is exactly the same (click stuff until it explodes), level design is the same (TQ is actually less corridory), quests are a joke, dialogue and story not worth the mention. The one major difference is that in TQ I looked forward to leveling up because it let me pick talents and abilities and plan my build the way I wanted. D3 automates that process and takes away control from the player which also takes away a large chunk of the fun.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

You just rolled a 20 in your *summon Lyric Suite* spell, but i'm not in the mood to derail this thread, so i'll just say that you're a fucking moron and your shit is all retarded.

I read the novel. It was mind-blowing.

Then I watched Solaris from start to finish in its native Russian. It was a pretentious slog of extremely-drawn-out variety, the kind that raised the question - at which point does a "reintepretation" cross the line into being an insult to the source material?

The same question that comes to mind upon playing Diablo3...

Still better than Soderbergh. Hoo boy.

It's me who prefered the Soderbergh one. It had all these orange filters and weird musical drones which bordered on total stupidity which somehow delighted me. The one from Tarkovski doesn't do it for me, it's like if he went deliberately bland to kill his style and shuffle the deck again (which did him good seing his ulterior movies). For me "Solaris" is the point blank of Tarkovski, I don't know what to think about it, really.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

You just rolled a 20 in your *summon Lyric Suite* spell, but i'm not in the mood to derail this thread, so i'll just say that you're a fucking moron and your shit is all retarded.

I read the novel. It was mind-blowing.

Then I watched Solaris from start to finish in its native Russian. It was a pretentious slog of extremely-drawn-out variety, the kind that raised the question - at which point does a "reintepretation" cross the line into being an insult to the source material?

The same question that comes to mind upon playing Diablo3...

Yeah man, I agree. But Event Horizon? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

 

[abija]

Wow, it's much easier to argue with people when I can just paraphrase everything they say in such a way as to avoid having to respond to anything they've actually said! Bonus points to my ego if I can insult them in the process as well! I should start doing this all the time.

That's not a legitimate concern for this game. If they made you clear the previous level then you would have a point.
It's just amazing how a couple of days ago you were complaining about difficulty and now you want checkpoints during boss fights?
Fair enough. Let me elaborate.

One of the key design goals of Diablo III's combat system, which I think Blizzard were (kind of) successful with, was to get rid of instant death. In Diablo II, usually death, especially at high levels, was a result of running out of potions or simply getting one-shotted. This led to this war of attrition that revolved around dealing damage, drinking potions and running to town for more. In reality the biggest limiting factors were your fingers on the potion hotkeys and how quick you could return to town, not anything mechanical about the combat itself.

This is why health orbs were introduced and potions were given cooldowns. Blizzard tried to make combat more interesting by forcing alternatives to drinking potions, like using protection spells, slows, stuns and other stuff. For the most part, this was a success. However, there are a select few instances in the game where Blizzard break their own rules, most of them pertaining to elite or boss monsters.

Mr esteemed game journalist, instant death has nothing to do with potion spam/health orbs mechanics. Instant death just means you are not ready stat wise for that fight. So you should probably put some defensive stats on your char, or in case you rushed go back a bit and level up.

For example, the ents in the first act leave behind plants that explode, and they are very, very lethal. While easy to see, almost all players will have at least one cheap death as a result of them because there is no way to know in advance what they are - it's either stand on plants and die, or don't and learn nothing about how dangerous they are. There's similar stuff like "molten" enemies, who leave behind small explosive fire orb things on death - less lethal, but still can be a big problem and combined with lag can lead to an easy death, or one when your guard is down.

None of those are oneshot mechanics (in lower difficulties when you learn to avoid them) and killing players when they're careless or when sometimes they meet a new type of enemy with a surprising ability is fine. Die -> learn -> try again is a perfectly fine mechanic and they did a pretty good job with letting you get fast enough in the fight.
What's one of the fondest memories people have from D1, riight... fresh meat -> DEAD.

Bosses also do this, like the Butcher's grapple attack and Azmodan's fireballs. Can they be avoided? Yes - but if your cooldown has run out, you don't have a healing potion to use, or you lag a little bit, you'll often die in a single hit (or immediately after). These fights primarily revolve dodging these particular attacks on a changing playing field (specifically, the floor deals damage, so you need to keep moving), and victory occurs when you dodge the insta-death attacks long enough.

In practice, this isn't very much fun, because when playing solo, you have to restart a boss fight, or run to where you died from the last checkpoint. Sometimes this means as much as 2-5 minutes of lost time. Blizzard's goal with death mechanics was to deter death without it really causing any loss of progress, and they succeeded... but only in a multiplayer context, because in those, time loss is minimal due to being able to teleport to others from town. In single-player, it means long walks back to where you left off, or replaying the same boss only to die again when he/she has 10% life left, etc.

Now you start assuming what Blizzard's goal is. You apparently don't even enjoy the type of games they produce yet you pretend to know how they design them? You can't even teleport in boss fights, other players need to resurect you (which has a certain amount of risk) or finish the fight without you.
As far as death penalties are concerned, 2-5 mins running back (which is GREATLY exagerated unless you take different routes) can be considered quite a mild one. It certainly was blamed of being dumbed down as opposed to the naked run in D2.

So yeah, basically what I'm saying is - insta-death mechanics suck, and as implemented in Diablo III they continue to suck; they're very similar to dreaded "press X not to die" QTEs... except sometimes you can't always press X because your cooldown is still going, and then you've lost 5 minutes of your life doing something boring. The potion-guzzling hasn't really been fixed, it's only been obfuscated because there are more ways of surviving - mashing Q vs. the 3 button on my keyboard isn't really that different in effect, only aesthetic. And when you run out of buttons to mash, the effect is exactly the same as running out of potions to chug - you die.

And that's the armchair game designer showing up. Starting from an erroneous assumption (instant-death mechanics are very few if any, I can't remember one at least) and ending up with the conclusion that every action game is a QTE. Why did you stop there, every game where you have to perform input in a finite amount of time is QTE too, damn them all to hell.
To follow up, your astute mind discovered the problem with the potions wasn't really in the "aesthetic" and you probably expected the game to fix that underlying cause. I mean we could just make enemies not do damage so we don't need to react to it by using abilities or potions.

 

[DraQ]

Call me a stupid idiot as much as you want, I still like it and it doesn't stop me from enjoying great games of yonder

That's not the reason I call you a stupid idiot.
Even if you liked oblivion I would just shake my head in distaste but not necessarily called you a stupid idiot.

I call you a stupid idiot because your choice has consequences and the consequence of everyone bending over to Blizzard's DRM scheme will hit the entire industry, because this kind of DRM isn't genre specific.

In other words, you're breaking the line because you can't resist fapping to your clickfest H&S even if this mean you will add your part to a potential disaster.

In other words, you're breaking the line and, in good tradition of Codexian WH40k image spam:

Also, how the fuck can you like shoddybugger's Solaris?
It was a turd and an insult to the original.

 

[Zed]

Abija has a point.
It feels like they balanced the game around the auction house or something. Some stuff are simply too difficult without appropriate gear. For me, a new sword meant the difference between beating Act4 hell and being stuck on the first pack of mobs.

 

[Gragt]

The Diablo serie never had much of an interesting world, and that's mostly because it never had great characters.

That's bollocks.

Take TES - very interesting world, but most characters are hahahaohwow.jpg in terms of memorability.

Bollocks yourself, o scaly one. I didn't talk of the character's memorability but their quality. The two are different and not necessarily linked. Then, on the subject of TES, it has indeed an interesting world because it builds it with stories found inside the games themselves — unlike Blizzard or Bioware that often use extra-diegetic means like publishing novels — and those stories are often about interesting characters. Sure, they're mostly made from a few wide brushstrokes, but the stories are short and to the point and so you get to see what makes these people who they are, even if it doesn't get much farther than that. Take the stories about Tiber Septim, Barenziah, the Wolf Queen of Solitude, the Tribunal, etc. In the case of the "real" characters within a fictive world, it's fun to see the differences in the ways they are presented. And then there are the twice fictive characters, like Decumus Scotti, whose adventures also help to flesh out the world while also telling a fun tale. Yeah, there are the recollections of boring historical facts — which can be just as boring as our recollections of boring historical facts — but thankfully TES is developped through more than just that: characters.

There. You can all continue spreading your misinformed opinions about Solaris to the masses. :D

 

[racofer]

I'm rather baffled by the reports on this thread. I need to see this pile of shit for myself, so can anyone PM me a guest key?

 

[felipepepe]

Hell, was kicked out of my saturday morning single-player game because Blizzard shutted down the servers for maintance...

 

[Average Manatee]

inb4 someone spends $100 on a weapon then their character gets rolled back.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

I find the game really, really fun. That some aspects like the stats have been simplified doesn't bother me, it was always a mindless slasher in the first place. And it is compensated by some nice ideas and design decisions.

The skills are fun to use and make combat more dynamic. Crafting is pretty nice. The followers as well. I was surprised to see that they went for Bioware-lite companions (with dialogue), but it's nothing that takes up a big part of the experience at all, if any. Story and dialogue are OK for that type of game, which is basically mainstream, popcorn fantasy. It's dark fantasy, but not over the top and cringe-worthy, nothing like BioWare. The environments are really gorgeous, and not demanding at all. I have a friend who plays on a really old laptop and it works perfectly. I expected it to look far more cartoonish and WoW-like, but it's actually OK.

Thumbs up. The fan service with the Butcher was really cringe-worthy, though. I was like, really??? At least it looks like most of the boss fights will have more variety in them than "click on monster and use potions until he's dead".

 

[felipepepe]

Yeah, the boss fights improved a lot, especially without portal cheating. Facing Duriel in D2 was ridiculous....enter lair, open portal, keep fighting until out of potions, enter portal, buy more potions and repeat...

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Abija has a point.
It feels like they balanced the game around the auction house or something. Some stuff are simply too difficult without appropriate gear. For me, a new sword meant the difference between beating Act4 hell and being stuck on the first pack of mobs.

If you're not familiar with WoW character development, it goes like this: A character gains skills and stat increases automatically as they level; each level, they also get a talent point, to allocate to one of three talent trees; talents predominantly modify/improve the way skills work or grant passive bonuses, occasionally they can add a new skill. As far as I could tell, D3 runes do the same thing, with the caveat that you can only have one rune equipped for each skill. It is kind of telling that they ended up with a system that's less complex than the one in WoW. Another thing that comes with this is the extreme importance of gear - having a decent weapon absolutely trivializes the Beta, not that it was difficult in the first place. But more on that later.

Welcome to WoW. Ah, feels so good to be right.

 

[Ulminati]

Hell, was kicked out of my saturday morning single-player game because Blizzard shutted down the servers for maintance...

Isn't it nice to know that a few months down the road, those of us who held out for a piratebay version won't have to deal with that bullshit?

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

inb4 someone spends $100 on a weapon then their character gets rolled back.

I have no idea why anybody would want to do that. I mean, hell... the game's pretty much over once you hit 60. What's left to do anyway? Grind gear? For what? Pvp? Don't make me laugh.

As for the game... well... Diablo 2 had three solid first acts and a shitty, rushed, fourth act, and Diablo 3 seems to follow this tradition, but with a twist: Act one and two are nice and fleshed out while act three and four fly by so quickly that you're left wondering what the hell happened. (It doesn't help that Act 3 three is filled with Chris Metzen's stereotypical raving as the bad guy either.)

Still... it's a good waste of time.

 

[Heresiarch]

Just read the spoilers on wikipedia. Well, it seems Blizzard's tradition of massive lore-rape since WC3 is still there.

As for the game itself, it definetly does NOT feel like D1 or even D2...it's more like a more serious Torchlight. The dungeon designs just feel DAMN TOO MUCH like Torchlight for fuck sake. In D1 and D2, the dungeons and crypts can really give the claustrophobic feeling, but in D3, the cathedral's dungeons and the crypts all have wide and looong hallways and apparently very tall ceilings, not mention all the decorations like the big statues and unreachable hallways, which are all exactly what Torchlight's dungeons are like. They all makes me feel the dungeons are EPIC, which is very wrong in my dictionary for a Diablo game. There are a lot of details that make the game really lacks the feeling of a real Diablo game, like skeletons with cartoonish screams and yellings, lack of gruesome decorations like mutilated corpses, and last but not the least I really don't like the colour tone of the game as well. Instead of D2's Act 1's plains, the old Tristram Road in D3 reminds me of WoW's Duskwood...

 

[Jasede]

lack of gruesome decorations like mutilated corpses

I can't move five feet without wading through blood and torn-apart bodies.

 

[Gragt]

A real-life BRO and I started to play it on Nightmare and it's rather challenging, much much more than Normal. It's very fun and we can't wait to see what's next.

 

[aron searle]

Impressions from first few hours of gameplay.

Fucking colours, colours everywhere, exploding star streaking messages every fucking five seconds. The screen feels extremely cluttered with colourful messages exploding everywhere any time something happens.

4 fucking players, FOUR, why so little, this is a serious decline?

Chat box is tiny, can't seem to find a chat "room", can't pick from list of games, just press "join" and you are assigned to a game.

Feels much less "multiplayery" than D2 if you get what I mean.

In motion the graphics are as cartoony as they seem on stills, but still not quite to my taste.

Would agree it feels more like torchlight than diablo 2.



Playing demon hunter, the machine gun arrow skill is very cartoony.



Frankly I bought it because there isnt anything else like it worth buying at present, would give it a B- as a hack and slash.

Graphics are a D, just don't know why the fuck they went with this cartoony look, it's fucking horrible and has no atmosphere.

 

[poetic codex]

For a billion dollar company, why did they cheap out on the voice acting? Leah sounds like the female equivalent of "Bob from Accounting" which is ironic because she is a veteran voice actress, so it's probably the sound director's fault. They probably didn't give her much to work with in terms of setting up the mood/feel of the game, or only payed her enough money to "phone in" her performance. Gives the whole game an amateurish feel.