They've also been a part of pretty much every game in the genre for the last decade or so.
You can't boil something like 'damage' or 'deadliness' down to a single number anyways. Is a water jet cutter more or less deadly than a hammer? Bullet vs arrow? Etc.
Why is that supposed to be my problem? I am not an advocate of simplistic HP-DPS damage models. They are shit.
On those rare occasions when HPs *are* an appropriate solution to a problem (when they are low-detail way to embody statistics of getting hit), neither HP nor damage inflation makes no sense and DPS is a worthless measure.
Physics and anatomy are complicated, games abstract them for a reason.
That's never an excuse to abstract poorly.
Abstraction is basically a black box put over part of a system, in which you are allowed to implement something simpler than the system itself. If the math works out and whatever comes out of the box looks like it came out of the actual system itself (within the limits of applicability of given abstraction), the abstraction works out. In this sense yes, it very much does make sense to talk about deadliness of a fireball VS a cannon even if the damage dealing mechanism happens to be different.
Damage numbers and hp don't get bigger because you sword or character is more deadly, they go up because if there'd be no difference between anything you fought during the entire game.
That's a piss poor and brain fucking dead retarded excuse. How exactly is bloaty shit for bloaty shit's sake a good idea?
No other genre suffers the cancer of players masturbating over the numbers going up. In most other genres players don't even see the actual numbers.
Take Doom for instance - no one has ever complained that you don't replace your basic shotgun by one that does a few millions damage but the enemies are bloated accordingly.
But if you really want to you might LARP that both numbers are going up at whatever rate you find satisfactory (linear? quadratic? exponential? Ackermann function on Graham's numbers?) so the overall result is the same.
Cosmetics not mattering has always been a load of shit. Affecting gameplay or not, nobody wants to walk around looking like some sort of mish-mash clown in intentionally ugly looking armor so they feel more enticed to "stand out" by dropping cash. These aren't games you just drive-by, beat in a playthrough and go on. They're designed for replayability and to keep you coming back. Sinking hours into a game by the hundreds or thousands will eventually make most people break and shell out. It's scumbaggery done with a smile because, "it's only cosmetics." Being fine with shit doesn't make it smell any better.
I disagree. As long as the baseline art design remains palatable and cosmetics are either not an eyesore or are not forced upon other players, having microtransactions for cosmetic shit is acceptable.
I don't give a fuck if some weak willed, borderline retarded twat caves in and shells out all his daddy's money to have pimped out armor with bling.
What is not acceptable for me is always online shit, but that holds even in the absence of microtxns.
My main problem with Diablo 2 isn't even with its inflation, though that doesn't help. But what really kills it for me is how different the atmosphere is. Diablo 1 really nailed it with the NPCs, the village, the music, the enemy design, the spell design, the way magic worked with you having to look for those tomes. A lot of it was really simple and people might say the healer or the blacksmith are hardly the epitome of drama. But that is besides the point, they worked within the setting and worked really well. Diablo 2 never has the same impact with the player, at least it didn't to me. I specially dislike the class selection. The necromancer might have worked, although obviously not as a hero. The sorceress is less interesting as a character than the wizard from diablo 1, which at least looked foreign without looking displaced. The barbarian and the paladin too didn't look like they belonged in the same setting as Diablo 1, altoughI suppose it could have been made to work. The amazon however looked bad, really breaking the gothic atmosphere, but I have a special hatred for the druid because after making it such a big deal the secrets that were supposed buried in the church in Diablo 1, Diablo 2 comes along with a class based on a completely different kind of magic from the one we had seen in the previous game, and this just makes it feel cheap somehow.
You could make the classes work if you adjusted the lore and magic system to better fit with 1. The issue is setting going full retard and purely point based ability system, not classes themselves.
The Barbarian is more prone to looking cartoony because this is Blizzard and they can't help but put gigantic glow sticks in the hands of big guys.
That's the problem with blizztard, though.
I liked the old sites showing they wanted to make Diablo a turn-based RPG. Guess that didn't fly (which is fine now).
It's not that it didn't fly but accidentally did something that kept auto-advancing turns and were surprised how well this worked.
I don't really think there is much point to TB with single character, BTW. First person Diablo would have been a potentially better idea even though it would go further from the original.
Meanwhile, in D1, the entire thing is more landed, more "realistic". Fighting multiple enemies at once is dangerous, having to use the architecture in your favour is often a must to survive (even gets silly sometimes, like door camping). The entire atmosphere is more grounded and darker.
This. Even though you do end up fighting huge mobs in D1, gangbang is an ever present threat and you don't have the huge speed advantage in the form of sprint afterburner that allows you to disengage and GTFO if overwhelmed. At best you can get some minimal breather out of specific pathfinding quirks of various monsters.
Tome Magic was far more exploration-focused than the magical skill trees of the new games.
The main advantage is that it relies on what you find. In D2 you can just plan your entire build because you develop by spending points. It's all deterministic.
D1 was less deterministic in all aspects than its successors, dungeon layouts and enemy composition included.
D2 is a world tour of fighting horror enemies, mummies in the desert, cannibal-pygmies in the jungle, abominable snowmen etc, the original feel of D1 gets lost somewhere but that's to be expected with a much bigger game. There are some new cool enemies but they got really lazy in some cases too, giant spiders, insect swarms, beetles, vultures, furry cat-people(?), evil porcupines shooting thorns, that's as shitty as it gets.
True. The world tour also works remarkably poorly due to how theme park it is. They could have executed the concept (after all journey east was hinted at since the ending of D1) if they stuck closely to what would work with quasi-medieval European setting.
Act 2 could have worked if they as much as dropped all the derpy shit in the desert.
Act 3 could have worked if they didn't necessarily make it the last act or Mesoamerican jungleswamp (temperate european swampy area could be worth it for example, so would the setting's equivalent of something near the Euphrate or Sud).
Another difference is the quality of enemies, in D1 if you get surrounded or get into bad position where archers start hitting you, you can just die to some random low-level monsters. In D2 most normal monsters are just there to get killed, the threat comes mostly from elites and their modifiers, and you can always run away. D2 has much bigger areas so it wouldn't work without running, but it also changes the combat dynamics from D1 completely when you can just charge an archer or a mage and outmaneuver most monsters. The classes are different and more powerful than in D1 and fit the world of D2 but wouldn't necessarily fit the world of D1. D2 is still a great game but it's not really the same type of game as D1.
The thing is all those open spaces didn't add anything to the gameplay. A game like Diablo needs battlefield to be structured by all sorts of obstacles. Large featureless planes are boring.
As far as I agree with the point that D1 had an overall more consistent theme, and that the sequel abandons a lot of the tension by adopting globetrotting style of adventure, stylistically and atmosphere-wise D2 is still leagues above most things that followed. In my mind diluted awesomeness is still awesomeness. I could never quite get why the second act desert is what killed the mood for so many people.
Catgirls and demonic vultures.
But for me it really went downhill with act 3. Desert at least fit thematically into the journey east from quasi-medieval Europe.
Kurwast is where game just tells you to stop fucking around with your stupid character and just roll a Sorceress uninstall.exe.
Fixed it for you.
