Before I get ripped a new one, I just want to say that I understand that almost everyone here loved DII to death and I'm not hating you for it. Although the title is rather authoritative in my dislike of the game, I also played many hours of the game with friends, and they liked it more than me, and I'm still friends with them (except this one guy who liked Daikatana, but that's a rant for another day).
I really hope they make some core changes in the design philosophy in Diablo III from the way Diablo II is built. From the gameplay trailer, I see that one can now easily utilize more of the abilities more readily via the hotkeys; which is wonderful but useless if the skill tree works at all like the previous game. A clear problem I had with the game is that it requires your to specialize in specific skill sets in each classes skill tree to make an effective character. Furthermore, the game had no way of communicating this to the player, and he/she could easily “ruin” their character by placing skill points in various skills that would later prove to be useless (this was mitigated somewhat in much later builds of the game by allowing skills to improve other skills down the tree).
The core issue is with the design of DII 's character class system. For a game that allows you to place skill points and stat points that directly effect how your character works within the game engine (and leaves it open for you to see the numerical results, not much unlike a pen and paper RPG), there isn't' a whole lot of diversity in character development. One would assume that when you have such an open pallet to play with, allowing you to place points anywhere, that there would be wildly varying customized characters cutting through the game. But it just isn't so, there's only a finite number of specialized character builds that can survive as the game goes on. On top of that, despite the fact that the game allows you to place points anywhere you want, diversity is severely punished. Any kind of “jack-of-all-trades” or “red mage” character builds just can't cut it after a while, even if just supporting other characters.
It would appear that the design team obviously had various sub-classes in mind when they build the character classes to begin with. The various effective builds grouped various ability types related to each other, and the correct skill point placements to make the builds effective left only a little common variations in skill choice beyond that. Instead of giving the player the illusion that they have freedom in building a character class, they could easily do the vary same thing much more intuitively by having the player select a sub-class from the start, and allow them to spend points in the auxiliary skills to supplement the class. This would have been much more accessible to the player, and not require researching forums for build types or countless hours of testing builds instead of just playing the game. It also removes the risk of permanent error when placing points, and possibly allow for further character diversity.
Another problem earlier in the game's life was that several skills, and at times whole characters (looking your way Necromancer) where totally ineffective. What is the point of making abilities and play types if they don't serve a purpose in the game world. Even if this was fixed later, this isn't something that should be hashed out after years of patches. This is a problem that Blizzard has consistently had since DII as well. Warcraft III had unit types and at times whole factions that just didn't cut the mustard, and WoW was eventually sent to a new development team to sort out the issues in recent builds and expansions. Patches fix game glitches that were missed in beta, like clipping issues or to improve the game; not for milling around with core design elements.
Let me take a moment and talk about some games that don't have these issues. Phantasy Star Online came out shortly after Diablo II. Not only was it fully 3D, it had a fully balanced character class roster, and one could easily diversify each character's abilities in much the same way one could in Diablo I (magic tomes/technique disks could be used by anyone who had met the stat requirements excluding robots). Phantasy Star Universe was similarly diverse, but through a freely changeable job class system. Speaking of freely changeable job classes, Final Fantasy XI is an excellent example of balance and diversity. By allow any character to change to any class at any time, making the class level the character level, and having the option for a sub job, it has the most amount of diversification and balance out of almost any online RPG (although, mostly because of the class building culture of Diablo II, many American players never fully explored this, and fanatically stuck to specific race/class combinations that seemed to work well. This is why I mostly played with Japanese players).
I hope Diablo III addresses these issues, and maybe takes some examples from other games that have come out since Diablo II. With the ability to utilize more abilities at once with a better control scheme, and the possibilities that can be reaped from new technology, I hope that we will be able to use more diverse tools with our characters and have more diverse characters than before.
By making the game more accessible you are literally taking the RPG away. I spent a long time deciding what skills I need and asking people if a build like that would work. This is the part that makes RPGs fun. You take that away, not only you are ruining the fun, but you are also cutting the playability ten-fold.
I think Diablo nailed the RPG element and I'm quite sure a ton of other people will agree with me.
I'm sure Blizzard is fully aware of the critics reguarding Diablo 2's shortcomings. There will always be balancing issues in games of this nature. They can certainly be looked over a little more closely but I don't think we will ever bare witness to a gaming experience of this type where character balancing won't rear it's head.
By making the game more accessible you are literally taking the RPG away. I spent a long time deciding what skills I need and asking people if a build like that would work. This is the part that makes RPGs fun. You take that away, not only you are ruining the fun, but you are also cutting the playability ten-fold.
I think Diablo nailed the RPG element and I'm quite sure a ton of other people will agree with me.
That comes from a school of thinking that the stats and dice make a Role Playing Game. This sometimes gets the negative moniker "Roll Player" instead of "Role Player".
Regardless, let me give you an alternative solution. Maybe instead of streamlining the class making process, why not make the abilities actual "abilities" instead of attacks. Why should all these abilities add damage or replace the damage your character does with his/her attack, they should just be a different way for your character to attack for specific situations. Then adding points would change duration/effective range/amount of usage of said ability.
If the skills were designed this way, none of the abilities would be weaker than others, and if you liked a particular skill you could increase it's usability without forgoing the ability to use other abilities when the time is right.
That wouldn't take so much away from the point building, and possibly solve some of the diversification and balance issues. This is also more like the pen and paper RPG's the game takes alot of ideas from.
I totaly agree with you for the Skill part. Personaly, I had fun searching for the best build (myself) for my characters but I can understand how it could be if I wouldn't really care that much and would have put some points on useless skills and later I would have regret it.
For the second part, I totaly disagree with you :D. You are trying to compare a Hack n' slash game and a Online RPG. Diablo was not a RPG, clearly not. And it never intended to be one. And Final Fantasy XI should be compared to WoW, not Diablo Serie. Cause in WoW, you can change drasticly your spec, of course you do not switch your class. If you rolled a warrior, you cannot become a mage by exemple. But talent and gear builds are so well done no warrior looks perfectly the same.
Back to Diablo. I REALLY wish they do something about this skill tree problem. I think they should look around the other games and see how, like even in WoW, every skills and talents are useful in some way. And of course, Blizz should make it possible to take out points previously put in the talent tree. But I think they will do it, it probably already a goal for them. I hated to have 3 different Sorc for MFing, Hydras and nova (exemple)
Even if DI is a classic you would go play back to DI right now, you wouldnt reach The Butcher yet you would be pissed of how old this game got!
I have to go on DII. Even if the game is soooo repeatable, it was fun to see again and again the same zones. But in DI, After you saw 2 level of the caves you were finding the time long.......
Even if DI is a classic you would go play back to DI right now, you would reach The Butcher you would be pissed of how old this game got!
Back then you could do something innovative like closeing the door on the butcher use the tactical advantage that he can't open doors and lay on him with arrows.
It's nice to see that they'll be bringing enviromental awareness back to the game at least.
Your description of the skill tree is accurate with the exception that you say there wasn't diversity, I saw all kinds of chars running around d2 and there was a huge variety in builds. I would go so far as to say that the skill building style of character is one of the core elements of diablo 2.
You talk about having to research builds and remake chars to experiment with skills with disdain but I personally believe experimenting with new builds is part of what has kept d2 going for so long. People love to try and build new specialized builds, even to build characters that revolve around certain special items. Many of the people who are still playing diablo 8 years later are the people who sit up all night on forums obsessing about their buiild and that is what they love about the game.
A sub class system would fundamentally change the game. To me a sub class implies restricting abilities to things "appropriate" to the sub class and then specializing based on that. To me this offers less options. If someone wants to max the level 1 ability in one tree and the top end ability in a completely different tree they should be able to and it just might even work. There are some pretty weird builds in d2 that work just fine.
As far as fear of ruining your char because you don't know what your doing, they did say they wanted people to be able to respec which imo is a much better option but it needs to be handled carefully or it willl really throw off the long term replayablity of the game.
As far as classes being weak at low levels, to me that is a huge bonus, I love it when a game uses the idea of a character starting out weak and difficult to play but ending up super powerful in return at the end game. It is a trade off. I want to be able to mess up my char by picking the wrong skills. Picking skills is just as much a part of the game as hacking up monsters. It adds an element of strategy to the game and it is no fun if there is no possibility that you will fail.
D2 did have some problems and I am sure blizzard is keenly aware of that. I disagree that the skill tree (at least in the way you are saying) was one of them though.
That said, I also hope d3 is better than d2, seriously, who wouldn't want it to be better. "Hey, you wanna play a game better than your favorite game of all time?" who is going to answer that question with a no?
Your description of the skill tree is accurate with the exception that you say there wasn't diversity, I saw all kinds of chars running around d2 and there was a huge variety in builds. I would go so far as to say that the skill building style of character is one of the core elements of diablo 2.
You talk about having to research builds and remake chars to experiment with skills with disdain but I personally believe experimenting with new builds is part of what has kept d2 going for so long. People love to try and build new specialized builds, even to build characters that revolve around certain special items. Many of the people who are still playing diablo 8 years later are the people who sit up all night on forums obsessing about their buiild and that is what they love about the game.
A sub class system would fundamentally change the game. To me a sub class implies restricting abilities to things "appropriate" to the sub class and then specializing based on that. To me this offers less options. If someone wants to max the level 1 ability in one tree and the top end ability in a completely different tree they should be able to and it just might even work. There are some pretty weird builds in d2 that work just fine.
As far as fear of ruining your char because you don't know what your doing, they did say they wanted people to be able to respec which imo is a much better option but it needs to be handled carefully or it willl really throw off the long term replayablity of the game.
As far as classes being weak at low levels, to me that is a huge bonus, I love it when a game uses the idea of a character starting out weak and difficult to play but ending up super powerful in return at the end game. It is a trade off. I want to be able to mess up my char by picking the wrong skills. Picking skills is just as much a part of the game as hacking up monsters. It adds an element of strategy to the game and it is no fun if there is no possibility that you will fail.
D2 did have some problems and I am sure blizzard is keenly aware of that. I disagree that the skill tree (at least in the way you are saying) was one of them though.
That said, I also hope d3 is better than d2, seriously, who wouldn't want it to be better. "Hey, you wanna play a game better than your favorite game of all time?" who is going to answer that question with a no?
Yeah but it isn't fun when some cool looking skills are completely useless...
I don't think D3 should be an easter egg hunt for the good skills only (with the bad skills serving as traps for the naive).
I really hope they make some core changes in the design philosophy in Diablo III from the way Diablo II is built. From the gameplay trailer, I see that one can now easily utilize more of the abilities more readily via the hotkeys; which is wonderful but useless if the skill tree works at all like the previous game. A clear problem I had with the game is that it requires your to specialize in specific skill sets in each classes skill tree to make an effective character. Furthermore, the game had no way of communicating this to the player, and he/she could easily “ruin” their character by placing skill points in various skills that would later prove to be useless (this was mitigated somewhat in much later builds of the game by allowing skills to improve other skills down the tree).
The core issue is with the design of DII 's character class system. For a game that allows you to place skill points and stat points that directly effect how your character works within the game engine (and leaves it open for you to see the numerical results, not much unlike a pen and paper RPG), there isn't' a whole lot of diversity in character development. One would assume that when you have such an open pallet to play with, allowing you to place points anywhere, that there would be wildly varying customized characters cutting through the game. But it just isn't so, there's only a finite number of specialized character builds that can survive as the game goes on. On top of that, despite the fact that the game allows you to place points anywhere you want, diversity is severely punished. Any kind of “jack-of-all-trades” or “red mage” character builds just can't cut it after a while, even if just supporting other characters.
It would appear that the design team obviously had various sub-classes in mind when they build the character classes to begin with. The various effective builds grouped various ability types related to each other, and the correct skill point placements to make the builds effective left only a little common variations in skill choice beyond that. Instead of giving the player the illusion that they have freedom in building a character class, they could easily do the vary same thing much more intuitively by having the player select a sub-class from the start, and allow them to spend points in the auxiliary skills to supplement the class. This would have been much more accessible to the player, and not require researching forums for build types or countless hours of testing builds instead of just playing the game. It also removes the risk of permanent error when placing points, and possibly allow for further character diversity.
Another problem earlier in the game's life was that several skills, and at times whole characters (looking your way Necromancer) where totally ineffective. What is the point of making abilities and play types if they don't serve a purpose in the game world. Even if this was fixed later, this isn't something that should be hashed out after years of patches. This is a problem that Blizzard has consistently had since DII as well. Warcraft III had unit types and at times whole factions that just didn't cut the mustard, and WoW was eventually sent to a new development team to sort out the issues in recent builds and expansions. Patches fix game glitches that were missed in beta, like clipping issues or to improve the game; not for milling around with core design elements.
Let me take a moment and talk about some games that don't have these issues. Phantasy Star Online came out shortly after Diablo II. Not only was it fully 3D, it had a fully balanced character class roster, and one could easily diversify each character's abilities in much the same way one could in Diablo I (magic tomes/technique disks could be used by anyone who had met the stat requirements excluding robots). Phantasy Star Universe was similarly diverse, but through a freely changeable job class system. Speaking of freely changeable job classes, Final Fantasy XI is an excellent example of balance and diversity. By allow any character to change to any class at any time, making the class level the character level, and having the option for a sub job, it has the most amount of diversification and balance out of almost any online RPG (although, mostly because of the class building culture of Diablo II, many American players never fully explored this, and fanatically stuck to specific race/class combinations that seemed to work well. This is why I mostly played with Japanese players).
I hope Diablo III addresses these issues, and maybe takes some examples from other games that have come out since Diablo II. With the ability to utilize more abilities at once with a better control scheme, and the possibilities that can be reaped from new technology, I hope that we will be able to use more diverse tools with our characters and have more diverse characters than before.
But, this will definately be better than Diablo 2
I think Diablo nailed the RPG element and I'm quite sure a ton of other people will agree with me.
That comes from a school of thinking that the stats and dice make a Role Playing Game. This sometimes gets the negative moniker "Roll Player" instead of "Role Player".
Regardless, let me give you an alternative solution. Maybe instead of streamlining the class making process, why not make the abilities actual "abilities" instead of attacks. Why should all these abilities add damage or replace the damage your character does with his/her attack, they should just be a different way for your character to attack for specific situations. Then adding points would change duration/effective range/amount of usage of said ability.
If the skills were designed this way, none of the abilities would be weaker than others, and if you liked a particular skill you could increase it's usability without forgoing the ability to use other abilities when the time is right.
That wouldn't take so much away from the point building, and possibly solve some of the diversification and balance issues. This is also more like the pen and paper RPG's the game takes alot of ideas from.
For the second part, I totaly disagree with you :D. You are trying to compare a Hack n' slash game and a Online RPG. Diablo was not a RPG, clearly not. And it never intended to be one. And Final Fantasy XI should be compared to WoW, not Diablo Serie. Cause in WoW, you can change drasticly your spec, of course you do not switch your class. If you rolled a warrior, you cannot become a mage by exemple. But talent and gear builds are so well done no warrior looks perfectly the same.
Back to Diablo. I REALLY wish they do something about this skill tree problem. I think they should look around the other games and see how, like even in WoW, every skills and talents are useful in some way. And of course, Blizz should make it possible to take out points previously put in the talent tree. But I think they will do it, it probably already a goal for them. I hated to have 3 different Sorc for MFing, Hydras and nova (exemple)
Even if DI is a classic you would go play back to DI right now, you wouldnt reach The Butcher yet you would be pissed of how old this game got!
I have to go on DII. Even if the game is soooo repeatable, it was fun to see again and again the same zones. But in DI, After you saw 2 level of the caves you were finding the time long.......
Back then you could do something innovative like closeing the door on the butcher use the tactical advantage that he can't open doors and lay on him with arrows.
It's nice to see that they'll be bringing enviromental awareness back to the game at least.
You talk about having to research builds and remake chars to experiment with skills with disdain but I personally believe experimenting with new builds is part of what has kept d2 going for so long. People love to try and build new specialized builds, even to build characters that revolve around certain special items. Many of the people who are still playing diablo 8 years later are the people who sit up all night on forums obsessing about their buiild and that is what they love about the game.
A sub class system would fundamentally change the game. To me a sub class implies restricting abilities to things "appropriate" to the sub class and then specializing based on that. To me this offers less options. If someone wants to max the level 1 ability in one tree and the top end ability in a completely different tree they should be able to and it just might even work. There are some pretty weird builds in d2 that work just fine.
As far as fear of ruining your char because you don't know what your doing, they did say they wanted people to be able to respec which imo is a much better option but it needs to be handled carefully or it willl really throw off the long term replayablity of the game.
As far as classes being weak at low levels, to me that is a huge bonus, I love it when a game uses the idea of a character starting out weak and difficult to play but ending up super powerful in return at the end game. It is a trade off. I want to be able to mess up my char by picking the wrong skills. Picking skills is just as much a part of the game as hacking up monsters. It adds an element of strategy to the game and it is no fun if there is no possibility that you will fail.
D2 did have some problems and I am sure blizzard is keenly aware of that. I disagree that the skill tree (at least in the way you are saying) was one of them though.
That said, I also hope d3 is better than d2, seriously, who wouldn't want it to be better. "Hey, you wanna play a game better than your favorite game of all time?" who is going to answer that question with a no?
Yeah but it isn't fun when some cool looking skills are completely useless...
I don't think D3 should be an easter egg hunt for the good skills only (with the bad skills serving as traps for the naive).
That's like saying a 1940 ford is faster than a 2007 ferrari.
More items, more classes, more quests, more story, more playability, more logic, more EVERYTHING and yet you aren't satisfied?
You are dumb, and unfortunately, because you are loud, are one of the reasons diablo 3 may be a failure.