A game you've obviously never played or you'd know that pressing hotkeys and clicking a mouse in a game similar to Diablo CAN require skill.
Is it skill, or knowledge of best-used combinations and tricks? I did not say that there was no skill involved in Diablo, all that I said was that the item differences tend to overcome skill differences. Assuming that a player has at least some idea of what he/she is doing. And, we were not talking about PvP, the discussion pertained to PvM. Again, there is some skill involved in implementing timings of attacks, movement, potion drinking, etc. But these patterns are repetitive and fairly simple. I enjoyed playing WW barbs. You would click on one side of the mob, wait for the WW to stop, then click on the other side of the mob. Oh ya, you would occasionally rebuff with war cries. Not really any skill involved there. But it sure was fun nonetheless.
Is it skill, or knowledge of best-used combinations and tricks?
In relation to Nox, skill. There isn't much knowledge considering there is no building nor item finding, it's an top down - shooter, pretty much.
DII, probably more of tricks.
Quote from "cherd" »
I did not say that there was no skill involved in Diablo, all that I said was that the item differences tend to overcome skill differences. Assuming that a player has at least some idea of what he/she is doing.
That's true, but I think a different control system can make gear less significant than player skill, if, of course, Blizzard wants to do that to begin with. Huxley has gear but skill still matters.
Quote from "cherd" »
Again, there is some skill involved in implementing timings of attacks, movement, potion drinking, etc. But these patterns are repetitive and fairly simple. I enjoyed playing WW barbs. You would click on one side of the mob, wait for the WW to stop, then click on the other side of the mob. Oh ya, you would occasionally rebuff with war cries. Not really any skill involved there. But it sure was fun nonetheless.
The patterns are mostly repetative due to a low amount of options available to the player in DII, for instance. Considering that most builds center on 2-3 main skills, there's very little room to put skill to the test since there's only so much stuff you can do. If all you ever cast is WW, it will be pretty undemanding. But, take, for instance, a starter sorc with a bunch of random prereqs, it can be pretty fun and demanding for that brief period where you still have mana issues.
Another issue is imbalance. If something is very powerful, it may negate the usage of alternatives. If you have super fast mana regen, conserving mana is not a problem. If you have too much vitality, avoiding attacks is not a concern. And so on.
DIII seems to be moving towards more usable skills per build, so that may change.
I wrote such a long post and had it all wiped out by an unknown failure of the internet...
As concisely as possible (Also, I apologize that I am only talking about softcore mode):
D2 is an old game and we should enjoy the fact that it still has some replayability. But, I feel that there are many aspects of the way that D2 worked that we would probably be a lot better off not seeing in D3. I would like to discuss the following possibly-redundant triad:
Pointless Power <=> Lack of End Game Content <=> Repetition
I don't know how to separate these or determine which caused which. There game repeated itself as soon as the player finished normal difficulty. Everything that followed was at most minimally different from previously-played content. Ironically among the most significant changes in gameplay were the immunities in higher difficulty levels, and lots of people really hate those so I might really be addressing the wrong crowd as I make a case for variety...
A high-level player could amass stupefyingly powerful gear and this was a large part due to the fact that there wasn't much else to do after beating baal in hell. Before dClone and UT, there weren't many instances where uber gear had any real necessity so it was easily thought of as "uber." And, after learning how to beat dClone and UT the only thing left to do was repeat killing them... I don't think that at the highest difficulty level, the boss of a game is meant to be brutalized to the extent that Baal and his minions were in act 5 hell especially in an 8-player game where 7 players are just sitting around trying to snag drops... Too much power in a game gets boring when there isn't really anything else to do or set one's sights on as a goal.
I don't know how to make D3 incredibly fun because it's not my job to do so, although it might be cool if it were...
I do know that all of this discussion about difficulty levels reminds me of that which I liked least in D2--repeatedly replaying the same areas chock-full of monsters with retarded AI.
If D3 intends to deserve the ridiculous amount of sales it will generate, I would expect to see some clever challenges and some real difficulty. And, if different difficulty levels are to reappear, I would really appreciate genuine variations in the gameplay and/or content between difficulty levels.
As I said, I am sorry that I lost my first post as this one is far inferior though I've now been typing for far too long.
This is just an interesting read on grinding especially if one considers how a "lack of game content" may have led to grinding in D2. Also there's an interesting discussion of below-average players tending towards games which reward time investiture over skill...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- Ernest Rutherford
It is probably very hard to make end-game gear for characters that long ago killed the final boss, without making them so powerful that the last boss is no longer a challenge. The only way to give those players a challenge after that is to create special scenarios, like UT. One downside is that cascual players never get to beat these enemies, making them very sad pandas.
This is not a downside. Since when casual players should beat all the content of a game?
I prety much agree with the rest of your post though !
Hmm, probably not... But I bet some people (like me) are annoyed that they never get to see this cool Uber Tristram just because they are too cascual. They never get to fight these ultra fun enemies (perhaps not in D2) because they are cascual. The game is less fun for them because they are too cascual. I don't like the concept of pro-only content, that is why I suggested a dungeon system that can be done in any level, but gets gradually harder.
I would argue that even a casual character could get to Uber Tristram and check it out for at least .26 seconds, possibly with the help of some less casual players.
Quote from "SFJake" »
Since Blizzard clearly stated in WoW that they don't want to make content that only a minority will see.
I would expect this to stay true for D3.
Bummer... That is somewhat of a point which makes difficulty levels seem like a necessary evil: let the casual guys play through the game on normal and nightmare while still maintaining a very difficult though not exceedingly different in content hell difficulty...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- Ernest Rutherford
Since Blizzard clearly stated in WoW that they don't want to make content that only a minority will see.
I would expect this to stay true for D3.
WoW's case is different. Pre-BC only about 1% could enter nax and even smaller % could pass the 4hm.
Old School WoW were a ridicolously hardcore game. I"m not saying D3 should be that way.
But it also doesn't mean any casual can grab all items, do all quest, do all game content. Thats just ridicolous and not even wow nowdays works like that lol...
WoW's case is different. Pre-BC only about 1% could enter nax and even smaller % could pass the 4hm.
Old School WoW were a ridicolously hardcore game. I"m not saying D3 should be that way.
But it also doesn't mean any casual can grab all items, do all quest, do all game content. Thats just ridicolous and not even wow nowdays works like that lol...
Old school WoW was definitely not that hardcore. I pretty much only played pre-BC, and I was easily able to get a guild that could do most of the raids. Honestly, having a couple instances that only more elite groups can do does not constitute "ridiculously hardcore."
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"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will." -Thomas Carlyle
All this leads to is people with no life getting to content that people with a life will not see. There's nothing hardcore about doing 200 baal runs and I don't understand why these people are somehow better than others and deserve more content.
(I just lost another typed-out post to a mis-click, I really need to find a way to stop doing that)
What is difficulty?
Difficulty for me in Pre-BC WoW (the only period when I played it) was fitting the game into my life or my eventual choice to not bother trying to. It was difficult to schedule my days or evenings around leaving a specific >1 hour period open for doing whatever the guild was up to. As it has been said thousands of time before, it sucks when "having fun" in a game feels like "having a job," and when the difficulty lies more in getting 40 guys to show up and work together than in the average raid-member's role(/job :().
Difficulty might have happened in D2 when there were too many people in the game for the most well-geared member(s) of the party to be able to carry the others... maybe. I'm sure that hardcore mode was plenty frustrating; I just never played it because it seemed like it would have added a lot of stress without really adding much to the fun department (put that way, it sounds a lot like the reason why I quit WoW). It may be argued that in D2 the difficulty was planning a build since there were no respecs and with comparable gear an impossible area for one player could be a cakewalk for another based on how well each did with certain immunities, etc (I'm not actually sure that "etc." is needed here...).
I don't think there was any real or meaningful reward for doing hell runs in D2. I replayed through the game this summer for a couple weeks and found that after finishing hell, the only other (and for me, new) content to see was UT and dClone, and that was not a whole hell of a lot of additional content! Before beating UT and after finishing Hell, I basically just did some NM Meph, Diablo, and Baal runs to get gear to do Hell Meph then Diablo and Baal and keys. It wasn't difficult, just annoying and random to have to grind up gear and experience. UT wasn't really anything new content-wise; the same bosses had better stats and maybe some different abilities. The enemies did hit really hard and fast but other than trying to pull only one of the prime evils at a time and kill them fast to avoid spawns, if properly geared it wasn't really a new challenge or over tactically-difficult experience.
As people have said before, I don't know what could make Diablo III actually difficult unless we are given much more sensitive ways to control characters and much better AI. I think that Blizzard actually wants to do this... So, I don't think that there is any reason why we shouldn't see these things and have the potential to play a game which at least at the higher difficult levels could be a challenge of skill (more than a gear-check) and might actually require teamwork when played with others.
I think that ideally high-level and high-difficulty content should happen after the game's story has concluded or be harder versions of the story elements. It may be that the most friendly-for-everyone option if the hardest stuff to do was similar in style to the new WoW hard-mode stuff (which I have only read about since I haven't played since pre-BC), albeit genuinely more difficult so that people who might not be able to do hard-mode could still experience the content and those who want a challenge can still have one.
In the previous paragraph, I feel like I almost made a case for the difficulty levels as they existed in D2... I will say that while this may be, the AI really didn't seem to change through the difficulties and immunities were the most significant gameplay change. So I would conclude by saying that while it was a little bit more difficult to have to plan on bringing multiple types of damage when one ventured into Hell in D2, I'm hoping for a bit more bang for my buck in D3's "difficult" areas, and I think that there are ways to work around content being impossible for people with little skill or little time to experience.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- Ernest Rutherford
(I just lost another typed-out post to a mis-click, I really need to find a way to stop doing that)
Devlop a habit of doing ctrl + a and ctrl + c, I do it every now and then as a reflex and it saved me a lot of retyping occasionally. Of course you still have to think about it!
And nice post, by the way. I share your opinion on most of it.
One way to make more challenging content, without making it 'hardcore (in the sense that you need to grind 1 years to get the absolute best gear needed to survive) would be to borrow from WoW (and countless other games I'm sure), when it comes to boss fights.
Make the bosses (and even normal mobs) more tactical based. Make bosses who are reasonable to kill if you do it right, but if you make a mistake or try to kill them using the wrong strategy they will make your life a hell.
Bosses who require different types of gear (but still not the best gear you cnan possibly get), due to different types of dmg, different types of defense mechanisms etc. could also add some sort of challenge.
Beside that bosses who became more difficult the more you killed them could certainly be an interested self-adjusting difficulty mechanism as well, while still allowing everyone access.
Overall challenges should not come just from 'higher stats' but from varying and 'surprising' mechanics imo.
One way to make more challenging content, without making it 'hardcore (in the sense that you need to grind 1 years to get the absolute best gear needed to survive) would be to borrow from WoW (and countless other games I'm sure), when it comes to boss fights.
Make the bosses (and even normal mobs) more tactical based. Make bosses who are reasonable to kill if you do it right, but if you make a mistake or try to kill them using the wrong strategy they will make your life a hell.
Bosses who require different types of gear (but still not the best gear you cnan possibly get), due to different types of dmg, different types of defense mechanisms etc. could also add some sort of challenge.
That's pretty much what's being done, from what I can see. Perhaps not so much the needed different gear for different bosses, but it definitely seems like significantly more strategy (compared to D2) is needed for bosses.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will." -Thomas Carlyle
One way to make more challenging content, without making it 'hardcore (in the sense that you need to grind 1 years to get the absolute best gear needed to survive) would be to borrow from WoW (and countless other games I'm sure), when it comes to boss fights.
Make the bosses (and even normal mobs) more tactical based. Make bosses who are reasonable to kill if you do it right, but if you make a mistake or try to kill them using the wrong strategy they will make your life a hell.
Bosses who require different types of gear (but still not the best gear you cnan possibly get), due to different types of dmg, different types of defense mechanisms etc. could also add some sort of challenge.
Beside that bosses who became more difficult the more you killed them could certainly be an interested self-adjusting difficulty mechanism as well, while still allowing everyone access.
Overall challenges should not come just from 'higher stats' but from varying and 'surprising' mechanics imo.
I agree.
Quote from "Sildrugtanni" »
That's pretty much what's being done, from what I can see. Perhaps not so much the needed different gear for different bosses, but it definitely seems like significantly more strategy (compared to D2) is needed for bosses.
Just curious how you know "that's pretty much what's being done." I'm not doubting you, just wondering how you know that what I hope is happening is actually happening :).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- Ernest Rutherford
I don't know exactly what interview it came from or whatever, but I believe I remember reading that, for example, they're going to make some bosses with stages and such in them. Plus, certain bosses are going to have minions fighting with them. I also think that the fact that you'll have to be a bit more cautious about your health than in D2 also contributes to that.
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"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will." -Thomas Carlyle
Well i dont want something thats like omg if the boss hits me once im dead type of thing. But yea i do agree that there should be more of a challenge in D3. Also i would lov it if bosses had minions with them, i mean cmon Diablo with some Balrogs would be awesome.
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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]"The lord of murder shall perish, but in his death he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny. Chaos shall be sown in their footsteps"
-So sayeth the wise Alaundo
Well i dont want something thats like omg if the boss hits me once im dead type of thing. But yea i do agree that there should be more of a challenge in D3. Also i would lov it if bosses had minions with them, i mean cmon Diablo with some Balrogs would be awesome.
Agreed. Generally (assuming reasonable gear) one-shots shouldnt happen unless its something you could have avoided by paying a bit of attention (for example: the boss clearly starts to cast a spell, 3 sec later everything close to him takes massive damage, e.g. run the fuck away...).
The risk of death should come from making one or liekly multiple mistakes in a row, being careless or by being brought down in health somewhat slowly (a scenario which is made possible by not being able to spam health potions).
Overall there really is only 2 ways to make it 'challenging', strategy based or stat based. And stat based usually leads to 'one-shots'. You see very clearly it in an A-RPG like Sacred 2, but also to a lesser degree in Diablo 2. The only way Sacred 2 can offer you a challenge what-so-ever, is through the risk of getting one-shotted (partly because you can spam potions, so slow dmg simply wont kill you). This might be considered challenging in some way, but not very entertaining.
On the other hand, A-RPGs are supposed to consist of fast gameplay, and not too much strategy, so its not like they should go in the totally opposite direction and make every single encounter a test of your strategical skills, having to spend 10 sec before each enemy consdering how to deal with them. That fits well for some more tactical based RPGs and similar, but wouldnt realy fit Diablo well imo. Its about hitting the right balance of fast pace and strategic combat.
The level of difficulty is pretty important, I bet Blizzard is working hard to sorta...even it out juuuuust right.
Although we know nothing about how the difficulties will vary from one another, im sure we will be surprised.
Having waited this long, only to wait another year, im sure Blizzard wont hold anything back.
This game will rock...
I also just realized, I made this thread a little over 1 month ago....This thread is still interesting to talk about. (Proud)
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And, we were not talking about PvP, the discussion pertained to PvM. Again, there is some skill involved in implementing timings of attacks, movement, potion drinking, etc. But these patterns are repetitive and fairly simple. I enjoyed playing WW barbs. You would click on one side of the mob, wait for the WW to stop, then click on the other side of the mob. Oh ya, you would occasionally rebuff with war cries. Not really any skill involved there. But it sure was fun nonetheless.
DII, probably more of tricks.
That's true, but I think a different control system can make gear less significant than player skill, if, of course, Blizzard wants to do that to begin with. Huxley has gear but skill still matters.
The patterns are mostly repetative due to a low amount of options available to the player in DII, for instance. Considering that most builds center on 2-3 main skills, there's very little room to put skill to the test since there's only so much stuff you can do. If all you ever cast is WW, it will be pretty undemanding. But, take, for instance, a starter sorc with a bunch of random prereqs, it can be pretty fun and demanding for that brief period where you still have mana issues.
Another issue is imbalance. If something is very powerful, it may negate the usage of alternatives. If you have super fast mana regen, conserving mana is not a problem. If you have too much vitality, avoiding attacks is not a concern. And so on.
DIII seems to be moving towards more usable skills per build, so that may change.
^This.
Or else!!! ̿ ̿̿’̿’\̵͇̿̿\з==(•̪●)==ε/̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿
As concisely as possible (Also, I apologize that I am only talking about softcore mode):
D2 is an old game and we should enjoy the fact that it still has some replayability. But, I feel that there are many aspects of the way that D2 worked that we would probably be a lot better off not seeing in D3. I would like to discuss the following possibly-redundant triad:
Pointless Power <=> Lack of End Game Content <=> Repetition
I don't know how to separate these or determine which caused which. There game repeated itself as soon as the player finished normal difficulty. Everything that followed was at most minimally different from previously-played content. Ironically among the most significant changes in gameplay were the immunities in higher difficulty levels, and lots of people really hate those so I might really be addressing the wrong crowd as I make a case for variety...
A high-level player could amass stupefyingly powerful gear and this was a large part due to the fact that there wasn't much else to do after beating baal in hell. Before dClone and UT, there weren't many instances where uber gear had any real necessity so it was easily thought of as "uber." And, after learning how to beat dClone and UT the only thing left to do was repeat killing them... I don't think that at the highest difficulty level, the boss of a game is meant to be brutalized to the extent that Baal and his minions were in act 5 hell especially in an 8-player game where 7 players are just sitting around trying to snag drops... Too much power in a game gets boring when there isn't really anything else to do or set one's sights on as a goal.
I don't know how to make D3 incredibly fun because it's not my job to do so, although it might be cool if it were...
I do know that all of this discussion about difficulty levels reminds me of that which I liked least in D2--repeatedly replaying the same areas chock-full of monsters with retarded AI.
If D3 intends to deserve the ridiculous amount of sales it will generate, I would expect to see some clever challenges and some real difficulty. And, if different difficulty levels are to reappear, I would really appreciate genuine variations in the gameplay and/or content between difficulty levels.
As I said, I am sorry that I lost my first post as this one is far inferior though I've now been typing for far too long.
This is just an interesting read on grinding especially if one considers how a "lack of game content" may have led to grinding in D2. Also there's an interesting discussion of below-average players tending towards games which reward time investiture over skill...
- Ernest Rutherford
This is not a downside. Since when casual players should beat all the content of a game?
I prety much agree with the rest of your post though !
Since Blizzard clearly stated in WoW that they don't want to make content that only a minority will see.
I would expect this to stay true for D3.
I would argue that even a casual character could get to Uber Tristram and check it out for at least .26 seconds, possibly with the help of some less casual players.
Bummer... That is somewhat of a point which makes difficulty levels seem like a necessary evil: let the casual guys play through the game on normal and nightmare while still maintaining a very difficult though not exceedingly different in content hell difficulty...
- Ernest Rutherford
I completely agree with you guys. You will either love or hate the game even more haha.
It would make me appreciate everything that's for sure.
Definitely should be more missions, maybe a whole different area simply because youre playing a higher difficulty and a special boss.
You know who i think should return? The Butcher. I wouldnt mind seeing him with the chopped bodys all over again.
WoW's case is different. Pre-BC only about 1% could enter nax and even smaller % could pass the 4hm.
Old School WoW were a ridicolously hardcore game. I"m not saying D3 should be that way.
But it also doesn't mean any casual can grab all items, do all quest, do all game content. Thats just ridicolous and not even wow nowdays works like that lol...
Old school WoW was definitely not that hardcore. I pretty much only played pre-BC, and I was easily able to get a guild that could do most of the raids. Honestly, having a couple instances that only more elite groups can do does not constitute "ridiculously hardcore."
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will."
-Thomas Carlyle
What is difficulty?
Difficulty for me in Pre-BC WoW (the only period when I played it) was fitting the game into my life or my eventual choice to not bother trying to. It was difficult to schedule my days or evenings around leaving a specific >1 hour period open for doing whatever the guild was up to. As it has been said thousands of time before, it sucks when "having fun" in a game feels like "having a job," and when the difficulty lies more in getting 40 guys to show up and work together than in the average raid-member's role(/job :().
Difficulty might have happened in D2 when there were too many people in the game for the most well-geared member(s) of the party to be able to carry the others... maybe. I'm sure that hardcore mode was plenty frustrating; I just never played it because it seemed like it would have added a lot of stress without really adding much to the fun department (put that way, it sounds a lot like the reason why I quit WoW). It may be argued that in D2 the difficulty was planning a build since there were no respecs and with comparable gear an impossible area for one player could be a cakewalk for another based on how well each did with certain immunities, etc (I'm not actually sure that "etc." is needed here...).
I don't think there was any real or meaningful reward for doing hell runs in D2. I replayed through the game this summer for a couple weeks and found that after finishing hell, the only other (and for me, new) content to see was UT and dClone, and that was not a whole hell of a lot of additional content! Before beating UT and after finishing Hell, I basically just did some NM Meph, Diablo, and Baal runs to get gear to do Hell Meph then Diablo and Baal and keys. It wasn't difficult, just annoying and random to have to grind up gear and experience. UT wasn't really anything new content-wise; the same bosses had better stats and maybe some different abilities. The enemies did hit really hard and fast but other than trying to pull only one of the prime evils at a time and kill them fast to avoid spawns, if properly geared it wasn't really a new challenge or over tactically-difficult experience.
As people have said before, I don't know what could make Diablo III actually difficult unless we are given much more sensitive ways to control characters and much better AI. I think that Blizzard actually wants to do this... So, I don't think that there is any reason why we shouldn't see these things and have the potential to play a game which at least at the higher difficult levels could be a challenge of skill (more than a gear-check) and might actually require teamwork when played with others.
I think that ideally high-level and high-difficulty content should happen after the game's story has concluded or be harder versions of the story elements. It may be that the most friendly-for-everyone option if the hardest stuff to do was similar in style to the new WoW hard-mode stuff (which I have only read about since I haven't played since pre-BC), albeit genuinely more difficult so that people who might not be able to do hard-mode could still experience the content and those who want a challenge can still have one.
In the previous paragraph, I feel like I almost made a case for the difficulty levels as they existed in D2... I will say that while this may be, the AI really didn't seem to change through the difficulties and immunities were the most significant gameplay change. So I would conclude by saying that while it was a little bit more difficult to have to plan on bringing multiple types of damage when one ventured into Hell in D2, I'm hoping for a bit more bang for my buck in D3's "difficult" areas, and I think that there are ways to work around content being impossible for people with little skill or little time to experience.
- Ernest Rutherford
Devlop a habit of doing ctrl + a and ctrl + c, I do it every now and then as a reflex and it saved me a lot of retyping occasionally. Of course you still have to think about it!
And nice post, by the way. I share your opinion on most of it.
Make the bosses (and even normal mobs) more tactical based. Make bosses who are reasonable to kill if you do it right, but if you make a mistake or try to kill them using the wrong strategy they will make your life a hell.
Bosses who require different types of gear (but still not the best gear you cnan possibly get), due to different types of dmg, different types of defense mechanisms etc. could also add some sort of challenge.
Beside that bosses who became more difficult the more you killed them could certainly be an interested self-adjusting difficulty mechanism as well, while still allowing everyone access.
Overall challenges should not come just from 'higher stats' but from varying and 'surprising' mechanics imo.
That's pretty much what's being done, from what I can see. Perhaps not so much the needed different gear for different bosses, but it definitely seems like significantly more strategy (compared to D2) is needed for bosses.
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will."
-Thomas Carlyle
I agree.
Just curious how you know "that's pretty much what's being done." I'm not doubting you, just wondering how you know that what I hope is happening is actually happening :).
- Ernest Rutherford
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will."
-Thomas Carlyle
-So sayeth the wise Alaundo
The risk of death should come from making one or liekly multiple mistakes in a row, being careless or by being brought down in health somewhat slowly (a scenario which is made possible by not being able to spam health potions).
Overall there really is only 2 ways to make it 'challenging', strategy based or stat based. And stat based usually leads to 'one-shots'. You see very clearly it in an A-RPG like Sacred 2, but also to a lesser degree in Diablo 2. The only way Sacred 2 can offer you a challenge what-so-ever, is through the risk of getting one-shotted (partly because you can spam potions, so slow dmg simply wont kill you). This might be considered challenging in some way, but not very entertaining.
On the other hand, A-RPGs are supposed to consist of fast gameplay, and not too much strategy, so its not like they should go in the totally opposite direction and make every single encounter a test of your strategical skills, having to spend 10 sec before each enemy consdering how to deal with them. That fits well for some more tactical based RPGs and similar, but wouldnt realy fit Diablo well imo. Its about hitting the right balance of fast pace and strategic combat.
Although we know nothing about how the difficulties will vary from one another, im sure we will be surprised.
Having waited this long, only to wait another year, im sure Blizzard wont hold anything back.
This game will rock...
I also just realized, I made this thread a little over 1 month ago....This thread is still interesting to talk about. (Proud)
Or else!!! ̿ ̿̿’̿’\̵͇̿̿\з==(•̪●)==ε/̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿