I would have been surprised had he been positive. That said, I take these posts as good in that, if Blizzard can improve the game to the standards of those who are easily disappointed, then the game will be all the better for someone like me who is already enjoying the game
If those who are unhappy are given a better quality game with patches or expansions then I am all for it. I enjoy most games I purchase but I am all for having others voices their concerns and push blizzard to try even harder and refine this game, which certainly can benefit from some major end game tweaks.
All I heard was "WAH WAH WAH Why isn't Diablo more like WoW? WAH WAH WAH"
If anything Diablo 3 is MORE like WoW now, just a an WoW-ified RPG, it is simple and boring. Why in the hell is there a CD on my pots, wtf blizzard? I have 35K hp, 12k pot doesn't do it brah, it just doesn't. I gotta spam that sh*t. Screw the limits.
If "the endgame in Diablo 3 is pathetic", then Diablo 1 & 2 endgames are uber super pathetic?
Diablo 1, sure. But Diablo 2's end game is GOD over Diablo 3's end game, why even make such a BS statement. You had ubers, you had boss runs that actually had a good chance of dropping good stuff, runes, so many great stuff, then you had a higher level cap where you actually was excited that you gained a level where you could finally use a bad ass rare gear that you were saving for. In Diablo 3 I was getting bummed everytime I was getting closer and closer to level 60, I was like 'oh come on, its only day 2 and I'm almost max level, pls not 60, please not 60.' Diablo 2's end game blows Diablo 3's end game out of the water, straight up. Diablo 2's longevity where people still play today is a testament to that.
Sooooo, you're idea of 'end game' is to do the same boss run over and over, and have an extremely high level cap that did almost zilch for anything other than an epeen factor? You also want to spam health potions, because you can't figure out how to play your class and survive without them?
I'll agree, ubers were cool, and I'm sure something like that will get put into D3 at a later date. But cmon, you're not fooling anyone. You're mad because you can't farm inferno because it's insanely hard without having spent millions of gold on the AH. I agree, it sucks farming act 1 and maybe bits of act 2, knowing that even better gear drops in the later acts, but because we arn't geared enough for it we can't get to it then.
Diablo 3's endgame is far, far more dynamic, intricate and engaging than D2's was. You just... can't argue that farming 1 extremely easy boss over and over again is anywhere near better than farming whole acts at a time, with different encounters along the way every playthrough.
Diablo 1, sure. But Diablo 2's end game is GOD over Diablo 3's end game, why even make such a BS statement. You had ubers,
Oh...you mean that patch they added 7 years after the game came out?
you had boss runs that actually had a good chance of dropping good stuff
Elite uniques were extremely rare to drop and having to farm the same 3-4 areas for those drops was tiresome.
runes
lol....in 5 years of online play I think I had 3 or 4 high runes drop.
then you had a higher level cap where you actually was excited that you gained a level
It took like 1, maybe 2 days to reach lvl 85 and every level after that was accomplish by 1 of 2 means.....endless Baal runs or endless Chaos runs....how fun was that ?
The last 8 or 9 levels barely did anything to improve your build.
Diablo 2's longevity where people still play today is a testament to that.
The people that still play D2 are a bit OCD if you ask me. Last I checked in 2010, the realms were overrun by robots and haxzorz. D2 was great, but it's been outdated for about 8 years or more. It had serious issues with lag, hacks, dupes and scammers. The PvP was a relentless nk fest of bad mannered brats.
D3 has way more potential than D2 ever had, and I have every reason to believe that Blizzard will take full advantage of it. People keep knockin Bliz because they stand to make a cut of the RMAH.....well good, that means they'll have a heavy incentive to keep the game fresh, continue to add expansions and patches as well as keep the integrity of the game safe from dupes etc.
All I heard was "WAH WAH WAH Why isn't Diablo more like WoW? WAH WAH WAH"
If anything Diablo 3 is MORE like WoW now, just a an WoW-ified RPG, it is simple and boring. Why in the hell is there a CD on my pots, wtf blizzard? I have 35K hp, 12k pot doesn't do it brah, it just doesn't. I gotta spam that sh*t. Screw the limits.
If "the endgame in Diablo 3 is pathetic", then Diablo 1 & 2 endgames are uber super pathetic?
Diablo 1, sure. But Diablo 2's end game is GOD over Diablo 3's end game, why even make such a BS statement. You had ubers, you had boss runs that actually had a good chance of dropping good stuff, runes, so many great stuff, then you had a higher level cap where you actually was excited that you gained a level where you could finally use a bad ass rare gear that you were saving for. In Diablo 3 I was getting bummed everytime I was getting closer and closer to level 60, I was like 'oh come on, its only day 2 and I'm almost max level, pls not 60, please not 60.' Diablo 2's end game blows Diablo 3's end game out of the water, straight up. Diablo 2's longevity where people still play today is a testament to that.
Sooooo, you're idea of 'end game' is to do the same boss run over and over, and have an extremely high level cap that did almost zilch for anything other than an epeen factor? You also want to spam health potions, because you can't figure out how to play your class and survive without them?
I'll agree, ubers were cool, and I'm sure something like that will get put into D3 at a later date. But cmon, you're not fooling anyone. You're mad because you can't farm inferno because it's insanely hard without having spent millions of gold on the AH. I agree, it sucks farming act 1 and maybe bits of act 2, knowing that even better gear drops in the later acts, but because we arn't geared enough for it we can't get to it then.
Diablo 3's endgame is far, far more dynamic, intricate and engaging than D2's was. You just... can't argue that farming 1 extremely easy boss over and over again is anywhere near better than farming whole acts at a time, with different encounters along the way every playthrough.
Why not, at least it's more fun now than the actual end-game in Diablo 3, how about that? At least you knew you were constantly progressing and it wasn't just about 'epeen', some items required you to have certain level, stat requirements etc. there was just so much variety, it was amazing.
Sorry to say, but revenge is not enough in inferno for my barb to compensate for the CD's on potions in this game. The gems that add some life after hit/kill are useless due to how fast my health goes down and how slow I recover. So yeah, I want to spam positions. There was not broken, why dumb it down and WoW-fy it? Maybe limit it to PVP, fine.
'You're mad because you can't farm inferno because it's insanely hard without having spent millions of gold on the AH.'- umm.. yeah. Like I said, farming bosses and mini bosses in D2 is still way funner.
'Diablo 3's endgame is far, far more dynamic, intricate and engaging than D2's was. You just... can't argue that farming 1 extremely easy boss over and over again is anywhere near better than farming whole acts at a time, with different encounters along the way every playthrough.'
Dynamic? How exactly, please elaborate. Farming in Diablo 3 is the most frustrating and tedious thing ever, you almost never get better item drops from the elites you kill and there are elites every 2 steps, not even boss runs and the items they drops can save you from that annoyance, see what I did there? That's a reference bro So again that instantly goes to your second point, farm gold 2 million gold, buy sweet items, profit. Seriously, have you even seen a set drop yet? Cuz I didn't.
OP thinks D2 was launched with 5 acts, all uniques, rune words, uber runs.
What a fool.
^^
This kind of post is exactly why I menace excessive, harsh, rude trolling on some people such as this guy.
Hey, did I actually think that?.....no....... too bad, uh?
Or is assuming they learned from Diablo 2 and would try to do something deep from it... thats crazy? I'm supposed to wait it out until they get yet another 5 years of production for basic things they should have learned from Diablo 2 already?
Frankly I'm not sure what point I'm arguing with people like you.
OP thinks D2 was launched with 5 acts, all uniques, rune words, uber runs.
What a fool.
^^
This kind of post is exactly why I menace excessive, harsh, rude trolling on some people such as this guy.
Hey, did I actually think that?.....no....... too bad, uh?
Or is assuming they learned from Diablo 2 and would try to do something deep from it... thats crazy? I'm supposed to wait it out until they get yet another 5 years of production for basic things they should have learned from Diablo 2 already?
Frankly I'm not sure what point I'm arguing with people like you.
Oh but behold, you do think that. You lob your opinions around as factual statements. Just because you found botting all day the same bosses fun doesn't mean it really was. If you think it is, then go back to it.
I also get the feeling that Inferno is just too hard for you, and you can't handle packs that you deem "Impossible." I used to think this way, until I realized that there is a proper way to fight everything, every class.
You can stick to your never changing Diablo 2 casual fest, where you can out level the mobs by 25 levels and use rune words that ruin the game, me I'll stick here and play something challenging for once.
If you love the simplistic no brain challenge Diablo 2 currently offers, you'll be stoked when TL2 comes out. It's being developed for casual cry babies who like to just stand there and spam 1 or 2 spells and collect loot. Gotta get that instant gratification, fuck working for something.
Me? I'll stick to something that has enough of a challenge that a java script parser can't play the game for me.
If "the endgame in Diablo 3 is pathetic", then Diablo 1 & 2 endgames are uber super pathetic?
Diablo 1, sure. But Diablo 2's end game is GOD over Diablo 3's end game, why even make such a BS statement. You had ubers, you had boss runs that actually had a good chance of dropping good stuff, runes, so many great stuff, then you had a higher level cap where you actually was excited that you gained a level where you could finally use a bad ass rare gear that you were saving for. In Diablo 3 I was getting bummed everytime I was getting closer and closer to level 60, I was like 'oh come on, its only day 2 and I'm almost max level, pls not 60, please not 60.' Diablo 2's end game blows Diablo 3's end game out of the water, straight up. Diablo 2's longevity where people still play today is a testament to that.
I don't know how you can speak to D3's longevity when it hasn't even been out for two weeks and we have yet to see what Blizzard's post release support looks like (the first two things I bolded in your post are examples of post-release support). It's hard for any game to stand the test of time like D2/LOD did, but it will be interesting to see how the gaming population treats the game in a year -- especially with so many people who got D3 through the annual pass not really knowing what the Diablo series was really about. Hopefully Blizzard will listen to the community but, unlike WoW, not bow down to the lowest common denominator.
Also don't forget that in D2, anything much beyond level 70-80 did not matter too much even before synergies were introduced. Oftentimes builds were done and all pieces of gear could be worn. Leveling up to 99 was just for ladder or mere accomplishment. But by that point it's pretty much just running Baal again and again and again. I'll let you have your opinion of which game has a better endgame, but after years of running it Baal's throne room can DIAF.
Its quite easy for me or anyone to randomly think ideas that could work in making every difficulties more challenge. Blizzard sure as hell could, too, but the point is, they just didn't. I would think if I had years of time and a big team with lots of opportunities for massive brainstorming, I'd try and come up with variations through the difficulties, instead of lazily copy pasting. I'd try to vary the game as much as I can, to make every difficulties as interesting as they can be.
And most of these changes are, coding wise, not very difficult at all, since they mostly rely on things that already exist! Why didn't they try? I have no official game design experience, I only have modding experience and the likes.
I hope you won't tell me just TRYING to make the difficulties more different is exactly "hard". In my mind they just didn't see the need and never bothered. That bothers me, because it means they think 4 difficulties copy-pasted will get everyone hooked and no more effort is needed, and worst is they're right! I don't believe any truly passionate developer would look at this and not WANT to vary things up, when they know how big a part the difficulties play in a game like Diablo!
I'm not surprised by your response. I like your suggestions and I am also all for more variety in gameplay instead of simply upping the stats from difficulty to difficulty. I'm sure most players would say they would love to see Blizzard, or any developer, do more instead of sit on their hands if given a choice between the two.
That said, it appears we come from two different design philosiphies. Both have merit, but both have pitfalls as well. You seem to be taking the kitchen sink approach -- which is illustrated in what I bolded. You want to add as much as you can until the bucket overfloweth with fun.
But the problem is one resource that is as finite for you and me as it is for a large development team like Blizzard: time.
It takes time to design creatures. It takes time to design abilities. It takes time to animate attacks. It takes time to debug code. It takes time to make sure everything works together as it should. Yes it starts from resources that exist, but a good portion of it will also have to come from scratch. You can add bit by bit, piece by piece, and block by block. Creative teams are great at brainstorming, and I'm sure there are some quality idea guys at blizzard (except for maybe in their writing department...*hides*) -- but it's up to the director/producer/team leader/teammates to make sure the project is not so bloated that it can actually be completed in a realistic timeframe. As great as the design phase is, eventually it has to end and eventually development has to start without dipping back into too much redesigning.
What are some common pitfalls from letting ideas get too big and too bloated (including some of my own prior mistakes):
1) TOO LATE: Blizzard loves pushing the date back. At one point in time, although not so much since being acquired by Activision, they were known for working until a game was perfect no matter how long it took. But the reality is that there are not only internal timetables that must be met by the devlopment studio, but also external pressures. Take too long adding in little things and fine details, and eventually someone beats you to the punch. Or worse, they do it better. Or worse, what you have been coding becomes entirely obselete (Duke Nukem Forever anyone?) so that even though you have these fantastic details, no one is going to buy it. The product just ships too late.
2) HEMOGINEZATION: Is there such a thing as doing too much? Lets say creatures have unique art and some unique animations, but that there are only so many ways an enemy can poke a player to do damage. It may look different or cool, yes. But one trap developers fall into (and one you seem to suggest/imply by saying the resources for it already exist) is to create more content by transplanting qualities of one creature/place/etc. to another and vice versa. Suddenly that cool attack appears all over the game. Suddenly that super imposing creature gets pallete swapped so much that it loses its luster (ex. first Dragon Soul boss, or pallete swaps in the Monster Hunter series). Suddenly so many creatures have so many attacks that there is little making them unique or setting them apart. Where your game once had character, now it has sameness.
3) MISPLACING RESOURCES: If you're aware of the Diablo 3 development timeline, you'll know D3 was scrapped in its entirety and begun anew because it was beginning to look like D2.5. I bring this up because that meant the team had to go back to designing things all over again. To plan and implement all over again. As awesome as it would be to build an everything engine, it is impossible to make a team a) plan for everything or b ) design so much that the other teams are crushed under the burden of implementing it. And with time being a finite resource, that design time and its consequences are going to have to come out of something else in development. What if it's bug testing? That would go over well (EA/Bethesda still seem to be selling okay though, and like Blizzard they have the $ to suck up the bad PR). What if it becomes apparent that there is too much too late, and suddenly a lot of content gets cut. It happens all the time in development, but what that means is that the overplanned game had people working on parts that are not going to be implemented instead of what will ship in the final product. Too much of this and the product crumbles. Will teams have to rush and play catch up? If other teams are waiting for one team to get stuff done, then the answer is quite possibly yes. As a result, letting too many ideas leave the design phase can have a negative impact on development as a whole.
4) END USER EXPERIENCE: This speaks directly to your comment about an elite mob that is a Jailer and with other combinations becomes almost impossible to kill and your idea of Tree spreading. How would player know? Games like Demons Souls are in the minority, most players are not going to like, and not going to tolerate surprises that pull up out of the blue to destroy them. So what I find interesting is that you do not want the game to make elites harder or more compliated to kill as you go up into higher difficulties (something the player can predict and expect), but on the other hand you want some enemies to arbitrarily have abilities that can effect the entire field of play while others of the same kind do not (something that would come as a total surprise)? As a developer it is important to look from the eyes of who will be playing your game and determine what surprises are acceptable and what are not -- be the gatekeepr as it were. But allowing too many surprises to slip into the fold can confuse or otherwise turn away the player. That's not what you want.
5) MORE DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN FUN: Games are like anything else, you need a certain level of predictability to make the surprises more interesting. There needs to be a certain level of familiarity. Yes, the game is neatly split up into Acts with different locales and flavor. But what happens when enemies can do too much? When you don't know what's coming? When changes happen all the time. It can be neat or interesting. It can also be frustrating and alienating. The questions a game designer needs to ask is not whether variety is being added for the sake of variety or freshness. Instead, the question must always be whether variety is being added in because it makes the game, as a whole, more fun. Sometimes more is more. Sometimes less is more. There needs to be a balance.
TL;DR: You're not wrong, but Blizzard had reasons for making the design choices they made and seem to be working on successfully implementing them. But obviously, it is impossible to please everyone all of the time. That's why they're "design choices" instead of "correct choices"
Diablo 1, sure. But Diablo 2's end game is GOD over Diablo 3's end game, why even make such a BS statement. You had ubers,
Oh...you mean that patch they added 7 years after the game came out?
Elite uniques were extremely rare to drop and having to farm the same 3-4 areas for those drops was tiresome.
lol....in 5 years of online play I think I had 3 or 4 high runes drop.
It took like 1, maybe 2 days to reach lvl 85 and every level after that was accomplish by 1 of 2 means.....endless Baal runs or endless Chaos runs....how fun was that ?
The last 8 or 9 levels barely did anything to improve your build.
The people that still play D2 are a bit OCD if you ask me. Last I checked in 2010, the realms were overrun by robots and haxzorz. D2 was great, but it's been outdated for about 8 years or more. It had serious issues with lag, hacks, dupes and scammers. The PvP was a relentless nk fest of bad mannered brats.
D3 has way more potential than D2 ever had, and I have every reason to believe that Blizzard will take full advantage of it. People keep knockin Bliz because they stand to make a cut of the RMAH.....well good, that means they'll have a heavy incentive to keep the game fresh, continue to add expansions and patches as well as keep the integrity of the game safe from dupes etc.
True, but that was still just a small factor that added to the end-game content, people were still playing and trading and just hanging out around the game even before that. I know that because I was rigorously playing D2 during that time. I started in 2003, probably stopped playing seriously in 2009. I've made a great deal of friends on there and even formed a clan, SK_Clan, good times. I log on occasionally, right now I'm leveling my zon, which I never did. D3 actually made me miss D2, funny huh? That says something. Just go on metacritic and see user reviews, then compare it to critic reviews. Something is horribly wrong with the way Diablo 3 took course. Although I do still have faith, small amounts of it, but still. Because this is not the blizzard of 1990s or early 2000s, let's keep that in mind.
If you knew where to farm and how good your mf was, you wouldn't be saying that. Or just do boss runs that had a higher chance of dropping rares and high end set items where people fought for them.
That's why you have the lobby, that's why you can create a specific game with description stating you want a certain rune for this and this etc. That's how I built many of my runewords for my frenzy and ww barb or completed my tal's or ik set. Right now there is none of that. It was always fun to go farming on bosses or the countess for runes.
That wasn't the whole routine though, again. There was many things you could and did in between runs. You traded, , dueled, mulled, experimented with different runewords because a lot of them were equal in many different ways, rushed your friends, chatted on b.net etc. Idk about you but I leveled to my lvl 95 barb maybe in 1-2 months, didn't regret it all because it wasn't the only thing I was doing, I was getting actual good drops, many times different drops that I could trade for different things, not just equipment.
Def not more potential. but it does have it. I just don't see them do a huge revamp of the game, which would actually fix it. But that's a theory, it's not practical, especially for blizzard today. That is why I'm not optimistic. And for that I'm not leaving yet, I'm shelving the game until the next 'fix' patch. And I hope it is the savior.
Basically it was the nuances and variety that made Diablo 2 sexy. Diablo 3 simply got dumbed down to hell.
I cant wait for bliz to "tune" inferno to make it more fun. I have a DH in act3 inferno and it's just not fun to keep playing him because of this gear check. I feel like it's not even a gear check though, it's just that bliz didn't fully test inferno. I loved LOD back in the day and could play it for hours because it was addicting and fun. I really have no motivation to log in ATM because inferno is just a die fest for crappy gear. I am confident bliz will fix this though and we can all grind the shit out of rare packs and diablo for some phatty loot that we can trade/sell.
I'm not even sure why I'm reading these posts anymore. I thoroughly enjoy the game and the difficulty (got barb in act1 Inferno) and I know plenty of people who agree completely.
However, the solution is simple: If you don't like it, quit whining and quit playing. Or just settle for Hell difficulty if you can't take the heat in Inferno. Playing all 5 classes to Hell will give you plenty of fun gaming, and honestly still worth the price.
Act 1 Inferno is a cake walk. Please stop kidding yourself, you really have no place in this discussion until you're there. The complaints are coming from anyone who's in Act 2 Inferno. Act 1 Inferno, I can clear the whole thing very quickly. Going from Act 1 Inferno to Act 2 Inferno currently is like jumping from Normal to Hell, but not having the opportunity to get the gear you need to clear it except for from the wizards and DH who got past the areas pre-nerf.
"Diablo 3's endgame is far, far more dynamic, intricate and engaging than D2's was. You just... can't argue that farming 1 extremely easy boss over and over again is anywhere near better than farming whole acts at a time, with different encounters along the way every playthrough."
Dynamic? How exactly, please elaborate.
He said how it was dynamic: You get the best loot by chaining fights against different kinds of Champions with different skill sets sprawled over entire levels within time limits of each other. The fight changes from pack to pack, some harder, some not.
D2 was not dynamic, it's static: You get the best loot by fighting bosses who have the same resistances/minions/skills every time you face them. You solve the same riddle every time you get to it. There is zero variation in the enemy (the boss) and once he's dead, you reload the game to do him again.
There was many things you could and did in between runs. You traded, , dueled, mulled, experimented with different runewords because a lot of them were equal in many different ways, rushed your friends, chatted on b.net etc. Idk about you but I leveled to my lvl 95 barb maybe in 1-2 months, didn't regret it all because it wasn't the only thing I was doing, I was getting actual good drops, many times different drops that I could trade for different things, not just equipment.
I trade, mule, experiment with builds, rush my friends and chat in D3. That leaves duels and runes, and PvP is coming so you're just down to runes. Yes it was kinda interesting to "create" a piece of gear through materials (runes) you gathered in the world, if only the kept that feature in. Luckily they did but they renamed it and grossly undertuned it. Just as some of the best runewords were added later, so the blacksmithing shall be fixed. So that's all of those points countered.
2000: D2 Launch
2003: Synergies, first global rebalance, 70+ leveling penalties, doubled runeword lists, doubled recipe totals, Uber Diablo.
2005: Pandimonium Event.
2008: You don't need the CD in the drive to play. 2010: Respecs.
The game most of us loved in D2 took years to come about. Jake even said he started after most of these things were in the game so I imagine when most people say "Diablo 2 was better than Diablo 3", they're talking about "2005 Diablo 2 was better than Diablo 3", which I might accept, but I'm still leaning towards D3.
Basically it was the nuances and variety that made Diablo 2 sexy. Diablo 3 simply got dumbed down to hell.
Again, it tooks years for most of those beloved "nuances" to get put into the game. I posit that week #2 of Diablo 3 was better than year #2 for Diablo 2.
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"Anything I say can't, and won't be used against me because if they understood my point, they'd have given up theirs." -Christopher Hitchens
The people that still play D2 are a bit OCD if you ask me. Last I checked in 2010, the realms were overrun by robots and haxzorz. D2 was great, but it's been outdated for about 8 years or more. It had serious issues with lag, hacks, dupes and scammers. The PvP was a relentless nk fest of bad mannered brats.
Somehow you seem to think that D2 was limited to the bnet realms, and completely overlook single players, LAN players and mod players. Take a stroll down the Phrozen Keep and you'll see what I mean.
I don't consider that crap as part of D2, no sir. Single player was fun but limited.....other than that...it doesn't count when comparing to D3.
I only consider the product they packaged for retail.....period. Anyone comparing D3 to the aftermarket spew that followed is highly misguided.
I've got a serious problem with some of you saying anything akin to, "If you don't like it, don't play it." This is supreme trolling. It's not like the OP started a thread and merely said, "Inferno sucks! You suck Blizzard!" Anyone who at least makes the attempt to explain why they don't like something is perfectly justified in making their complaint.
You, Avrunath. You're the most useless person in this entire thread because you were just so eager to equate someone with a legitimate complaint to a person who totally lacks all perspective since there are starving people somewhere in the world. "People are starving in Africa and YOU are complaining about a video game?!" Get real, will you?
I feel kind of lucky to have not reached Inferno yet. I still find it hard to understand how someone could. I'm still in Hell and it's been pretty difficult for me but I guess I'm hardly a serious player as I'd like to be. And I do believe there will be more to come with the endgame. I'm also interested to see how Blizzard puts to use its revenue from the AH and maybe they'll devote some of that to continuously improving the game beyond your standard patches.
Keep in mind, for all of you who are whining about inferno difficulty, that Bashiok posted that much much less than 1% had even made it there.
So, stop posting your opinions as *fact*, because, they're just the opinions of the less than 1%.
I found inferno to be what I expected: hard for the sake of hard, but doable. That's what we were told it would be, and that we'd have to farm gear for it.
If it's too hard for you, fine, go play something else that's easier, instead of calling for nerfs. Inferno is not MEANT to be linear difficulty compared to the rest of the game, imo, from what the D3 team has said about it.
(To put in perspective, they said 6.3 million playing after the first week, and we're roughly 1.5 weeks in now. 1% of the 1 week number is 63,000. So, 50,000 people could be in inferno, and still be less than 1% of the playerbase. And that means you're not *nearly* as important to Blizzard as you think you should be.)
Kinda wierd with all the "Inferno is fine, if you don't like it go play something els" posts, seeing that far under 1% has actually hit inferno and prolly even less that's past act 1...
You gotta be freakin' deranged to think inferno is fine as it is now! Yeah maybe some classes are doing better than others but if ur playing a barb or a monk past act one, ur pretty much screwed unless ur sitting on shitloads of gold or the "best" items available at the moment..
Unless you wanna corpse-run and just skip every pack and kill bosses, this game is pretty much downright boring in it's current state.
Only thing you can do is just find a good farm spot and wait it out because vortex/teleports champions are plain stupid.
Don't get me wrong, I love when it's difficult but this is just difficult in the wrong and least fun way..
Just my 2 cents.
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If those who are unhappy are given a better quality game with patches or expansions then I am all for it. I enjoy most games I purchase but I am all for having others voices their concerns and push blizzard to try even harder and refine this game, which certainly can benefit from some major end game tweaks.
D3 Channel: OnetwoD3
Sooooo, you're idea of 'end game' is to do the same boss run over and over, and have an extremely high level cap that did almost zilch for anything other than an epeen factor? You also want to spam health potions, because you can't figure out how to play your class and survive without them?
I'll agree, ubers were cool, and I'm sure something like that will get put into D3 at a later date. But cmon, you're not fooling anyone. You're mad because you can't farm inferno because it's insanely hard without having spent millions of gold on the AH. I agree, it sucks farming act 1 and maybe bits of act 2, knowing that even better gear drops in the later acts, but because we arn't geared enough for it we can't get to it then.
Diablo 3's endgame is far, far more dynamic, intricate and engaging than D2's was. You just... can't argue that farming 1 extremely easy boss over and over again is anywhere near better than farming whole acts at a time, with different encounters along the way every playthrough.
Oh...you mean that patch they added 7 years after the game came out?
Elite uniques were extremely rare to drop and having to farm the same 3-4 areas for those drops was tiresome.
lol....in 5 years of online play I think I had 3 or 4 high runes drop.
It took like 1, maybe 2 days to reach lvl 85 and every level after that was accomplish by 1 of 2 means.....endless Baal runs or endless Chaos runs....how fun was that ?
The last 8 or 9 levels barely did anything to improve your build.
The people that still play D2 are a bit OCD if you ask me. Last I checked in 2010, the realms were overrun by robots and haxzorz. D2 was great, but it's been outdated for about 8 years or more. It had serious issues with lag, hacks, dupes and scammers. The PvP was a relentless nk fest of bad mannered brats.
D3 has way more potential than D2 ever had, and I have every reason to believe that Blizzard will take full advantage of it. People keep knockin Bliz because they stand to make a cut of the RMAH.....well good, that means they'll have a heavy incentive to keep the game fresh, continue to add expansions and patches as well as keep the integrity of the game safe from dupes etc.
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What a fool.
Why not, at least it's more fun now than the actual end-game in Diablo 3, how about that? At least you knew you were constantly progressing and it wasn't just about 'epeen', some items required you to have certain level, stat requirements etc. there was just so much variety, it was amazing.
Sorry to say, but revenge is not enough in inferno for my barb to compensate for the CD's on potions in this game. The gems that add some life after hit/kill are useless due to how fast my health goes down and how slow I recover. So yeah, I want to spam positions. There was not broken, why dumb it down and WoW-fy it? Maybe limit it to PVP, fine.
'You're mad because you can't farm inferno because it's insanely hard without having spent millions of gold on the AH.'- umm.. yeah. Like I said, farming bosses and mini bosses in D2 is still way funner.
'Diablo 3's endgame is far, far more dynamic, intricate and engaging than D2's was. You just... can't argue that farming 1 extremely easy boss over and over again is anywhere near better than farming whole acts at a time, with different encounters along the way every playthrough.'
Dynamic? How exactly, please elaborate. Farming in Diablo 3 is the most frustrating and tedious thing ever, you almost never get better item drops from the elites you kill and there are elites every 2 steps, not even boss runs and the items they drops can save you from that annoyance, see what I did there? That's a reference bro So again that instantly goes to your second point, farm gold 2 million gold, buy sweet items, profit. Seriously, have you even seen a set drop yet? Cuz I didn't.
This kind of post is exactly why I menace excessive, harsh, rude trolling on some people such as this guy.
Hey, did I actually think that?.....no....... too bad, uh?
Or is assuming they learned from Diablo 2 and would try to do something deep from it... thats crazy? I'm supposed to wait it out until they get yet another 5 years of production for basic things they should have learned from Diablo 2 already?
Frankly I'm not sure what point I'm arguing with people like you.
What?
ARPG isn't about end game. In fact, there is no end game, there is just playing the game over and over, just like d2.
D2 end game was leveling from 90-99, that shit was hard.
Oh but behold, you do think that. You lob your opinions around as factual statements. Just because you found botting all day the same bosses fun doesn't mean it really was. If you think it is, then go back to it.
I also get the feeling that Inferno is just too hard for you, and you can't handle packs that you deem "Impossible." I used to think this way, until I realized that there is a proper way to fight everything, every class.
You can stick to your never changing Diablo 2 casual fest, where you can out level the mobs by 25 levels and use rune words that ruin the game, me I'll stick here and play something challenging for once.
If you love the simplistic no brain challenge Diablo 2 currently offers, you'll be stoked when TL2 comes out. It's being developed for casual cry babies who like to just stand there and spam 1 or 2 spells and collect loot. Gotta get that instant gratification, fuck working for something.
Me? I'll stick to something that has enough of a challenge that a java script parser can't play the game for me.
Also don't forget that in D2, anything much beyond level 70-80 did not matter too much even before synergies were introduced. Oftentimes builds were done and all pieces of gear could be worn. Leveling up to 99 was just for ladder or mere accomplishment. But by that point it's pretty much just running Baal again and again and again. I'll let you have your opinion of which game has a better endgame, but after years of running it Baal's throne room can DIAF.
I'm not surprised by your response. I like your suggestions and I am also all for more variety in gameplay instead of simply upping the stats from difficulty to difficulty. I'm sure most players would say they would love to see Blizzard, or any developer, do more instead of sit on their hands if given a choice between the two.
That said, it appears we come from two different design philosiphies. Both have merit, but both have pitfalls as well. You seem to be taking the kitchen sink approach -- which is illustrated in what I bolded. You want to add as much as you can until the bucket overfloweth with fun.
But the problem is one resource that is as finite for you and me as it is for a large development team like Blizzard: time.
It takes time to design creatures. It takes time to design abilities. It takes time to animate attacks. It takes time to debug code. It takes time to make sure everything works together as it should. Yes it starts from resources that exist, but a good portion of it will also have to come from scratch. You can add bit by bit, piece by piece, and block by block. Creative teams are great at brainstorming, and I'm sure there are some quality idea guys at blizzard (except for maybe in their writing department...*hides*) -- but it's up to the director/producer/team leader/teammates to make sure the project is not so bloated that it can actually be completed in a realistic timeframe. As great as the design phase is, eventually it has to end and eventually development has to start without dipping back into too much redesigning.
What are some common pitfalls from letting ideas get too big and too bloated (including some of my own prior mistakes):
1) TOO LATE: Blizzard loves pushing the date back. At one point in time, although not so much since being acquired by Activision, they were known for working until a game was perfect no matter how long it took. But the reality is that there are not only internal timetables that must be met by the devlopment studio, but also external pressures. Take too long adding in little things and fine details, and eventually someone beats you to the punch. Or worse, they do it better. Or worse, what you have been coding becomes entirely obselete (Duke Nukem Forever anyone?) so that even though you have these fantastic details, no one is going to buy it. The product just ships too late.
2) HEMOGINEZATION: Is there such a thing as doing too much? Lets say creatures have unique art and some unique animations, but that there are only so many ways an enemy can poke a player to do damage. It may look different or cool, yes. But one trap developers fall into (and one you seem to suggest/imply by saying the resources for it already exist) is to create more content by transplanting qualities of one creature/place/etc. to another and vice versa. Suddenly that cool attack appears all over the game. Suddenly that super imposing creature gets pallete swapped so much that it loses its luster (ex. first Dragon Soul boss, or pallete swaps in the Monster Hunter series). Suddenly so many creatures have so many attacks that there is little making them unique or setting them apart. Where your game once had character, now it has sameness.
3) MISPLACING RESOURCES: If you're aware of the Diablo 3 development timeline, you'll know D3 was scrapped in its entirety and begun anew because it was beginning to look like D2.5. I bring this up because that meant the team had to go back to designing things all over again. To plan and implement all over again. As awesome as it would be to build an everything engine, it is impossible to make a team a) plan for everything or b ) design so much that the other teams are crushed under the burden of implementing it. And with time being a finite resource, that design time and its consequences are going to have to come out of something else in development. What if it's bug testing? That would go over well (EA/Bethesda still seem to be selling okay though, and like Blizzard they have the $ to suck up the bad PR). What if it becomes apparent that there is too much too late, and suddenly a lot of content gets cut. It happens all the time in development, but what that means is that the overplanned game had people working on parts that are not going to be implemented instead of what will ship in the final product. Too much of this and the product crumbles. Will teams have to rush and play catch up? If other teams are waiting for one team to get stuff done, then the answer is quite possibly yes. As a result, letting too many ideas leave the design phase can have a negative impact on development as a whole.
4) END USER EXPERIENCE: This speaks directly to your comment about an elite mob that is a Jailer and with other combinations becomes almost impossible to kill and your idea of Tree spreading. How would player know? Games like Demons Souls are in the minority, most players are not going to like, and not going to tolerate surprises that pull up out of the blue to destroy them. So what I find interesting is that you do not want the game to make elites harder or more compliated to kill as you go up into higher difficulties (something the player can predict and expect), but on the other hand you want some enemies to arbitrarily have abilities that can effect the entire field of play while others of the same kind do not (something that would come as a total surprise)? As a developer it is important to look from the eyes of who will be playing your game and determine what surprises are acceptable and what are not -- be the gatekeepr as it were. But allowing too many surprises to slip into the fold can confuse or otherwise turn away the player. That's not what you want.
5) MORE DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN FUN: Games are like anything else, you need a certain level of predictability to make the surprises more interesting. There needs to be a certain level of familiarity. Yes, the game is neatly split up into Acts with different locales and flavor. But what happens when enemies can do too much? When you don't know what's coming? When changes happen all the time. It can be neat or interesting. It can also be frustrating and alienating. The questions a game designer needs to ask is not whether variety is being added for the sake of variety or freshness. Instead, the question must always be whether variety is being added in because it makes the game, as a whole, more fun. Sometimes more is more. Sometimes less is more. There needs to be a balance.
TL;DR: You're not wrong, but Blizzard had reasons for making the design choices they made and seem to be working on successfully implementing them. But obviously, it is impossible to please everyone all of the time. That's why they're "design choices" instead of "correct choices"
True, but that was still just a small factor that added to the end-game content, people were still playing and trading and just hanging out around the game even before that. I know that because I was rigorously playing D2 during that time. I started in 2003, probably stopped playing seriously in 2009. I've made a great deal of friends on there and even formed a clan, SK_Clan, good times. I log on occasionally, right now I'm leveling my zon, which I never did. D3 actually made me miss D2, funny huh? That says something. Just go on metacritic and see user reviews, then compare it to critic reviews. Something is horribly wrong with the way Diablo 3 took course. Although I do still have faith, small amounts of it, but still. Because this is not the blizzard of 1990s or early 2000s, let's keep that in mind.
If you knew where to farm and how good your mf was, you wouldn't be saying that. Or just do boss runs that had a higher chance of dropping rares and high end set items where people fought for them.
That's why you have the lobby, that's why you can create a specific game with description stating you want a certain rune for this and this etc. That's how I built many of my runewords for my frenzy and ww barb or completed my tal's or ik set. Right now there is none of that. It was always fun to go farming on bosses or the countess for runes.
That wasn't the whole routine though, again. There was many things you could and did in between runs. You traded, , dueled, mulled, experimented with different runewords because a lot of them were equal in many different ways, rushed your friends, chatted on b.net etc. Idk about you but I leveled to my lvl 95 barb maybe in 1-2 months, didn't regret it all because it wasn't the only thing I was doing, I was getting actual good drops, many times different drops that I could trade for different things, not just equipment.
Def not more potential. but it does have it. I just don't see them do a huge revamp of the game, which would actually fix it. But that's a theory, it's not practical, especially for blizzard today. That is why I'm not optimistic. And for that I'm not leaving yet, I'm shelving the game until the next 'fix' patch. And I hope it is the savior.
Basically it was the nuances and variety that made Diablo 2 sexy. Diablo 3 simply got dumbed down to hell.
Act 1 Inferno is a cake walk. Please stop kidding yourself, you really have no place in this discussion until you're there. The complaints are coming from anyone who's in Act 2 Inferno. Act 1 Inferno, I can clear the whole thing very quickly. Going from Act 1 Inferno to Act 2 Inferno currently is like jumping from Normal to Hell, but not having the opportunity to get the gear you need to clear it except for from the wizards and DH who got past the areas pre-nerf.
He said how it was dynamic: You get the best loot by chaining fights against different kinds of Champions with different skill sets sprawled over entire levels within time limits of each other. The fight changes from pack to pack, some harder, some not.
D2 was not dynamic, it's static: You get the best loot by fighting bosses who have the same resistances/minions/skills every time you face them. You solve the same riddle every time you get to it. There is zero variation in the enemy (the boss) and once he's dead, you reload the game to do him again.
I trade, mule, experiment with builds, rush my friends and chat in D3. That leaves duels and runes, and PvP is coming so you're just down to runes. Yes it was kinda interesting to "create" a piece of gear through materials (runes) you gathered in the world, if only the kept that feature in. Luckily they did but they renamed it and grossly undertuned it. Just as some of the best runewords were added later, so the blacksmithing shall be fixed. So that's all of those points countered.
2000: D2 Launch
2003: Synergies, first global rebalance, 70+ leveling penalties, doubled runeword lists, doubled recipe totals, Uber Diablo.
2005: Pandimonium Event.
2008: You don't need the CD in the drive to play.
2010: Respecs.
The game most of us loved in D2 took years to come about. Jake even said he started after most of these things were in the game so I imagine when most people say "Diablo 2 was better than Diablo 3", they're talking about "2005 Diablo 2 was better than Diablo 3", which I might accept, but I'm still leaning towards D3.
Again, it tooks years for most of those beloved "nuances" to get put into the game. I posit that week #2 of Diablo 3 was better than year #2 for Diablo 2.
I don't consider that crap as part of D2, no sir. Single player was fun but limited.....other than that...it doesn't count when comparing to D3.
I only consider the product they packaged for retail.....period. Anyone comparing D3 to the aftermarket spew that followed is highly misguided.
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You, Avrunath. You're the most useless person in this entire thread because you were just so eager to equate someone with a legitimate complaint to a person who totally lacks all perspective since there are starving people somewhere in the world. "People are starving in Africa and YOU are complaining about a video game?!" Get real, will you?
I feel kind of lucky to have not reached Inferno yet. I still find it hard to understand how someone could. I'm still in Hell and it's been pretty difficult for me but I guess I'm hardly a serious player as I'd like to be. And I do believe there will be more to come with the endgame. I'm also interested to see how Blizzard puts to use its revenue from the AH and maybe they'll devote some of that to continuously improving the game beyond your standard patches.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
So, stop posting your opinions as *fact*, because, they're just the opinions of the less than 1%.
I found inferno to be what I expected: hard for the sake of hard, but doable. That's what we were told it would be, and that we'd have to farm gear for it.
If it's too hard for you, fine, go play something else that's easier, instead of calling for nerfs. Inferno is not MEANT to be linear difficulty compared to the rest of the game, imo, from what the D3 team has said about it.
(To put in perspective, they said 6.3 million playing after the first week, and we're roughly 1.5 weeks in now. 1% of the 1 week number is 63,000. So, 50,000 people could be in inferno, and still be less than 1% of the playerbase. And that means you're not *nearly* as important to Blizzard as you think you should be.)
Edit: math
1 - Finish the highest difficulty
2 - Farm it until you are at the most l33t point, then return back to hell bosses to 1-shot your ego out of them
Too many WoW-players spewing at the game for being the bad customer they are, sigh
You gotta be freakin' deranged to think inferno is fine as it is now! Yeah maybe some classes are doing better than others but if ur playing a barb or a monk past act one, ur pretty much screwed unless ur sitting on shitloads of gold or the "best" items available at the moment..
Unless you wanna corpse-run and just skip every pack and kill bosses, this game is pretty much downright boring in it's current state.
Only thing you can do is just find a good farm spot and wait it out because vortex/teleports champions are plain stupid.
Don't get me wrong, I love when it's difficult but this is just difficult in the wrong and least fun way..
Just my 2 cents.