Well? I've heard a number of places talk about whether or not D3 innovated, or if it is just a polished standard ARPG. And I'm curious, what innovations do you think there are/aren't? And let's not get into if it is a GOOD or BAD innovation (there's too much of that going around as is), just if it is innovating.
The innovations I can think of are:
Skills - no points, no choice in what you have, only what you use.
Runes - A little iffy on this, but I haven't seen any other games where every single skill has 6 variants that are pretty different.
AH - Not sure. Is this an innovation? Or is it just common?
RMAH - Well, it's more or less new. I haven't heard of any games that let players sell items to each other for money (yeah, there's the freemium games, but thats the devs selling items to the players).
Most places I've seen focus on those last time ideas.
Blizzard doesn't always innovate. What they're really good at is pulling together ideas from multiple sources, *iterating* them, and polishing them till they glow.
For example, say what you want about WoW, good or bad, it's a huge powerhouse. (I don't play it anymore, so I've no axe to grind for or against) But, they didn't innovate that much in WoW. They did the above better than anyone else to get where they are.
D3 is the same. They took the skill/loot/attribute points from D2, iterated them and mixed the ideas around, and ended up with WoW's setup, then re-mixed them again for D3. The 'new' LFR loot system for MoP? D3 co-op loot. Everyone gets their own.
The key to all of it, is that the game (for most of us, I know some have issues) *just works*.
(I'm not bashing Blizzard at all. It works for them. They didn't invent RTS, but they dominated it for years.)
Well? I've heard a number of places talk about whether or not D3 innovated, or if it is just a polished standard ARPG. And I'm curious, what innovations do you think there are/aren't? And let's not get into if it is a GOOD or BAD innovation (there's too much of that going around as is), just if it is innovating.
The innovations I can think of are:
Skills - no points, no choice in what you have, only what you use.
Runes - A little iffy on this, but I haven't seen any other games where every single skill has 6 variants that are pretty different.
AH - Not sure. Is this an innovation? Or is it just common?
RMAH - Well, it's more or less new. I haven't heard of any games that let players sell items to each other for money (yeah, there's the freemium games, but thats the devs selling items to the players).
Most places I've seen focus on those last time ideas.
Thoughts?
I dunno.. the RMAH "innovation" is more like, they found a way to sell digital items without having to do any work, you are the ones selling it and they profit off of the imaginary items. It's innovative in that sense, in the sense that in Diablo 2, lots of people sold items on ebay.. and Blizzard knew it was going to happen in D3 and wanted a cut of it instead of trying to find a way to keep it from happening.
As far as the rest of the game goes, I haven't found anything that is a "Step forward" for ARPG's. It's all been done before for the most part.. I am sure people will be mad at me for saying it. I love the game, it's my new favorite time sink. But it needs work.
Mavfin pretty much nailed it. There's nothing really revolutionary about D3, but Blizzard did what they always do which is to iterate on a well-known style of gameplay until it has as much broad appeal as possible.
There really isn't anything new. No permanent skills is just free and easy respeccing. Runes are just providing a little customization to an otherwise static skill system. I'm pretty sure EQ2 had a RMAH on some servers, but either way, Blizzard didn't invent the idea. Note that this isn't a slam against Blizzard -- they're very good at what they do. They produce very safe games (ie guaranteed sales) and they leave innovation to smaller developers who aren't risking nearly so much investor capital.
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...and if you disagree with me, you're probably <insert random ad hominem attack here>.
Meh no. In my opinion the didn't elevate the gameplay like Diablo 2 did to Diablo 1. It doesn't really feel like an upgrade. They altered some mechanics but nothing that really says "Hey I am new and innovative and great compared to my predecessor." Then again, developers are to scared shitless to take real risk or develop anything like a classic these days, to much money involved now.
I think if you follow the development of "skills/talent/etc selection" from D1 -> D2 -> WoW -> SC2 -> D3 you can see that it's an ongoing philosophical evolution within Blizzard.
1) Diablo: this had a very simple system where you learned spells by picking up spell books. Additional spell books of the same type increased your "skill" in the ability. This meant that your spell advancement was determined by drops, and you could "max out" every spell given enough luck with book drops.
2) Diablo 2: The skills were developed into trees, which meant you weren't tied to book drops anymore and you had a finite amount of points to spend, leading to players making choices on which spells to take - the creation of "builds". It was a bit awkward though, first because there were no "respecs" and second many of the lower skills weren't that useful, leading to you pooling skill points for a very long time until the high skills unlocked and you could start spending them. Which was pretty lousy. It was somewhat offset when later patches introduced "synergies" where for example, points in fire bolt (low level ability) buffed fire ball (which replaced fire bolt rendering it useless) so you still had some viable options at low levels.
3) WoW: A lot of refinement went into the WoW talent trees, making sure that most low-level abilities remained useful on fully leveled characters so there were less dead end talents. Also you had to spend a certain number of points per tier so you couldn't hoard talent points even if you wanted to. This was actually a good thing in that you had some "free" talent choices where none of your options at a particular tier had a direct DPS (or HPS or tanking) benefit so you could pick some utility along with straight performance increases. But it was kind of an awkward way to achieve that goal, and in MoP the cookie cutter performance abilities become baked into the specs and only the utility/QoL abilities remain in talent trees - now simplified down to a choice of 3 per tier. WoW's talents evolved a lot over time and many other improvements like respecs and dual specs were made over D2's system.
4) Starcraft 2: The "research" options in the campaign mode are very much like MoP talents in that they are a simple "tree" of 1 choice out of 2 for each tier. Simpler than the WoW/Diablo talents because Starcraft is an RTS.
5) Diablo 3: Embracing the new "treeless" design of talents without emulating MoP talent trees too much, Blizzard gives us 6 skills with numerous glyph enhancements each, but you can only choose one glyph for each skill. Again they're trying to encouraging player choice and meaningful playstyle (over just letting you use anything in your arsenal at any time). Each glyph has its own merits making the choice interesting (not 100% successful in that respect but still).
So I think in terms of skills/talents/etc it's an ongoing evolution in Blizzard and their philosophy and approach have changed over time as they learned from experience (and indeed the genres they operate in did as well). It's not so much a matter of single games innovating but a long development in which multiple games influence one another.
Innovate
verb (used without object)
1. to introduce something new; make changes in anything established
Yeah, and to my mind, what I listed was innovation, as I don't know of them being done before. No ones really had anything to counter that, it seems to be, generally, "it was a big change." And I'll agree there, it's not radically different, but you don't have to re-invent the wheel to innovate (solid rubber tires on metal rims to air filled tires on metal rims - same basic shape and function, but smoother ride).
I think Wilson did some neat and relatively innovative stuff on skills, even if the design team badly dropped the ball on the basics.
Where it really innovated - basically in making itself an MMO-lite with gamers railroaded into the RMAH - is where it has failed hard, and will fail even harder if they're bold enough to actually launch the RMAH.
If you go with the second part of the definition. Then technically yes it is innovative. Just because they didn't really introduce anything new. Doesn't mean it wasn't innovative. They did make changes to systems that were already in place in other games to make them better. I think one of the hardest changes to accept was when they took away spending stat points. However, if you think about it. It put alot more empahsis on item finding. You can't just expect to get buy with anytype of gear as long as you spent your stats/skill points properly. Your gear is your stats. Your gear determines how much damage you do, or how much survivability you have. Not how much vit you decided was the right amount. This imo is innovative, they took the very essence of D2 which was the item finding and made it that much more important.
This imo is innovative, they took the very essence of D2 which was the item finding and made it that much more important.
Agreed, though it is potentially (and probably IMO) disastrous.
Basically they assumed that everyone wanted to play like a multiplayer item-trading D2er, despite that being a small minority of the total D2 audience.
Of course, it really isn't much of a gamble in the big picture if you think of any backlash being confined to the IP and not attaching to the brand itself. If it is overwhelmingly negative, that's isn't true, of course.
If you want to be pedantic about "innovation" you could claim the whole Diablo franchise is just a slick graphical skin on top of a Roguelike from the 80s.
Basically they assumed that everyone wanted to play like a multiplayer item-trading D2er, despite that being a small minority of the total D2 audience.
Nobody's making you use the AH. They just made it convenient.
Nobody's making you use the AH. They just made it convenient.
Ah, but they are making everyone uses their servers to play the most basic single-player game. And the only reason you'd obsess over the potential "security" therein (of course, the reality is the opposite) is if your focus was multiplayer and item ownership, and, ultimately, the AHs. And, of course, even the ersatz "single player" game design is so warped towards gear-gear-gear that if you have even the slightest interest in an endgame, they're making you use the AH.
So, actually, they are making me use the AH, and they're making the basic game experience the absolute opposite of "convenient".
If you want to be pedantic about "innovation" you could claim the whole Diablo franchise is just a slick graphical skin on top of a Roguelike from the 80s.
Sorry to multipost - Brevik has been very clear in multiple interviews that it is exactly that:
"I came up with the idea for Diablo ... when I was high-school," says Brevik. "It was modified over and over until it solidified when I was in college and got hooked on an ASCII game called Moria/Angband. When we pitched Diablo to Blizzard, we pitched a turn-based, single-player DOS game."
Ah, but they are making everyone uses their servers to play the most basic single-player game. And the only reason you'd obsess over the potential "security" therein (of course, the reality is the opposite) is if your focus was multiplayer and item ownership, and, ultimately, the AHs. And, of course, even the ersatz "single player" game design is so warped towards gear-gear-gear that if you have even the slightest interest in an endgame, they're making you use the AH.
So, actually, they are making me use the AH, and they're making the basic game experience the absolute opposite of "convenient".
Diablo has ALWAYS been a multiplayer game. Diablo 1 was a LAN game. When net gaming came along, Diablo 2 was on BNet. It had a LAN component as a legacy of D1. LAN games are pretty much defunct now, everyone prefers the convenience of online play, so they've dropped that.
Ah, but they are making everyone uses their servers to play the most basic single-player game. And the only reason you'd obsess over the potential "security" therein (of course, the reality is the opposite) is if your focus was multiplayer and item ownership, and, ultimately, the AHs. And, of course, even the ersatz "single player" game design is so warped towards gear-gear-gear that if you have even the slightest interest in an endgame, they're making you use the AH.
So, actually, they are making me use the AH, and they're making the basic game experience the absolute opposite of "convenient".
Diablo has ALWAYS been a multiplayer game. Diablo 1 was a LAN game. When net gaming came along, Diablo 2 was on BNet. It had a LAN component as a legacy of D1. LAN games are pretty much defunct now, everyone prefers the convenience of online play, so they've dropped that.
Diablo has ALWAYS been a multiplayer game. Diablo 1 was a LAN game. When net gaming came along, Diablo 2 was on BNet. It had a LAN component as a legacy of D1. LAN games are pretty much defunct now, everyone prefers the convenience of online play, so they've dropped that.
Sure it was a feature, but I've heard that the majority of Diablo and Diablo II players never played a single battle.net or LAN game. Interested if there was some documentation on it. And I still don't get what's "convenient" about an inability to play single player away from the 'net and/or lag. IMO, it isn't about convenience, it's about piracy and monetization, and the only ones that deny it are paid shills and/or koolaid drinkers.
Well, that's why Blizzard North was such a poor fit. Diablo was incredibly innovative as the PC space goes in terms of combining new elements, wherease the Warcraft RTSs were just Dune II reskinned and polished, Starcraft was just War II with Warhammer 40K and Geiger IP skins and WoW was just a polished Everquest with D2 mechanics.
"Hellgate" is a good example of why innovation isn't always a great idea. And, of course, D3's always-online railroading (and, to some degree, badly failed itemization as an extension of this) into AHs is proving to be another example of it.
Genuine creativity is always a bad fit for a profit-hungry global conglomerate. It leads to blown projects because of feature creep and endless experimentation, and prima donnas that don't make for functioning organizational command structures. That's why Irvine has fought so hard to get rid of it.
Well, that's why Blizzard North was such a poor fit. Diablo was incredibly innovative as the PC space goes in terms of combining new elements, wherease the Warcraft RTSs were just Dune II reskinned and polished, Starcraft was just War II with Warhammer 40K and Geiger IP skins and WoW was just a polished Everquest with D2 mechanics.
"Hellgate" is a good example of why innovation isn't always a great idea. And, of course, D3's always-online railroading (and, to some degree, badly failed itemization as an extension of this) into AHs is proving to be another example of it.
Genuine creativity is always a bad fit for a profit-hungry global conglomerate. It leads to blown projects because of feature creep and endless experimentation, and prima donnas that don't make for functioning organizational command structures. That's why Irvine has fought so hard to get rid of it.
Really? SC was just Warcraft 2 with the AvP franchise?
Last I checked, SC really was innovative, what with B.Net built in, and the fact that it was an RTS with 3 fanctions that were entirely different, yet decently balanced.
But overall, I guess I'm using a different cut off for new then the rest of you. I'm thinking in terms of game mechanics, and what I haven't seen done before. It seems the rest of you are basically thinking genre (re)defining.
Sorry to multipost - Brevik has been very clear in multiple interviews that it is exactly that:
"I came up with the idea for Diablo ... when I was high-school," says Brevik. "It was modified over and over until it solidified when I was in college and got hooked on an ASCII game called Moria/Angband. When we pitched Diablo to Blizzard, we pitched a turn-based, single-player DOS game."
I played umoria on mainframes in the late 80s, and yeah, the whole basis for Diablo and ARPGs came from umoria, rogue, larn, nethack, etc. Angband was a later evolution of Moria and Rogue, and indeed it's still out there in open source land.
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The innovations I can think of are:
Skills - no points, no choice in what you have, only what you use.
Runes - A little iffy on this, but I haven't seen any other games where every single skill has 6 variants that are pretty different.
AH - Not sure. Is this an innovation? Or is it just common?
RMAH - Well, it's more or less new. I haven't heard of any games that let players sell items to each other for money (yeah, there's the freemium games, but thats the devs selling items to the players).
Most places I've seen focus on those last time ideas.
Thoughts?
For example, say what you want about WoW, good or bad, it's a huge powerhouse. (I don't play it anymore, so I've no axe to grind for or against) But, they didn't innovate that much in WoW. They did the above better than anyone else to get where they are.
D3 is the same. They took the skill/loot/attribute points from D2, iterated them and mixed the ideas around, and ended up with WoW's setup, then re-mixed them again for D3. The 'new' LFR loot system for MoP? D3 co-op loot. Everyone gets their own.
The key to all of it, is that the game (for most of us, I know some have issues) *just works*.
(I'm not bashing Blizzard at all. It works for them. They didn't invent RTS, but they dominated it for years.)
I dunno.. the RMAH "innovation" is more like, they found a way to sell digital items without having to do any work, you are the ones selling it and they profit off of the imaginary items. It's innovative in that sense, in the sense that in Diablo 2, lots of people sold items on ebay.. and Blizzard knew it was going to happen in D3 and wanted a cut of it instead of trying to find a way to keep it from happening.
As far as the rest of the game goes, I haven't found anything that is a "Step forward" for ARPG's. It's all been done before for the most part.. I am sure people will be mad at me for saying it. I love the game, it's my new favorite time sink. But it needs work.
There really isn't anything new. No permanent skills is just free and easy respeccing. Runes are just providing a little customization to an otherwise static skill system. I'm pretty sure EQ2 had a RMAH on some servers, but either way, Blizzard didn't invent the idea. Note that this isn't a slam against Blizzard -- they're very good at what they do. They produce very safe games (ie guaranteed sales) and they leave innovation to smaller developers who aren't risking nearly so much investor capital.
1) Diablo: this had a very simple system where you learned spells by picking up spell books. Additional spell books of the same type increased your "skill" in the ability. This meant that your spell advancement was determined by drops, and you could "max out" every spell given enough luck with book drops.
2) Diablo 2: The skills were developed into trees, which meant you weren't tied to book drops anymore and you had a finite amount of points to spend, leading to players making choices on which spells to take - the creation of "builds". It was a bit awkward though, first because there were no "respecs" and second many of the lower skills weren't that useful, leading to you pooling skill points for a very long time until the high skills unlocked and you could start spending them. Which was pretty lousy. It was somewhat offset when later patches introduced "synergies" where for example, points in fire bolt (low level ability) buffed fire ball (which replaced fire bolt rendering it useless) so you still had some viable options at low levels.
3) WoW: A lot of refinement went into the WoW talent trees, making sure that most low-level abilities remained useful on fully leveled characters so there were less dead end talents. Also you had to spend a certain number of points per tier so you couldn't hoard talent points even if you wanted to. This was actually a good thing in that you had some "free" talent choices where none of your options at a particular tier had a direct DPS (or HPS or tanking) benefit so you could pick some utility along with straight performance increases. But it was kind of an awkward way to achieve that goal, and in MoP the cookie cutter performance abilities become baked into the specs and only the utility/QoL abilities remain in talent trees - now simplified down to a choice of 3 per tier. WoW's talents evolved a lot over time and many other improvements like respecs and dual specs were made over D2's system.
4) Starcraft 2: The "research" options in the campaign mode are very much like MoP talents in that they are a simple "tree" of 1 choice out of 2 for each tier. Simpler than the WoW/Diablo talents because Starcraft is an RTS.
5) Diablo 3: Embracing the new "treeless" design of talents without emulating MoP talent trees too much, Blizzard gives us 6 skills with numerous glyph enhancements each, but you can only choose one glyph for each skill. Again they're trying to encouraging player choice and meaningful playstyle (over just letting you use anything in your arsenal at any time). Each glyph has its own merits making the choice interesting (not 100% successful in that respect but still).
So I think in terms of skills/talents/etc it's an ongoing evolution in Blizzard and their philosophy and approach have changed over time as they learned from experience (and indeed the genres they operate in did as well). It's not so much a matter of single games innovating but a long development in which multiple games influence one another.
Yeah, and to my mind, what I listed was innovation, as I don't know of them being done before. No ones really had anything to counter that, it seems to be, generally, "it was a big change." And I'll agree there, it's not radically different, but you don't have to re-invent the wheel to innovate (solid rubber tires on metal rims to air filled tires on metal rims - same basic shape and function, but smoother ride).
+1 for definition posting : )
I have to simply say NO. It is not an innovative game.
Where it really innovated - basically in making itself an MMO-lite with gamers railroaded into the RMAH - is where it has failed hard, and will fail even harder if they're bold enough to actually launch the RMAH.
Agreed, though it is potentially (and probably IMO) disastrous.
Basically they assumed that everyone wanted to play like a multiplayer item-trading D2er, despite that being a small minority of the total D2 audience.
Of course, it really isn't much of a gamble in the big picture if you think of any backlash being confined to the IP and not attaching to the brand itself. If it is overwhelmingly negative, that's isn't true, of course.
Nobody's making you use the AH. They just made it convenient.
Ah, but they are making everyone uses their servers to play the most basic single-player game. And the only reason you'd obsess over the potential "security" therein (of course, the reality is the opposite) is if your focus was multiplayer and item ownership, and, ultimately, the AHs. And, of course, even the ersatz "single player" game design is so warped towards gear-gear-gear that if you have even the slightest interest in an endgame, they're making you use the AH.
So, actually, they are making me use the AH, and they're making the basic game experience the absolute opposite of "convenient".
Sorry to multipost - Brevik has been very clear in multiple interviews that it is exactly that:
"I came up with the idea for Diablo ... when I was high-school," says Brevik. "It was modified over and over until it solidified when I was in college and got hooked on an ASCII game called Moria/Angband. When we pitched Diablo to Blizzard, we pitched a turn-based, single-player DOS game."
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_48/289-Secret-Sauce-The-Rise-of-Blizzard.3
Diablo has ALWAYS been a multiplayer game. Diablo 1 was a LAN game. When net gaming came along, Diablo 2 was on BNet. It had a LAN component as a legacy of D1. LAN games are pretty much defunct now, everyone prefers the convenience of online play, so they've dropped that.
D1 had Bnet also
Sure it was a feature, but I've heard that the majority of Diablo and Diablo II players never played a single battle.net or LAN game. Interested if there was some documentation on it. And I still don't get what's "convenient" about an inability to play single player away from the 'net and/or lag. IMO, it isn't about convenience, it's about piracy and monetization, and the only ones that deny it are paid shills and/or koolaid drinkers.
Well, that's why Blizzard North was such a poor fit. Diablo was incredibly innovative as the PC space goes in terms of combining new elements, wherease the Warcraft RTSs were just Dune II reskinned and polished, Starcraft was just War II with Warhammer 40K and Geiger IP skins and WoW was just a polished Everquest with D2 mechanics.
"Hellgate" is a good example of why innovation isn't always a great idea. And, of course, D3's always-online railroading (and, to some degree, badly failed itemization as an extension of this) into AHs is proving to be another example of it.
Genuine creativity is always a bad fit for a profit-hungry global conglomerate. It leads to blown projects because of feature creep and endless experimentation, and prima donnas that don't make for functioning organizational command structures. That's why Irvine has fought so hard to get rid of it.
Really? SC was just Warcraft 2 with the AvP franchise?
Last I checked, SC really was innovative, what with B.Net built in, and the fact that it was an RTS with 3 fanctions that were entirely different, yet decently balanced.
But overall, I guess I'm using a different cut off for new then the rest of you. I'm thinking in terms of game mechanics, and what I haven't seen done before. It seems the rest of you are basically thinking genre (re)defining.
I played umoria on mainframes in the late 80s, and yeah, the whole basis for Diablo and ARPGs came from umoria, rogue, larn, nethack, etc. Angband was a later evolution of Moria and Rogue, and indeed it's still out there in open source land.