The Health Orbs system comes from the very first game Jay has worked on - Blood.
One of the lessons that they learned in development was people’s memories of Diablo II were way different than the reality of Diablo II. People remember all kinds of stuff that never actually happened in that game. They remember what it was like in hell difficulty. They don’t remember what it was like in normal difficulty. They remember something that's visually darker than it ever was. They remember a variety and depth of monsters that was never there.
One of Jay's mantras is, if you’re going to be an M-rated game, don’t be a soft M. Embrace it. Sometimes they had to push people — "you can be gorier than that, you can be grosser than that, go more in!"
As much as I like Dustin Browder or try to respect guys like Wilson, I never really understood why they had to include stupid gimmicky mechanics from their former, much less successful games. It's fine if Blizzard wants to take a feature that actually adds gameplay value to the game and reinterate it, that's cool. That's Blizzard's method. They did a lot of that sort of thing when creating Warcraft III and WoW. Most of their other games just took concepts from their own titles (a.k.a. town portal scrolls from Diablo I being in Warcraft III.)
I disagree with them acting the players that actually played D2 (not the ones that claim a bunch of crap and talk nonsense) have somehow forgotten how their game experience was. They could only get away with saying something like this, because this is a Wall Street Journal article and they have no clue about what manner they should present information about their game in for WSJ. I could argue that a large handful of the D3 devs game simply didn't play D2 enough or didn't take it as seriously. Diablo 2 isn't just DARK because of a shitty brightness level setting. It also had mutilated/tortured/ severed human corpses all over the landscapes and as doodads. Maybe the devs have conveniently forgotten that those existed to make the game more of a "Soft-M" type a game? How ironic. Let's just hope that I just have Beta Syndrome.
As for "underexplored barbarians" and "no evil heroes," I'll just chalk that up to Jay's dev team not understanding Diablo 2 at all. Many players look to the D2 barbarian as extremely bad-ass and will see the D3 as softspoken. Sorry Jay. Moon Physics and partical-effects are a cheap way to show off imaginary strength. Go watch the Avengers a 10th time and maybe you'll see how the Hulk should be portrayed properly. I think it's hilarious how it seems like the devs had a more clearer understanding of how their characters should be portrayed 3 years ago. We went from "characters that exist in a morally grey setting to "this character is a good guy or is a rebel good guy that used to be apart of a larger group of peers." I'd link the youtube where they discuss that several years ago, but I'mpretty sure it was the 2009 Blizzcon Diablo 3 Lore Panel and I couldn't find it on youtube.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Some people tell me I'm going to hell. I just let them know that I've already packed my bags!
I actually prefer the Health Orbs because of the reduction in downtime. One of the things that annoyed me in Diablo II was needing to visit the town vendor before my armor needed repairing or stash away items from my inventory.
Or maybe I'm a bad player. Maybe I wasn't doing enough praying.
As much as I like Dustin Browder or try to respect guys like Wilson, I never really understood why they had to include stupid gimmicky mechanics from their former, much less successful games. It's fine if Blizzard wants to take a feature that actually adds gameplay value to the game and reinterate it, that's cool. That's Blizzard's method. They did a lot of that sort of thing when creating Warcraft III and WoW. Most of their other games just took concepts from their own titles (a.k.a. town portal scrolls from Diablo I being in Warcraft III.)
I disagree with them acting the players that actually played D2 (not the ones that claim a bunch of crap and talk nonsense) have somehow forgotten how their game experience was. They could only get away with saying something like this, because this is a Wall Street Journal article and they have no clue about what manner they should present information about their game in for WSJ. I could argue that a large handful of the D3 devs game simply didn't play D2 enough or didn't take it as seriously. Diablo 2 isn't just DARK because of a shitty brightness level setting. It also had mutilated/tortured/ severed human corpses all over the landscapes and as doodads. Maybe the devs have conveniently forgotten that those existed to make the game more of a "Soft-M" type a game? How ironic. Let's just hope that I just have Beta Syndrome.
As for "underexplored barbarians" and "no evil heroes," I'll just chalk that up to Jay's dev team not understanding Diablo 2 at all. Many players look to the D2 barbarian as extremely bad-ass and will see the D3 as softspoken. Sorry Jay. Moon Physics and partical-effects are a cheap way to show off imaginary strength. Go watch the Avengers a 10th time and maybe you'll see how the Hulk should be portrayed properly. I think it's hilarious how it seems like the devs had a more clearer understanding of how their characters should be portrayed 3 years ago. We went from "characters that exist in a morally grey setting to "this character is a good guy or is a rebel good guy that used to be apart of a larger group of peers." I'd link the youtube where they discuss that several years ago, but I'mpretty sure it was the 2009 Blizzcon Diablo 3 Lore Panel and I couldn't find it on youtube.
Or maybe I'm a bad player. Maybe I wasn't doing enough praying.