Project XII of Hellforge has compiled a quick list of top ten of the dumbest features that made it into Diablo II, including the terrible nerfing of the Barbarian's Whirlwind skill (despite community uproar) to the horribly unimaginable but barely remembered Golden Axe-inspired "Thief" monster ability that all but lasted a single patch. There was nothing worse than losing your hard earned Windforce to an imp.
Here's hoping that current team has learned from the mistakes of Blizzard North, Diablo's original creators (which became the now-defunct Flagship Studios) and listen to their community for it most certainly be watching closely.
I actually used stamina potions a lot. Good for backtracking without having to stand there for a few seconds. Mostly for impatient players like me.
Of course no one liked how Duriel sometimes dropped nothing, but that's the nature of the game, you're never guaranteed anything. It's pretty widely accepted that Duriel isn't the best choice for MF runs anyway.
I'll admit the corpse explosion stuff really pissed me off on hardcore. But there was much worse stuff than that, like getting iron maidened in the middle of a whirlwind or zeal.
I agree on most things, but what's with the loot "glitch" he's talking about? He mean the times that you kill a boss and get no uniques? Because there's no bug there... he's just whining that he doesn't get good stuff every time he kill a boss... I don't get it.
which includes the guys who actually created Diablo in the first place before anyone else was there... I'm pretty sure the Lead Designer, Lead Art Direction and Lead Programmer matter more than 10 QA guys or 3d modelers in developing the gameplay. That's not to say that the QA people and 3d modelers don't matter, but the core of the game is based on what the aforementioned people come up with and what the rest of the team works on.
Here's the list of Blizzard North people as of the shipping of Diablo:
max schaefer eric sexton kenneth williams david brevik erich schaefer peter brevik doron gartner jon morin robin van der wel richard seis ben haas kelly johnson matt uelmen michio okamura hugh tom byrne patrick tougas christopher root mark sutherland karin colenzo
Only the first five on that list went to FSS. The fact that you mention QA and 3d modelers says it all about your familiarity with the title - all of the QA and 3d modeling took place in Irvine (Diablo was a 2d game with rendered art, in case you didn't notice). Also, the two main guys specifically mentioned as designers in the DII credits - Hedlund and Sexton - never spent a day at FSS. Same goes with 13 out of the 15 programmers credited, including the lead. Nor did 12 out of 14 character artists. http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/diablo-ii/credits Really, Sol, it is one thing to keep your ignorance to yourself, but to present it as history and fact is embarrassing to you and the site itself.
Boy does that person really love to whine. I disagreed with almost everything:
-Drops are meant to be random, try again sucker!
-Stamina potions useless, ok...when you have no stamina and you're walking like hell from diablo with his flaming lightning all up your ass...useless?
-Nihlathak's CE attack, had no problem with it. You just need strategy my friend. Every boss can't simply be "run in with swords and arrows flailing and hope he dies before you do". That's boring.
- + light radius..................that shouldn't even be dignified with a response. But here's one...STFU whiner and go play "Hello Kitty Island".
-Again with the drops thing. Ok, then how about Blizzard makes a patch where IK's drop every time you kill something.
-The Great Marsh? Seriously? How about having the Valley of the Vipers entrance spawning right next to the Lost city entrance. Again, random experience...deal.
-And personally I think it's neccessary to nerf skills that players exploit because of their uberness. Why should a player have the option of even trying another class if one class has an uber godly skill? This kills the replay of the game.
Dude, next time you want to whine, do it to yourself where no one can be irritated by it's pointlessness.
i agree with everything Psykosis said. There are some features that ruined the game (I'm in no place to whine about them because I loved d2 when I played it) but i think the author picked things that bothers farmers (omgrandomdropswaaaah), and I've always thought farming itself ruined the game. True, there was an immersion problem when random monsters spawned, but it could be overlooked as long as it kept things interesting
Whirlwind was fine even after the nerf, in 1.10 it has been the suck compared to pre1.10. No synergy but monster hp's went up..
i just hope that the monsters that i kill this time stay dead... i hated to kill every one again every time i exit the game
Lol so when you have killed all the monsters 1 time.. the game is over It doesn't work like that in Diablo games if you wanna play longer than 10 hours or something
Great marsh is prerty cool how you think people complete the countess without going there. Countess some nice exp in normal.
Great Marsh (Act III), not Black Marsh (Act I)
I find Act III to be boring, the Great Marsh was tiring, but they advised us GREAT Marsh.
Quote from "Siaynoq" »
Quote from "Archetype_Zero" »
I actually used stamina potions a lot. Good for backtracking without having to stand there for a few seconds. Mostly for impatient players like me.
Of course no one liked how Duriel sometimes dropped nothing, but that's the nature of the game, you're never guaranteed anything. It's pretty widely accepted that Duriel isn't the best choice for MF runs anyway.
I'll admit the corpse explosion stuff really pissed me off on hardcore. But there was much worse stuff than that, like getting iron maidened in the middle of a whirlwind or zeal.
Totally agreed.
I can't stand waiting my stamina to recover.
Duriel is a one time per difficult fight, ONLY.
Iron Maiden=dead barbarian.:mad:
I think the article was just his personal opinion.
i find once u get past X level (usually 10 for me) you never need stamina potions for anything. But the first few lvls u do b/c u have to run everywhere =\
Obviously there were some terrible flaws. I agree with author on these ones:
1- Light Radius. In D1 it really made a difference. In D2 absolutely not. Not even in dungeons, it was pretty lame.
2- Drops. Not the way he got it, but I got more than once drops from Duriel that didn't even included magic items. Imagine, 2 quivers of arrows, a town portal and a stamina potion for one of the hardest bosses in the game.
I would like this one to make a complain (or whine if you like it more) of my own. I can't really understand why there's no lower limit for the items drops, only superior limits. It REALLY bugs me out to get a rare amulet in Hell in Lvl 80 that gives +2 light radius and +1 to max damage. How many +1 max damage max rings I find in hell? That is simply ridiculous, it isn't making the game more random, it is just throwing a lot of trash up.
3- Potions. They were completely useless from half of act1 normal on. More trash on latter acts. It was good only because it could be sold for decent money in the beginning.
Now an extra complain of my own.
Most of uniques are absolutely super ultra power hard to find. And again, most of it are completely useless when you find it. Very nice to get a unique mace from Nightmare Mephisto. Very nice to never find a single SOJ in my whole life playing D2 since the day it was out. I won't even mean the elite uniques. If Blizzard wanted us to stop doing runs, they should rise up the chance for common monster to drop good items, otherwise there will always be runs. I would love to kill monsters in an area just to get itens, but it is simply stupid since in 5 minutes in 1 or 2 runs you get guaranteed a lot more then you can get in days from monsters. In D2 is clear that you kill monsters for XP and bosses for items. I would really love to kill for XP and items also.
Lol so when you have killed all the monsters 1 time.. the game is over It doesn't work like that in Diablo games if you wanna play longer than 10 hours or something
i mean like it was in D1, so if u miss a waypoint u don't have to kill everything in betwen again... is just my opinion anyway...
I agree on most things, but what's with the loot "glitch" he's talking about? He mean the times that you kill a boss and get no uniques? Because there's no bug there... he's just whining that he doesn't get good stuff every time he kill a boss... I don't get it.
I agree but one "loot drop glitch" I would like to add is the dropping loot off a cliff glitch. Whenever you kill a flying monster that is over a drop off of some kind , bats in the sewer, ghosts in the arcane sacntuary, the loot does not drop. I've killed more than a couple rare monsters this way and always get no drop from them. It's not too hard to pull them over the land but there should be a better way to handle this.
“F*** off, you useless w****y piece of c**k cheese”
Further insight into the age of the average Hellforge writer.
Quote from "Roger" »
I would love to kill monsters in an area just to get itens, but it is simply stupid since in 5 minutes in 1 or 2 runs you get guaranteed a lot more then you can get in days from monsters.
Eh, I disagree. Try clearing The Pit, Inner Cloister (+Cathedral), Eldritch, Shenk and Pindle for a while. "5 minutes" of Mephisto will not get you better loot than an entire day of these guys.
The list is whining a little bit, but I do agree with some of the items.
Armor sets were a waste A great idea but I never found a complete set in time to make it worth my time. By time I did I had already found better items or was looking to complete a better set which I never found in it's entirety either. The cycle just kept repeating itself. Too often I found some the same items I already had! *sigh*
Runes! Oh those fricken runes Another great idea but again I hardly ever found any of the rarer ones to make a truly cool rune set item. Rare runes were just too rare and the more common runes we just too common. It got to the point where it seemed as if 'El' runes came off an assembly line or something. Every time I found one I would anticlimaticly say 'Oh great another El rune, whoopee'.
Too much of a good thing Again these were great ideas, I didn't mind all the different potions, I think the problem with D2 is you found so much stuff, TOO MUCH! TOO MUCH of the same stuff! This is where I liked D1, you didn't find too much loot or too much of the same item. It seemed better balanced to me in this respect.
In real life you wouldn't find loot in every jar, nor would you find chests just laying out in the grass, or find loot laying under loose rocks. It should require a bit more effort to find treasure, D2 was so loot rich I had to go gamble hundreds of thousands (sometime millions) of gold pieces off because I hit my carry and stash limit. So off to gamble it away I went just to get rid of it just so I could start collecting more.
In real life you can't carry thousands of gold pieces, that stuff is heavy! In reality 1000 troy ounces of gold is quite heavy; roughly 70 Lbs ...not to mention quite expensive in real life, 1000 ounces as of today is worth $734,000. Can you imagine lugging around 70 pounds of gold all over the countryside?
A little known historical fact - silver was worth more than gold for a long time
It would be nice to see some silver in the game too, historically in our world silver held far greater value than gold for thousands of years, it was the predominant money for 4500 years and was first minted into coins in Lydia and Athens Greece in 680 BC, it wasn't until the American gold rush when gold started to rise against silver. If you saw the movie 300, then you guessed it right those in-bread swine 'the Ephors' would have been paid off in silver not gold.
cant believe i didnt see my least favoraite feature to this game. TPPK
i remember trying hardcore very late into the game only to hit a wall at lvl 70. anyone remember being on a baal run, only to have some druid cast a bunch of tornadoes on you then teleport to town and activate hostile in 1.5 seconds (TPPK)? that was hands down the worst feature in the game.
Isenhart's set is a good set for newbies, as it was my first complete set and the armor was the first armor I found that exceeded 100. But that's just me.
And stanima potions are actually used a lot more than people think. You know when you're level 6 and you all of a sudden stop and have to walk away from Rakanashu (or whatever his name was). Yeah, that sucked for sorceresses in those days where you would put nothing in vitality.
Dexterity doesn't work correctly, with 80%-90% chance to touch its happen often to doesn't touch 5 time in a row.
Many skill is unecessary (latest patch fix some skill with % bonus)
The time to leveling grow, more you progress in the game. (I think is a great problem for casual gamers) I think is better to let players having more of small choice than let players having less of big choice. Choices is the key for the fun factor of the game. When I said choice, I mean the skills you have to choose to build a strategic character.
Gold and market is unnecessary.
A great solution for that is an enchanter : you take an empty weapon or item of your choice and you put the power you want, more power and more effectiveness you put more expensive will be. Now strategie is increased, choose skill and make combo with weapon power.
Long playing for finding, I'm little bite frustrate, I bought a game and I don't see all of the content (soj).
Fist of the Heavens on left click start witout having press on a monster.
Hammer have a zone where monster couldn't be damaged.
Necro skill "Revive" if you go away too far, monsters disapear.
If you don't have enough % of fast hit recovery, it can be frustrating. Its not a good way to cut the control of players.
PvP is good when player is agree. It isn't normal when someone highest level join lower level games for complet quest before others or kill thems
I think is a great resume of problems found in diablo 2. I hope some majors problems will be fix like usefulness of skill, the time to leveling and new market. I hope that for best experience and a better game.
Recently finished D1 on all 3 characters and just started a new D2 game yesterday. I really appreciate D1 even more now. Most obvious is how much scarier D1 is than D2, it really was eerier. The music, monsters, sound effects, and environment were all eerier. The monsters in D1 were largely better too, for example the goats in D1 were far better than the D2 goats.
In many ways D1 was more balanced and less predictable than D2. D2 had so much treasure and gold it was disgusting, shrines and treasure chests everywhere! Even on a new game you knew where the monsters generally going to attack you, in D1 you can still get taken by surprise no matter how many times you play it. Despite D2 having more treasure, it was also more predictable as well, you knew pretty much what to expect.
Not being able to run was a plus and con at the same time in D1, on one hand you couldn’t as easily get away from the monsters, and it seemed to me in D1 they chased you more. The terrible part was the amount of time it took to get to Adria’s shack or if you forgot a town portal or didn’t have enough mana to create one, that got old fast.
Granted D1 was underground the whole time, I have to say I liked the D1 dungeons better than ones in D2 until you got to level 8 just before you hit the caverns and they got a little less realistic.
I really hope D3 takes on more of D1 qualities in these respects. IMO that is what got people into the game.
Wish list for D3
1) Scarier less predictable more startling monsters, some need to be able to chase you down too and be driven to get you
2) Environments need to be eerier too, New Tristram’s art would be a good measure for that
3) Much wider array of unique items not only in ability but in look
4) All treasure needs be harder to find, less common, so you can appreciate it more.
5) Gold needs to be worth more, and adding some silver would be cool too.
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Of course no one liked how Duriel sometimes dropped nothing, but that's the nature of the game, you're never guaranteed anything. It's pretty widely accepted that Duriel isn't the best choice for MF runs anyway.
I'll admit the corpse explosion stuff really pissed me off on hardcore. But there was much worse stuff than that, like getting iron maidened in the middle of a whirlwind or zeal.
Here's the list of Blizzard North people as of the shipping of Diablo:
max schaefer eric sexton kenneth williams david brevik erich schaefer peter brevik doron gartner jon morin robin van der wel richard seis ben haas kelly johnson matt uelmen michio okamura hugh tom byrne patrick tougas christopher root mark sutherland karin colenzo
Only the first five on that list went to FSS. The fact that you mention QA and 3d modelers says it all about your familiarity with the title - all of the QA and 3d modeling took place in Irvine (Diablo was a 2d game with rendered art, in case you didn't notice). Also, the two main guys specifically mentioned as designers in the DII credits - Hedlund and Sexton - never spent a day at FSS. Same goes with 13 out of the 15 programmers credited, including the lead. Nor did 12 out of 14 character artists. http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/diablo-ii/credits Really, Sol, it is one thing to keep your ignorance to yourself, but to present it as history and fact is embarrassing to you and the site itself.
-Drops are meant to be random, try again sucker!
-Stamina potions useless, ok...when you have no stamina and you're walking like hell from diablo with his flaming lightning all up your ass...useless?
-Nihlathak's CE attack, had no problem with it. You just need strategy my friend. Every boss can't simply be "run in with swords and arrows flailing and hope he dies before you do". That's boring.
- + light radius..................that shouldn't even be dignified with a response. But here's one...STFU whiner and go play "Hello Kitty Island".
-Again with the drops thing. Ok, then how about Blizzard makes a patch where IK's drop every time you kill something.
-The Great Marsh? Seriously? How about having the Valley of the Vipers entrance spawning right next to the Lost city entrance. Again, random experience...deal.
-And personally I think it's neccessary to nerf skills that players exploit because of their uberness. Why should a player have the option of even trying another class if one class has an uber godly skill? This kills the replay of the game.
Dude, next time you want to whine, do it to yourself where no one can be irritated by it's pointlessness.
If u run out of stamina fighting D u shouldn't be fighting him...
Lol so when you have killed all the monsters 1 time.. the game is over It doesn't work like that in Diablo games if you wanna play longer than 10 hours or something
Great Marsh (Act III), not Black Marsh (Act I)
I find Act III to be boring, the Great Marsh was tiring, but they advised us GREAT Marsh.
Totally agreed.
I can't stand waiting my stamina to recover.
Duriel is a one time per difficult fight, ONLY.
Iron Maiden=dead barbarian.:mad:
I think the article was just his personal opinion.
1- Light Radius. In D1 it really made a difference. In D2 absolutely not. Not even in dungeons, it was pretty lame.
2- Drops. Not the way he got it, but I got more than once drops from Duriel that didn't even included magic items. Imagine, 2 quivers of arrows, a town portal and a stamina potion for one of the hardest bosses in the game.
I would like this one to make a complain (or whine if you like it more) of my own. I can't really understand why there's no lower limit for the items drops, only superior limits. It REALLY bugs me out to get a rare amulet in Hell in Lvl 80 that gives +2 light radius and +1 to max damage. How many +1 max damage max rings I find in hell? That is simply ridiculous, it isn't making the game more random, it is just throwing a lot of trash up.
3- Potions. They were completely useless from half of act1 normal on. More trash on latter acts. It was good only because it could be sold for decent money in the beginning.
Now an extra complain of my own.
Most of uniques are absolutely super ultra power hard to find. And again, most of it are completely useless when you find it. Very nice to get a unique mace from Nightmare Mephisto. Very nice to never find a single SOJ in my whole life playing D2 since the day it was out. I won't even mean the elite uniques. If Blizzard wanted us to stop doing runs, they should rise up the chance for common monster to drop good items, otherwise there will always be runs. I would love to kill monsters in an area just to get itens, but it is simply stupid since in 5 minutes in 1 or 2 runs you get guaranteed a lot more then you can get in days from monsters. In D2 is clear that you kill monsters for XP and bosses for items. I would really love to kill for XP and items also.
i mean like it was in D1, so if u miss a waypoint u don't have to kill everything in betwen again... is just my opinion anyway...
I agree but one "loot drop glitch" I would like to add is the dropping loot off a cliff glitch. Whenever you kill a flying monster that is over a drop off of some kind , bats in the sewer, ghosts in the arcane sacntuary, the loot does not drop. I've killed more than a couple rare monsters this way and always get no drop from them. It's not too hard to pull them over the land but there should be a better way to handle this.
Eh, I disagree. Try clearing The Pit, Inner Cloister (+Cathedral), Eldritch, Shenk and Pindle for a while. "5 minutes" of Mephisto will not get you better loot than an entire day of these guys.
Armor sets were a waste
A great idea but I never found a complete set in time to make it worth my time. By time I did I had already found better items or was looking to complete a better set which I never found in it's entirety either. The cycle just kept repeating itself. Too often I found some the same items I already had! *sigh*
Runes! Oh those fricken runes
Another great idea but again I hardly ever found any of the rarer ones to make a truly cool rune set item. Rare runes were just too rare and the more common runes we just too common. It got to the point where it seemed as if 'El' runes came off an assembly line or something. Every time I found one I would anticlimaticly say 'Oh great another El rune, whoopee'.
Too much of a good thing
Again these were great ideas, I didn't mind all the different potions, I think the problem with D2 is you found so much stuff, TOO MUCH! TOO MUCH of the same stuff! This is where I liked D1, you didn't find too much loot or too much of the same item. It seemed better balanced to me in this respect.
In real life you wouldn't find loot in every jar, nor would you find chests just laying out in the grass, or find loot laying under loose rocks. It should require a bit more effort to find treasure, D2 was so loot rich I had to go gamble hundreds of thousands (sometime millions) of gold pieces off because I hit my carry and stash limit. So off to gamble it away I went just to get rid of it just so I could start collecting more.
In real life you can't carry thousands of gold pieces, that stuff is heavy! In reality 1000 troy ounces of gold is quite heavy; roughly 70 Lbs ...not to mention quite expensive in real life, 1000 ounces as of today is worth $734,000. Can you imagine lugging around 70 pounds of gold all over the countryside?
A little known historical fact - silver was worth more than gold for a long time
It would be nice to see some silver in the game too, historically in our world silver held far greater value than gold for thousands of years, it was the predominant money for 4500 years and was first minted into coins in Lydia and Athens Greece in 680 BC, it wasn't until the American gold rush when gold started to rise against silver. If you saw the movie 300, then you guessed it right those in-bread swine 'the Ephors' would have been paid off in silver not gold.
Check it out
i remember trying hardcore very late into the game only to hit a wall at lvl 70. anyone remember being on a baal run, only to have some druid cast a bunch of tornadoes on you then teleport to town and activate hostile in 1.5 seconds (TPPK)? that was hands down the worst feature in the game.
So it was you?
(joking)
And stanima potions are actually used a lot more than people think. You know when you're level 6 and you all of a sudden stop and have to walk away from Rakanashu (or whatever his name was). Yeah, that sucked for sorceresses in those days where you would put nothing in vitality.
In many ways D1 was more balanced and less predictable than D2. D2 had so much treasure and gold it was disgusting, shrines and treasure chests everywhere! Even on a new game you knew where the monsters generally going to attack you, in D1 you can still get taken by surprise no matter how many times you play it. Despite D2 having more treasure, it was also more predictable as well, you knew pretty much what to expect.
Not being able to run was a plus and con at the same time in D1, on one hand you couldn’t as easily get away from the monsters, and it seemed to me in D1 they chased you more. The terrible part was the amount of time it took to get to Adria’s shack or if you forgot a town portal or didn’t have enough mana to create one, that got old fast.
Granted D1 was underground the whole time, I have to say I liked the D1 dungeons better than ones in D2 until you got to level 8 just before you hit the caverns and they got a little less realistic.
I really hope D3 takes on more of D1 qualities in these respects. IMO that is what got people into the game.
Wish list for D3
1) Scarier less predictable more startling monsters, some need to be able to chase you down too and be driven to get you
2) Environments need to be eerier too, New Tristram’s art would be a good measure for that
3) Much wider array of unique items not only in ability but in look
4) All treasure needs be harder to find, less common, so you can appreciate it more.
5) Gold needs to be worth more, and adding some silver would be cool too.