Official Blizzard Quote:
Followers were originally going to be available during co-op, and actually are right now because of a bug in the current build we're playing. And it's crazy. If you're unfortunate enough to also have a witch doctor, it's insanity. Eight characters running around plus all of the potential pets. It's complete chaos. That's the biggest reason they aren't going to be available outside of single player.
Not wanting the game to be chaotic is completely understandable and is likely one of the contributing factors behind why they initially decreased the maximum party size from eight players [in D2] to four this time around. Going back and doubling the party size would be the last thing they want to do if things truly do become chaotic. However, this begs the question, how will the game feel with a full party of Witch Doctors'? If adding four more potential "summons" turns the game into chaos, how apocalyptic will the game feel with a full set of summons from each of the four WD's? Regardless, if we do want to take advantage of these Followers, we won't be able to with a full party anyway.
Official Blizzard Quote:
It encourages co-op by giving people that are going to be playing the game alone from the start many of the thoughts and process that go into playing with another person. Seeing someone else on screen. Thinking about their items and skills. Hearing them talk. That all sounds silly from a lot of our perspectives, because, we all play co-op and who needs a primer? Well, a lot of people, and that's where this encourages co-op. More people playing co-op means more people in a mindset of an online community, and that has many far reaching benefits for all players.
It seems to me like we have to drop the Mercenary line of thinking from D2 in order to understand this decision. Essentially, Bashiok makes it sound like Followers aren't really supposed to be Mercenaries, but they are supposed to act as party members that replace other real players for those users who refuse to play multiplayer. When you look at the system in that perspective, it makes this functionality great, as it adds some form of cooperation for those who would rather play by themselves, and could even persuade said user to jump online and play with other users, for some real co-op play. This is simply because once you complete Normal by yourself, or rather with the [fake player] Follower, the Follower will become useless.
Official Blizzard Quote:
Followers will not stay alive easily past Normal, and if they're not alive you aren't going to be getting their bonuses. I'm sure people will try to game this, and ideally they will fail. If not we will ensure followers are not part of the end-game MF equation. They are not intended to be, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure they cannot be.
Now you'll be yearning for that co-op play and your only choice will be to jump on Battle.net and find some peers to game with. Blizzard is doing some real funky reverse psychology to promote the social experience, but in the end, they are still promoting the social experience.
People will choose wich follower fits their character best. People will also choose their skills and items. No matter how "small" those choices are, they are choices. Jay Wilson said "we don't want to follower to feel like secondary character". As long as people choose their skills and use then freely, this is execly what they will feel. Not us, that already kno that they will be useless beyond normal. But the new players, wich they are trying to please by adding this, will truely feel that the follower IS a part of their characters.
However, later in the game, the follower will be scraped. It will feel like, as you advance in the game, a part of your character will be scraped. Found out that the guy who helped you so much time will no longer follow you have a bitter taste.
Imagine a avarage casual player starting to venture in the nightmare difficulty and fiding out that the guy that he build so carefully is now obsolete. Seriously, i can't imagine anyone getting happy with this situation. Everyone feels weird when advancing in the game the amount of game features decrease.
Imo theres a great way to fix this system. Remove a few follower customisation features and their ability to follow you anywhere you wanna go. Those 3 followers will be only present while you doing a quest related to then. Also, make then scale and take a part in MP (1 follower per party, not per player!). The benefict of those chages:
- The player will not have a sense that theres something missing between Normal and the higher difficultiess, wich is the number one problem right now.
- They can take a part in MP w/o making a fuz.
- They still play a big role in the game, add alot of lore elements and makes the world of sanctuary feels more filled with cool characters.
- They still play their main role: show to solo players how cool play with another player might be. Solo player will make a quest chain with some of the followers and see how cool it is to see a friend protecting you from danger by ccing the monsters, for example.
- They make some quests chains feels really unique and special. Not only the quest chain will involve a character you might like, but this quest will also have a really unique gameplay. Playing with a templar tanking and healing is surely alot different, for example. They can even build some new mechanics using the follower in specific situations. Like a certain boss that loose his shield when the enchantress curse him, for exemple.
- The item and skill choices don't need to be removed! You still pick a feel skills for your follower and still give him items! The only diffenrence is that they will not level up with you since you will be using then only pontually.
Imo this design would make followers a perfect addition to the game. My 2 cents!
so you basically want more of those tag-alongs that die relatively quickly, but stronger so they last the whole quest
thats the argument for them maybe, but the whole lure of a follower is it follows you where ever you go, and the customization is important too
but if you limit it to one and leave ANYTHING changeable, who gets to decide what they wear, what skills they have, their role etc. Sure there are methods in which this could be done, but it would be messy, and at the end of the day, not viable.
besides, if your going to have one mercenary, it might as well be an actual player
with multiple mercenaries, they chat spam and waste screen space, so there is no way they work in multiplayer
if they lasted throughout single player, there could be places where the player finds the content much too easy, because to balance around the /players suggestion relies on the AI being sufficient, as well as players using a limited set of builds that incorporate the mercenary, not to mention blizzard having to determine the worth of the mercenary in all acts and balance the final monsters around single player twice
not only that, but with the current system, and sufficient places to provide tips, they could show how the game is better with other people, think of the PGGC from earlier in this thread
there is a reason this was blizzard's direction from the start, and didn't change
I know there's a large crowd that doesn't feel like the followers should be a crutch, and that's fine, but making them completely useless seems like it's going a step too far.
I for one almost exclusively play singleplayer in Diablo 2, and I kind of like having that mercenary around, even in the endgame, and while I agree with the people that say the follower shouldn't be a crutch, I also think it's counterproductive to invest that much effort into a system that becomes completely useless in the higher difficulties.
Am I in the minority here? Thoughts?
it's because you misunderstand the point of the followers, check out the PGGC earlier in this thread
@Nekrodrac, man i love that acronym
I completely understand why people who wanted a better merc system in D3 are disappointed. Obviously this isn't a great replacement. I think we were all disappointed when we saw a kickass video of followers only to learn we won't be using them that much. But that doesn't mean that this system doesn't have a defined purpose. The reason they put 'so much time' into it (and, really, this kind of system probably didn't take as much time as, say, the Artisan system) is because it has the potential to encourage people who are just playing SP on Normal for the first time to try out multiplayer. If you already know that you only want to play single player, fine. But theres plenty of people who just played D2 on SP Normal and shelved it. In fact, that probably describes the majority of people who ever played D2. So its worth spending time on a system that could potentially lead to some of those people instead getting involved in multiplayer and higher difficulties, because that means a larger online community, which then means a game that sticks around for longer.
As for the people saying this was all just a waste of development time, I would argue that balancing the followers in a way that would satisfy everyone (as in the people who want them to be useful and the people who want them to be non-essential) would be a process that would take much more time than the current system. You might say "Oh, well just do whatever the equivalent of /players 2 is in D3" but its considerably more complicated than that. In order to ensure that SP with a Follower doesn't become the best way to MF (even if you removed the follower's MF skills) you'd have to both increase difficulty and decrease loot drops in an almost perfect way. If you make it too hard, people start complaining that followers are useless again. If you make it too easy, people start complaining its the best way to MF. It would be something that the team would have to constantly be worrying about after release.
I can't stand having mercenaries in hell. Short of not having them in the game at all, I am glad I'll be able to experience them without having it ruin gameplay.
I don't think I have misunderstood anything, if I may be so bold. I simply think it's an extreme solution to a relatively easy problem. It's nothing but numbers, at the end of the day.
Followers have 'x' hitpoints and 'y' amount of damage, coupled with 'z' magic find. To my mind, this is just a rather inelegant solution to the problem of MF. A better one could simply be to place a penalty on those MF numbers (as in resistances in Nightmare/Hell D2) without destroying them completely. You could make Mercenaries useful, but nonessential by simply having 'x' hitpoints increase without substantially increasing 'y' damage, or vice verse.
Of course, this is but one hypothetical solution to it, and it's definitely not even the best, but at the very least, it would present you with the option to tailor your play to choose to have them or not have them without substantially affecting the gameplay in any truly significant way.
What I'm essentially saying is that I do think there's a way to keep everybody happy, and I just don't necessarily think that their proposed solution is the best way to do it, that's all.
I'm sure Blizzard had plenty of iterations where mercs were available in co-op or higher difficulties, and it just ended up too chaotic or too hard to balance. If you allow followers in Hell, that will lead to the kinds of builds we saw in D2 where they're entirely reliant on the follower. Theres simply no way to avoid it considering the insane amount of possible builds in the game. So instead of going through all that balancing, Blizzard made them only usable in normal as a way to get people who just pick up the game and play SP Normal (which, again, is the majority of players) to play multiplayer.
I mean, yeah, you could have someone power-act you through Normal, but this way, you get to experience the game for yourself again, allowing for interesting replayability.
But seriously, you could argue that it was a "massive waste of dev time" as Magistrate and the some people on the bnet forums put it, but that's only true for those people who either won't be using the system or those who plan on playing with friends at the get-go. For all the rest of us, it's not a waste of dev time. We want something interesting to happen when we play through the second, third, and fourth time. One of the most boring parts of playing D2 right now is starting a character. It's pretty much the same each time. Now with this system there seems to be a bit more variety to the early game.
Also, n00bs will be very happy to hear that they can still play the "single player" version and not get hammered when they forget to just keep right-clicking.
Personally I think it's silly not to have the followers to only be available to you via Normal difficulty. Or, however it's implemented, I think the Followers should also be capable of making it to level 60 with you for any time you want to play single player.
i think that covers it all, right there.
There's always a place for puns in my book. It's been a Nightmare getting them all together!
You, sir, win.