Last time I checked, carrying several swords, as well as armor pieces and helmets, which you could do with the tetris system, is not realistic either so I don't understand why 1 slot per item is offending people. I think it mostly has to do with people being Diablo elitists so if ANYTHING AT ALL was involved in WoW it must be "gay" or the incorrect thing to do.
Last time I checked shooting fireballs out of your hands and fighting demons from hell isn't too realistic either. If you get all bent out of shape on the simplest thing of CARRYING ITEMS then how the hell do you plan on enjoying a fantasy rpg?
Some reasons why I like the Diablo style inventory is that:
- Different items have different sizes. This lets you see the intricate details and artwork of each item, which gives tangibility of the items. Each item has its own "feel" to it, which you don't get with the icon style of WOW/mmorpg's
- Allows you to pick and choose items more easily in your inventory because you can see what you have in there very quickly without squinting.
- I found it very relaxing to sort and proudly look at newly found items in my stash/inventory after a session of killing
- you can still have lots of room, maybe additional pages (the room argument is flawed)
With icons, you don't get any feel for an item. A lance with a picture of a lance, where most of it is cut off? Not as cool. It distances the player from their items, and in Diablo, its all about items!
I see no loss of convenience or functionality with the grid inventory system. All we need is more squares, to satisfy people who like to pick up every useless piece of junk that drops.. and voila every one is happy.
After reading what cocobuffs has said i must agree. Nothing feels better than looking at that armor or weapon's detail after you got it... sure d2 didn't have great textures but it felt good to just lookat it etc nonetheless, kind of have a feel for the weapon
Wow, have to say this is one of the silliest polls I've ever seen...can't say I'm shocked now that d3 is here; that we have all been waiting soooo long..why not complain about it. All the complainers out there did you complain when d1 graphics changed in d2, or when run was added, or when they added the horadric cube? Oh that's right probably not, because the internet was still in it's infant stages back then (still is in my opinion). Now we have mass communication at our fingertips so might as well tear apart a game that was last visited 10 years ago; and be pissed that they are changing something so mundane as the item system. Why don't you all go make your own diablo 3? It can have shitty out of date graphics, tetris inventory and be bland as you like......it's unfortuante this poll is closed; I would obviously vote for new inventory...not that I would care either way..just to piss off the people who appear here after announcing (or right before wwi; may takeover of diablo3.com) just to complain about how Blizzard hasn't satisfied their every whim..honestly I've checked a lot of your ages and most of you are like 18 years old; ok I remember when the FIRST diablo demo came out in my pcgamer...i still have that excitement for d3, because I know what changed in the past two were the right changes.........this is just all so ridiculous and unintelligent
I loved managing my tetris inventory
Putting together your personal inventory with charms and the like was a ton of fun. You always needed to manage your space so that you'd have enough room just in case a unique armor dropped on the ground randomly! You always had to be on your toes!
What made it kinda slow, and what would really speed up the process is to have quick commands, like mouse dragging ( to select multiple items ) and maybe some "auto sort' features. Oh well, I can dream.
I agree, that it was much more hands on and the item graphics were much larger so you could really see your precious goods.
dunhac82, I hope your post gets deleted because it is not constructive nor is it intelligent.
The complainers are only complaining because they CARE about the game, not because they want to stick it to Blizzard out of some kind of spite or disrespect. Good friends don't hold back when it comes to telling the truth in order to help, even if it hurts. Same way here. And I doubt Blizzard is hurt. I'm sure they want as much criticism as possible, otherwise how would they know how to make it? God-given senses? Sometimes you need to look at things from the outside, and we are the outside
Hey, I'm going to reply to Cocobuffs post simple beacuse it was easy to read, gave good information and was completly on topic.
Quote from "Cocobuffs" »
- Different items have different sizes. This lets you see the intricate details and artwork of each item, which gives tangibility of the items. Each item has its own "feel" to it, which you don't get with the icon style of WOW/mmorpg's
First off I'll have to say some of your points contradict eachother, but I'll get onto that soon.
I'd be willing to bet you could see the intricate details and artwork of each item in the new inventory system simply by scrolling over said item. Probably bringing up a larger/full image of the item along with all it's stats. What I believe Blizzard are trying to achieve is a smooth flowing, action packed adventure when you leave town, then when you return with all your loot you can check it out to your hearts content back in town.
I guess this adds to the immersion for me, and probably will for alot of people. I believe it's more realistic as if I was fighting hordes of demons from hell, and I was picking up stuff deep in a dungeon, I wouldn't spend my time checking it out where I might get jumped by some foul thing lurking in the shadows. I'd wait until I was back in town.
Quote from "Cocobuffs" »
- Allows you to pick and choose items more easily in your inventory because you can see what you have in there very quickly without squinting.
Probably correct, apart from the squinting part. Do you have that little faith in Blizzard making an inventory system that you think they would make it so tiny you would have to squint to see the different between a sword and an axe? I think not.
I also doubt that items that needed to be picked and chosen from your inventory would be that hard to distinguish. (Seriously, how many times did you run through playing D2 and keep switching between armour you had to wear? The majority of picking and choosing happened for me when I had to put things into the cube to transmute, or to re-arrange my inventory to fit stuff in).
Quote from "Cocobuffs" »
- I found it very relaxing to sort and proudly look at newly found items in my stash/inventory after a session of killing
Obviously that option will still be available. But now you will have the chance to relax 10 fold when you come back to town carrying heaps of loot, instead of every 5 minutes using the old D2 system.
Quote from "Cocobuffs" »
- you can still have lots of room, maybe additional pages (the room argument is flawed)
With icons, you don't get any feel for an item. A lance with a picture of a lance, where most of it is cut off? Not as cool. It distances the player from their items, and in Diablo, its all about items!
You can still have lots of room, but who the hell wants to sort through 5 pages of inventory slots to organise there stuff. That's also a slap in the face of everyone arguing about the 'realism' of the D2 inventory. Once again, scrolling over the icon will probably produce a larger image that you can drool over anyway.
Quote from "Cocobuffs" »
I see no loss of convenience or functionality with the grid inventory system. All we need is more squares, to satisfy people who like to pick up every useless piece of junk that drops.. and voila every one is happy.
First off let me just say I've never played WoW, I've never looked at screen shots of it. I refused to play it simply because I didn't want to pay a fee every month to a game owned if I bought it. But at first glance of the D3 inventory I could tell it was a huge improvement over the D2 system.
Why?
It's insanely more convenient to use and makes the game alot more free-flowing.
The contradicion I see in your post is that you want to see the intricate detail of your items you pick up (D2 inventory style), but you also want more room to make the inventory comparable in size to the D3 style. To do that you would have to make the inventory take up the whole page (Or close to it) which detracts from the visuals and take you out of that immersed in the gameworld feeling. Or you have to make the squares smaller, making it so you can't see your loot properly anyway.
I believe the new system will aid adventuring so much that you will be more immersed than ever before.
- Players won't have to go back to town every 5 minutes to pawn off their stuff.
- Players won't need to keep enough room in their inventory for that one unique that might drop, while having the rest filled up with charms.
- Players may not need 1000 mules anymore.
- The speed and flow of the game will increase.
I think my biggest gripe however is at the general community. Basically every forum I've gone to has contained more threads bashing Blizzard and what they are trying to achieve than threads in support of their efforts.
Basically everyone wants D3 to be the same as D2 with no changes. They don't want graphics to be changed, they don't want the inventory system to be changed, they want the original 5 classes from D2, They want boss size reduced, they want players to look less powerful, they want less colours and more grey/brown.
It's obvious to me that what Blizzard arn't doing is re-inventing the wheel. But to me it looks like they are making it rounder. They are streamlining the ActionRPG that Diablo is, while keeping all the good frills like checking out your loot and tooling out your character in.
I always loved how in Diablo there were shields that took up four slots, and shields that took up eight slots. A dagger might take up two slots, while a huge lance would take up eight, it wasn't really the realism, but I just loved it... I think that the new system is fine, but I would prefer a nice tetris style. But in the end it doesn't matter that much.
The contradicion I see in your post is that you want to see the intricate detail of your items you pick up (D2 inventory style), but you also want more room to make the inventory comparable in size to the D3 style. To do that you would have to make the inventory take up the whole page (Or close to it) which detracts from the visuals and take you out of that immersed in the gameworld feeling. Or you have to make the squares smaller, making it so you can't see your loot properly anyway.
I see your point. Making a separate inventory window, apart from the equip items window, would not allow you to have the stash+inventory+equip windows up at the same time.
And, introducing pages to the inventory screen would not allow you to see everything at the same time. In WOW the one good thing about that setup is you can see all your items everywhere without having to scroll, or change "pages". You can open all your bags simultaneously and see everything.
Surely there must be a way to retain the grid, without sacrificing these things! I dont know. What I initially thought of was to separate the inventory screen from the equip screen (opposite sides) this way the entire right half side of the screen could be the grid inventory (plenty of space). Even if they did go and decrease the size of the little squares, most items would still take up more than one square.
In WoW, when you open all your bags, the view size of all of the inventory shrinks down to a smaller size anyway, so the same thing is present there.
There was a problem with the limit of the items you could carry on any one given character in Diablo, compared with the large number of stuff that was always being aquired - but I still think that can be solved by simply making more of the screen show the inventory, rather than a tiny section of it (which was surrounded by decorations, and border frames).
Also dont forget that the resolutions will be higher than 800x600, so it would be very easy to implement this.
Agree with paralleluniverse. Tetris inventory is more of a chore than anything else.
For a game like Diablo that focuses so much on acquiring items, it may have been a bit slower, but it fit very nicely. I think a truly creative person would have taken the idea and evolved it with quicker methods of organizing items and perhaps multiple item selection methods such as mouse dragging, and more. I think they really should focus more time on this element before the game is released instead of resorting to something so abstract as the WoW item management system. Item tetris worked because it was so hands-on. It was like a billionaire (Scrooge McDuck!) counting his money.
The Tetris inventory design was definitely more of a pain than anything. I am definitely not nostalgic about the D2 inventory system in the least.
One more thing.. since I can assume we can now see how the individual pieces of armor look on the character in the game in greater detail, I don't really care how it looks in my inventory. That being said though I really don't like the WoW loot icons.
How and why is it outdated? Is there an expiration date on art? Don't you think that there's been non-tetris inventories for years before Diablo III, WoW or any other "new" game?
This has nothing to do with time or evolution. It's a preferential choice amongst many others.
It's cumbersome and inconvenient compared to the 1 slot system. It also seems to give an impression of an outdated interface.
I really can't think of any reason why the old system should be used other than nosalgia.
Age of Conan actually does a good job with the inventory. everything is one square, however the inventory grpahics for the items are all represented by their actual in game 3D models. So if I hover over a Warmaul in your inventroy the 3D model rotates in it's cube, same with armor etc... so you know exactly what it will look like on your character when you pick it up. This is a game that prides itself on being realistic by the way, and even they didn't go with the Tetris system, and really, who can blame them.
Oh, and another thing i forgot: the size of items has an aspect of balancing, thinking of charms, the bigger the better. With a one slot inventory you could use 10 bad charms or 10 good charms, which could be problematic...
We don't even know if charms are going to be in the game, but if they were going to be in Diablo3, I'm sure Blizzard would have the common sense to address this.
Last time I checked shooting fireballs out of your hands and fighting demons from hell isn't too realistic either. If you get all bent out of shape on the simplest thing of CARRYING ITEMS then how the hell do you plan on enjoying a fantasy rpg?
- Different items have different sizes. This lets you see the intricate details and artwork of each item, which gives tangibility of the items. Each item has its own "feel" to it, which you don't get with the icon style of WOW/mmorpg's
- Allows you to pick and choose items more easily in your inventory because you can see what you have in there very quickly without squinting.
- I found it very relaxing to sort and proudly look at newly found items in my stash/inventory after a session of killing
- you can still have lots of room, maybe additional pages (the room argument is flawed)
With icons, you don't get any feel for an item. A lance with a picture of a lance, where most of it is cut off? Not as cool. It distances the player from their items, and in Diablo, its all about items!
I see no loss of convenience or functionality with the grid inventory system. All we need is more squares, to satisfy people who like to pick up every useless piece of junk that drops.. and voila every one is happy.
Putting together your personal inventory with charms and the like was a ton of fun. You always needed to manage your space so that you'd have enough room just in case a unique armor dropped on the ground randomly! You always had to be on your toes!
What made it kinda slow, and what would really speed up the process is to have quick commands, like mouse dragging ( to select multiple items ) and maybe some "auto sort' features. Oh well, I can dream.
I agree, that it was much more hands on and the item graphics were much larger so you could really see your precious goods.
dunhac82, I hope your post gets deleted because it is not constructive nor is it intelligent.
First off I'll have to say some of your points contradict eachother, but I'll get onto that soon.
I'd be willing to bet you could see the intricate details and artwork of each item in the new inventory system simply by scrolling over said item. Probably bringing up a larger/full image of the item along with all it's stats. What I believe Blizzard are trying to achieve is a smooth flowing, action packed adventure when you leave town, then when you return with all your loot you can check it out to your hearts content back in town.
I guess this adds to the immersion for me, and probably will for alot of people. I believe it's more realistic as if I was fighting hordes of demons from hell, and I was picking up stuff deep in a dungeon, I wouldn't spend my time checking it out where I might get jumped by some foul thing lurking in the shadows. I'd wait until I was back in town.
Probably correct, apart from the squinting part. Do you have that little faith in Blizzard making an inventory system that you think they would make it so tiny you would have to squint to see the different between a sword and an axe? I think not.
I also doubt that items that needed to be picked and chosen from your inventory would be that hard to distinguish. (Seriously, how many times did you run through playing D2 and keep switching between armour you had to wear? The majority of picking and choosing happened for me when I had to put things into the cube to transmute, or to re-arrange my inventory to fit stuff in).
Obviously that option will still be available. But now you will have the chance to relax 10 fold when you come back to town carrying heaps of loot, instead of every 5 minutes using the old D2 system.
You can still have lots of room, but who the hell wants to sort through 5 pages of inventory slots to organise there stuff. That's also a slap in the face of everyone arguing about the 'realism' of the D2 inventory. Once again, scrolling over the icon will probably produce a larger image that you can drool over anyway.
First off let me just say I've never played WoW, I've never looked at screen shots of it. I refused to play it simply because I didn't want to pay a fee every month to a game owned if I bought it. But at first glance of the D3 inventory I could tell it was a huge improvement over the D2 system.
Why?
It's insanely more convenient to use and makes the game alot more free-flowing.
The contradicion I see in your post is that you want to see the intricate detail of your items you pick up (D2 inventory style), but you also want more room to make the inventory comparable in size to the D3 style. To do that you would have to make the inventory take up the whole page (Or close to it) which detracts from the visuals and take you out of that immersed in the gameworld feeling. Or you have to make the squares smaller, making it so you can't see your loot properly anyway.
I believe the new system will aid adventuring so much that you will be more immersed than ever before.
- Players won't have to go back to town every 5 minutes to pawn off their stuff.
- Players won't need to keep enough room in their inventory for that one unique that might drop, while having the rest filled up with charms.
- Players may not need 1000 mules anymore.
- The speed and flow of the game will increase.
I think my biggest gripe however is at the general community. Basically every forum I've gone to has contained more threads bashing Blizzard and what they are trying to achieve than threads in support of their efforts.
Basically everyone wants D3 to be the same as D2 with no changes. They don't want graphics to be changed, they don't want the inventory system to be changed, they want the original 5 classes from D2, They want boss size reduced, they want players to look less powerful, they want less colours and more grey/brown.
It's obvious to me that what Blizzard arn't doing is re-inventing the wheel. But to me it looks like they are making it rounder. They are streamlining the ActionRPG that Diablo is, while keeping all the good frills like checking out your loot and tooling out your character in.
I see your point. Making a separate inventory window, apart from the equip items window, would not allow you to have the stash+inventory+equip windows up at the same time.
And, introducing pages to the inventory screen would not allow you to see everything at the same time. In WOW the one good thing about that setup is you can see all your items everywhere without having to scroll, or change "pages". You can open all your bags simultaneously and see everything.
Surely there must be a way to retain the grid, without sacrificing these things! I dont know. What I initially thought of was to separate the inventory screen from the equip screen (opposite sides) this way the entire right half side of the screen could be the grid inventory (plenty of space). Even if they did go and decrease the size of the little squares, most items would still take up more than one square.
In WoW, when you open all your bags, the view size of all of the inventory shrinks down to a smaller size anyway, so the same thing is present there.
There was a problem with the limit of the items you could carry on any one given character in Diablo, compared with the large number of stuff that was always being aquired - but I still think that can be solved by simply making more of the screen show the inventory, rather than a tiny section of it (which was surrounded by decorations, and border frames).
Also dont forget that the resolutions will be higher than 800x600, so it would be very easy to implement this.
Hellforge: Forging a passion for video games.
For a game like Diablo that focuses so much on acquiring items, it may have been a bit slower, but it fit very nicely. I think a truly creative person would have taken the idea and evolved it with quicker methods of organizing items and perhaps multiple item selection methods such as mouse dragging, and more. I think they really should focus more time on this element before the game is released instead of resorting to something so abstract as the WoW item management system. Item tetris worked because it was so hands-on. It was like a billionaire (Scrooge McDuck!) counting his money.
One more thing.. since I can assume we can now see how the individual pieces of armor look on the character in the game in greater detail, I don't really care how it looks in my inventory. That being said though I really don't like the WoW loot icons.
I really can't think of any reason why the old system should be used other than nosalgia.
We don't even know if charms are going to be in the game, but if they were going to be in Diablo3, I'm sure Blizzard would have the common sense to address this.
That is what diablo should be.
One stock one item makes diablo like a mmprg game.