DiabloFans

with this and the other upcoming changes, all i need is an offline/LAN mode. it's effing sweet to see diablo 3 is finally coming out!

blizzard, i love you again

there are plenty of (mostly) fun ways to kill stuff in the game. it's just that the stuff on the ground after all that killing is terrible. i keep seeing rewards come up in these interviews. the only reward you really need are items of a decent power level that give you choices.

sometimes i wonder if blizzard isn't overthinking things a bit. they really need to get us (at least a little) something soon.

developing games before you sell them to the public is cool. i wish blizz had taken this approach.

but seriously: where were all these ideas when they spent the better part of a decade developing the game?

i like the game and was surprised at how much more enjoyable it is to play after the monster density changes, but putting off seemingly any changes until an expac is far too long. the game really needs help now, and any small changes (or at least some contact from the devs about what is being worked on) would be welcomed.

Edit: With such a long delay expected for the all-at-once itemization patch, it looks like they're waiting on the expac. Wanted to clarify. I'm expecting the patch to line up with some sort of DLC for the console version.

Remember when computer games had brutal learning curves? I do. That's why I really like PoE. I like complex games. Call of Diablo III's loadout skill system and terrible item drops bore me. I farm currency at my job, not my games.

That said, I'm hoping D3 'gets there'. The game's systems don't seem to mesh very well together and the feeling I get is that it lacks a clear direction. I still have a little bit of faith in Blizzard being able to pull it all together into a cohesive whole.

*sigh*

Hopefully with PvP no longer taking up dev time, they'll be quicker about rolling out changes to the bigger issues surrounding the game.

The game is fun to play but has a severe lack of anything approaching depth. I think there are a few easy fixes that, in the short term, improve the game without requiring an expansion or any serious systemic changes:

1) Some sort of stat linking to make stat choices interesting (since Blizz seems militant on not making any deep changes to the skill system, at least in the forseeable future).

2) Increase mob density across every area/act.

3) Give us a reason to go somewhere other than Act III to kill stuff by giving bosses an increased chance to drop items/maybe a paragon xp bonus/etc (why this wasn't there at launch almost killed my faith, of which there was a lot, in Blizzard).

4) Tighten the stat ranges on 60+ items, especially legendary items. Make Echoing Fury not the best weapon for every class.

5) Gems that do more than increase your main stat and crit damage (another complete failure that I do not understand).

I wouldn't think these would be too hard to implement in a single patch and would provide a huge boost to what is a game with great playability but absolutely no depth or other form of user engagement.

Edit: Didn't see Jaetch's post above while I was writing mine. And not all of these ideas are original and have been mentioned elsewhere, but are worth repeating.

Quote from overneathe

Quote from Azidonis

I'm an "actual D2 player" - played D1 and D2 for many since their releases, and am in my 30s...

...and I think that D3 is technologically a step up from both games. But gameplay, no. It might beat D1 but doesn't come close to D2, in my opinion. D2 wasn't boring to me either, even before LoD.

And the story of D3 is just total shit. I could have written a better story putting a marker in-between my toes and spinning around on a large roll of wax paper completely drunk off my ass... and that's if you read it with the vomit still on the pages. The story is absolute trash.

And Diablo's voiceover is just completely terrible. People may say, "Oh, it' just a voiceover," but when you spent over a decade opening the seals of Chaos Sanctuary to hear the chilling, "Not even death can save you from me," the Diablo voiceover from D3 just doesn't cut it.

Let me not fail to at least mention the disaster that is itemization in D3.

I agree with your story assessment, but in terms of mechanics let's wait 3 years and see how well Diablo 3 evolves and then measure it against what the developers managed to do with Diablo 2 and its expansion. One reason for that: what most of us remember is _after_ all the glorious changes to Diablo 2 and we've mostly played the almost finished game for many, many years.

This would be great, except that Diablo I or II didn't ship with such fundamental itemization flaws and a resulting lack of gameplay depth. D3 is over-simplified to the extreme. Waiting three years for PvP is fine, but waiting for changes that make a game about item farming about item farming and not farming for gold is too long.

I'm glad to see them step back from PvP in the hopes that they start working on the underlying issues that are currently plaguing the game.