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.
I to am greatly disappointed . It really highlights the unwillingness of people to accept change. I'm just grateful that blizzard chose to develop D3, I know they don't owe me anything so I don't expect anything from them.. plus they will always do what's best for their shareholders (and that's to make a popular game), thats the nature of a publicly listed company.
I'm a single player guy. I first played d2 with friends, then they stopped playing, and I didn't, so I tried bnet, and found a bunch of jackasses, so I went to SP, and I enjoy it much more alone.
And now I get the idea the bliz is really pushing co-op, to the point of crutching SP to coach you into MP.
Let's face it, this is Blizzard's game, not Blizzard North's, and I'm starting to think all of us who were hoping for a Blizzard North D3 are gonna be disappointed. Blizzard has a different idea for D3 than what were hoping for, and it's much more "community" oriented.
I get it, sort of, but I feel some of us who were hoping for a complete SP experience will miss out once again, but this time we won't be able to rely on mods to make it right.
LOL. Both of your statements are false. Why are we scared of playing alone if we are saying to scrap the idea? which is what most of us are saying. thats a very big change. btw.
Don't like mercs? They can scale the difficulty similar to the way they did in d2; just count the merc as an extra player. Now you have the option and both options are viable.
Mercs taking up screen real estate? Creating chaos? Don't use them. Difficulty scales down just for you.
And let's be honest, the "mercs create chaos" argument is a joke. You're venturing into hell filled with demons bent on your destruction. You were expecting rainbows and unicorns?
Let me have my mercs back :'(
I'm on your side silly. My post are for peeps that wanted it more than normal (my mistake was I generalized). Anyway, I went to the official d3 forums and a bit surprised that there's no lengthy thread regarding followers.
Very well said, I agree. I definitely want a lot of people, of all skill ranges, to play and love D3. And I want the features to work for everyone. That was my point, though. It's definitely not a big gripe.. But I think the reason we're all a bit miffed about followers is that it's a cool feature, but it hasn't been implemented for everyone.. it's only useful for people who will play the game through normal, single-player.
Just seems like a waste of a great feature. The main reason followers aren't viable at endgame, that I could extrapolate, is they help too much with MF and Gold grinding.
BUT... maybe, just maybe.. they're not needed at end game, because end game play is way more involved and amazing than we can imagine.
Edit: And as for the "screen chaos" argument.. try playing WoW with 25 ppl in a raid fighting bad guys that don't even fit in the screen. It's AMAZINGLY fun to be in the middle of pure chaos.. I was main tank in a very active guild, and I had to find a way to keep everything that was happening under control during extremely complex mechanics. You find a way, and it's exhilarating. I agree with those here, that we should have the option.
However i can't see why they added this feature in SP-Normal only. If they want to show players how cool it is to play with another players, just design a couple of quests were the player fight along side the npcs, simulating a online party.
The way it is now is extremely weird and will surely damage alot of people's experiences. It is common knowledge that blizz don't want people building characters around the followers. With SP-Normal followers the new comers will not only build character around the followers - they will loose part of thier strategy as the game progresses.
Imo it's like D2's immunities. People that don't know the game very well is pretty confident in building characters with one kind of element dmg. However when they enter hell they find out that they can't kill the act boss and are stuck there forever. Changing the rules of the game, in the middle of the game, without any preview warning is bad design.
And the reason it works is, for one, because of the screen angle, and secondly because of balance. WoW's health system allows for harder hitting monsters, because its someone else's responsibility to heal you. Theres no such thing in D3. Your health goes steadily down until you get a globe. If you had eight players monsters would have to hit insanely hard for it to be a challenge for the group as a whole, but that would also mean that whoever is getting attacked is dying way too quickly. For D3's screen angle and graphical effects, 4 players is chaos, but just the right amount of it. But again, thats not the topic we're discussing.
Its really not debatable in terms of raw numbers. D2 has sold what, 4 or 5 million copies? Theres no way the online community, even if you combined every unique player across the game's life, is or was anywhere near that. SC2 has sold over 3, probably closer to 4 million copies, and even during the game's beginning the amount of players online numbered in, at most, the high hundred thousands. Its a common trend across many games that people just play SP/Campaign or whatever the game offers that isn't online.
Obviously your second point, about hours played, still stands, and we should be rewarded for that. But that doesn't have to be through followers or a similar system. Even if you had something like a box to check to include followers, people would still make builds based around them, and thats just pretty lame. Especially considering the emphasis on character power. Why should it be possible for you to make a build where you intentionally exclude normally essential parts just so that the follower can fill in the blanks?
Followers (both as hirelings in D2 and across many other ARPGs that have included similar systems) are notoriously hard to implement well, so Blizz decided against them. That doesn't mean that we won't see their usefulness expanded in the future, and it also doesn't mean that their restricting our current options. Its just something that (for reasons I've delved into countless times in these threads) is incredibly hard to balance correctly. If you get it slightly wrong in either direction, suddenly one side of the argument is outraged again. You saw how many people were pissed off because they thought followers were essential, and you also see how pissed off people are now that they think their useless (for good reason). So its much easier to simply make it a nonissue but still helpful to a large portion of the people who will end up getting the game. That doesn't mean we're getting the shaft.
Lets put it this way. Suppose WW Barbs are a common, fun build to play. Now suppose that a WW Barb benefits greatly from a Follower's AoE slow skill, to the point where it becomes overpowered. So Blizz nerfs the AoE slow, but it still helps the WW Barb too much, and the follower is still essential to the most effective WW build. What you end up with is ridiculously complicated balancing, where you have to take the followers, which a lot of people didn't want in the first place, into account, instead of directly nerfing/buffing character skills. As we all know, a game like Diablo is incredibly hard to balance, and it will only be harder with the amount of builds in D3. Why make it more complicated by allowing people to supplement their build's weaknesses with a follower?
I'm not saying balancing followers isn't a challenge Blizz wouldn't be able to handle, but clearly it would take a lot of time. And thats not even taking into account the fact that no matter how finely you balance it, people could (and with billions of build possibilities, probably will) find a way to still exploit followers to make builds with very few weaknesses, that are also lame because if your follower is down suddenly your significantly less powerful, and because you, the hero of the game, have to rely on some random guy you rescued.
Well, you make a lot of good points, and I don't even disagree that the substance of what you're saying is true... I still just think it's a bit silly, is all.
OF COURSE you're going to kill things a little quicker if you have someone else helping you, even if they're underpowered. That's inherent in any game system, no matter what you do.
What I'm saying is that I think it's a bit of a fanatical and excessive step to scrap followers in the endgame because you think they might give you some sort of edge.
You don't hear anyone complaining about characters being too reliant on gear. What if I want a gear-free build dammit? I don't want it to be even slightly harder for me if I choose to walk out there naked. You see where I'm going with this?
Not a peep about characters being too reliant on their skills. Still waiting to hear about characters being too reliant on the services that artisans can provide. Why?
Because these are systems that are built intimately into the mechanics of the game. And for better of for worse, so is the follower system. To make an entire system (which undoubtedly had months of work poured into it) void itself a third of the way into the game is simply bad problem-solving, and it's just plain silly.
I'm not saying that we should recreate Diablo II's merc system here. Something is dreadfully wrong when you can't win the game without hiring help. I definitely think that needed major revision as well. But not THIS major. The solution I underlined would make it so your follower would be useful, but unnecessary. I think that's a fair compromise to everyone, honestly, because at the end of the day, it SHOULD be harder if you choose to venture out there all by your lonesome than if you had someone watching your back, amirite?
So, instead of fine tuning a system that, as I said in my last post, could easily shift in either direction (as in useless or too useful) just based on a person discovering a build, Blizzard made it help the 'newbies' and encourage them to go online. As much as people have argued that choice makes the system useless, and even an insult, those new players are ultimately a large part of the reason Blizzard is able to make the game. After all, they do make up for a lot of the sales. And lets not forget that, if the follower system does end up promoting online play, we would all benefit.
As maka said, hardcore players ultimately make up for most of the hours played in a game, and as such they deserve recognition. For all we know, not allowing the follower system into the endgame is a favor to us. It means that Blizzard won't have to nerf any of your favorite skills because it got attached to some cheap follower build and was declared overpowered. You won't get screwed in the last few seconds of a boss fight because Diablo decided to target your follower and you suddenly don't have a reliable heal (or something of that sort.)
If the follower system was going to inherit any of the problems of the D2 hirelings, I know I sure as hell wouldn't want it there. I think thats something we can mostly agree on. But thats just a really hard thing to do. I'm not saying Blizzard isn't up to the challenge or that its not a possibility for the future. In fact, it would be an obvious target for an expansion or even a content patch (if they are going to do anything like that.) That being said, the fact that they weren't able to devise some incredible system where followers are both not essential and optional isn't an atrocity.
In D2, there just wasn't at all. It didn't happen often, but I remember a couple times there where my mercenary was actually killing things even more efficiently than I was, and THAT definitely speaks of a broken system. I almost wonder if some of this might just be panic because the merc system failed so spectacularly. But that's another story for another day.
I think mainly my issue is a personal one: that even if it does solve the problem (which it seems it will pretty handily), it feels like a hollow victory for me at least, especially because the system shows such promise in comparison to its predecessor.
And I think that's really the crux of it. If they had done something similar in the Diablo II expansion (diminishing merc value towards endgame), I probably wouldn't complain as much (or at all), because the merc system in D2 was pretty clumsy and certainly not nearly as intriguing. The process of creating the followers was clearly much more thoughtful and evolved, and its overall a more interesting system, so it seems an awful waste to lose it.
Also, I'm with you, I expect they'll continue to tweak the numbers and play with it, perhaps making them more relevant in patches or whatever.
Look nobody is saying you guys are wrong for not wanting mercs or endgame followers. We're just saying there are lots of us who wanted them, and won't have them. And -I- am saying you have no justification in your argument, since you've always had the option of not using it. And you still have that option now. We, on the other hand, no longer have any option at all. They took it from us.
Which is worse? Having the option or not having the option? That's the question you need to answer here, not "how much do i hate stupid mercs". There are other ways of getting people to go online, clear screen space, and balance the game, without taking away our options.
Fishmancers, Esp. CE ones, would disagree with you.
Me want Diablo!!
Hopefully D3 has good enough multiplayer to allow me some comfort, but just because you don't necessarily play it doesn't mean that that is fact that nobody plays it.
Honestly, the real reason why I'm excited for this game is to see what happens with the story. Keeping in mind that all the systems revealed thus far have been pretty spectacular (I'm not interested in mercs, but the system is good), that is only more reason to enjoy my single player experience. Sure, I'll play D3 multiplayer with my friends and stuff, but it's not even because it's multiplayer and "killing enemies with your friends is fun." I've never seen Diablo multiplayer as fun in many ways (to me at least) because I prefer to go at my own pace (which is often pretty fast) and I get sort of frustrated while waiting for people to recuperate just so I can continue and they don't moan and complain.
Now, I really don't see how mercs are going to work well in the endgame. I really don't see how they're going to add anything substantial to the lore either. Mercs have no real appeal to me and I don't suspect to enjoy them.
Consider other people please.
And as for the number of people disappointed, there was an equally large crowd complaining that followers would be essential.
Did you even read my posts? I pointed out multiple different ways that followers would be almost impossible to balance in a way that makes them both useful and non-essential. If you can't see a valid reason in there its your own fault.