…
what is the difference between a good book and a bad book…?
It’s hard to say, exactly, but it has to do with how it’s structured, composition, and setups and payoffs.
Craftsmanship.
Diablo 3 is atrocious in it’s design on so many levels I’m dumbfounded that anyone actually likes it, beyond the WoW-like graphics.
It cannot be played like the roleplaying game roguelike the Diablo series is supposed to be.
There are no choices, no compromises, in the leveling process.
No choices in the story nor optional parts of the story or maps.
Every monster is a bag of flesh, and every weapon and skill is a knife.
In Diablo 3, you can burn stuff that bathes in flames. You can freeze elemental cold to death. You can poison the unholiest of cursed spiders from the depths of hell. You’d be able to strangle a golem, and electrocute a copper rod, and bleed a mummy to death.
Again absolutely atrocious.
They added runewords to Diablo 2 in the expansion to make sure every tier of items that could drop had a potential use.
White items, blue items, yellow items and uniques.
Every single tier has it’s uses.
Diablo 3 dropped that philosophy entirely, and it’s all about legendaries and sets of the highest tier of items.
Again, just atrocious, coming from the series where you can find items at level 18 that are useful throughout the game, before D3.
There being no difference between a sword-wielding barbarian and a sword-wielding wizard is again atrocious. They both use their weapons to deal area of effect damage.
It’s amazing they stopped short of letting the demon hunter fire arrows with a sword – but the idea of a weapon’s melee damage determining spell damage is exactly that bad.
Cooldowns.
That’s like admitting you have absolutely no idea what so ever what you’re doing when you as a developer add minute long cooldowns for active skills in the diablo universe, and put 10 second cooldowns on basic skills just to force players to cycle through skills.
Diablo 2 introduced casting delays for server-intensive spells, and only had delays long enough to clear some particles.
Some summons have cast delays – because they actually generate and equip gear. Shadow Warrior, Master and Valkyrie generate two magical or rare claws, magical armor, and a magical helmet, that’s invisible apart from the color of the weapons.
There is no reason for cooldowns – it’s like when a writer forces a character to do something because the plot requires them to, and not because it’s in their character.
Cooldowns is season 7 of game of thrones, mechanically.
Your wizard forgot how to cast that spell for the next ten seconds, then he’ll remember again. It’s basically the statement:
‘So sorry, but we don’t know how to balance this stuff so that’s what we did.’
There’s dozens of ways to balance skills and spells:
Prolong the casting time before the spell or skill takes effect.
Force the character to spend time charging up the skill by holding the skill button, unable to take any other action but walking – or running – or be forced to stand still, as balance requires – during that time.
D2 had stamina, but stopped short of actually implementing it as a resource cost.
Which is a shame, it’s a perfect resource cost, though it started out too low, and running should just have stopped stamina regeneration or drained it slowly, not drained it fast.
…stamina makes perfect sense as a secondary resource to balance skills.
Even without stamina, exhaustion as a mechanic can be used to balance powerful skills.
Have an exhaustion meter or only an exhaustion effect, that prevents you from using any powerful skills or lowers the effect for as long as you’re exhausted. Over-casting intensive spells and using powerful skills can cause your character to be too tired to run, and too tired to use even common skills, relying on basic skills to survive while recovering.
Resource cost doesn’t have to be a 1-dimensional axis. You can make it two- or three dimensional. If you use a powerful skill, your mana pool is ‘poisoned’, the top of the pool filled with a dark liquid that takes longer to replace than an empty pool.
Your resource regeneration is hindered. And similarily, some skills can require a sacrifice of mana – mana that is bound to the skill’s effect, and doesn’t regenerate before you unsummon the summon, or the skill duration is exhausted.
Cooldowns is for high caliber automatic weapons in war games and steampunk games, and arcade MMOs and games that don’t try to take mechanics seriously and/or don’t try to make sense from within the game world.
Then there’s the story.
One plays like a spanish soap opera, the other is actually good.
D2, you play to learn the story, and can run straight for Andariel in act 1 skipping every other quest.
D3 is a railroad track through a museum.
Nuff said.
And how difficult is the highest rift levels for an undergeared character?
Literally impossible.
It’s a brick wall that you need to deal “X” damage and have “Y effective health” to pass.
That is not difficulty, that’s having gear checks gatekeeping players.
Diablo 2 can be cleared by naked characters in hardcore – yet most people can’t, because it’s too hard.
Difficulty is based on what can be done through the skill of the player, not what can be done with the correct gear.
…
There could be written novels on the subject of why Diablo 2 is a great deep and complex game, for it’s time, and how it’s a great roguelike and roleplaying game because of it’s streamlined but fair mechanics – and how Diablo 3 is a polished bad game that in no way is a roguelike nor roleplaying game, with mass appeal not due to quality, but brand recognition and millions of dollars funneled into making it a passable passtime skinner box, with the mechanical depth and complexity of a damp cloth.