Just got the game a couple of weeks ago. Must say I’m pretty happy with it aside from all the obvious server connection issues (and then the login queues throughout the past week). New inventory and stash are perfect. Saw a few issues with the chat system, and they seem like minor issues but since they make it much more inconvenient to communicate with other players during cooperative gameplay I’d say they should be taken note of. You would probably have noticed the change if you have played the original, and then the remaster, but otherwise you probably wouldn’t notice how inefficient it is. The simplicity of the original was the best, and it worked perfectly. I’ll point out why the ingame chat system in the remaster is far from ideal, and why it should just replicate the system used in the original:
-The ingame chat is supposed to work in tandem with the gameplay, but not get in the way of it. It’s supposed to be something you can use in the thick of battle and not something that is cumbersome to use around hostiled players/monsters
-the chat and the message log are supposed to be separate, not mashed together. In the original you pressed “enter” to say something in chat, and you pressed “m” to look at something you may have missed or didn’t really read before, but you almost never did both. On the rare occasion that you want to type something while looking at the log, you would just press “m” and “enter” (or maybe assign a common hotkey to both. I don’t know whether possible or not). The new chat system doesn’t allow you to close the message log by pressing “m” again, which is real troublesome because you usually only use it for a split second to read something you missed before. Now you have to press “m” and then “esc” to close the message log, and this is inconvenient because it disrupts hand placement. I also don’t want there to be almost opaque square that blocks out part of the battlefield (you also cannot click on it) every time I press “enter” to type something, because in the 3 seconds it takes you to type something a monster could have crept up on you without you seeing it.
-Text placement and message log placement are very poorly placed. You want the text to appear where you can see it easily, because you shouldn’t have to glance away from the battle to read it. In the remaster it’s in the lower left which is more difficult to read, probably because it is sandwiched between the life meter and the battle screen, and also because of the font size. The messages from other players and player join/leave messages are also now lumped with the party invite/hostile notifications, and you really only have to keep tabs on all of the former, the latter is just a quick glance, and the party invites you don’t even need to look at after you have already joined up. This is why a lot of the time in the remaster you don’t even notice it when somebody says something.
-In the original the message log was centrally placed, which is what a message log is supposed to be because sometimes you want to reread something when mid-battle (if you are using it out of battle it should also be in the center anyway), so again you don’t want to have to glance away from the battle for that. In the original the log was transparent, so you could keep tabs on the whole battlefield while scanning your message log really quickly, but in the remaster you have to take your eyes off the battle just to look at the log. Also, the log is near opaque and creates a blind spot area on the field, and the box is so small that the message log gets flooded very quickly with the player join/invite messages so now you would usually have to scroll through it several pages just to read something you missed from a few seconds ago. In the original you could quickly scroll through the message log using the arrow up/down keys, which you usually didn’t need to because all the messages would’ve been on the first page, whereas in this version you would have to move your mouse cursor to the corner of the screen and then click on the scroll bar (which is very thin and troublesome to click on), and you would usually need to because the box doesn’t actually contain a whole lot of text. Again, this is all very troublesome when mid-battle. Small stuff, big disruption.
-Read someone else’s post the other day about how the font looks incongruent with the theme of the game. It is a generic font and it may look out of place in the game. In the original I’d say the text blended perfectly with the graphics, and it did not get in the way of the gameplay and did not look out of place, but it may be less so in the remaster. We never had problems with text covering the screen in the original, and we just pressed spacebar or “n” if for some reason there was a lot of messages, or we just used the mute button for it. The current font is also too small and you tend to miss a lot of the things said by other people in chat.
The rule of thumb is that it is more convenient when there are (in that order): less unnecessary mouse movements, less unnecessary hand movements on keyboard. If things are too cumbersome it significantly disrupts cooperative gameplay, and the thing is you wonder why after all those add-ons your multiplayer pvm experience didn’t seem to be as amazing as it was in original LOD, but you can’t exactly pinpoint it. Almost every change in the new chat system made it worse, not really doing justice to a nice remaster!
I spotted a few other issues that may have to be paid some attention to. I wager those problems would probably be gotten rid of anyway whether I take the time to point them out now or not, but will just point them out here:
-When looking for games to join from the lobby you only have to look at those: 1) level/char of all ppl in the game 2) how long ago the game started. You now have to tab between both using your mouse every time you want to check the stats on each game, which is real inconvenient. You also cannot just use the arrow up/down keys to browse through the games, which adds to the inconvenience.
-When typing in game names in the lobby you can’t use the arrow left/right keys to adjust the game name if you typed in a letter/a few letters incorrectly. You now have to use your mouse to click on the spot where you mistyped. This is an inconvenience because people type really fast when joining games (because you want to get in before the games completely fill), and you have to type in the exact game name when joining, so it is a very frequent thing that you have to adjust a few letters in the game name that you just typed in, and it is very inconvenient if you can’t use the arrow left/right keys like in the original over there. When you click on a game the game name also does not show up in the text box, unlike the original, which can also be inconvenient because sometimes you want to copy the game name to paste on Discord, etc.
-There is no sound when swapping weapons. You need to know whether you weapon swapped or not, especially in high latency games because sometimes it takes half a second for the actual weapon swap to take place when you press “w”, so sometimes you need to hear the click sound so you know you’ve already switched weapons.
-There is no option to stop somebody from hearing you (it’s on the party screen), unlike the original D2. You may have to use it around PKs in public pvm games.
-When you click on an item on the ground to pick it up, and you open your inventory while your char is walking towards the item to pick it up, instead of the item going to your inventory it now shows up on your mouse cursor. This gets in the way of things because now you can’t do anything in the time that your char is walking to the item. In the original you would always spend that time in that few seconds opening your inventory, checking whether your inventory has the space for the item or tossing out other stuff that is taking up your inventory space, or right clicking your tome of identify in advance so that you can id that item immediately the moment your char picks it up to decide whether to keep it in your inventory or throw it out (because you have to manage your inventory efficiently or it gets cluttered really quickly). But now you can’t. It seems like a delay of only a few seconds, but this is something that could take place up to hundreds of times an hour when you are pvming. In the original you had more control over this. Like if you wanted an item on the ground to go to the inventory, you would click on it with the inventory closed, and if you wanted the item on the mouse cursor, you would open the inventory before clicking on the item.
You don’t want the game to involuntarily put the item on your cursor every time you open your inventory while your char is walking to an item to pick it up, because sometimes you do this around monsters while pvming and when an item suddenly shows up on your cursor, it brings your character to a dead halt. When pvming you want to be able to manage your inventory quickly mid-battle, not deal with a strange kink like this that can get your chars killed in pvm.
-You can’t see what anybody is saying when you are in the tradescreen, not even yourself or the person you are trying to trade with.
-The minimap doesn’t realign properly when you open certain tabs, e.g. Inventory, Quest Log, Stat Point Allocation Screen, Skill Point Allocation Screen etc. In the original the minimap would just center on the char itself every time you opened those tabs, which was perfect, but now you just get disoriented every time you open any of those tabs while playing.
-This is more of a minor issue that was in LOD, but I may as well just mention it here. When you are swarmed in pvm, those are the things that you would try to click on the most: 1) your town portal 2) your corpse. These are the MOST DIFFICULT things to click on when you are actually swarmed in pvm. Prolly have to change the click radius or something.
EDIT: GEEZ, how in the world do you post a bulleted list over here? It looks unreadable unless you reduce font size (ctrl + -)