Gold is not irrelevant through Normal, but yes, after that it typically is, if you are a smart player, and that could have been handled better (in D2 and pretty much every other game ever).
I agree on deleveling, but not on exp loss. I like EXP loss and it properly sets people back, plus the time lost by dying, going to town and getting your body back adds to that loss. It is not that different from the losing a buff, except one is a reward you lose and the other is a penalty imposed. I get why they do that. Because casual players will give up if they lose too much and get frustrated. That said, I am not against the method you suggested, though how do you balance a time buff when you can just stand around? I have not played Sacred 2, so perhaps they do it some way I am not familiar with. I could see more of a monster kills or exp gain amount without dying translating to a buff. Not sure how I feel about monsters getting harder when you get higher buff.
I get the pitfalls of attributes, but I find that if you streamline everything, take out attributes, take out item tetris, take out class differences, take out death penalties…it all becomes repetitive and boring to me. I am not saying D2 is the only way, or that there was not fat to be trimmed from it. Stamina is a great example. That was pointless and not fun. I could see it having been used as a resource of some sort, for dodging and attacks or something, but that was kind of fixed through resources in D3, which is fine by me. I just hope D4 doesn’t streamline everything to the point that it has no character and gets repetitive. We have plenty of games like that already.
The big difference is that since you cant delevel, the penalty has limited effect. Nor do most of us want people to lose items on death etc.
So the buff works better, as we cant (and should not) take away past gains, we can take away future gains instead. If you die a lot you will find a lot less items. Countering the benefits of being a high dmg glass cannon, unless you are extremely good at staying alive as that glass cannon.
Yeah, it is not an important part of the system. I kinda like the added risk though, so it isnt just a bonus without any drawbacks. I’d be fine with the same system without that part though.
In Sacred it is somewhat required since you are outright getting better items, not just more items, so without the difficulty increase it could end up feeling like power creep.
It would be like if you could only get ancient items in D3 if you didn’t die too often. Diablo should not do that though. The item scaling is one of the worst parts of Sacred imo (and to a lesser degree Diablo 3), I sure dont want to see that anywhere near D4.
I am definitely not arguing for taking out attributes. Just make them different from what they were in D2 and D3, and seem to be in D4.
In D2 attributes were nearly pointless, and mostly served as a “noob trap”. In D3, well, they only really exist on a technical level, and served as a bad, if not offensive, joke. D4s attributes seems better than both, but not much. Seems like Blizzard want to keep the concept of a “main stat” for each class, which makes me want to hit something violently.
Is it class differences that one class uses str and another uses int? Maybe. Is it at all meaningful, or interesting? I dont see how.
As for death penalties, I am fairly certain I am one of the people on the forum who want the most severe death penalties in D4. Unless there are someone who want the game to be HC mode only
But tetris? Yeah, I dont see any redeeming qualities, nor fun, there.
I get what you mean, but even having the “no exp in the bar” lack of exp loss is not terrible to me. It is another thing to consider, and I love having things to consider :P. But I get how that would not be ideal to some people. Not a big deal either way to me. I am fine with a properly handled buff, though not sure if I would prefer it.
I guess we will have to wait and see all the elements of D4 before passing judgement on the attribute system and how it impacts the rest of the game functions.
Still very much disagree about Tetris though. I am open to other ideas, but single-slot tiny items is not what I want.
This x 1000. Basically, I just want the developers to design amazing builds through the skill/talent system first. Make them varied and awesome. Then design items that preserve the original design intent of every skill in every build they make. If you are designing an item that makes a skill that was originally designed to be a hard hitting high resource cost skill a still hard hitting but virtually free under some condition skill, then players will find ways to break those conditions and completely change what the design intent was. Do not allow this under any circumstance or you will have a nightmare down the road balancing builds and items that interact with those builds. Always preserve the original intent.
And with level cap being 40, I don’t think they will be able to use XP as a death penalty in the game, unless they apply it toward paragon xp, which could be very interesting depending on how they design that system. There should be a significant gold loss imo and gold should matter in game, so that it hurts when it happens.
If they designed the paragon xp at higher levels to be a real grind to exhaust then death could mean several hours of paragon progression lost and personally, I would really feel that, if I cared about what paragon progression gave me.
I really kind of like their design of low character level max level that is essentially: complete the campaign and you are at max lvl - if they have deep, significant endgame paragon progression to begin on at max lvl.
endless, going back to the whole ‘it is okay to be able to finish a character/game, instead of endless grind’
account-wide, removing/diminishing the individual character from the equation, horrible concept
no choices, as you can get all the rewards, which is outright anti-RPG
And the moment it is not endless (but more like a replacement for lvl 85-99 in D2 or whatever, as it should be), then xp loss can’t serve much of a penalty again.
I imagine paragon is going to function exactly like that and will probably be what they use to raise the monster levels in the world relative to your character + paragon lvl. My guess is they will take the system Diablo Immortal is implementing for various paragon trees and do some refining on it. I highly doubt it will be anything approaching infinite progression, but will be quite a grind. This all seems consistent with what they’ve said they want for the system but as of yet we’ve gotten no solid details unfortunately
But, say it takes 20 hours of grinding to go from lvl 59 - lvl 60 in paragon and you die and the death penalty is you lose 100% of your current paragon lvl xp (you don’t delevel). You could lose 18-19 hours of playtime toward getting that next rank. That + a significant gold penalty wouldn’t seem like it mattered? If not, then I’m not sure how to make death matter in a game that isn’t HC mode.
It still wouldn’t matter much. Sure, then you “play it safe” for those 20 hours. Better than nothing for sure. But at some point you reach max lvl, and it no longer matters.
Imo hit players where it hurts the most; magic find. An insatiable thirst for more items is the most endless thing you can find in A-RPGs
It doesnt have to be either/or of course, as you can cut peoples XP while lvling, and increasingly hit their MF when they are done lvling.
Although I would still prefer taking away future XP gain instead of taking earned XP away. The former seems better balanced. If you lose 20 hours of XP gain on death, you basically force people to lvl paragon in tanky builds.
If you take away an XP bonus instead, people can still lvl up even if they die, it will just be slower (how much slower can be adjusted of course). That should help balancing glass cannons vs. tanks, instead of making tanks better.
100% agreed. D3 paragon system is atrocious. It could be a system that would actually make the D3 end-game more interesting and redeem some of the short-comings, but instead further magnifies the issues of the game (for me) and makes it very shallow and grindy.
That is an interesting thought for sure. Had not considered that one before. I’d still like it paired with economy and time penalties though especially at endgame.
Oh my example was extreme for sure - I was trying to find where it felt like a meaningful penalty for you, but I could definitely be talked into a slow down in the character’s efficiency through -decreased paragon xp gain, decreased mf and gf %, and a modest gold loss.
Yep, definitely was not arguing for it, but the endgame XP has come to be known as paragon now in Diablo so that’s the general name I was referring to it by. Perhaps the D4 devs should not use the P-word when they design their system due to sheer PTSD from D3.
Agreed, could mix and match different rewards/penalties.
I did have Gold Find as part of my proposal earlier too (MF/GF/XP bonuses as one package), but losing gold is okay too. One problem there is; you can create a silly meta where you transfer gold between characters, unless you want it to be an account-wide penalty (which I am not a big fan of either, why should my tanky characters suffer because I wanted to play a glass cannon; part of my whole ‘each character should be its own thing’ as with paragon too). Maybe character-bound gold? A bit too inconvenient.
Probably not a bad idea. I am not one to care much which labels Blizzard uses for anything. But “Paragon” sure comes with certain, uh, expectations.
Reading back over this thread and seeing how it devolved at one point into some arguments about whether D2 or D3 is the better model for how D4 should function might I argue “both” and “neither” are the answer? If you are thinking that the D4 developers on the first day of development asked the team whether they want to make a D2 clone or a D3 clone - the answer is clearly neither since D4 has a shared world and many other mechanical differences. My guess is on that first day of development they wrote a list of the best things each game brought to the series and talked about how they want to further iterate on those best in series features. Then they had a 4th column where they identified some things each game was missing and that is their vision for D4. What would those lists look like?
Best of D1
A spooky, multi-level dungeon that descends into hell. I’ve argued this should be one of the endgame activities in D4 and I’d love for it to start in a cathedral just for the nostalgia bits.
The music.
The conversations with townspeople that gave you their worldview and pointed you in the direction of interesting things along your journey to keep an eye out for.
Scrolls of TP and identify.
Dark gothic aesthetic.
Best of D2
The item affix and unique item design that made for memorable item drops.
Skill ranks and item affix breakpoints.
The wonderful class identities forged through items and skills.
Well defined item tiers and item qualities.
The music.
The cinematics and general storytelling.
They made monsters interesting and difficult. Gave us the concept of monster families and elites.
Defensive stats mattered.
Boss runs.
The horadric cube as the core of a crafting transmute system.
Waypoint system
Runewords and crafting depth
Best of D3
Best feeling combat until it speed-scaled out of control. Still arguably the best in class despite that.
Skill runes. Choices that fundamentally alter how skills work. A great design choice.
Followers with their own stories and now own itemization which impacts the player (emanate).
Great team based play.
Acknowledging an endgame progression system is needed (even if the one they implemented has major flaws).
Having a competitive endgame feature.
God-tier quality cinematics.
Again music.
Adventure mode - separating campaign progression from go anywhere progression.
Artisans (transmog in particular)
From a design standpoint each game offers so much to the series as a whole and elements of each will be felt in D4. So that only leaves the developers to figure out what is missing from this formula. So far, these seem to be things they’ve identified:
We don’t know enough about Sanctuary - world building, expansive open world experience.
Shared world to accentuate cooperation while maintaining the solo (if you want) instanced dungeon horror and despair vibes.
A deeper endgame progression system (they’ve said they want this)
A deeper skill tree, skill rune / passive tree integration.
A deeper endgame crafting experience (they’ve said they want this)
Mounts, character customization (hair, tattoos, cosmetics, etc…)
In my opinion the future is bright in Diablo and it’s all because of the things we’ve learned along the way. D4 is its own game and we will find pieces of all 3 games in it.
I wholeheartedly agree that D4 should be its own game, though as you mentioned, borrowing and being inspired from D1-3 and even other games in the genre.
With that said, I am concerned that the D2 inspiration is being invoked less than the D3 inspiration. I agree with many of your notes on what they bring to the table, but some of D4 is looking to repeat issues from D3.
To go back to the original topic, inventory management. I am open to new ideas for how this is handled, but honestly I am struggling to think of a better system for D4 than inventory tetris that is a slightly larger version of D2 and probably has an auto-sort button for those that want to use it. D4 right now is basically D3, but even more streamlined to single slot item only. Which yes, is probably better than D3, though I prefer D2. So I have been thinking, is there a different system that might be even better than any Diablo yet? I am struggling to come up with one so far.
Especially other games in the genre. Except for atmosphere (D1) and combat fluidity (D3) other games are doing everything better. Sadly not all at once.
I kinda dislike auto-sorting, it makes a mess of the inventory. If there is an auto-sort it needs to be possible to “lock” items to their current position, so the auto-sort ignores them.
not to get too off topic, but I am curious what games you think do to certain aspects better.
Path of Exile had a shot at being top in several areas, then it grew into the abomination it is now.
I would say
Presentation (story/art/atmosphere) is best in D2. D1 had its strengths, but cinematics, variety and so on, D2 takes the crown. Grim Dawn is quite good as well, but obviously more of a budget title than Diablo series.
Graphics: Artistically, D2 is still king to me, but fidelity it has to be PoE I believe.
Combat: D3 is fun for sure, but it also is lacking some depth that I miss from D2. I think hybrid D2/D3 with new elements would be king. PoE once again lost this when it got out of hand with updates.
Itemization: this is a tough one, though I still think D2 is king here. PoE is probably second best, but it is hard for me to care now, given how I get burnt out on the insanity by end-game.
Builds/progression: D2 is still my favorite, though I can understand why PoE would be top or even Grim Dawn. My problem with Grim Dawn is the classless system leaves a lot to be desired when you have characters that look the same and so on. It just doesn’t feel polished and fleshed out like Diablo. PoE is umatched at what it does, but once again what it does is wayyyyy too intense and complicated now.
Audio: Diablo series is always king, though grim Dawn is close and PoE has some good stuff too.
I could go on and on, but to me D2 was only ever rivaled by PoE, but PoE through that away with its bloated expansions/updates making it a mess.
Digged up an old post. It is of course simplified as there should be more than one inspiration source for pretty much all systems.
Get end-game inspiration from PoE (atlas system in particular, but also the general diversity of end-game content)
Get itemization inspiration from Grim Dawn
Get skill customization inspiration from Last Epoch/Wolcen
Get passive skill customization inspiration from PoE/Wolcen
Get combat flow inspiration from Diablo 3 (excluding the mob density, terrible balance, and AoE spam gameplay of course)
Speaking of mob density; D2 is probably the closest to feeling right on that. Most A-RPGs have too high monster density with too many irrelevant monsters
Get trading inspiration from Diablo 3: RoS
Get crafting inspiration from… Grim Dawn mostly. Not a fan of any of the crafting in A-RPGs, but Relics are nice.
Get atmosphere inspiration from Diablo 1
Get survival bonus/death penalty inspiration from Sacred 2
And a few aspects that matters a lot less to me, but just to make it more comprehensive:
Lore/world building: Diablo 2
Music: Diablo 1 & 2
Btw, the above doesnt mean I think D2 is bad. It is still pretty much the king of the genre because it does most things okay. Whereas all the above might be stronger in specific aspects but has some serious issues elsewhere.
Since I prefer as simple an inventory as possible, I might not be the right to ask. D3s inventory fine, but 1 slot for all items seems better. Most A-RPGs I have played used some variation of a tetris system (even D3, albeit one with only 2 shapes), not sure which ones exist that doesn’t.
Should maybe also say, it is not a topic I consider important. If Blizzard announced D4 had changed to Tetris inventory tomorrow, I would not have any real issue with it. Which is a rare thing for me
End-game inspiration from PoE is fine, though I hope their keyed dungeons are even better and feed into the open-world feel. PoE’s map system is nice for sure (though I am usually bored at this point by the chaos of the game, so I have not cleared it since they did the major map update. The thing I don’t want is 100 different side things to do that feel disjointed. There are so many different activities to do between mutations, infiltrations, capturing monsters, etc. They just don’t feel cohesive and become more annoying than fun.
I like Grim Dawn quite a bit. It might be my second or third favorite game in the genre, but I am not sure I agree with item inspiration from GD over D2. What do you like more about GD? If it is the components (no sockets), I agree, that system is pretty good overall. And the loot is good, however I find that there are too many stats of the same type across too many items and it all just feels a bit like stat sticks…at least to my memory. Perhaps I am off base. I don’t recall items feeling as special and unique as in D2. I think PoE does that better than GD.
have not played Last Epoch or Wolcen. Wolcen looks way too much like a straight D3 ripoff for me. Last Epoch I want to play when they have multiplayer. Game looks pretty good, thought he presentation looks a bit shoddy to me.
Combat flow of D3 I mostly agree with. Needs to have some more depth mechanics and less laser beams and walls, but I like action and D3 does that well for the most part.
Agree on D2 mob density.
Disagree on D3 trading. Go with D2 and let me play how I want.
Grim Dawn did have pretty good crafting if i recall. I think D2 had some interesting aspects as well that many people don’t know about with the cube. And runes can almost be considered crafting, since you find some rare ones and a base item and mix them together to make a god tier item. So yes, something like GD/D2 and improved upon would be nice.
Agreed on D1 atmosphere, though D2 is just as good and has some of the best cinematics of any game I have ever seen.
Never played Sacred 2 (only 1…a long time ago), but I do like some survival aspects, which D1 had more than D2 or (obviously) D3.
Didn’t play enough of Titan Quest to judge. Hated the look of the game from the UI to the graphics and animations. Don’t remember Sacred enough, and have not played Wolcen or The Last Epoch yet.
And to circle back around to the topic at hand, D2 and PoE have the best inventories, haha. I am sure improvements could be made somehow, but item tetris is still king for the genre in my opinion.
Agreed. They have gone way overboard with systems. They are purely quantity over quality. I think it is more than a year since I played it last, so likely even worse these days.
Note that inspiration also doesn’t mean copy.
Still, I like the concept of the Atlas, where your “endgame” system is not watching an XP bar move up again and again, but something directly related to progressing through the game world (even if that game world only consists of maps in PoE). Also like the whole UI design of the thing.
And even if they have too many endgame activities, that is still better than the opposite, of bsically having 1-2 at most, as is the case for pretty much all other A-RPGs. But yeah, fewer, more fleshed out systems would be the next step above this. And dont introduce new half-baked systems every 3 months.
Mostly the normal affixes. There are a lot more affixes, and they are generally more interesting than in other games. You can nearly always find something useful on items.
It is not perfect, they still use very specialized affixes such as +specific skill, although it is somewhat countered by having multiple different +skills on an item, even more than you can use on a single character (such as from 3 different classes).
Which leads to another extremely positive thing, and one it shares with D2, to some degree. The idea of imperfect items. Due to many of the items in GD having all kinds of affixes mixed together, such as skills from different classes, or affixes that might often be in direct opposition, like +% dmg types, means that most items feel like they have flaws. Stuff that means they are not perfect. That makes the items a bit messy. I really like that. Unique items in D2 has some of that too, with affixes that just weren’t particularly useful, but other parts make up for it. GD takes it a big step further however, by not simply having “bad” affixes on the items (which is not exactly good design), but as said above, have affixes that doesn’t really mix together. Which means two different builds might look at the same item and want it. But due to different affixes on the item. I think that aspect pretty much is as good as it gets in itemization. It only really works for unique items with pre-determined stats of course.
Its “legendary” affixes are not particularly interesting; I would say PoE, and even D3, are best in that department, if we ignore all the flaws of D3s balancing at least. But normal affixes is the foundation, and arguably the much harder part to get right. GD is far ahead of everyone else there imo.
Runners-up are PoE and D2.
Haven’t played Last Epoch either, so that is only judging by screenshots of the individual skill trees. Which look great, and far ahead of everyone else. My biggest criticism might be that there should be more of a web to the trees, with multiple paths to the same end-points.
Wolcen has a similar system, just without the tree. Which can be both good and bad, but inthe end, it just offers more skill customization than most A-RPGs.
PoE offers lots of skill customization through its gems too. I just really dislike the socketing system. Maybe PoE 2.0 will be up there too. PoE’s skill upgrades also have to be generic, due to how the gems work. Whereas Last Epoch and Wolcens skill upgrades can be uniquely designed for each skill. Which is better. Especially since it contrasts what I want from the item design; less skill-specific affixes.
Then there is the passive trees, Wolcen and PoE are fairly similar there. Wolcens web is smaller, which is honestly a good thing, as PoEs is too much. Still, both are interesting. I would definitely not copy PoEs crazy skill web. But a passive “root” system like it in D4, on a smaller scale, that would seem very nice.
Also quite brilliant how you can reshape the Wolcen passive web, by rotating its 3 parts.
Yeah, I am pretty much only talking how the combat “flows”, the speed, how the characters move and react to your button presses etc. Very much not the lackluster enemy design etc. Also, in that regard, D3 combat was pretty much at its best in early vanilla. If we ignore how badly itemization hurt the difficulty progression back then.
Should note that I mostly dont want to see item crafting in the game at all (which includes D2 runewords). Items should come from drops primarily, and crafting should be about enhancing those drops (something Grim Dawn is also quite good at with the component system, and the augments). However, to compensate for a general lack of item crafting, the Relic idea from GD could be nice too; as in, a single item slot that can only be gained through an intricate crafting system (if D2 ruenwords should return, it could also be part of that).
I think the sweet spot is like with keyed dungeons adding a new max level to that system if players have shown they can hit max level, or adding new dungeon affixes that keeps the game feeling fresh.
If they opt for shared world systems a faction reputation system is something that’s easily added onto over the long term with new rewards for boosting reputation with camps/factions.
If they have an endgame descent (long form dungeon with unique challenges that’s repeateable), they can add to the number of levels and include various special events/story elements or crafting elements to it over time).
Designing good systems that have a ton of longevity at launch but can be added to through patch content down the road is far superior to adding a new mechanic/activity that dillutes all the other activities you can do at endgame like the PoE approach. The oversaturation of their systems at endgame is one of the main reasons I stopped playing as well. I have high hopes for PoE 2 though - the skill gem change is awesome - and I hope they refine their endgame/league mechanic crafting systems on the whole.
At minimum I think end-game, at launch, need the following overall systems:
Mapping/random dungeons - D4 seemingly got that covered with Key Dungeons. But no matter how varied they might be, it is just a single system.
Boss fighting - D2 basically had nothing else, but imo the game needs an end-game activity where you can just go in, and fight bosses. No normal mobs, elites etc. Just the most challenging boss fights, taken up another level.
I would imagine some kind of arena, where the bosses can get additional random affixes to spice things up. And at even higher difficulty, throw in multiple bosses at once etc.
Overworld/exploration - there has to be some way for the overword to be relevant. Really sad if 90% of the game is instantly irrelevant the moment you can do Key dungeons etc.
Personally I would love if we could replay the campaign, but other than that we just need 1) the overworld to have similar difficulty scaling as key dungeons can offer, and 2) stuff to do in the overworld that can reward us somewhat similarly to key dungeons. Like camps, random events, “treasure maps”, random exploration; chests, rare bosses, goblins, random portals to challanges etc.
3 basic end-game systems, which can then have all kinds of variety inside them, and expanded with more content in patches.
I would add one more, although a bit different. Challenge dungeons, 100% static dungeons designed by Blizzard. A few of them rotates in and out every 1-3 month or so. They have little to offer for rewards and are purely a leaderboard activity, where people can compete on clear speeds, without any RNG elements.
Unlike D3 challenge dungeons, you use your own characters.
Speaking of factions, I kinda liked the factions in Grim Dawn. BUT, it was probably not a good system for multiple characters, farming the same rep again and again, to unlock more end-game stuff. At least it should be somewhat less grindy.
