Practice what you preach and exclude me from your categorization.
You’re all for permanent gains in progression, so long as they’re not negative or detrimental then?
Is it because of the poor neophytes that would rage quit?
There has to be more to it than this. I know you can do better!
Edit:
Well, losing XP on hit as it pertains to OP, you would be given a chance to reverse it. Obviously you’d just have to hack n slash some more, and regain the lost xp.
Not even as a special mechanic with extra incentive reward?
Brings to mind the metal slimes in Dragons Quest. Only took 1 damage no matter what and would always try to flee after a certain thresh hold. But boy were they worth the xp to successfully kill.
I’ve included you in the group because you’ve done what I’m talking about to me.
I’m for a progression system that feels enjoyable to play. Taking things away for things that I can’t realistically be expected to be able to always avoid is not enjoyable.
A death penalty is fine(and I support it) because a player can realistically avoid that, as evidenced by hardcore characters existing. There is no such thing as a high level character that has never been hit, though.
There really doesn’t need ot be more than that.
If you didn’t want the player being that powerful don’t let them get that powerful then take it away. Just don’t let them get that powerful.
That feels like saying you can reverse stat loss by leveling up. It’s not exactly the same thing.
I could also ask what’s the actual value to the game here? What benefit do you get by randomly inflicting negative gains on the player that you do not get by having mobs which are capable of easily killing the player?
I’ve not played Dragon Quest but as you’ve described it here doesn’t sound like a problem. It’s just a simple mob mechanic. There’s no permanent negative status effect inflicted on the player.
What worked back then must not necessarily work now. A quarter of a century has passed since then. Diablo 1 and Diablo 4 are very different games. Heck, even Diablo 2 was very different from the original and caused a significant backlash from the community at the time. Also let’s not pretend it was perfect by any measure. I’d argue that the Black Death wasn’t good game design at the end of the day. It has the potential to completely ruin your character, and worse, there isn’t even any indication that it’s capable of doing so. Diablo 1 is the founding father of the entire genre. It did many things right. But it also did some things wrong, as pioneers are wont to do.
I don’t worship any single game. My main gripe with Diablo 3 is that it turned Sanctuary into a theme park attraction and purposely crapped all over the established lore like a pigeon on a marble statue to troll the original creators from Blizzard North. The Diablo lore is damaged beyond repair at this point in my opinion. The reason I’m still here is because the gameplay is sound. And part of it is that I can simply charge headlong into the enemy hordes without worrying about permanent consequences for my actions. For people who do, there’s Hardcore mode. It’s a thing I don’t like in my games. Permanent consequences are for real life. I play games to forget real life for a moment. And the experience penalty upon death is one of the “features” in DIablo 2 that I did not enjoy.
While I understand a lot of people didn’t like the XP loss on death how do you feel about the mechanic where you can recover some of the lost XP(or in the context of D4, potentially all of it) by going back and getting your body?
I feel like even in softcore there ought to be some penalty for death so as to not promote gameplay where people just zerg everything down with a complete disregard for any mechanics because if they die they’ll just jump back up.
For boss fights obviously you can take the Diablo 3 approach of saying that the player has to beat it in one go otherwise you start the fight over, but that wont work for everything in the game.
Dying causing loss of experience, dying often enough repeatedly via zerging with a disregard to the consequences ultimately causing loss of level, which then causes loss of stats.
You’d think twice about zerging. You’d build a buffer before wilding out.
Would you like to continue the discussion now or are you still intent on being argumentative for arguments sake and labeling me as a D2 fanboy?
That’s the point. If the consequences aren’t permanent then the disregard for the consequence exists.
The problem that plagues both D2 and D3 are this lack of true cost association with penalties.
You’re disregarding itemization.
You can never lose your gains in gear progression and thus power creep exists.
Which ultimately results in “balance” that is increased time investment for smaller and smaller gains.
If your lightning sorceress clad in brittle cloth armor gets ripped to shreds by physical claws, spewed acid on from acid reflux infected undead, and then hit with a corrosive fireball, your prized possession mages hat ought to at least have a chance to permanently go poof.
We can disagree, that’s okay. I appreciate you pointing out where I’ve done these horrible atrocities to you in which to deserve your accusation.
We had 1 very lengthy debate on ADA powers. As far as I can recall, we have some disagreements about breakpoints.
Aside from that, I’ll still need my memory refreshed.
I like many others have been trained to think through decades of gaming that there absolutely must be some penalty for failure, be it a Game Over, an experience loss or whatever. But over time I have come to comprehend that failing itself is the penalty. It costs you the most precious thing of all: your time. There is no way you will ever get back the time you spent trying, and failing. And the older you get the more precious this time becomes.
An experience penalty, in essence, is a time penalty of sorts. Because it makes you spend time getting back to the point you were before you failed. In other words, it makes you repeat the same process over and over and over again. This is not my idea of fun.
What I might find interesting, if the monsters put the stolen experience in a bag and you can get it back by killing them. All of it. That way, if you’re strong enough, you can essentially negate the penalty. If you’re not strong enough to beat the monsters, this would be the game’s way of telling you to go back to training at a lower difficulty and come back when you’re prepared.
It is exacerbated by prolonged and drawn out grinding. Paragon farming would be an example of this tedium.
Having a maximum level that you can reach, and ultimately forfeit, alleviates this syndrome to an extent.
The more times you have to repeat the same process over and over again, the worse having to do it even more feels.
You essentially can have continuity of progression by way of potentially losing the progression. This works best when progression doesn’t take your entire irl lifetime.
+1 for the constructive criticism. I really like the idea of
People don’t disregard death even in a game like WoW where the only penalty is a small loss of durability on your items and needing to run back to your body.
The consequence doesn’t need to be permanent, it just needs to be something worth avoiding over zerging things things.
I wouldn’t call getting gains in gear power creep as much as I would just say it’s part of the natural progression of the game. That is unless you’re constantly introducing new items that are increasingly more powerful. The 1.10 Runewords in Diablo 2 is power creep, for example.
However if you don’t have the infinite paragon system that Diablo 3 has(which never should have existed anyway), then you have an upper limit on how powerful a player is capable of getting and can just tune that to a point where it’s good.
Also increased time investments needed for smaller gains as you get more powerful is just how progression ought to work. It’s how most RPGs work, even ones with permanent consequences.
The part where we disagree is that I don’t see the value that a Diablo game would get out of this.
It might be one thing if permanent consequences was a core game mechanic that the entire game was built around. I do enjoy games like XCOM and Fire Emblem that feature perma-death of units, but that’s a core game mechanic.
If we make a Diablo game that is based around the idea that you are constantly losing things and nothing is permanent, we’ve basically ceased making a Diablo game and we’re just making a rogue-like.
Which I wouldn’t be against, but I still want a mainline Diablo game.
I never suggested they were horrible atrocities. You seem to have more of a chip on your shoulder about this than you suggested that I did.
Also it’s not like I have links just sitting here to post, and your profile is private while I don’t particularly want to search through my own 3000+ post history just to prove an off-hand comment to somebody on the internet.
Personally I find that a game without any form of death penalty leads to a different kind of gameplay where the player is significantly more reckless because that style of play becomes high reward low risk, since dying carries no real weight to it.
This goes doubly for Diablo 3 where the player can literally just pop right back up where they died after a few seconds.
It also promotes more durable builds as there is more benefit to them in the way of avoiding the death penalty.
I could argue that this is the core essence of what a Diablo game is, though. What are we doing if not farming the same rifts, bosses, cow levels, etc. over and over again?
Diablo is by its’ very nature a game where you repeat the same processes.
With a Diablo 2 style death penalty you can still negate most of the penalty by getting your corpse.
I’m not talking about XP loss on hit like the OP is. I don’t think that is a particularly good idea for a Diablo game.
but I do think there are several benefits to having some kind of death penalty other than just a minor inconvenience of a few seconds of your time.
Well, I’m not completely against such ideas, if it’s usably unrealized.
For example, the experience can be refunded if the enemy is defeated before you die.
If you die while the experience was taken away, it’s gone.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure that the APRG genre is suitable for this.
If I imagine the game as a pure real-time RPG, combat-based, well slowed down by the speed, but still with a tendency to ARPG, that might be much cooler. That would then represent a strong threat in the game, so to speak.
For an ARPG, it’s just one of those things.
Most of the time, the enemies just don’t have the expressiveness and seem more like one of the horde, which is threatening, but not itself distinctive.
Even in D1, which had very good atmosphere and strong enemies, such Dark Knights were strong in the end, but only one of many.
The whole game would have to be on a different level and that would not be an ARPG like D4 wants to be.
Imagine D1 from the speed as a group game with NPC companions and then you have a large world with lots of RPG and story etc… And then there are enemies like that… That could be a very cool gaming experience for now and it could work there.
Well, I’m a solo player, and I’ll admit that I’m entirely casual by the standards of this forum, so I’m not sure how common this is. But a common occurence in higher Grifts for me is this:
get one-shotted by random elite
get up and instantly be one-shotted by fodder because the set buffs are not up
get one-shotted over and over until teleported back to last save point (potentially very far)
ultimately returning to town because all gear is broken
… and in the end that’s just the critical few seconds that I lack for defeating the Grift Guardian. And voila, that’s 15 minutes of grifting entirely wasted. I wouldn’t call this a minor inconvenience.
Jumping genres, sure they do. Sometimes even that “only” penalty is a great enough annoyance that they take the res sickness and /afk until it’s gone. People rage quit in DOTA even though it places them into a category of losers until they can take their loss like a good sport and finish the game.
A significant enough consequence albeit not a permanent one that renders recklessly zerging dubitable. Do you have any suggestions for softcore? I’m entirely content with the death penalty of hardcore. Getting locked into kill or be killed with the Butcher on hardcore for D3 was intense and fun for me.
Continuity and longevity is the value that a Diablo game would get out of this. A better blend of balance between the “action” and the “rpg”.
I believe softcore diablo would benefit tremendously from a less harsh version of hardcore diablo.
You falsely accused me of doing something and then when asked to clarify the allegation you weren’t able.
So what you’re saying is you’re filling this forum full of hot air balloons?
