D3 is plenty difficult enough, you can scale solo grifts up at high as you want until you’re not able to complete them. The gameplay is smooth and fun, there’s a reason people still play this game and come back season after season.
All i remember doing in D2 is Baal and Pindelskin runs… and occasionally PVP.
My worry with D4 is that the core gameplay loop won’t be as interesting as D3, but only time will tell. I worry that they will try to cater too much to the players who barely played D3, players that played for a month then moved onto the next game… instead of players like me, who still put in 100’s of hours every season.
I can honestly say, d3 is probably my favourite game of all time, it’s definitely a game i’ve spent more time in than any other game and it’s a game that i keep coming back to season after season. I’m perfectly fine admitting it, and i have high expectations for D4.
My worry is that D4 won’t be aimed at the type of player that I am.
Scaling content in end-game is fine. Having a menu where you choose between ~15 difficulty levels is less so imo.
The scaling also really shouldn’t be endless. That just pigeonholes everyone into fewer and fewer viable builds.
Also seriously important to have varied end-game activitites. If you make a game where the end-game consists of time-limited runs, don’t be surprised when the build viabilty is solely based on that.
Have stuff that is somewhat easier with fast moving builds, stuff that is somewhat easier with slow, tanky builds, etc.
I mean, in D3, they could have greatly improved the end-game diversity by simply having two independent GRrift modes, one with the timer, and one without (where if you die, it reset). Wouldnt even have taken any effort. Adjust the rewards as appropriate of course.
Preferably make the scaling end-game feel more hand-crafted in a sense, where you progress through increasingly difficult content - new bosses, new areas etc. Instead of rerunning the same content which just increases in difficulty. It cant all be handcrafted of course, takes too much development time, but PoE for example is doing a decent job of having both the repeatable endgame, with a sense of meaningful progression to it.
without a gameplay LOOP players will finish all the content and stop playing, that at its heart is the opposite of what you want people playing ARPG’s to do. You want them repeating content and farming gear. If it’s a one and done progression style with no reason to repeat content then people are going to lose interest and fall off.
i fled from the complex steps in POE bossfights-endgame and their punishing skilltree, where you have to seek info outside the game to avoid any mistake to:
to the best aRPG mobblaster, that can even drop more complexity imo, to have more fun mobblasting.
I literally said that. Just make it feel like you are progressing through the treadmill content. As if things are moving forward. Even if the grind theoretically never ends.
Strongly disagreeing.
You wont have to worry about D4 being anywhere close to PoE complexity though. And sure, that is not necessarily a bad thing. You can have progression in the end-game, without having to follow a 50-step guide to do it.
Try fitting a Blizzard classic moment from Starcraft in a game today: when Kerrigan and Jim meet and she reads his mind.
Watch bloggers go crazy over something that happens billions of times a day (assessment->fantasy) and is NOT gendered.
Blizzard will never do it again though. And it’s a shame - not for this specific type of humor, but for the very ‘gritty’ thing people want to see. Or, at least why people in my age group used to flock to Blizzard games.
Or we can just make a Diablo Immortal, and I’ll sit on trains to Manhattan every day like everyone else, headphones in, staring and mashing 2-3 buttons repeatedly for some kind of ‘achievement’ in watered down arpgs with no ‘soul’ in them.
That’s simply due to the fact, that the set bonuses in D3 were buffed many times throughout the years.
Now, when you finish a build, it would allow you to jump from GR 1 directly to GR100, if not higher (depending on the build).
To take those numbers and call them “different difficulty levels” is a total joke, considering, that just by finishing your build you can directly skip 100 or so of the supposed difficulty levels.
Also, just because D2 allows for difficulty between players 1 and players 8, that doesn’t mean, that there wouldn’t be builds that are capable of beating content like Greater Rifts.
You do realize, that in D2 Necromancer would be able to beat GR150 due to the simple fact, that he has skills such as Corpse Explosion and Revive, right?
They are not ever scaling. The highest GR is 150. Legendary gems are capped at 150. It is the Paragon that seems to be uncapped, considering, that there are people, who have more than 10K Paragon (thus the cap is not 10K).
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Many builds in D2 allowed for the characters to have inate power.
In D3 your character doesn’t have any inate power as everything is based on weapon damage multiplied by extremely overpowered sets and paragon.
You take away the weapon, and your character becomes gimped and useless.
This design is crap.
I am glad, than in D4 they are brining back flat damage on skills and skill rank.
First few season WD turned all the monsters on the map into still statues. Very difficult endgame.
Later on, you just stand in the Monk’s circle. Very difficult endgame.
Ok,The major core of the problem here is you want a game directed at a mature audience which is fine .But then you also want a game for so called "HARD CORE " gamers and not so much for so called "Casuals " . Ok, Here is the major problem with that over all.
1.To have a game rated M or M+ you have removed a segment of your money spending market .
Now your target demographic are more of a "Casual "Gaming market because they actually have real life responsibility’s IE: Job ,GF ,Wife ,Kids and so on But they also have potentially a larger income to spend on entertainment .
Your so called "HARD CORE " gamers make up a lot smaller percentage of your Target demographic .Yes, They may play more but they still spend the same money to buy the game as a "Casual player "
If you make the game to hard to be rewarded for time spent playing then you turn of the larger part of your target demographic who will not potentially buy your product or get their friends to buy their product.
There needs to be a balance between time played and rewards earned . You seem to want it leaning towards the constant grinding side of play for rewards .Which to me there is nothing wrong with that but for your "Casual " player they will get turned off very fast with out semi constant rewards . With what appears to be the incoming attempt by Blizzard to get an income generating game through cosmetic and stash tab sales like PoE they can not afford to turn off potential players with disposable income to spend .
I think this is a bit far. I think it was designed to be an action/adventure game. Not a horror game. You can especially see this when you compare the cinematics in D2 vs D3. Not to take away from your point, because I think you are right. But to me it’s more because they were off on the tone.
This was the one part that I liked about D3 vanilla. Even though the game’s item progression was a disaster… I at least felt a sense of accomplishment when I did some things. My first time beating act 2 on inferno was an amazing feeling. But then they started nerfing a few things that needed to be nerfed… Then they started nerfing EVERYTHING!
You can make a game that is accessible to casual players and still be difficult. The real thing I’m having a problem with is players that want all content available for their play style. Which will inevitably handcuff the developer’s creativity. The number of people complaining about how there might be some content that they have to group for, or have to go through PVP zones to get to is disconcerting IMO.
The path to redeeming the Diablo legacy is paved with trapped chests, cursed weapons, and of course the occasional “immune to physical” for good measure. And that’s just for starters!
This x1000. I get why people are intimidated by PoE’s tree. And it isn’t a bad idea your first few times playing through to look at a guide. But you definitely don’t HAVE to follow a guide. Once you get experienced enough you can create your own builds from scratch that will be nearly as good as the “most optimal” builds. The only thing your kind of forced into is certain ascendancy skills, that without the right ones you might find yourself handcuffed during late game.
This has… nothing to do with it. Yeah you can skip a bunch of grs when you complete your set, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t difficulties beyond what your set ‘gets you into’ that you need to optimize for and grind paragon for. I don’t see how you connect the statement “D3 has more difficult content” to “yeah it does, but you can skip some of it and get to the hardest levels because of set power creep”. O…kay? D3 still has more difficulty than D2. Point still stands.
You do realize that this is an example of exactly why D2 is far less difficult, right? You’re making my case for me.
And I am sure that that 150 cap will be removed soon, to make way for the continued growing power of sets and items. Nobody has reached 150 during a season, only with half a decade of cached paragon is it possible. Your point is moot.
So, basically, Diablo 2 is so trivial that it can be beaten without gear, but you lot are arguing D4 should be more difficult… like D2? This makes no sense. I think having some innate power is a good thing, but I dont think the hardest game content should be beatable without any gear equipped, at all.
If you are glad that D4 is making skills do flat damage then you are happy about nothing- the damage you deal with skills is based off your Attack stat, which you get 100% of from your gear. I played the demo, I know. When you lowered your Attack, your fireball did less damage. Its the same as D3. The only difference is that the tooltip showed actual damage numbers instead of %attack.
Yeah, use stuff that was patched out of the game years ago as your basis, brilliant. Even with a monk tank or cc WD, the game was still more difficult than diablo 2. Any D2 hammerdin can defeat any monster in the game with a few hammers. If you scoff at D3’s difficulty then you are scoffing even harder at D2’s.
that’s my point. lol