But I can get good PvP elsewhere.
I can for ARPGs.
Not EVERYTHING needs PvP. Some genres just have things and others don’t, and that’s fine. Would you ask for Halo to become a loot-based game? Heck no.
WoW would be just fine without PvP. I should know, I did it for a decade. The absolute worst times in WoW were when the best PvE equipment came from PvP. And PvP was usually horribly imbalanced, sometimes to the detriment of PvE.
Give it a rest. PvP was absolute trash in D1, and what players managed to cobble together in D2 was a happy accident, nothing more.
Besides, can you name an ARPG that’s had successful, planned PvP? No. Can you name an RTS without PvP? No.
We can get good PvP here too, if devs only put on their thinking-caps. Heck, even if they don’t: D2 PvP (especially pre-LoD) was actually a lot of fun, despite that it didn’t really hold up to scrutiny and theorycraft as a fair competition. Not unlike the first two Warcraft games, actually.
Sure but this is Blizzard. PvP has been central to Battle.net since the very beginning. And PvP was always a natural fit for the cruel & punishing Diablo setting, thematically if nothing else.
That’s like saying, not everything needs multiplayer.
It’s technically true that D3 didn’t need to be excellent, but merely fine, but this is far from ideal, of course.
Yeah, maybe WoW in 2020 without PvP would be fine, who cares at this point. But WoW in 2004-2005 with no SS vs. Tarren Mill, no honor patch, no AV? You’re out of your mind!
If there were no original classes in D4 that would be fine, if D4 was “7/10” that would be fine. I understand if you are tempering your expectations for D4 so you don’t get disappointed. Maybe it’s wishful thinking to expect greatness from Blizzard these days.
That’s more or less about game genre. In an RTS units are expendable besides your main center so no unit or ability worths removing from the game for competitiveness, also the average match span is just about 40 mins to 2 hours. In an ARPG, you imagine that’s all sorts of difference; no character or class is expendable, else game is an imbalanced mess and you could’ve been playing the same character for hundreds of hours.
With near two to three hundred variables and thousands of build options, you can only hope to turn PvP in an ARPG to a game of rock-paper-scissor by narrowing it down. If a skill is broken, that’s kinda okay but if it’s overpowering maybe it’s time for developers or community to step forward.
I don’t know if you ever played D2 but in a proper PvP scene for example characters are NOT allowed use their certain skills. Such as Sorceress are not allowed to use Static Field, they could even insta kill Barbarian’s in mid-air as they use Leap. That’s a natural attitude to take.
It is absolute trash for modern standards, but it basically was what popularized online RPG pvp in the first place. What other online RPG had PvP before Diablo that was as successful? Even UO wouldn’t come until almost a year later. Online RPG PvP was a HUGE deal in D1 and wouldn’t exist as we know it today if it wasn’t for that game. Considering it literally hadn’t been done to that extent before D1 and Battle.net, I’d say it’s quite amazing for what it is.
But it was done in Starcraft 2. There are units, techs, etc that are exclusive to the campaign mode.
Likewise, you can have a separate PvP mode in Diablo 4 with a subset of the skills and even gear that are otherwise available for PvE. That’s what I’m proposing. Not take away from PvE so you can have PvP, but just take away from PvP itself. Fundamentally, the combat of something like Diablo and something like Battlerite is not that different. I literally can’t see why a different PvP mode with it’s own balance wouldn’t work.
Unproven. No ARPG has had intentionally good PvP. The other ARPGs avoid it like the plague and treat it as a stretch goal if it’s present at all.
Arguable. D1 was released directly after, but the PvP scene in D1 sucked… especially since hackers were rampant.
Not everything needs multiplayer.
SS vs. Tarren Mill didn’t really happen on non PvP servers. AV was largely ridiculous - fun at times, but 12-24 hour AV games were just stupid.
Meh. D4 doesn’t necessarily need original classes. It’s not like the classes that are present have been even close to the same. The only times they come close are when the devs intentionally introduced abilities/mechanics into D3 that were in D2.
But I expect a couple new classes anyway.
Whether D4 has PvP or not will not affect my level of disappointment - unless it turns out that PvE suffers for it. There is less chance of that with PvP being entirely optional, though.
So… it didn’t do much? Because RPG PvP largely flops, and other ARPGs tend to ignore PvP entirely.
D1 PvP was trash back then, too.
It largely doesn’t exist.
They should make PvP and PvE servers. Why would I share the same world with people who hates PvP?
D2 PvP was a lot of fun. It’s a shame Blizzard couldn’t improve it on D3, but I have high expectations for D4, particularly for the PvPvE.
I have NO problem with any game having this. That being said… I have 0 faith in “Blizzard” to do it proper. They can’t even balance the things they have let alone something that involves player skill vs one another. It’s not you, It’s them. lol
Same can be said for the first RTS games, which were rough indeed, and about any new developing genre of games. But in Diablo’s case, the only difference with something like WoW is a set camera angle, and your character moves at a comparatively blistering speed. Hardly unproven. Even at Blizzcon 2011, they show-off what is essentially Frost Nova → Blink → Pyroblast. It’s the bloody same thing (but IMO design space was stymied by a compulsory overuse of cooldowns). First two Diablo games + LoD were zerg-rushed out the door anyway, in an era where free content patches were unheard-of. There’s no telling what could have been fleshed-out…until D4 that is, unless the luddites get their way!
With the radical transformation that D1 underwent, it’s amazing that it happened at all. So we give it the same slack as we give Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.
Diablo sure as heck does!
I enjoyed every iteration of AV, they each had pros and cons. But it’s a shame to me that AV wasn’t a part of the open world as originally planned.
That would be nice. To have my expectations exceeded once again, instead of knowing exactly what I’m getting and saying “Yes, this is adequate, I don’t need a refund”. I know you don’t feel that way, but WoW without PvP servers would feel that way for a lot of people, and so it was with D3. And if it turned out that say, ranged classes dominated D3 PvP, or some other grave imbalance, it’d be no worse than the situation in WoW vanilla, where rolling a non-engineering Paladin is a deathwish. Players dealt with it.
I’d argue that the overall game would suffer, if devs were forced to abandon PvP against their own wishes. It’d be just another gig for them, another uninspired product bent to the whims of trends & market research.
I wonder what D3 pre-orders would be like, if players knew what was coming and weren’t told that PvP was “full steam ahead”. D3’s PvP didn’t excite devs, likely because players were just taking turns using their high-impact skills off cooldown and it was quite one-dimensional. As was D3’s PvE if you ask me. Normal/Nightmare was way too easy in any case.
Please. It’s been nearly 25 years, if we define D1 as the beginning of modern ARPGs.
RTS games started doing well with it about that long ago, if not more.
Okay. Then we got Warcraft 2, which was a fantastic game, then Starcraft and Warcraft 3. Vast improvements, and other companies were also improving RTS game balance for PvP.
ARPGs? Other way. PvP in D2 wasn’t given much thought, and the rest of the ARPGs out since then have either been single player, put PvP on the backburner, or abandoned it outright.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean it needs PvP. Cooperative multiplayer =/= PvP.
I did not, as the games often went on too long back then for me to ever complete one.
Probably worked better as an instance.
Even D3 had new classes, and the ones that were similar were at least reimagined. It’s not like the Wizard is the same as the Sorceress or the Sorcerer from the first 2 games.
WoW PvP servers were nothing more than griefing grounds, for the most part. I actually was on a PvP server for the start of Burning Crusader because my IRL friend was in a progression guild that had openings. Leveling up was a pain in the ***. At least I chose to do it, though. I remember one night our raid for SSC got delayed because a few Horde guilds had decided to camp the zone in… not a real fun experience.
Meh. We don’t even know whether they’re including it because they wish to or because it’s considered expected for some weird reason.
Probably much the same, as all the pre-orders from the WoW subs would have stayed, and it was said that PvP wasn’t going to be included at launch. Me, I wouldn’t have bought the game once I heard that if I’d wanted PvP.
Because the others games’ PvP wasn’t?
I also think that’s partly a limitation of the system… which is why I believe PvP in an ARPG will never approach what you can get in a genre that’s got PvP in mind from the beginning.
PvP is just an allure for trading scene. It doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, it doesn’t have to be just “like an MMO”, it doesn’t have to be perfect. When you look at MOBAs you realize it’s a rock-paper-scissor game between individual heroes too. I have no idea why you have such grudge against some human interaction.
It can impact PvE but any interaction you have in PvP can be easily isolated to lessen it. There will be Best İn Slot items that you both use in PvP and PvE for instance and this will increase their value, price and perhaps rarity while balancing the game. That’s all you had to suffer.
By design, ARPGs are pretty limited on player interaction and no PvP match lasts long enough for you to test your reflexes, reaction or stability. You’re always bound to timers or resource amounts when reacting and game never can ask you fine tuned manual mouse inputs that you can twitch or flick with reflexes, there are shortcuts for any input.
Instead of such reflex checks, game asks you to sustain, manage and prioritize your abilities in a PvP match. At most you have animation cancels for a skill ceiling but not the depth perception for instance as everything locks, homes in and position checks automatically.
That’s the same deal in any other MMO or MOBA games out there. You won’t have twitchy mouse inputs in 1v1 fights else the power creep by the time you reach level caps, will turn any PvE or PvP fights into a slog. Game design solves this issue by RNG; chance to block, chance to proc, chance to reset, you have no control over these and that’s dictated by the genre itself.
That… That’s rather only your own opinion. There are guides on D1 PvP out there. It might be limited to always active friendly-fire but between classes, each of them had an answer to certain circumstances.
It really does though. Although it’s more popular in asia, but you have competitive scenes of games like Blade & Soul, games like Ragnarok Online which are pretty much only alive because of guild vs guild pvp, you have games like ESO which have really fun PvP. And of course, Dark Souls duels are a very nice community too.
ARPGs and MMOs are separate. I’m talking about the former, you keep presenting the latter.
I said “RPG” pvp as a whole. It all started on Diablo. Before MMOs were even a thing.
Not to mention there’s still an active D1 PvP community (with tournaments and all that jazz) 24 years later. Not bad for a trash game I’d say.
Which doesn’t matter; they’re separate distinctions now. Yes, MMOs can have PvP and do pretty well at it, though it still tends to be woefully unbalanced and/or hurt PvE at times.
ARPGs? No real successes in PvP. As I said earlier, just about every ARPG except Diablo has either ignored PvP, set it as a stretch goal, or axed it.
Also, MMOs were a developing thing right along with Diablo. Ultima Online was out in 1997 and EverQuest in 1999. I’m sure there’s a couple others I don’t know about.
Edit: Neverwinter Nights, '91. Nexus, '96. Asheron’s Call, also '99. So MMOs might even be older than ARPGs. If you wanna start with Diablo, anyway.
Yet Diablo 4 is blurring the line between the 2 in many ways. The existance of a separate PvP mode could very well be one.
There’s no such thing as a balanced game. Even MOBAs have broken characters. Fighting games have tier lists, and so on. The important thing is to keep it fun. If there’s something hugely broken, fix that and move on.
What I’d like to hear about PVP is this:
IK HoTA Barb vs UE MS Demon Hunter; same paragon, equivalent gear, augments, gems and stats. What adjustments for PVP compared to PVE do you make so that this is a ‘fair and balanced’ contest where player skill wins out? Show your math.
If the answer is that player skill will by and large be an irrelevance in PvP “contests” where OP ranged builds/classes and cheesy tactics will reign supreme (as they do in all ARPG PvP modes) then you’ll understand my disbelief as to how anyone would think a ‘serious’ PVP mode for D4 is a ‘must have’.
Maybe the skill is in coming up with a ranged build so OP and so cheesy you can’t lose? I can kind of appreciate that, but if that’s what PvP is, it’s a hard pass.
I don’t think it needs to be ‘serious’. I just think it needs to be some fun. And like, with actual objectives, not just kill each other for the sake of it.
Pvp events can be a lot of fun 
About gear, have balanced pve gear and PvP is not a problem to manage^^
What worries me is the whole PvPvE concept. It just leads to griefing and making the experience miserable for those of us who have no interest in the second “P”.
I’ve been very vocal throughout the years on PvP. I’ve been a vocal supporter of it, even in D3. But my stance has ALWAYS been the same. I don’t want it in my game. I don’t want it force fed to me because the devs are too damn lazy to program a separate instance specifically for PvP. I played d2 a lot. Thousands of hours spanning over 12 years. The single worst thing was when some doucher came into a baal run or a MF run, or even cows and layed out his traps then went hostile on us because he could. Cows or Chaos was the worst. You had a half a chance to finish a baal run or a MF run before the jack hole caught up to you, but something that took some time to clear such as cows or chaos you pretty much had to abandon ship and start a new game.
No thank you. I’m just not willing to go through that same BS song and dance again. You can have your PvP all to yourself. With my blessings and support. Just don’t expect me to participate, either willingly or forcibly.