I thought they were “dungeons” that were group based?
They were designed to be group-based, which would actually be amazing with Personal Loot.
This is fine because melees were very inefficient and weak without high-end gear, and levelling them was so painful. I loved this buff to melees personally.
I hated it. Completely killed the leveling experience by trivializing it. One of the greatest things when leveling a melee class is when you finally get an AoE skill and the gratification that brings.
As for requiring high end gear, you can build some of them in a fairly budget way.
I’m not a no changes guy. I just think PD2 did the wrong changes.
A core principle of Diablo is to be just as fun solo as it is in a group. D2 has a single player mode after all. D2 isn’t an mmorpg.
user reviews are they only reviews that matter.
Forum Moderator Note: Inappropriate comment removed.
Would be true if all users left one. But user reviews are mostly used by haters to bomb a game for whatever reason.
Case in point: The Last of Us Part II.
Sales matter the most. Mainstream reviews matter too.
Lets put all of this into perspective. If you want to take sales numbers as the main source of what makes a game good then lets bring more games into this than D2 and D3 sales.
This is all pulled directly from wiki:
D2- 4M
Dark Souls: 3.6M
Dark Souls 2: 2.7M
Dark Souls 3: 3.3M
Roller Coaster Tycoon: 4M
Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos: 3M
FINAL FANTASY 7: 2.1M
You want to tell me that because D3 sold far more copies than any of those games that it’s objectively better? You want to tell me that D3 is better than FF7? WC3? The Dark Souls trilogy and Roller Coaster Tycoon? All of these games are regaled as the best of their series and cult classics. But they sold less than D3, so they must suck in comparison.
Like another user stated, player retention and engagement metrics are far more important than overall sales especially today. Why do you think free to play games are so popular? They don’t need box sales, they operate on player retention and engagement because statistically they are more likely to continue to purchase through a cash shop if so.
Add in the introduction of DRM to D3 and you’ll have even higher inflation of sales due to countless accounts being banned for botting/cheating. Don’t forget that D3 had a real money auction house that was exploited to no end through botting/cheating. Every banned account would have to purchase another, and these bot farms would absolutely purchase hundreds or thousands more because they would continue seeing net gains through the RMAH.
You mention at some point how D2 players had purchased 4 games (for some reason). Think about the massive inflation of sales due to bot farms in D3. Heck of a lot more than 4 sales per person.
While I do agree that sales numbers don’t mean quality (nor do reviews, and I have hard evidence of that), you’re comparing games on completely different genres, and some genres are more popular than others. That argument only makes some sense when comparing games of the same genre and preferrably the same franchise.
A HUGE factor for popularity is how new the game is. D2 is a game from an era when the internet was just starting to become a popular thing, and it was graphically and technically dated on launch (it launched in 2000 with a 640x480 resolution cap which was absurd considering Age of Empires from 1997 could do 1024x768). That and RPGs were considered nerd stuff back in the day, they weren’t nearly as widespread (and I’ll even say, not nearly as socially acceptable in most places, lots of stigma about how they were “demonic games” or how they made people addicted) as they are today. D3 launched in 2012 if I recall correctly, when RPGs were MUCH more widespread, thanks in no small part to the mmo fever, the spread of the internet and digital inclusion, and just the overall casualization of the genre.
That, and the fact that the Diablo name was already estabilished and likely many people had already heard of it because of D2 and were waiting for the next big release to try the series out (people who didn’t play D2 because of it’s dated graphics or whatever other reason).
just a reminder
Every account could only post 10 auctions.
this was known before it was released and contributed massively to the sales.
If you twist the RMAH ever so slightly you can see the intentional design in D3 RMAH to rip as much money out of the 3rd party vendors and playerbase as possible.
In the first week of d3 being released you could go 50 pages deep in any search and not get 1/4 of the way through it.
You had to buy multipul accounts to simply post more. Thats before you loose accounts.
In D2’s defense, it was made by people with a limited budget and tech, where as AoE was made by a billion dollar software corporation, I think.
Hearing this I could see the 100s of people who were already making a living off D2 item selling buying 100s of copies of the game.
It was published by a billion dollar software corporation, but developed by a studio no bigger than Blizzard North. They didn’t have that big of a budget either. It was their first game ever.
Bro, it’s not even a debate. Diablo 3 sucks butt. 15k players right now on Playercounter playing on pc, D2 literally has more players than this at any moment - probably double the playerbase and it came out in 2000. Your argument is a joke lol. Even most of the “d3 fans” always have some qualifier about preferring D2, hardly anyone likes D3 cause it’s a dog crap sequel.
Imo it is far underserving of the name Diablo and an embarrassment to the dev, prob why Jay got fired and the next expansion got cancelled. And they hilariously ignored the playerbase for half a year and then came back and added paragons. Sounds like what Asmondgold says about the WoW expansions, but that’s the problem with D3 is that it’s more an easy mode of WoW than D2. Nobody at Blizz plays D3 cause it’s not as good as D2 or a number of other games, a few will get to max lvl to tweet about it but who would waste their time.
I’m sure they had free access to the most advanced software available at the time. I’m not criticizing them, I’m just saying, well, you know.
Strolln is laying a factual D2/D3 comparison smack down! I love it.
I understand your point, but a bigger screen resolution than what D2 offered wasn’t state of the art stuff in 2000. Most games of the time had that support.
Why would they not make it higher resolution when developing the game?
No idea. Maybe because they decided to use the same base resolution other blizzard games (Warcraft 2 BNE, Diablo 1 and StarCraft) used. Regardless, it was definitely doable and didn’t need any rocket science.
My theory is, that they started the project a few years earlier and made the decision to use 640x480 as a base canvas size. Imo, this was short sighted as at that point, more than half of the monitors in the market were 800x600 and the more expensive ones were 1024x768, but it was probably too late to worry about that. In LoD, they expanded that to 800x600 which is better but I have no idea why they didn’t go for 1024x768 at that point. I clearly remember many games of the time that used similar isometric 2d tech (Civ III, Sim City 3000, the first The Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon) all supporting that res.
Just to add up, this wasn’t a big deal in 2000, and not until LCD monitors started to become the norm. In CRTS, upscaled 800x600 still looked gorgeous. But it did make the game a little dated on release, it’s all I’m saying.
Reflecting back to when BN started working on D3 (2003?), do you think it’s possible that they never expected D2 to be played for 20 years nor be the 11th highest selling game in 2010? They likely thought the game would go until their iteration of D3 was launched, and D3 would have the advanced resolution. If you really think about it, them having to rush D2 and losing the majority of the assets, and launching a big expansion (item wise)…
It’s almost like the stash size is reflective of the resolution size. 
No connection, I know, but…
They definitely had bigger plans for D2 than what we got. Have you heard of Battlenet Town? I think D2 was supposed to be a way to test the waters for their intended direction with the series, which was to go for a more online-focused experience. David Brevik and the other Blizzard North guys were all playing Everquest back in that day and the mmo bug probably bit and influenced a lot of their plans.
Funny enough, the opposite was also true (Diablo inspiring and influencing MMO devs). Naoki Yoshida, the lead dev for Final Fantasy XIV (which is my favorite MMO), said in an interview that his first experience playing an RPG online was Diablo 1, and his first character was a Sorcerer, which is why spellcaster classes remain his favorite.
Anyway, nobody necessarily makes a game expecting it to be played for decades, but great games usually are. Games from the 1980’s still get remasters and rereleases to this day because of that.
I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t played a lot of games, but the ones that have had the most impact on fondness in memory are all 20 years old or older. The very first game I ever player online with others was Midtown Madness 3 on xbox, and I still remember the fun we had most vividly playing capture the rabbit and trying to get into glitched areas.
The Bnet town sounds like something that would be well received today.
My favorite game of all time is Phantasy Star II, from 1989, and the vast majority of my all time favorites are games for Mega Drive, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, PS1 and PS2. I love retrogames and my first exposition to videogames was my uncle’s Atari 2600.
I also like modern games, but my collection leans heavy on the retro side.