Pretty interesting debate going on in the last few posts about “free respecs” vs “no respecs” and how “feels” play into all of it.
I guess all I can say is that RPGs (even ARPGs) have always been about character development that has an ownership “feeling” to it i.e. this is “my” character.
I think D3 has gone so far over to the “Hack and Slash” genre, that it forgot that it was an ARPG. If you like D3, do a little test and play a game called Sacred 3. They had a similar model to D3 which was a massive shift from Sacred 2 > 3.
The reason I say this is that it isn’t wrong to want free respecs and easy conversion of builds, but also realize that it really shrinks the longevity/replayability of a game. You are talking about casual gamers vs gamers that enjoy a time sink for the “feels”.
In an ARPG what else is there to do than slay the same monsters over and over again with different builds? The argument here is whether trying different builds should come with investment or not.
I’m of the school of characters taking a long time to develop with a good power curve. I like my character feeling weak at first and then after “some work” being noticeably stronger. D3 does this wrong imo because the growth phase of a character is so short.
I don’t care if respecs are relatively free or cheap in D4 as long as the journey to get to end game feels gratifying from an RPG stand point. There has to be a balance of character strength and the time to reach end game.
I also hope they bring individuality to Diablo 4. I don’t want another fully set dependent ARPG where the devs basically say “put this on and you win”. There is no choice there. Similarly, when you can switch builds on the fly further dilution of “choice” occurs.
That’s the real crux of it. Just make some kind of choice matter… maybe not tying specifically to builds but maybe gear? or something else? Don’t matter… I just want to “grow” with my character and not have choices stripped away from me because the game is easier to balance when there are only 5 good answers vs 105.
While it’s true that gaming, on its own, is a time sink, the main point I try to emphasize is that there is such a thing as “too much” and the gains for going over that point are highly questionable at best. It’s a topic I’ve butt heads on with certain genre purists in the old forum, partially in part because they sincerely feel if the game is not the sole object of their interest, it is a failure of a product. The factors that constitute that include things like the reroll/respec issue here, a significant leveling process, high death punishments, poor drop rates, and ultimately mandatory trade.
I tend to refer to these things as “fake difficulty” because they’re not so much about learning from challenges you face in the world, but instead repeating things well past the point of personal mastery, which over time, tends to spawn a path of least resistance among the community on top. Seriously, just reread Shadow going ape on me because I called into question people getting rushes in D2. Just because they perceive a solution to a “problem” existing, they’re further okay with that “problem” existing. I’d rather that “problem” not exist at all, eliminating the need to bribe strangers or hope for some kind, bored soul in this particular instance.
Otherwise, the attacks tend to persist in the usual anti-welfare rhetoric. We just want things handed to us. We don’t want to be inconvenienced. We don’t want to think. I largely call bull on this because they insist on perching on the extreme end of the argument no one is really making. And of course, me further asserting that a fair update schedule would do more for the game in the long term than all the “fake difficulty” tricks makes me an unreasonable person. As if they forgot how D3 had a very poor update history these past few years which could have been avoided if Blizzard didn’t take the lazy way out I accused them of taking. And I’m not going to accept the need for the microtransaction model to pull this off, either. We know 30+ million copies sold. The money is there.
In the end, a lot of this is nebulous without having actual game specifics in front of us to critique. I poked at the questionable logic of why we’re limited in learning. I can look at PoE and say it doesn’t make sense that leveling a skill suddenly making it unusable because of changed stat reqs is a good thing, further waggling a potential point of hypocrisy with the fact gems can be freely relocated or moved to other characters, as well as deleveled if you make the above “mistake”. I can understand people not liking D3’s approach to skills, but at the same time, it’s also obvious having all skills doesn’t make them functional at any given moment without the gear to back them. No one is ever really going to share the same, or even care about, identity no matter how our avatars are built, which is further why I push the narrative that our characters should simply be visually customizable so you avoid that whole “All of x class of y gender look the same” issue. You won’t stop people from seeking PLs. You won’t stop people farming areas their build shines in. You won’t stop people from playing in a non-optimal manner they otherwise find fun. I’ll otherwise continue to insist that if players are met with a challenge they can’t overcome, the solution shouldn’t be a mandated character reboot, but instead some sensible reevaluation that will hopefully get them past the problem spot if they identify the right problem(s). And if they can’t? Then they can ask their friends or the community. But make no mistake you’d have some smartarse waiting to sling, “Suck less, noob!” like they’re god’s gift to gaming.
The devs of D4 can add a special mode that would be called sandbox mode. There you can have your Johnny on the Spot respecs while the rest of us that want to have that extra layer of challenge of needing to plan things out to be able to achieve our goals for our builds and our characters can do so.
Decisions do matter more when you don’t have an endless redo that this game gives you. You know that you must make the right choices if you want a decent build in a game with limited or no respecs. But ones with Johnny on the Spot respecs you can mess up and fix it with just by pressing a few buttons
So you agree that players that like the limited to no respec are not perfect players nor do the majority see themselves as such.
You like games where you really don’t have to plan out things. No, it doesn’t take many long hours of research or planning a build. More so when you learn the basics of what makes a good build in a game. When that is learnt then you can make your own builds that will rock the house.
How can you make mistakes if the game moves closer to having almost every combination of skills result in a guaranteed success which players are asking for.
I am demonstrating that those who insist on easy respecs, but at the same time support bonus seasonal rewards (be they items, stash tabs, or whatever) being locked behind rerolling your character in “seasons”, are speaking from an irrational and self-contradictory position.
I’m definitely cool with skill trees as long as they do them in a way that isn’t overly convoluted. One thing that makes Diablo’s progression system so attractive is that you don’t have to pump numbers and be terribly precise to have a decent character. The overly complex character build systems are one of the major reasons why I stopped trying new MMOs and why I’ve been so overwhelmed with all the single-player RPGs I’ve been playing lately. Guild Wars 2, The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 have the best character build systems as far as multiplayer RPGs go, because they don’t rely on the overly complex build systems but are robust enough that they don’t hinder replayability or unique character builds.
While I loved the ability to switch certain traits/abilities in D3, it does remove a lot of replayability and it makes it difficult for your character to stand out beyond the cosmetic appearance. In D4, I’d like to see a hybrid of skill trees, the ability to switch some skills on the fly and keep it all basic enough that you don’t end up overwhelmed while maintaining the robustness necessary for deep customization.
I know that’s easier said than done but that’s what I’d love to see in the next game.
I have a question for those that are for a restrictive (in full or in part) respec system. Without considering the format of the skill system, what is the impact to your ability to play a character that never respecs if the game allows unrestricted respeccing?
inb4: I am not in favor of completely restrictive respecing. I favor that respecing should come at a cost, like gold, resources/materials or even a special rare material that allows you to respec, so that respecing is not something that you can do all the time. So since I am not in favor of a ‘no respecing at all’ system, I might not be the perfect person to answer this question, but I think I can somewhat relate.
Not having access to easy or even unlimited and free respecing gives your character more of an (individual and permanent) identity, like you own the char. He does not change so easily and when you want that he does, you have to work for it. And there are people out there who like this sense of ownership, permanence and the idea of (sort of) a reward for what they worked for.
Honestly, I don’t see it. Diablo 2 had a decent system for re-specializing, and I still felt that my characters had their own identity even when I’m in a room filled with people playing the same class.
Because the creative minds that forged a game with unrestricted respeccing, as a consequence of those minds being geared for comfort and ease…
The possibilities of the characters I could potentially explore, will be in all likelihood less flavour enriched and interesting, and varied than they would have been inside a game created by minds who see and understand the value in the elements of choice, or hardship etc…
This is not a guaranteed A will become B statement, but rather a more likely and predictable outcome.
D3 being a PERFECT example of how the product of a comfort and safety geared mind ends up being made up of pile of boring and flavourless pieces.
if the people who made D3 valued challenge and choice and consequence, that typically does not lead to:
Taking over 7 years to make legendary items halfway interesting,
Saidosha: Legendaries cannot be truly legendary if they fall out of the sky like rain. The same would be true if you called them uniques.
The reason I talked about rushing was that IIRC you mentioned that majority of players took their sweet time in D2 to level. I said otherwise that shows I know what I am talking about. If they took their sweet time there would be no rushing games.
Further the idea of leveling as fast as the flash doesn’t help either. There are players that want the leveling process to mean something. More than just dinging a level.
In order to get any developer to continually pump out new content needs the funds to get it done. The profits of 30 million sales won’t last forever. That is why a game has to have a continual source of funding if you want more content than what most games would normally get.
I said people sought rushes to minimize the time spent on the unfun process of rerolling. I didn’t say the majority did not rush. I said those who do not partake further have a longer process ahead of them, and that it’s further wrong to scold them if they didn’t seek rushes or even that rushing should be considered the intended way to play.
Also, I’m not saying no new money ever. Expansions are a thing, and a fine model to introduce bulk content through. What I don’t want to see is the nickel and diming plaguing so many other games, not just mobile titles, to become the de facto standard of a future game when we further have no promise the money it does generate is primarily reinvested. Because if you think current D3 is the result of $1.8b+ post-sale reinvestment, then all I can say is yikes. And really, we can’t pretend WoW hasn’t been printing gobs of cash even in decline.
And I’ve always had a problem with the legendary nomenclature in general. The very use of the word instills a sense that they just plain have to be rare. Simply broken down, they’re items with special abilities. That’s something that technically doesn’t need to be restricted to a specific item tier, but nonetheless came about that way. D3’s eventual proliferation of legendaries was more a result of guaranteeing a baseline functional build was within reasonable reach of the player, with ancients more the traditional “rare loot” with its higher roll values. Would D3 be better off if we just dropped normal legendaries, but kept ancient drop rates the same? Hard to say. Then again, I preferred v1 primals and didn’t just blanketly view them as yet more power creep, but instead as the carrot for the self-proclaimed hardcore and dedicated to differentiate themselves.
Otherwise, I could even pitch a more radical idea in that wearable gear would never actually drop from monsters, instead anything and everything worn would be crafted from the materials they drop instead. But just like some people cling to the identity argument when it comes to their own character, some would also complain that they wouldn’t have the same adrenaline rush if gear didn’t drop even if rarer component drops were involved. We also see people complain about Kadala despite shards coming from combat-related activity, even though I’m further inclined to call D2’s gambling more of a useless afterthought with how very rarely you’d get anything good.
I’ve thought about this too, so it’s not so radical in my opinion.
Sooner or later a developer will come along and reinvent this genre of game, they will be the new Blizzard…
The same is true for those that love to play hardcore as well as seasons. You are definitely contradicting yourself if you say you hate re-rolling but then do it when your hardcore character dies or play seasons.
What do you think about the new games that are coming out like Last Epoch or Wolcen?
To the players a free respec system means that there is no commitment. You can change your build at the drop of a hat. Characters in this game are just paper dolls until you put gear and a skill load out on them. In a game with more depth such as skill trees and other points to spend they become a collection of skills and points with free respecs. I want them to mean more than that.
D2 doesn’t have a free respec system beyond the three given for quest rewards. You have to earn the other respecs. With those limits you still have the identity that others are talking about. The problem we are talking about is free respecs at the press of a button or two. That is what we want to say bye bye in D4. Sure you might have respecs if they are something that you have earned like using mats, a special quest with a long cooldown timer, gold, etc…
If there was a scale on restrictiveness scale(or complexity). PoE would be an 8 out of 10, and D3 would be like a 2 or 3. Philosophically, I’m also an 8+(and I honestly like reading your/ShadowAegis rants on a personal level)…but I guess part of the point of my rants is to be pragmatic on the matter.
D3 was never going to be D2. I never expected this. I saw what WoW did in comparison to EQ. WoW was a lot less punishing than EQ. WoW was clearly a wild success early on(still is to a lot of intents seeing as it still sells more than most MMOs if not all of them). First thing I thought was they were going to do the same to D3 when they announced it. The problem is I thought they were also going to at least respect D2 as well…just trim the more outdated/convoluted mechanics, but they kind of failed in that regard(in my mind). Their answer wasn’t to re implement skill trees, attribute points, charms, runes…and other examples. It was to remove them. Heck, they even put in an AH to counter sites like D2JSP and when they didn’t like that…they removed that too. How is that a competent solution…just remove it?
D4 is never going to be D2, PoE, or D3 either…the question is what direction is it going to be in. We don’t know. I’m going to guess the odds are if anything it’s going to go from a 3 to a solid or 2 worse in restrictiveness(on a scale of 1-10)…but I’m going to hope it’s anything in between a 3 and 8…even a 4 would be a win to me. I’m adaptable in that sense. I just don’t get why the 2 extremes are non negotiable on this matter.
For me, Skill Trees / Builds need to have some meaning but not be an absolute punishment for picking the wrong skill or trying something new.
Old D2 was FAR to restrictive where basically its nerf your early game and don’t spend skill points till you get to those 20/30 level skills and make the early part miserable or your build is ruined.
Newer D2 is far better with the respec option but still in my opinion restrictive as your number is still limited and doesn’t allow going off the beaten path and trying something new.
On the flip side, I do think D3 is too free with the ability to change right on the fly as often as you want as fast as you want. Diversity is lost then. While you get to “play your way” and we’ve seen some crazy evolution of builds it loses some of its identity.
I do love LE’s skill skill trees where you customize the skill how you want it. D3 in its inital infancy i loved the rune system where you could socket runes into the skills. But changing it to what it is now felt a bit of a letdown to the skills.
Skill trees are fine. People often cite “but people just use the best build anyway,” as an argument against them. First of all, not…really, no. A singing Barb wasn’t the best build in D2, but many people had one because it was fun to tinker with. Same with sparkler sorcs and other off the wall builds.
The more options I have - even inefficient ones - the better. I’ll take fun over raw efficiency any day.
