Whether it was his idea or not he would have signed off on it. Essentially giving it his approval.
So does Schaeffer brothers and Wyatt Cheng too then. Do you think Wyatt or Schaeffer brothers valiantly favored the idea for wasting more server resources for a quality of life for the next decade? Wyatt Cheng was one of the brains behind D3, and you’re downtalking one of his colleagues.
Pretty sure Wyatt was never in charge of D2 at any point. Brevik was the studio head and the final buck stopped with him. Schaeffer’s can share responsibility as well but the buck stops with the head guy. If Brevik said no to something, it wasn’t getting done.
He was part of Blizzard North. Brevik worked with him and remembers it.
Former Blizzard North staffers including Joseph Lawrence, Wyatt Cheng, and Matt Uelmen subsequently appeared in the credits of Blizzard’s next retail release, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.
So does Mark Schaeffer and Erich Schaeffer, they wouldn’t say anything before developers and designers come up with something because they’re head names, they don’t exactly deal with design directly.
Will it ever stop at some point? What are you all trying here?
Wyatt didn’t get to Blizzard North until 2003, well after LoD launched. I don’t think he has a credit in D2. As for Brevik, I always thought he was a one trick pony that needed others to guide him to his greatness(Schaeffer’s, Blizzard Irvine).
Bigger stash and better inventory management. That is the only thing I need, and the only reason I stopped playing diablo 2 LOD. Not the graphics, not balancing, not bots, but the fact that I spent so much time muling rather than playing the game.
Good. Blizzard North closed its doors at 2005.
So what does me thinking Brevik is overrated have to do with Wyatt? Also, Wyatt wasn’t part of any of those D2 decisions.
Company had three head names. It has to be reflected on each of them for a greenlight. To add, what makes you think they had technical potential to allow a separated charm inventory back in 90s? Two of these head names made Torchlight, Brevik had personal projects and all three created Hellgate London which gets to be resurrected repeatedly by fan support.
You act as if if it wasn’t possible when you had 3 inventories already. Main inventory, character equip inventory with 2 loadouts, so make that 4, and the potion belt inventory. All they needed to do was modify the inventory UI to have a small grid for them.
Server bandwidth and data centers yearly paid. More space allowed for each player might also mean more memory space and more bandwidth required. That is pricey, thinking back at 90s. They curbed down the resources so the performance would be optimized. Similar trick pulled by Diablo 3 by removing all character bound progression to speak of, so server doesn’t have to remember the combination or skill levels for your character to recall it everytime, but use simpler methods. Separating the inventory would only go for dividing your current allowed inventory space into two.
I’m not talking about your plug-ins or offline mods, I’m talking about servers. Also back in 90’s it wasn’t even possible for them to split instances of loot which Brevik recently stated. What made you think it’s easy? For real. I wonder.
And you are talking about a game that saw just a tiny fraction of online players compared to total units sold. Doubt this would have been an issue. Considering they already had 3(4) separate inventories already.
Im not even suggesting it should have been done. It was obviously done to make players think about inventory.
His games after Diablo II have been mediocre at best. I’m criticising his work. He hasn’t made a major, successful game in two decades.
I don’t need to be an automotive design engineer to tell the difference between a Fiat and a Ferarri and give an opinion on which I’d prefer to drive. Similarly, I don’t need to be a games designer to say which games I do, or do not, like. I don’t need to be capable of doing a thing to differentiate between two instances of the thing and say which I prefer.
No, I’m just not giving him more credit than he deserves.
He isn’t that special.
Charms invented in to prevent players from stacking magic find, utility and damage all at the same time by last minute gear swap. A designer can see it as abuse when players exploit the system and take counter measures silently, this is a given.
When you grab an item in Diablo 3, your potion becomes red just to prevent you from attempting a dupe. Even though potion is a default slot now and server synchronizes the items between clients to avoid any tricks, the small feature is still there.
To give a direct example; back in D3 classic, around patch version 1.08 I think; magic find wouldn’t apply instantly when you swap gear but gradually over time to grant its full benefit.
It’s clear that designers (and perhaps Wyatt Cheng as he’s part of the D3 development from the very start), see this instant gear swap as a side-effect of shortcomings or exploit to take measures against it. This counter measure in Diablo 3, later turned into magic find affix being removed from the random affix pool, added to difficulty scales passively and its efficiency for additional magic find stacks reduced. I couldn’t be any more clear on their design intentions.
Oh also here… How convenient…
“He didn’t work extensively on the game’s expansion, as he was suffering from burnout on Diablo II”
Brevik mainly worked on classic Diablo 2, he didn’t have much role in expansion pack where charms came into the scene. There’s even a citation link at the end of that phrase. I hope we’re in the clear here. The crunch time in Diablo 2 addressed as one of the worst until WoW, in that article.
We don’t know that, but yes D2 get pirated to hell and back when it’s released. Still it’s a developer’s responsibility to take measures.
There’s nothing wrong when people like his work. Hellfire MMO was his perhaps most mediocre work (even Schaefer brothers couldn’t redeem it) but still played to this day. It was bug ridden mess, yet people still created private servers for it.
It Lurks Below did okay, so does Marvel Heroes but it is on hiatus because of copyrights. He’s still an advisor to Grinding Gear for tying ends with China; you don’t have to play the game to see his work but that’s still a success on his book.
Seriously, it’s been 4-5 years since Blizzard created a new intellectual property with Overwatch, Diablo 4 is years away and you’re hammering on Brevik for being part of only two, three games (Marvel Heroes, Hellgate and It Lurks Below) over two decades. Which, last of them being a grand personal project to be released on Steam as a hobby.
Don’t care about pirated games. As for online. It’s always been 10s of thousands online for the 4-17m units sold. A tiny fraction.
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There is no sense to do that. Effective D2 MF is around 250, this is very easy to get this number even for badly geared character. Not every class ofc, not melees, but still there is a number of viable options. Well, even some 150 MF works fine.
i agree whit all of this
If you’re going to force voice acting, rather than text, because that’s what “everyone does” these days, get interesting people. I generally despise the voices chosen for characters in a game as the portrayal and my personal take are often at odds but that may just be me.
Do not do stereotypes. I know the game won’t have dwarves, for example, but if it did… don’t make them sound Scottish. Nothing is as immersion-breaking as laughing at the accents.
Oh, and because it is related - make NPC dialogs, after the first interaction, entirely skippable. D3 got this so wrong. I hate listening to the seemingly hour long (yes, an exaggeration) talks every time I have to click someone…
This should be something most games offer now, especially with the cross platform play getting more and more popular. Computer can use almost any controller and consoles often don’t allow anything else.
Also, I just cannot enjoy Diablo the same way when playing with a controller. Not that I am going to play on console, but I remember playing D3 on PS4 at a friends house. It just isn’t the same. So many people seem to prefer it, but it takes away the precision and makes inventory management more of a pain or boringly streamlined.
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Some airfights and new Monsters would be very cool.
I explained it here: