The art I would say is somewhere in between. It’s definitely not Diablo 2, but it’s not full on cartoon like WoW either. As somebody who has played plenty of WoW and is very familiar with the artstyle, I can’t say as I would ever think a Diablo 3 Screenshot was World of Warcraft.
Level 60 is an arbitrary number, so I’m not going to say that a game is like WoW because of it.
Itemization I wouldn’t say Cataclysm era stats were overly similar to Diablo 3. You had stats that a spec would prioritize over others but you didn’t have this idea of a hard mainstat until much later in WoW.
Also D3V had pretty much every item be randomized stats while in WoW that was only most greens and a few blues. The good items: stuff from raids, dungeons, and PvP vendors all had pre-determined stats.
WoW also had talent trees still at the time which Diablo 3 actively got rid of(and Blizzard has admitted was an inspiration from Diablo 2 to begin with).
To top it off, most gameplay in WoW didn’t involve you AoEing down entire packs of enemies. Even dungeons in Cata they were trying to move away from the AoEfest that the game would later fully embrace and that started happening at the end of WotLK when we overpowered everything.
If the Diablo 3 devs were trying to make a game that was like WoW as it was at the time then they failed pretty hard at doing that.
These days it’s more like it, but that’s largely because WoW took a bunch of ideas from Diablo like Mythic+(which is just rifts) and Titanforging(which is just ancient legendaries)
I should have been more thorough on why I think this is like WoW, in addition to lvl 60 itself, which is arbitrary you’re right, the ease of getting to max level is very WoW like and not like D2 at all.
D3 has the worst kind of difficulty progression (mob stats)… There are other ways that could make the game feel completely different but no, “stats” it is, shoot at the first zombie for a minute, kill it, gain 3 levels immediately lol
There are other ways this could’ve been done better, one is combine different mob types earlier (shielding shaman for ex.), or better AI/cooperation, but last and not the least, even giving mobs some extra special ability without going ape on stats would’ve done the job better
Another way the game could’ve been more “spicy” on higher diff is simply reduce gold drops, increase repair rates and magic find somewhat (but that would’ve made it more D2-style where the progression gets reduced to “zerging” so would rather prefer the other approaches I just mentioned)
As far as D4 goes, would prefer both approaches above AND the gold/find/repair-cost % for some additional “fine tuning” options (at least in non-multiplayer) games tbh
So you disagree with facts then. Jay Wilson clearly stated the reasons for the changes. Again, the videos have been post ad nauseam and you have commented in pretty much every thread that has contained them. He thought the D2 systems were bad and wanted player freedom to choose. 6 buttons has nothing to do with WoW. Especially in 2007 or so when Wilson’s team took over and most classes were using dozens with ranks and so on.
Oh I got that. I was just saying with scaling, the way it works in WoW, if you are level 10 and your party member is 110, you still gain the appropriate experience for killing the same thing. He will see a level 110 mob you will se a level 10 mob and each of you would get that 1% exp for the kill.
Thank you for the answers. Now I am curious that why were they went for Lv60 instead of Lv50 cap or Lv75 cap.
If you are not power level in D3, you will find that you will have enough time to test all skills every time your character level up in D3. D3 level up is fast but not as super fast where you will gain 3 levels for killing one monster on yourself with a fresh start character.
Also, I think that envious solo players should stop sabotage the game by suggesting power level removal just because he doesn’t have friends to power level him. Why would these solo players care about what others are doing? Jealousy? Or Is it because those players don’t play the game the same way as he envisioned?
There are a lot of nice players whether in D2 and D3 don’t mind to power level an Lv1 player. In fact, I have been power level a lot of Lv1 characters in every D3 season and I enjoy the moment of doing that.
Also, this screenshot was taken on the first day of the D2 ladder:
and it doesn’t take long for them to get Lv70+ and doing the endgame farming content in the D2.
I heard his reasonings. I disagree fundamentally with his opinions though. He’s just a guy, and one with no arpg experience for that matter; I don’t think he was even a fan of playing arpgs iirc.
At some point, there should be more immersion elements instead of substituting immersion and depth for accessibility and QoL; it can definitely be over done. For example, I like how the journal notes in Grim Dawn that you find in Ruined buildings, corpses, etc have to be read (if you care to) and the story is actually quite good sometimes as opposed to it reading it automatically. It feels immersive. Solving little itemization puzzles feels good.
Stat points in Grim Dawn you usually want physique for the life - it still feels good even though a player could mess up. But let’s be real, how many people would mess up stat points and get frustrated and quit? Probably nobody, it’s too easy to Google or ask for help for simple choice things like this. I also think there were other weak points and strengths to his teams’ design choices.
Grim Dawn is really good, I think the boss fights are very modern D2 sequel like too - there’s no annoying cutscenes or complex mechanics to study (unlike PoE which is too WoW raid boss like imo). I wish Blizzard would take a lot of inspiration from Grim Dawn for D4. The itemization in that game is quite well done too. For a game like Diablo there would def need to be adjustments though (in regards to item rarity for sure, best items being more rare as opposed to drop rate design for a game designed mostly for single player).
He ironically talked about the pitfalls of straying too far from D2 and today there are about as many D2 players as there were 8 years ago. To me that means he did stray and it was too different for the original fan base.
That’s fine. You can disagree with his reasoning’s, but you can’t say it was becasue they wanted to copy WoW at the time, when that clearly wasn’t the case.
Grim Dawn also had a very liberal respec option from day 1.
I was a bit exaggarating but for me, even without powerlevelling, the time between new skills, a level up as it were, could be a little bigger. Even if a mediocre players as I am could see a pretty sizeable part of the skills in one day playing and I wouldn’t mind to see that stretched quite a bit further. I know, not everyones cup of tea.
Friends have nothing to do with powerlevelling. Hell, there are communities dedicated to that and it’s offered in general chat even.
One thing that might be a factor is that for some achievements for example there is a list for the first 1000 (or whatever) people that got it. Being powerlevelled gives those people a distinct advantage of a pure solo player so I can image that this can be quite offputting for solo players. I therefore would welcome a seperate list for pure solo players (at the beginning when you start a character you choose whether or not you want to be able to group play and that choice sticks and determines on which leaderboard you can get up).
There’s a fine line between ‘challenging’ and ‘fun’. I do not find it fun to have to repeat a given fight over and over until I ‘learn’ it. D3 doesn’t have that and I am glad.
I know and fully support Blizzard’s stance on accessibility for their games. They want players to be able to experience all the core gameplay regardless of their skill level.
That being said, I, like many others think that what is core to the enjoyment of these games is the challenge.
This is why I’m hoping that they have a proper rethink of the difficulty settings.
My current issue with D3 difficulty options is that they are actually a progression system NOT a difficulty selection.
This is to say, a fresh level 70 wearing only rare items will struggle on Torment 1 regardless of skill but unlock a full T13 capable set of items and you can probably AFK in T1 (depending on build).
The actual difficulty on any “difficulty” setting is relative to your progress/items/etc - so it’s actually a progression system disguised as a difficulty system.
For D4, I hope they consider an actual difficulty system that is distinct from progression and allows people to commit to a more challenging experience (separate leaderboard) while still allowing those who are not interesting in such challenge to enjoy the game without concern that they will be walled out of content at some point.
It’s a tough problem to solve, several different ways to achieve it. Hopefully we get a good solution.
It took like 100-200 hours to lvl a character in original WoW.
That is more similar to Diablo 2 than Diablo 3.
Cyonan tbh is right that Diablo didn’t take particularly much from WoW.
WoW seems to have taken some inspiration from Diablo 3 on the other hand; in particular GRifts => Mythic Dungeons, and Paragon => AP grind (although even AP grind is better than paragon…), not to mention WoW getting rid of talent trees and adding something slightly more like Diablo 3s runes/passives, but also just the general ease of play in end-game that has happened in both.
That is definitely fun for a lot of people though. Part of what makes Dark Souls etc. so good.
Would b pretty nice to see stuff like this in Diablo 4. Should probably be end-game challenges only, as I do agree with the general “easy to learn, hard to master” sentiment.
Diablo is not a mmo…leveling up is boring as it is. I can agree to let’s say 20h to level to 50 but that’s about it. Anything more is just plane bore fest grind.
Plenty of people find challenge fun and if you design difficulty settings to actually be difficulty setting and not progression like Diablo has historically done, then people who don’t want the challenge can play on an easier difficulty.
That’s the beauty of what difficulty settings are actually designed for. Me playing Halo on Legendary doesn’t affect the person who plays it on Normal.
Even for a loot focused game like Diablo I wouldn’t offer the harder mode any better loot progression. Maybe a cosmetic at most to show off your achievement for beating a really hard boss, but that’s it.
While I dont really want there to be pickable difficulty settings at the start of the game (PoE does it right imo), the above really is important.
Sure, have really challenging stuff in end-game, but dont make it reward more than other content. Make it something you do to challenge yourself.
Like, Key dungeons might have 10 lvls (with much less scaling than D3!), that offers increased drop rates (but never better items!). But then have 10 more lvls that are only there for challenging yourself, maybe for leaderboards too, and maybe for a few cosmetic rewards of course.
If you scale difficulty and rewards together, and scale it significantly, you just make the highest difficulty the de facto place to be, limiting build options to the few builds that can handle it.
Well, it was the original level cap of the game. Progression to level 60 in WoW specifically feels really nice IMO, in terms of level-per-level time and such.
