Read the original comment I responded to.
i can definitely agree that the town portal/idenfification books were annoying since they were pretty much mandatory and took up inventory space.
element immunities were BS as well tbh. nothing like being a poison necro and getting to a map where a certain mob type is immune, same for sorc when it comes to fire/frost/lightning.
so yeah those are some negative aspects of d2.
i would disagree that the skill trees are basic, to begin with they were sort of simple yeah, but since they updated skills to scale with other skills and/or improve the power level of other skills was pretty neat.
i mean its not rocket science or anything, but i wouldn’t say its braindead to where its not complicated at all either.
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Very good post mate.
To bad Blizz never listens to player base.
I just want a private option like in D3.
There’s definitely some complexity in the D2 skill trees, and you can definitely go off the beaten path with them. But most of the time, for me at least, it boils down to picking a skill I want to focus on and then putting points into the other skills that boost it. I like being able to make more choices along the way. I liked the rune system in D3 a lot, cuz you could make a change and it would immediately change how your character worked. However, in D3 a lot of the time it boiled down to picking an element and trying to boost that. Similar to D2 it forced you down a specific road. Sets alleviated that a little bit. At any rate I’d like D4 to improve on them both. I think it can, as there is def room to tweek it. We’ll see what they do.
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i’m not reading all that. so…TLDR
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Why do you assume you have so much power over the mindset and opinion people have about the game simply because you’re vomiting this massive hottake at us?
It sold big time after reaper went live, name alone didn’t get it to 30+ million on the base games release.
Please, just stop, it’s embarrassing.
The base sold around 10-15 million. The expansion that launched much later is what brought in twice as much. Again, you’re wrong on the expectations being the driving factor for the total d3 sales.
You also have to remember the base game was 60 and the expansion was 40. Anyone who got both paid roughly 100 usd. So 30,000,000 at 100 is a substantial amount of income for a buy to play. Even if we worked under the assumption that only half of the total sales actually bought reaper, we would still have 10-15 million 60 dollar purchases.
This is without getting into the wow contract for a full year of wow to get the game for free, effectively paying more money to acquire diablo 3 while maintaining your wow subscription.
The game has simply made so much money for how little they spent making it.
You’re surprised an arpg lost over 90% of its players over an 11 year timespan? I certainly am not surprised. Turns out, people get bored and move on, it made plenty of money over those 11 years. They had one expansion that released 9 years ago, very few are gonna stick around in a game that went full maintenance mode after the first few years. They keep refreshing the seasons, but it’s not really game changing new content. It is more of the same with tweaks.
The fact that you’re coming in here trying to compare it vs immortal in a frail attempt to somehow win an argument is just silly.
Trying to compare a game designed around microtransactions vs a buy to play as a gotcha for total profit. When I was doing my comparison I wasn’t adding immortal due to it being vastly different and all of its main profit isn’t based on the game being diablo, it was based on making people spend money to have any meaningful progression.
If we wanna get into it, then sure, diablo immortal should’ve already passed d3 by now in total profit being the abomination that it is. That just means the d2 is even further down the list of value brought to the table. D2R didn’t even sell all that good for it being considered the best while d3 is always garbage to those who don’t think objectively.
In the order of earners, d2 is way below d3 regardless of whatever immortal does. d1 was even further removed from the value race.
I get a handful of very determined people want to keep up this shtick that diablo 3 was a failure, but it only reinforces their own stupidity by going along with the fantasy of d3 being garbage. It literally added 15-20+ million sales onto the base game after the original diablo 3 system tanked the game as hard as it did, hype may have got them around 10-15 million. But good changes and design got them the other 15-20+.
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The best post ill probably ever read here! Thank you so much for your wonderful writing, Jang! This post is so well-written, so worth a read, people.
Lol, yes!
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The point on the game needing to have difficulty in order to be fun can’t be overstated enough. It really pains me to see so many people begging to have difficulty entirely removed from the game, it’ll just completely ruin it. I worry that the devs will cave and buff druids and barbs instead of nerfing sorcs and necros because that’s what everyone asks for. I can’t help but think that they don’t know what they’re asking for.
Anyway, that’s my special subject - wanting the game to have difficulty (= fun) in it. Everything else I pretty much agree, but can take or leave. The only thing that really matters is that the game is fun, for which it absolutely must involve challenge, which means MASSIVE nerfs for necro, sorc, and to a slightly lesser extent, rogue.
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Bruh your comment needed a table of contents. JFC…
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It had one, and it’s a forum post not a comment. Sometimes people have more to say than can be encapsulated in a hip acronym.
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That’s precisely how I got my copy of D3. Then later, I bought the expansion. I have yet to be disappointed, D3 was a fun game. And, I can more easily go back and play D3 for a week or two, than do the same with D2 or D2R.
to say every one of those 30 million copies sold all include the expansion is a bit disingenuous, because according to wikipedia its 20 million copies of the expansion sold.
1/3 of the game’s playerbase didn’t even consider buying the expansion after trying out the base game, because they had no intention of playing it, which shows by todays player numbers.
and again, you say its no surprise that an 11 year old game drops in player numbers, while being true, the fact it dropped over 99% of its playerbase says a lot.
diablo 2 never had a drop of 99% and that game is at least twice as old, in fact its 23 years old, and still going strong.
[Citation Needed]
would that i could.
no live player numbers available for diablo 2.
safe to assume that this isn’t the case since the game is still going strong after 23 frekkin years, which is more than 2 decades.
i don’t actually play d2r so i don’t even have access to the current ladder numbers, but if this wowhead article https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-2/news/over-500-000-players-on-first-diablo-ii-resurrected-ladder-season-326923 is anything to go by, that certainly seems a lot healthier than diablo 3 has been in years and years.
now take into account that some people deliberately avoid the ladder on top of that, and you can easily add 200.000-300.000 more without being too far off.
here is an article on diablo 2’s debut alone (which means the 2000 release): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_II#:~:text=On%20its%20debut%20day%2C%20Diablo,one%20and%20a%20half%20months
says right there at the bottom that 11 million players were still actively playing diablo 2 (and starcraft, dunno why they included that game here) in 2010.
and this was back when PC gaming wasn’t as mainstream as it is today.
a quick google search of d2r sales numbers yield a number of 5 million sold since launch as of april 15 2022.
i’d say that’s fairly great for a 23 year old game that didn’t really change anything but the graphics.
certainly no indicator of any 99% playerbase drops anywhere.
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Impressive numbers for D2:R that’s for sure, but we don’t know how many bots are there, tho.
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well the same can be said for d3.
this is a number we’ll never be informed about.
Yes, probably many more bots than actual real players.
That is why I said below that even if only half of them sold, it would still be a sizable sum. The exact math isn’t the main focus here, it’s the issue that people keep saying it’s a garbage game when all the facts point to it being a massive success. It outperformed d2 in every area that counts in terms of business.
Regardless of what our personal opinions are on which of the two games is best ( I like d2 more) doesn’t change the facts of how much d3 brought in that allowed for them to consider a sequel.
Highly debatable
As good as d2 may be in some areas, the replayability was significantly less for its time compared to seasons. If d3 didn’t have seasons it would’ve probably died out pretty hard.
I never once played ladder in all those years before d2r, I can bet almost as much as you can that I wasn’t the only one. Whatever numbers they could come up with for the online would be heavily skewed as there would be no way to track the offline population.
We can’t though, as we have no way to track how many people offline were playing. Be a wonderful thought, but there is just nothing to indicate the addition of so many players without any measurable account of them.
I had a cousin that bought the game back then and quit within a week because they didn’t like how restrictive it was. There is just too many outside factors to ballpark that kinda number.
Makes the number look bigger. Hard to say which one had the bigger slice of the pie because starcraft is like a religion over in South Korea. They didn’t even bother to add wc3 numbers to that list, but it is probably below both significantly.
I liked the start, but then u stated a lot of wrong “facts” that made you imho do wrong assumptions.
Like itemization… rare were still usefull in beta, unless you spent 4+hrs on lvl 25 grinding legendaries. I didn’t found many, i played each char to 25(except necro), tried many builds couldnt find legendaries for all slot. Fe. on lvl 22 with barb i used yellow instead of leg. weapon i had coz it was simply better. And i asume that as you progress through the game, if legendaries wont shower from skies and you level up, you will be actually wearing blue and yellow items like in D3 vanilla. Ofc you can enhace them to become lagendary, but that’s another thing.
Another one “How much damage did your +1 to skill add to your skill? It was minuscule.”
Well no it wasnt, skills scaled with level as well. So fe. a druid (it doesnt show at diablo4-build-calc) if you put on lvl 3 point in landslide, you saw that on 2/5 dmg increase was indeed tiny, but as you leveled up it became so much stronger that if say on low lvls in was a single number that was added to another level. On higher levels it was raised by higher two digit numbers, it’s obvious that on higher levels it will be hundreds.