Making these points to any aRPG that you love. Mine is still Diablo 2.
Camera view, why are we so close, why are there certain instances where it zooms out and I WISH I could play at a slightly zoomed out picture.
Social Aspect, I’m an old man and I refuse to socialize on a 3rd party platform when you can have it in your game, easily accessible so I don’t have to walk my friends and family through your game settings to try and figure out your voice chat.
Item drop, does anyone else dread finding legendries? They fall way to much, there is nothing exciting when it comes to drops. Why can’t I find other classes, and why can’t we trade? Trading goes hand and hand with Social aspect and item drops.
End Game, What am I playing towards? Pinnacle? For what? It seems to me that we are playing to farm Rare items and to PvP. There is zero point after you get to lvl 70. If the item drop rate is all messed up, legendaries dropping to much, high end uniques don’t drop at all, no one wants to farm dungeons. Feels like this is the ol’ Diablo 3 game on better graphics with no set pieces.
What am I working towards late game if I have to socialize on a platform that not everyone likes in Discord?
but if we’re being objective the game would not be able to be released today as a new game.
You can finish the leveling process in a day or two, You can raise two children before you find a jah rune, you need to commit to 10 hour play sessions if you want to see a drop, lvl 87 zones not high enough, Terror zones feel crappy because of the hour rotation, your build is usually 5 high runes which you’ll pretty much never find in a season.
A bit missed, and this goes hand and hand with end game. Legendaries are just aspects and they’re totally necessary in regards to how often they drop. We need them. Don’t get hung up on the glowing beam when they drop, they’re not the same as D3. They’re just rare items with aspects.
The problem is as you increase in level, so does the level requirement of the gear that drops. But, ancestral gear with level requirement 60 is potentially as good as level 100. People want the GG level 60 items for Alts. They don’t want the same stats on a level 100 item.
What made Diablo 2 enjoyable in terms of endgame was that leveling up your character makes you stronger and you can therefore farm loot faster for trading and Alts. In Diablo 4, you max out a character, get stronger and find loot no one wants to trade for.
I would also like the option to remove targeted loot in addition to keeping ancestral items at level 60 requirement.
Items, it’s the items. Diablo 2 still has basically unrivaled item design. Having rares roll like 6 modifiers is fun, it makes the items feel more impactful. Having more things to drop and hunt for like runes, jewels, charms, set items, 4/6 socket weapons and armor for crafting, ect just feels good and mixes things up. Uniques are hand crafted with interesting modifiers and they feel truly powerful when you put them on. Magic items can roll some of the highest modifiers in the game. The Enhanced Damage can range from 1-300%, which means you can find a significant upgrade along the way that comes with a very visual power gain. Having your power wax and wane is what makes the arpg genre so fun. In D4 you don’t get any of that because of scaling and poor item design with small % gains. Does that mean Diablo 2 is perfect? No, it has issues with rune scarcity, inventory space, charms need a separate tab and Engima being too strong, but with how amazing Diablo 2’s item system is, it’s easy to ignore a few shortcomings.
This is going to be subjective, but I still like the class design in D2 better. They just have more personality and putting skill points in and getting another skeleton, having chain lightning bounce more, ect just feels better. Seeing a visual change when leveling up a skill just feels good from a progression standpoint. You also have the skill slots to make whatever build you want. Contrast that with D4 we get minor 2-4% increases on skills, no visual changes, and limited to 6 slots. Again, is D2’s skill system perfect? No, skills probably could have been reduced to a max of 12 points or something to work better with synergies so you have a bit more freedom.
But that’s kind of the issue with D4, it throws all of D2’s best systems out instead of tweaking and improving upon what works.
Give that one some time. Blizzard games typically don’t have an answer to this question at launch. They always solve that later - except in the case of Diablo 2 because that game never really had an endgame, but people seem to be fine with that because they can kill cows 100x faster than anyone else I guess.
It’s most definitely antiquated in some ways and is probably hard for younger gamers trying it for the first time. For the rest of us fans, it’s the arpg that set the standard and has been emulated ever since, but they always seem to miss the mark and don’t quite get there.
I’m convinced some of these people are paid by Blizzard to post propaganda. Like honestly, would you put it past Blizzard to pay some people to post positive things about their company on the forums?
I think ~2000ish they had patches and updates but it definitely wasnt streamlined as it is now. You had to go to blizzard. com / diablo / support and download it,unpack it in the right folder… not too unlike manually installing addons today
But a lot of people were still on dial up, winzip was funky… the consumer base had to have a certain amount of pc knowledge to get things to work as intended.
I know you know this, but others probably have no idea what i was like with software drivers and conflicts etc
I personally think D2 is overrated, but I didn’t like hammerdins or the handful of less than six other specs that could solo hell, so maybe I’m biased.
Better than diablo 1? For sure. I couldn’t even play diablo 1 today even if they redid the graphics. Better than diablo 3? For me, not at all. I still didn’t have any uber builds in d3 but at least I could somewhat, to some tiny degree, do what I wanted instead of falling in lockstep with a meagerly few number of builds.
So all this game has to do is be better than diablo 3. I think it’ll manage even if I need to give it six months.
Also, I bought D2R after taking an ambien, and successfully had it refunded. Because I played it for 30 seconds and knew I didn’t want to touch the game ever again. Unpopular opinion I know, don’t blow me up. BaalBaal87 sure was an endgame! Not.
Just look at the fake Q&A with the devs on youtube. Why wouldn’t they hand out a few $$ to forum white knights? Probably fake accounts who don’t even own the game in reality.
I’m not going to deny that, there are a lot of things I’d like to see modernized in D2. But the game is still really good, and I was HOPING Blizzard would take those amazing core systems, like item design, and apply them to D4, but instead we got a D3 copy with some skill trees as a bone thrown to D2 fans.
If I had one complaint to highlight, it would be the social aspect of this game. We (my family and friends) want an in game comms system that is easily useable or even a true world trade chat or general.
Playing by yourself at weird times during the day when others are not on to party sucks at times in this game. I would settle for a looking for group stone, I don’t know. I haven’t played with anyone random outside of who I know. Its been that or solo.
I’d love to hear feedback from a new player to both D2R and D4 and see what they think of both games.
It’s like those cheesy 80’s movies.
Some of us grew up on D2 and those movies which have a very special place in our hearts.
But some may watch some of those movies we love dearly and think otherwise.
Oh for sure they did, but it wasn’t to the extent now. People have been conditioned for a couple of generations now to be okay and expect an unfinished game and assume it will get fixed. Beta testing releases are becoming the norm and it’s a reason people can easily justify D4 being released in this state.
All that got patched up in D2R. Honestly if D2 continued to get the support it needed I think it would have continued to balance skills and specs so more were viable. But right now there is a lot more viable builds.