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Diablo

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Re: Diablo

#81

Post by Panoramix »

carlisle_ wrote: post #29
musha68k wrote: post #18

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…

This is a strange post to me. You can immediately see that you value soulslike as a superior genre, yet to me I see those games are just as grindy. Die to a boss a million times to learn the timings -> finally you beat it. Not that much different than ARPGs where you kill lots of stuff and die infrequently. It's just two sides of the same coin. Really these posts that call one kind of game time wasting or drug-like b…

It's the difference between spending a lot of time at the slot machine vs becoming good at chess. It's s massive difference. You don't "grind" chess, you learn from your failures and get better at it. Sure, you can get lucky sometimes if your opponent blunders but the strategy to wait for that to happen is a failing one.

Re: Diablo

#82

Post by kec »

carlisle_ wrote: post #29
musha68k wrote: post #18

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…

This is a strange post to me. You can immediately see that you value soulslike as a superior genre, yet to me I see those games are just as grindy. Die to a boss a million times to learn the timings -> finally you beat it. Not that much different than ARPGs where you kill lots of stuff and die infrequently. It's just two sides of the same coin. Really these posts that call one kind of game time wasting or drug-like b…

In Diablo you click on things to increase your avatar power, eventually if you click on enough things your avatar power will have gone up enough you can complete the challenge of the day. There is skill in crafting a build, and some builds and abilities do require some thought to deploy well, but at the end of the day your personal skill level doesn’t matter, its not like you’ll need to hone your clicking ability.

In soulslike games there is typically some amount of avatar power and it is possible to grind up such that your avatar power trivializes the game but that isn’t actually necessary, its possible to beat the game with a naked level one avatar. The challenge is more about you the player getting better at the mechanics of the game, not your avatar.

Both styles of game design can be enjoyable, but many find the latter more fulfilling.

Re: Diablo

#83

Post by rpastuszak »

I remember playing the first demo as a kid[1] and almost falling off my chair when I accidentally triggered the healing spell (I had no idea that I triggered it). It was scarier than Butcher grunting "aaah fresh meat" from a cold dark room, deep in the dungeon.

Then, for reasons not relevant here, to buy the full version of the game I had to drive 60 km to the nearest big city, get it at a shady bazaar, suspiciously only displaying CDROM covers at their stalls, but no disks. The game was so much better due to almost 2 years of anticipation!

And then, a few days later the nanny robbed us (= disappeared), and it took my parents more than a day to come back. So we played D1 for 23 hours, changing seats with my brothers, one of us making tea, another one snacks, rotating every 30 minutes.

The moral of this story is: Diablo was a wonderful game when it came out, but ffs never leave 3 kids at the age 7-10 alone for more than a few hours. xd

[1] Two rednecks playing D1: https://days.sonnet.io/#:~:text=I%20play%20Diablo%20for%20th... (if not on chrome, search for "I play diablo")

Re: Diablo

#84

Post by Erwin »

The complex ARPGs have some unlikely competition: rogue-lite bullet-heaven games. The "rougue-lite" gives you short playing sessions where you die, but can still progress for the next game. The "bullet-heaven" turns your character into a source of powerful and explosive attacks, where your actions during the game may be limited to just moving around and selecting upgrade paths.

These lo-fi 5 EUR games give a lot of the monster-slaying fun of Path of Exile, Diablo etc. but with less grind -- and extreme variety. Yet the same idea of killing thousands of monsters with visually and mechanically varied attacks remains. Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Bio-Prototype and Halls of Torment are some of the ugly-looking but addictive games which make me question returning to another only slightly different season of Path of Exile.

Re: Diablo

#85

Post by bombcar »

chrchang523 wrote: post #75
jerf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way. You can lean into it, like Disgaea, which just embraces the brokenness and writes them into its mechanics. You can just sort of write a standard game, but then, in the end, the solution to all problems…

There are games where the final score is primarily based on taking as little time as possible (e.g. the Heroes of Might and Magic series, which had its debut around the same time as Diablo); this tends to keep exponential leveling mechanics in check.

I always thought HoMM single player kind of just played directly into the “comp stomp” play style and only a few levels punished it.

The difference between single player and modern HoMM (it’s a thing!) multiplayer is absolutely stark. Entirely different games, basically.

Re: Diablo

#86

Post by foobazgt »

tstrimple wrote: post #79
foobazgt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see glimpses of what they were going for with online multiplayer in D4. There's some fun there, but I think it's currently a net negative. It forces them to balance tightly, but I don't need D4 to be perfectly balanced - just fun. Some of the best games I've ever played have had horribly broken balance - final fantasy 6 (3) and final fantasy tactics just to name two off the top of my head.

World events with online players have the potential to be much better. I'm hopeful it'll evolve over time. That being said, D4 is not even close to being balanced perfectly. There are orders of magnitude of power level in difference between classes and builds. At least if you measure them against "end game content" and not the campaign which can be completed with any class / skill selection.

Right, it's not currently balanced well, and the massive amount of nerfing in the last patch was to work to address that.

Thankfully, it looks like they realized the patch was bad. They just announced in their fireside chat that they were wrong to prioritize balancing over fun, and they're working to fix it.

Re: Diablo

#87

Post by anthk »

Diablo it's just a real time watered down Moria :). Get the real thing and play Nethack/Slashem. Moria feels repetitive in comparison. If you feel combat oriented instead of thinking out of the box a la NH/SLSM, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Re: Diablo

#88

Post by anthk »

moribvndvs wrote: post #73
atum47 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a post the other day about diablo being a clicker game https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328358

No joke, I just discovered Cookie Clicker a couple of weeks ago (sorry, I guess I’ve been under a rock) and it struck me that CC is a greatly distilled and simplified version of Diablo and pretty much all ARPGs. Perform some action to get resources to get a thing that will let you collect more resources that will let you get a better thing etc. A dopamine factory. The differences are just implementation details and a…

That's why I prefer roguelikes. Hoarding and grinding won't save you. Lateral thinking, lots of times.

Re: Diablo

#89

Post by themagician »

nonethewiser wrote: post #41
themagician wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always loved this series. The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the "endgame." I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, someti…

> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming. Didn’t all of this literally just happen?

Sort of, but not really. The real grind kicks in around level 50… so again, after you've already beat the game. I don't really care about the "endgame". I think this game would be much more fun if it was a bit more like am MMO, where you are maybe looking for a group to do a dungeon.

Below 50 is, IMO, the best part of the game, especially because respecs are essentially unlimited.

Re: Diablo

#90

Post by themagician »

tstrimple wrote: post #78
themagician wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always loved this series. The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the "endgame." I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, someti…

> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons…

I don't know how you do it, but I'm actually fascinated by it. I like watching Diablo players rant on YouTube, but for me the game pretty much ends after the campaign too. I wish it didn't because I find the campaigns great. Even just exploring the map and all the different atmospheric elements. It just feels too short.

I don't want to optimize my character. One thing I loved about D3 was that the entire skill tree was accessible to you. In D4 that's true right up until around 50 when it becomes cost prohibitive to respec.

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