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Diablo

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Re: Diablo

#61

Post by foobazgt »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #47
jnovek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the builds are all discovered Isn't that more a feature of the community than the game itself, though? You're always free to experiment and roll your own builds. That's what I'm doing with Diablo 4 and I'm having a blast. I don't care if I push the highest nightmare dungeon or even reach max level. I just want to see what I can do with a build that I come up with out of my own head.

I think that's more of a side effect of them wanting it to be a "game as a service", they need everything to be streamlined and balanced.. wich removes a lot of the fun.. I wish they'd have made D4 a proper single player game instead of an MMO, and let your community mod your game Look at D2 and the sheer amount of mods.. same for Warcraft 3..

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.

Re: Diablo

#62

Post by butlike »

hirundo wrote: post #36

This game murdered me. I discovered Diablo a few months after it came out and played obsessively for a few weeks. I had lots of cool stuff. Then one day wandering through a dungeon minding my own business, someone invisible killed me. Boom you're dead. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they just went away. I really felt murdered. I read myst…

[dead]

Re: Diablo

#63

Post by sgtnoodle »

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…

Sounds hellish to me.

Re: Diablo

#64

Post by dividedbyzero »

aflag wrote: post #45
shultays wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the difference is grinding against a challenge and grinding against RNG

How is that material in any way?

It feels very different and appeals to different crowds. I hate grinding against a challenge because I have to do a lot of that in real life, whereas blazing through the hell levels with my Diablo 1 Sorcerer was more like a relaxing stroll than much of a grind, with the occasional little reward from the RNG. Other people get a kick out of dying 83 times in front of the same boss, but that has never been me.

Re: Diablo

#65

Post by lgeorget »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #32
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lacking of significant strategic elements Planning for your gear and doing sims / optimizing are strategic elements, though potentially a meta-strategy?

That was a thing in Diablo 2 and that's when the IP peaked, this got lost with Diablo 3 and, i believe even more so with Diablo 4.. all the builds are all discovered and in front of you, there is no tinkering with incredible skill interaction possible like we used to do in Diablo 2 It's kinda similar to how Bethesda manages the Elder Scrolls IP, ~ a decade between titles and they casualize(? is it a word)/simplify me…

> It's kinda similar to how Bethesda manages the Elder Scrolls IP, ~ a decade between titles and they casualize(? is it a word)/simplify mechanics that made them popular, they became a shadow of themselves

I felt that as well when I played Skyrim after Morrowind. The fact that you cannot sell or drop quest items (even quests you've not received yet), you cannot meet NPCs you've not been talked about, unkillable NPCs, the marker in the UI that tell you where to go... For sure, it's "convenient" and it alleviates a lot of frustration but it also makes the world feel less real.

Re: Diablo

#66

Post by aprdm »

dleslie wrote: post #51
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. They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind. Diablo 4's greatest flaw,…

yes I totally agree.

Re: Diablo

#67

Post by chrisdfrey »

strictnein wrote: post #3

Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful. I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's ob…

This writer (Digital Antiquarian) has a lot of interesting articles on early computers and computer games.

Re: Diablo

#69

Post by atum47 »

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…

I made a post the other day about diablo being a clicker game

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328358

Re: Diablo

#70

Post by jerf »

dleslie wrote: post #51
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. They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind. Diablo 4's greatest flaw,…

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 is grinding. You can scale the challenges with the level, but then, what's the point of leveling? In fact all you're doing is running the risk of showing just how busted the mechanic is when you have a hard time matching the levels correctly because of the exponential power gains; see Oblivion, for instance. And even after such a mismatch, the solution to all problems is still grinding.

Obviously many fine games have used this and I still play some to this day, so I'm not saying it's never ever fun. I'm just saying, the ways in which it's kinda broken seem fundamental and there seems to be only so much you can do with them. Were I designing a game today, rather than treating it as a default as so many designers still seem to, I'd want to take a careful look at the disadvantages and be sure I'm comfortable with them before proceeding. And as a gamer I do have to say more and more I'm starting to mark a game using level-based mechanics down a point when I'm figuring out what to play.

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