Oh fuck yeah Diablo 3 *rubs tits* probably going to be my first game purchase of 2012.

I got a beta invite a little while ago and from what I've seen so far I'll definetly not buy this game.
Let's start with the graphics. It's outdated by at least three years. It looks similar to Torchlight which was released in 2009. Sacred 2 (2008) looks a helluva lot better than Diablo 3 at the moment. I've said several times in the past that graphics isn't really that important, but there are limits to how poor they can be for their time, especially when the game is coming from one of the most successful developers in the past 15 years.
Then there's the game world. While I've only played for an hour or something, what I've seen so far is pretty disappointing. One of the things I like about Diablo 2 and the Sacred series is that there's a lot more to see and many, many more monsters to kill than what you encounter while doing the main quest. What little I've explored of Diablo 3, all you do is follow a specific path where you more or less have to kill every monster on the way. Sure, this might change later on in the game, but the first impression is that it seems very limited.
Finally there's the thing that has ruined WoW. The game appears to have been dumbed down. Again, my knowledge on this field is limited to what I've seen in my beta, so it might be entirely different. You don't get to choose your stat points anymore and iirc you don't have much choice when it comes to choosing abilities either (gief back three different trees ;( ). And what's the point of leveling up if all that happens is that you get some more base stats? Automatically I might add.

tl;dr Blizzard pretty much only sell with their brand name nowadays.

So I can get back my tooltip stats under options? That's worth reinstalling for, since it was my second biggest problem.

Also, http://i.imgur.com/kYGga.jpg

Uhh tooltip stats you hold down ALT to get the detailed ones. Without holding down ALT it is just purely descriptive no stats. Yer, dumbing down for noobs I know.

I'll give you some example screenshots when maintence finishes...



That's another thing that has worried me, whenever a new patch comes out there is a lot of down-time... I hope this isn't like that during the game release... Lol - and the character wipes. Imagine that shit lol... "Patch 1.2 has come out, all your chars have been wiped."

I've already outlined why hardcore players will like it. People rushed characters to clvl 80 in D2 in order to "respec". They didn't actually play the game. Now in D3 you no longer need to waste time rushing a character if you want to try out something new.

They are going to add a permanent "advanced tooltip" configuration option at some point, or they might have already done it.

I agree the graphics don't look great, but this substantially improves them: http://international.download.nvidia.com/geforce-com/international/comparisons/Diablo3/Diablo3-AO-Comparison-1.html

It's exclusive to nVidia cards, which thankfully I have.

Recently people found a bug in the beta that let them play further than what is already there, into the Festering Woods. Player feedback has been unanimously positive, saying it's much more fun and far different from the rest of the beta content. Of course if you only played for 1 hour, then you never really gave it a proper chance anyway. Go back and play Diablo 2 for an hour and see just how much there is to "see, and many many more monsters to kill". Really the first hour of Diablo 2 is not very impressive either.

The auto-stats design makes sense when you include free-specs, though. They included free-specs for various reasons, as I've already gone over multiple times. Now if you include free-specs, what's the point of letting players assign their own stats? It just means when you find that new piece of armor, you'll take out your vitality points and move it to strength so you can wear it. Or when you get past the "hard" part of the game you move all your stat points back out of vitality and into other stats. Also stats in Diablo 2 weren't actually "fun" anyway. Everyone put in enough str and dex to wear their equipment and then put the rest into vitality. You only had an illusion of choice, not anything that made any fundamental difference to the game.

Now, if you were just playing Diablo 2 casually, then yes, you did have choice. In which case you'll probably be playing D3 casually too and therefore won't mind the change. If you played D2 very seriously, then as noted you didn't really have any choice anyway because the "best" way to do stats was to pump everything possible into vitality.

I honestly think a lot of this criticism of D3 is just looking at the changes at a superficial level and saying "wow, that's so noob-friendly!" without actually stopping to consider the actual outcomes of the systems as implemented in Diablo 2, why they were arbitrary and for the most part not actually fun.

And you're 100% correct. As brought up by Penny Arcade and numerous other sources, Diablo 3 has been made more casual through features like instant respeccing. Hardcore players do not like it, they never have and they never will.

That's why part of the community has shifted to games that stay truer to Diablo, like Path of Exile.


And you're simply wrong. They don't. Stop trying to tell other people what they do or do not like.

Lanth part of gaming is the thrill of completing a goal within the boundaries set for you. Even if it is totally reasonable to choose to never "respec" that doesn't make it as much of an accomplishment. It lacks the feeling of being genuine.

I think Titan Quest (if you've ever played it) had a good respec system. Whatever you put points into you could pay to have taken out at a rate that became higher with each purchase of a respec.

Speaking of Titan Quest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqGP4LT_cYo

Please present your survey of all Diablo players to prove your position that "they" do not like the new systems.

My evidence that they do is the general level support for them found on the diii.net forums. There are some people that don't like the new systems, but by and large most people posting in the forums do like them.

Now you're talking about something different.

He meant "hardcore" as opposed to "casual", rather than "hardcore" the Diablo game mode, in case that's where the confusion came from.

Are you somehow saying that diii.net, the largest fansite on the net that has been running for 15 years now, somehow caters to casual players only?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 18 2012, 3:38 pm by Roy. Reason: Don't make posts focused to insult the person you are debat

Azrael is rightly suggesting that these resources cater to the masses, which will not consist of only hardcore players. Let's rewind a little bit:
The people who do not like the new systems are the same players Azrael is talking about: they want a serious game with important decision-making aspects. It completely changes the rhythm of the game if you're allowed to make core changes to your character on the fly, and these players hate this reality.

On the other hand, a lot of players just enjoy having fun. These more casual players embrace these ideas because it makes it a more flexible and enjoyable experience for them. They don't have to stress over a bunch of build tables and statistics to figure out what direction they need to go to have a good character; they can just play and enjoy the game, and later they can move around some of their stats so they can continue to play and enjoy the game (i.e., they won't accidentally be stuck with a character that turned out to be useful for part of the game and really crappy for the rest of it).

When you get a popular game out on the market, there's two types of people: serious players and casual players. The number of serious players (at least at first) is always going to be a small fraction of everyone who wants to try the game out, but they are the same players that will still be playing the game a decade after its release. The number of casual players is always going to be a plurality of everyone who wants to try the game out, since they include people that just want to see what the big deal is, the people that want to play through the story only, the people who get the game because a friend plays it, etc. Most of these players won't be playing the game a few years down the line when another cool game is released and everyone switches to that (but some of them will become more serious players, and by that point they'll likely prefer some system where you can gain an advantage through experience and knowledge).

The question is: which group should you cater to? Azrael wants the game to cater specifically to the players that are very serious about it, and the casual players should either avoid the game or try to adjust to its more serious settings. Lanthanide is arguing that these features that win the approval of a majority of players should be included, even if it doesn't cater to the more serious players.

The bottom line: Blizzard is going to look at the numbers. They want to pull as many players in as they can, so they will cater to the majority (consisting mostly of the casual players) rather than the dedicated fans.

Except that for a long time, diii.net was the only real active fansite on the internet. It has a very strong contingent of hardcore Diablo players going back to when the game was first released. If you look around the forum, you will see many paid Site Pals and many people with forum join dates back before Diablo 3 was announced. These *are* hardcore Diablo players, because casual players don't peruse forums for games that have been out for 6+ years with no sign of a sequel (see also: SEN).

For the record I strongly prefer Diablo 1 over Diablo 2 because the game was a lot more strategic. Diablo 3 should be a lot more strategic than Diablo 2 and require more than just a couple of "click to kill everyone" spam skills, because Blizzard have put a huge amount of time and effort into making the combat deep and rewarding.

Actually I'm arguing that the majority of hardcore players that have actually informed themselves on what the game is like prefer the features as well.

Actually, I said it would be great if they just added an optional mode like that. Lanthanide protested it violently, arguing that it I am trying to force people to play a specific way by suggesting an optional additional game mode.

Pretty obvious who's being reasonable and who isn't.


Lots of games have instant respeccing, this isn't a new concept, and hardcore players have actually informed themselves on it and actually experienced it and they do not like it. It's a very casual feature.

Considering it already is an optional game mode. If you don't want to change your skills, don't.

No, you're asking me to pretend that's how the game is, when it isn't. If I could get sufficient enjoyment like that, I'd just use my imagination to entertain myself and skip the game altogether.

You want there to be only two modes: Forced instant respec, or forfeiting instant respecs that are available to you to pretend you don't have them.

I want there to be three modes: Forced instant respec, forfeiting instant respecs that are available to you to pretend you don't have them, or forced no respec.

I don't see any possible reason, logical or otherwise, that you could have to object to the inclusion of an optional game mode. Your reasoning so far has been "because more options is restrictive, somehow!"

Which makes no sense.

Because this is overhead work that Blizzard would have to do for no purpose. You ALREADY have the ability to play the way you want without Blizzard having to do any more work.

No, I don't. Clearly you don't see any difference between actually having game elements in place, and having the ability to pretend that game elements are in place. And that's what makes you a casual.

And yet many non-casual players of Diablo had a lot of fun playing such variants as Live Off The Land, Iron Man, Naked Mages, Beyond Naked Mages, pacifist necromancers and sword and shield sorceresses.

It's a pity you can't control yourself enough to unlock such interesting modes of play.