Future Diablo game discussion thread

[everydaygamer]

Yeah D2 Remastered seems likely, though I imagine they'll want to improve the online so there are less problems with hackers.

[Coldkil]

Well it's blizzard, so cheapest option is always 1st choice, so D2 remastered will be next.

Actually, it's basically confirmed they're doing both. Also, D2 remaster is on the pipeline form before the new Diablo game and the work needed is completely different. So, yes, it's pretty obvious that an eventual D2 remaster is coming before the new Diablo game (until everything goes bonkers and d2 remaster gets cancelled).

[Deleted]

Next Diablo needs trading, not AH, but old good trading via a trade chat. Go on a hunt and you have chance to loot a super rare that is worth alot is amazing feeling and good carrot. Loot only for yourself when you can loot for wealth doesnt makes sense and its boring.

Also i still think APRG can have similar PVP modes like moba. 2 leagues, ultimate, were you can use your looted gear and standard that use a set type of gear.

[Coldkil]

Next Diablo needs trading, not AH, but old good trading via a trade chat. Go on a hunt and you have chance to loot a super rare that is worth alot is amazing feeling and good carrot. Loot only for yourself when you can loot for wealth doesnt makes sense and its boring.

Also i still think APRG can have similar PVP modes like moba. 2 leagues, ultimate, were you can use your looted gear and standard that use a set type of gear.

And it will end like D2 and PoE where a "black market" on third party sites arises, where people buy gear with money promoting botting and so on. And this would bascally ruin any PvP environment until they go WoW style with diffrenet gear between PvE and PvP.

Honestly, i don't see PvP ever working correctly in a loot based dungeon crawler game, and i'd just prefer they exclude it from the project to focus on better PvE experience. There are a lot of other games with way better PvP, and even PoE which is the universal acclaimed "true D2 successor" (which i agree on most part) tried to implement PvP with the result of devs simply ignoring it after a while because it was nonsense trying to balance it around PvE drops.

As for trading, well, if it doesn't turn out like D3 where trading was infinitely more efficient than actually playing the game, i'm fine with that though i don't like it. Basically, make the game completely playable without trading or just go PoE route with 2 separate universes and possibly different rules.

[Deleted]

As for trading, well, if it doesn't turn out like D3 where trading was infinitely more efficient than actually playing the game, i'm fine with that though i don't like it.

As long as they allow to trade the ultimate gear the game offers, trading will always be superior to playing the game.
If you play the game you can have just a bunch of tickets for winning the lottery, trade is like an oil tanker full of tickets, specially if some people are willing to put real money on it.
However, i do not see anything wrong with allowing trading AH style for consumables, but gear has to be excluded, or you have to make tiers wow style.
The gear you can buy in AH in wow might help, but it is not gamebreaking, nobody stops raiding because of the gear the AH provides.

[Coldkil]

As long as they allow to trade the ultimate gear the game offers, trading will always be superior to playing the game.
If you play the game you can have just a bunch of tickets for winning the lottery, trade is like an oil tanker full of tickets, specially if some people are willing to put real money on it.
However, i do not see anything wrong with allowing trading AH style for consumables, but gear has to be excluded, or you have to make tiers wow style.
The gear you can buy in AH in wow might help, but it is not gamebreaking, nobody stops raiding because of the gear the AH provides.

Agree - that may be a solution but i don't think it would please players who like to trade. Or better, trading as a systems has to be meaningful enough to justify its presence but also has to be not so convenient otherwise the gameplay suffers.

Honestly, until the new Diablo game has a more MMO-like structure (hopefully no gameplay ffs) it's just better to not have trading at all imho. But i would be totally for a more structured game, especially after D3 (i can understand that D2 has not much content, because it's an old game and standards were very different from now).

[Seifa]

As for trading, well, if it doesn't turn out like D3 where trading was infinitely more efficient than actually playing the game, i'm fine with that though i don't like it. Basically, make the game completely playable without trading or just go PoE route with 2 separate universes and possibly different rules.

And it is fun how Diablo 2 without trading is more rewarding than D3 Vanilla and PoE. In offline mode single player we can enable ladder runewords and uniques with a txt file in a specifc folder and a launch command in the desktop shortcut; we can download a muling program and save all our items in a save file in our hdds and trade between characters easily; we can downgrade to patch 1.13 and mod (i don't, i take compatibility and a minor tool assistance over mods and random crashes).

Sure, if you want to take Diablo 2 to the long term route, it's best to invest some time into a MF Sorc (hi Teleport) but it's worth. I saved a lot of decent gear for other character i want to play as soon as i have the itch for something relaxing (PoE can be a pain) and even if i'll never see a Zod (or a Ber or a Fah) at least i own mid tier gear that work for the builds i want to play... Funny how itemlevel wasn't everything back in the day.
Really, i got a Titan's Revenge on my Javazon while farming Shenk in Nightmare!

PoE self found can be and it is a bit of a masochist way to play it, even i got a bit of hands out from a friend and it was worth while everyone on discord are like a wall street trading market: "X chaos this, too much, Y is fair"; no wonder they all have much better damage and mitigation than me. :3
Still, PoE was made with trading in mind but it's still possible to advance with minimal exchanges or not.

Diablo 3 Vanilla was the pure Wall Street simulator, we all know that: camping the AH was the better way to play the game! Even that, it didn't stop third party sites to step in and sell stuff when the gold was so inflated items had more value than the gold cap. So much for a safe trading environment... oh wait, it was a way to monetize the wrong way Diablo 3, thanks to the RMAH back then.

All this rant to say: Trading and Solo Self found can coexist; it worked more than a decade ago in Diablo 2, game made in house by Blizzard North, and today with PoE. Blizzard just had to reinvent the wheel twice and miss the target both times in D3.... rolleyes.

[Deleted]

Agree - that may be a solution but i don't think it would please players who like to trade. Or better, trading as a systems has to be meaningful enough to justify its presence but also has to be not so convenient otherwise the gameplay suffers.

A lot of players were furious when blizzard closed RMAH, the gameplay for them was chasing gear good enough to get some bucks out of it.
I am playing POE a lot this days, and i see a lot of interest in chat, about the value of gear, they are constantly asking if a piece of gear is worth something or not.
But it has to be one thing or the other, either you please players that love trade, or you please players interested in a more traditional sense of gameplay, i am afraid you can not have both, because players that love trade are to this day saying that for example they liked D3 better with the RMAH version of it.

[Coldkil]

And it is fun how Diablo 2 without trading is more rewarding than D3 Vanilla and PoE. In offline mode single player we can enable ladder runewords and uniques with a txt file in a specifc folder and a launch command in the desktop shortcut; we can download a muling program and save all our items in a save file in our hdds and trade between characters easily; we can downgrade to patch 1.13 and mod (i don't, i take compatibility and a minor tool assistance over mods and random crashes).

-snip the rest-

Lol. This makes me remeber how i added sockets to basically all items and created an astoundishing amount of new uniques, sets and runewords (lol the ruenwords txt had like 100 runewords already prepared where you just needed to add the affixes and flag as enabled) just for the sake of hunting more stuff. D2 hit perfect that sweet spot where nothing felt out of reach while actually it may take a lot to get and trading while present wasn't intrusive as in D3.

PoE on the other hand is just unforgiving but it's just a dev choice - it's not "too hard because" but a straight off decision that for the optimal experience you're supposed to trade. SSF mode being implemented as an officially recognized mode with his own istance has been one of the best decisions imho; i'd just like that they bite the bullet and make SSF a true separate environment (so no moving characters out of it) with a more forgiving droprate. Anyway they paved the way for two raoids that can coexist and work on separate rules with no interference.

D3 had everything wrong. AH with loot wall and literal impossibility of finishing Inferno (until you used a cheese build) was the wrongest they could have done. I'm a fan of AH removal (not much about the road taken later on but whatever) but the damage was done and honestly more a reaction than an action from Blizzard. Also, they made another very big error - merging endgame with ladders. Look at PoE, ladders are the races to 99 and lab speed clears - both things you can engage into or not because endgame is mapping and Shaper runs.

New Diablo game imho should just have the SSF and standard modes completely separate. One is the solo experience a lot of people wants balanced with that in mind; standard has party/trading and so on and can easily follow different rules as the two things cannot enter be merged. One could say that SSF is more or less offline mode of D2 (*wink*) but i also would really like to avoid a mess with cheats/dupes/trainers, which have zero effect offline but would affect really bad the online experience (D3 on console lol).

Fun fact: i spent like 2 months over a D2 set of double wands for Barb to make them balanced and usable at endgame. One was pretty common but had just a bunch of basic effects, the other was extremely rare but had all affix/suffix slots occupied. Used together made the first one to have lots of nice things on, plus a couple of set bonuses. Hard part was to have decent damage since wands are not exactly the best weapon to start from with a Barb XD

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A lot of players were furious when blizzard closed RMAH, the gameplay for them was chasing gear good enough to get some bucks out of it.
I am playing POE a lot this days, and i see a lot of interest in chat, about the value of gear, they are constantly asking if a piece of gear is worth something or not.
But it has to be one thing or the other, either you please players that love trade, or you please players interested in a more traditional sense of gameplay, i am afraid you can not have both, because players that love trade are to this day saying that for example they liked D3 better with the RMAH version of it.

Said above - PoE managed in a very easy way to separate the two environments. I just think it's the easiest and more intelligent solution; rulesets can be different because they're two distinct worlds.

[Deleted]

All this rant to say: Trading and Solo Self found can coexist

Sure they can, i will give you an example.
Enable AH or even RMAH in D3 with the exact same drops gear has as of today, and i have zero problems with it, i will simply not take part in trading gear, but it would be fine for me.
Now if you tamper with drop rates, and make it impossible for me to reach endgame unless i trade, because you want to promote your AH, then no, no way to coexist like that.

[Seifa]

Sure they can, i will give you an example.
Enable AH or even RMAH in D3 with the exact same drops gear has as of today, and i have zero problems with it, i will simply not take part in trading gear, but it would be fine for me.
Now if you tamper with drop rates, and make it impossible for me to reach endgame unless i trade, because you want to promote your AH, then no, no way to coexist like that.

Well, D3 Vanilla drops were lowered to make the AH viable and bait "credit card warriors" to buy gear or gold with real life money, the worst way to fund game development. I disagree that a trading system would work with current RoS drop rates and multiple ways to craft your gear; we are talking about being full operational in a couple of days, full legendary from head to toes. What will be the metric to trade? Ancient? Ancient Ancient? (Yes, i'm still laughing how Ancient^2 is a thing).

RoS 2.0 was a great experience, with a decent drop rate, a reason to find crafting materials in the open map, a reason to craft some legendaries from the blacksmith (gasp, he was useful!), a reason to make your own build based on your taste or gear you found. Bonus for Kadala for being a safety net for bad luck but not your prime reason to find gear.

I'm digressing now, i go into a cycle of full rant on D3 to an apathy phase once in a while. If Blizzard is going to release a new Diablo Arpg, even if i have my doubts they find this genre profitable with their gameplay philosophy, they really need to make the loot hunt a thrill, building a character a journey and stop tampering drop rates every patch because a guy doesn't want to trade but he wants his "expensive" build to work in a week.

Done, masochists like me can grind for weeks without seeing a Zod, traders are swimming in them while trading left and right for the perfect rolled unique. (Dude, that Vamp Gaze has a 18% damage reduction instead of 20%, get that trash out of here!) :P

[Deleted]

What will be the metric to trade?

Perfect rolls, for sure.
A travellers pledge socketed, with 10% crit chance, 100% increased crit damage, and 20%elemental damage.
You can get a traveller´s pledge, but with these rolls, it has to be like impossible to get without trading.
Also after three weeks i have been unable to get the dalbo i need for my monk build.
That is ok, i do like farming for gear, but do you know how impatient are some people this days?

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Done, masochists like me can grind for weeks without seeing a Zod

Lol, it is not masochism ,it is just that some of us do like the grindind a lot, i can also grind for a long time, as long as the build to make that grind is something i like, even at the cost of efficiency.

[Coldkil]

If Blizzard is going to release a new Diablo Arpg, even if i have my doubts they find this genre profitable with their gameplay philosophy, they really need to make the loot hunt a thrill, building a character a journey and stop tampering drop rates every patch because a guy doesn't want to trade but he wants his "expensive" build to work in a week.

I think the hack and slash genre has still a lot to offer - but the old acts/difficulties structure is just old and artificial gating; look at PoE that simply decided to get rid of them and add a full story playrthugh that leads you to endgame.

Hack and slash as gameplay type is awesome. Character building is awesome. Old ARPG shallow structure is not; reiterating, a MMO-like structure where you have tiered dungeons (scaling from solo to small party) and content flowing over time at a consistent rate is just a better core that can have better managed revenue and long term support.

Really, PoE needs to churn out content to keep people playing so they get revenue via microtx; D3 had just the B2P part and we all see how it ended. D2 actually had the same type of structure and support, but it was a long time ago and standards changed.

[Deleted]

look at PoE that simply decided to get rid of them and add a full story playrthugh that leads you to endgame.

I do agree, the genre has a lot of space for growing, i do also like ARPGs a lot, including POE, but POE does a lot of things that make the genre a Niche.
Backspace and stash limitations, have to simply go away, the constant micromanaging of backspace in POE is right unsufferable.
Also, there are some things, that are not acceptable even from a low budget game as POE.
I do understand the lack of cinematics, the clunky engine, and even the lag spikes, but seriously, the method you have to use for knowing the ilevel of gear, it is not acceptable in a game not in pre-pre-alpha state.
Another thing i find that is really bad for the genre, is nerfing/buffing things after game is released, that is not a good policy in a genre where loot hunting takes a lot of time, it is even worse if the leveling and building of the char does also take a lot of time.
Patching for fixing issues is one thing, but changing the rules of the game once the match has already started is horrible for the genre.

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D3 had just the B2P part and we all see how it ended

I still disagree with you in this one, sure it could have been better, but still it is hard to think it ended badly when i got, and still do get so many hours from it.
Now if they are gonna take 10 years between each new game, at least they should release two, better three, expansions with as much content as ROS generated.
I think that if anyone, not blizzard, could do ARPGs and give us a new one each 4 years i would be really happy with that, well let´s hope that is the case with lords of Mayhem, but still too early to know.

[Coldkil]

I think that if anyone, not blizzard, could do ARPGs and give us a new one each 4 years i would be really happy with that, well let´s hope that is the case with lords of Mayhem, but still too early to know.

I'm playing that game too

Yeah, i don't want to make PoE as the end-of-all APRG; there's a lot of good but also some outdated decisions - wirth pointing that is was all GGG intentions so they deliberately choose that design with the niche market in mind. It ended to appeal more people than expected, somewhat they same way WoW did at the time (on a smaller scale obviously). I would pay a monthly fee like i did for WoW if a game could deliver the "same" experience.

Anyway yes, i agree that some "dictat" on the ARPG genre now reek of outdated. Some things like inventory micromanagement are iconic but are limiting the evolution of the genre. Balancing stuff in and out to me is fine - less fine if like in PoE character building has next to no freedom and require huge investment; builds can be broken this way (but GGG gives a full free respec every season end exactly for this reason).

[Kokolums]

Well it's blizzard, so cheapest option is always 1st choice, so D2 remastered will be next.

The problem with D2 remastered is that it would absolutely need to include the PlugY interface. PlugY made it incredibly easy to transfer gear between different offline characters with the shared stash. Without that shared stash, the remastered version might suffer.

Other than that, it seems obvious that PoE is a major threat which will probably force them into a goal of creating a PoE with better graphics and smoother gameplay.

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The secret of D2's success was the original battle.net. battle.net WAS the draw. it was a social online platform for kids in the 1990s. Kids logged onto the internet, then logged onto battle.net and then began chatting and whatnot. Then they might hop into either D2, SC, or War3. It all revovled around the social scene on battle.net. They've since destroyed that support structure for their games and the battle.net 2.0 is just a launcher. There is no social scene.

If Diablo 3 was on the original battle.net, it would have been way more popular than it was, simply because it would have been another game to quick join after sitting in a lobby chatting for a bit. D3 sits in this antisocial environment with no in-game community and no lobby community.

[tikcol]

It's an mmo..

[MyndZero]

There won't be one for 5-10 years, because Blizzard hates Diablo and how they've treated it for 20 years proves that fact.

[RoutinelyWorgen]

There won't be one for 5-10 years, because Blizzard hates Diablo and how they've treated it for 20 years proves that fact.

They still owe a f**kton to the Diablo franchise because it essentially is responsible for making Battle.net a mainstream launcher (or creating it, rather).

Just because they may or may not lack interest in it doesn't mean that it isn't popular, the artwork from Diablo is the most recognizable online by a long-shot and even those that don't play Diablo still admire it for its aesthetic and uniqueness in a market saturated with dull shooters and fantasy games filled to the brim with dragons, so it's undeniably a potential trump-card for Blizzard should they ever run out of ideas at one point.

And there is a considerable weight behind the Diablo franchise, that is of course Blizz's shareholders, a party which they literally can't afford to rile up whom are also well aware of the opportunities behind Diablo.

Besides all that, they're actually already developing another Diablo game which will at least incorporate heavy multiplayer elements, judging by how they specifically want MMO developers to work on it.

[Deleted]

It's more than obvious we will be seeing another diablo game, the question is if its gonna be mmorpg/h&S or some new genre-mutation