D3 Q&A Impressions

[Dispirit]

Respect for guys who hate a game yet stick around the community long enough to follow its news and watch developer videos just to trash em. That's hardcore haterade.

We're the people that grew up on Diablo 1 and 2 and desperately cling to hope that Blizzard will fix D3 and not leave one of their biggest franchises in the garbage...Apparently, they care more about the money coming from WoW, Hearthstone, and Overwatch now.

[Thimagryn]

Trashing videos is the best way to get Blizzard to fix D3, I agree.

[Dispirit]

Trashing videos is the best way to get Blizzard to fix D3, I agree.

Thanks man : )

[Thimagryn]

Obviously because Diablo 3 isn't its own game, it's a sequel to D1 and 2 so it has to have the exact same gameplay that meets the standards of my 12-year old self. Anything less is unacceptable!

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Obviously because Diablo 3 isn't its own game, it's a sequel to D1 and 2 so it has to have the exact same gameplay that meets the standards of my 12-year old self. Anything less is unacceptable!

Feels like people wanted D2 but with updated graphics. That doesn't seem to be something Blizzard would care about tbh.

[Raugnaut]

Feels like people wanted D2 but with updated graphics. That doesn't seem to be something Blizzard would care about tbh.

Wasn't there some dude remaking D1 or D2 using the SC2 editor, and doing a pretty good job of it all?

[Wondercrab]

I have trouble wrapping my head around some of the current negativity surrounding D3. I mean, I guess for those who play it like an MMO it probably gets very stale after a while, but it's been a great ARPG since Reaper of Souls fixed many of the version 1.0 problems. The moment to moment gameplay is pretty fantastic compared to similar titles in the genre, it does a good job of being very accessible and streamlined, and there's a good meaty amount of replayability and end-game to enjoy for a few months, along with occasional updates to give people new stuff to come back to.

Most of the current grumblings seem to stem from a lack of new content and updates. And for a largely singleplayer, box-price ARPG with no ongoing monetisation (until the Necromancer comes out, of course) I feel like RoS has gotten a crazy amount of dev support. Do people just play the game a heck of a lot and expect it to receive an MMO-level of attention from the dev team?

[Dispirit]

I have trouble wrapping my head around some of the current negativity surrounding D3. I mean, I guess for those who play it like an MMO it probably gets very stale after a while, but it's been a great ARPG since Reaper of Souls fixed many of the version 1.0 problems. The moment to moment gameplay is pretty fantastic compared to similar titles in the genre, it does a good job of being very accessible and streamlined, and there's a good meaty amount of replayability and end-game to enjoy for a few months, along with occasional updates to give people new stuff to come back to.

Most of the current grumblings seem to stem from a lack of new content and updates. And for a largely singleplayer, box-price ARPG with no ongoing monetisation (until the Necromancer comes out, of course) I feel like RoS has gotten a crazy amount of dev support. Do people just play the game a heck of a lot and expect it to receive an MMO-level of attention from the dev team?

It's not an ARPG anymore. You have 0 control over character development. It's just a mindless arcade slasher. If all you want to do is log on for 10 minutes and slaughter a bunch of demons then this is your game but it's not a Diablo game and it's not an arpg. It's a shallow shell for shallow people.

[Dispirit]

"It's not a Diablo game"

So what defines "what a Diablo game" is, exactly? D1, D2 and D3 are all pretty different games. So if it's not the developer putting the name "Diablo" on the game that makes it a "Diablo game" then feel free to enlighten us on the criteria that you're going with.

A Diablo game is an ARPG. D3 has no RPG elements at all. No customization. No character building. Do you just not read to remain blissfully ignorant? It's been explained multiple times in all the forums.

[effs]

Respect for guys who hate a game yet stick around the community long enough to follow its news and watch developer videos just to trash em. That's hardcore haterade.

Or maybe some people want to see some actual new updates that are worth sticking around for. Maybe an expansion. Not a paid class, or rehashed content that's available in January (AFAIK).

[Dispirit]

So basically you - not the creators of the Diablo franchise - get to determine what is and isn't a Diablo game.

Got it.

If you want to believe it's just me and ignore the literal thousands of forum posts from people like me then...you do you baby boo. ; ) you do you.

[Zenny]

The "lead game designer" now is a 16 year old kid that never played Diablo 1 or 2. They have no plans to fix paragon. They're happy with greater rifts being the only end game and sets being the only things worth farming. So basically...RIP Diablo for good. There's 0 hope the franchise can be restored to it's former glory.

Joe Shely is in his 30's and has been a game designer since 2002. He has been at Blizzard for over 11 years. He is also not the lead designer of Diablo 3, he is one of the Senior Game Designers.

- - - Updated - - -

A Diablo game is an ARPG. D3 has no RPG elements at all. No customization. No character building. Do you just not read to remain blissfully ignorant? It's been explained multiple times in all the forums.

I choose a class, I level up, I gain new skills and passives, I customize my gear, I upgrade and socket my gear, I kill tons of monsters to get better gear.

Sounds like a ARPG to me.

The only real major difference from D2 is that you can change your skills/build without needing to create a new character. (Which changed in patch 1.13).

[Wondercrab]

It's not an ARPG anymore. You have 0 control over character development. It's just a mindless arcade slasher. If all you want to do is log on for 10 minutes and slaughter a bunch of demons then this is your game but it's not a Diablo game and it's not an arpg. It's a shallow shell for shallow people.

I have trouble wrapping my head around that line of thinking too. D3 has tons of development and customisation. It has more drastically gameplay-altering builds than the majority of ARPGs I've played, and a long tail-end of working towards and optimising specific loadouts.

What D3 lacks -- which is where I think a lot of comments like this come from -- is the permanence of being locked into a specific build as you progress your character (even though it partially does due to the way most end-game builds are reliant on specific gear loadouts). It is the polar opposite of a game like Path of Exile in that regard, focusing more on freedom and flexibility than the long-form, inaccessible, spread-sheet-y character building that PoE employs. Both of those styles of gameplay are completely valid ways to build an ARPG, appealing to different types of players and satisfying different niches. I think that D3 and PoE both do a great job of nailing the kind of experience they're going for.

But to dismiss D3 as a "shallow shell" of a game, or "not an ARPG" because it prioritises accessibility, moment to moment gameplay, and flexible character development, ironically comes across as a rather shallow assessment in itself, and going on to criticise players of the game is a rather petty emotional response to have. It's a different style of game from the classic ARPGs of the past. Genres change, they expand, they adopt new design goals. D3 does some things differently, but (as of RoS, at least) it does those things well. They may not be for you, and that's fine. There are plenty of other games out there like PoE that do the opposite. But it's not some failure of design to pursue the goals that D3 ended up going for.

[Dispirit]

I have trouble wrapping my head around that line of thinking too. D3 has tons of development and customisation. It has more drastically gameplay-altering builds than the majority of ARPGs I've played, and a long tail-end of working towards and optimising specific loadouts.

What D3 lacks -- which is where I think a lot of comments like this come from -- is the permanence of being locked into a specific build as you progress your character (even though it partially does due to the way most end-game builds are reliant on specific gear loadouts). It is the polar opposite of a game like Path of Exile in that regard, focusing more on freedom and flexibility than the long-form, inaccessible, spread-sheet-y character building that PoE employs. Both of those styles of gameplay are completely valid ways to build an ARPG, appealing to different types of players and satisfying different niches. I think that D3 and PoE both do a great job of nailing the kind of experience they're going for.

But to dismiss D3 as a "shallow shell" of a game, or "not an ARPG" because it prioritises accessibility, moment to moment gameplay, and flexible character development, ironically comes across as a rather shallow assessment in itself, and going on to criticise players of the game is a rather petty emotional response to have. It's a different style of game from the classic ARPGs of the past. Genres change, they expand, they adopt new design goals. D3 does some things differently, but (as of RoS, at least) it does those things well. They may not be for you, and that's fine. There are plenty of other games out there like PoE that do the opposite. But it's not some failure of design to pursue the goals that D3 ended up going for.

Hilarious you think +5 main stat and sets is "flexible character development". There no character development at all. All you do is pick up your free OP set and throw some skills on your bar and voila, a complete character in 10 minutes of gameplay. Super flexible, super exciting. It's ARPG dumbed down for the masses if you seriously want to still call it an ARPG and pretend that's valid.

[Thimagryn]

Hilarious you think +5 main stat and sets is "flexible character development". There no character development at all. All you do is pick up your free OP set and throw some skills on your bar and voila, a complete character in 10 minutes of gameplay. Super flexible, super exciting. It's ARPG dumbed down for the masses if you seriously want to still call it an ARPG and pretend that's valid.

Let's put it this way - Diablo 1 didn't have any of that 'character development' either. You only had stats and very limited options of end-game gear. Godly Plate of the Whale was literally the only thing you'd need at end game. Chain Lightning and Teleport was all a Sorcerer clear most dungeons. It's incredibly dumbed down if you play it today, so is it no longer an ARPG?

I don't understand the incredible double standard you're using to say D1 and D2 are so great, then criticize D3 for lack of character development when D1 had none.

[Coldkil]

Please stay on topic and don't divert the discussion onto what people does pro or against the game, thanks.

TL;DR: sorry for the wall of text, there's no TL;DR - read the whole thing as it's all important. It's not a simple topic and we're all NOT game designers. Just affectionate players.

I won't quote all the previous posts, but i'll try to address the the "fight" between the people supporting D3 and the ones going against it.

Overall, D3 is a good game. It provided me lots of fun and hours of gameplay and the combat is awesome and fluid and entertaining even after thousands of hours.
Played all classes and bulds extensively and s8 is the first one in which i didn't play after getting the wings/portrait and i didn't care about the journey (though actually i'm still in time to do everything since the season ends the 30th).

The whole point of the thread is to show how D3 has become so stale and has so much badly addressed or unused potential that developers don't seem to care about.

Diablo games and ARPG in general were/are all about your character progression. Getting stronger via item or skills or levels or whatever the progression system is.

We all know what was wrong in Vanilla. Bad itemization plus hard to drop stuff plus AH made the whole game revolve around buying gear to tackle Inferno. Also only very few selected items were king while the rest was just useless.

RoS did a huge restyling work and succeded for the most part. Expansion of the Paragon system, rifts/GRs, seasons, sets finally viable.

The problem lies in the fact that devs decided to tunnelvision this structure and we're in a completely stale situation.
- character power is determined by sets which are given for free each season - item hunt is non-existant.
- Paragon is a boring and uninspired system where you cap passive stat bonuses and then just increase your mainstat by 5.
- the whole game is reduced into running GRs because they're 1000x better than doing anything else for loot or xp (not that loot is good after a very short while)
- builds are premade by sets. Any set is 1000x better than random builds because too many skills have no set synergy thus is missing that 1565784157% damage multiplier. Also every class has one or more mandatory skills to survive higher difficulty levels (Vengeance, WotB, Archon, any mobility skill, etc) that reduce even more the choice.
- being based on sets most of your inventory is locked into it and the free slots left are actually not free since you'll just search for the complementary legendaries that go with your set.
- classes are balanced through sets and skills are left untouched; this means that until a skill finds a place in a new or existing set it's the same as if it didn't exist at all because no one will pick it.
- LoN set is good on paper; actually is way harder to gear for than a classic set and usually the option it provides isn't even on par with them making it just a huge effort for a suboptimal build
- character progression is actually non existant. You reach your power plateau pretty fast since via free set you have already everything handed to you after 2 or 3 hors of gameplay.
- GRs arrive also soon at a plateu in which you either luck out with monsters composition or bruteforce them via paragon; also they're the only way to power up the legendary gems which are the hands down biggest increment in player power after sets
- the whole focus on ladders is basically making anything else not related to them completely useless. Bounties, story mode, or other kind of possible content are completely ignored.

All in all, you don't get to play D3 other than this way. D2 didn't have anything like this, it was way less rich of content than D3 is. But you could create a character, make a build you liked and play to improve it via gear, and it would take so long because the max point was so far it wasn't really doable. But independetly from the build of choice, you could do anything everyone else did but racing to 99, which required dedication and was basically a two "man" run between RUSBarb and GERBarb.

In D3 you get an inifnite random dungeon generator where there is a concrete possibility of choosing something non-viable, which turns out into reaching a point where your character isn't able to progress anymore. until you swap to the FOTM build and nuke stuff down like evryone else does. And for this season you can just reach GR 75 (which is more or less just above baseline) and get a spot on the ladders which i find pretty explicative of current playerbase situation (it's not coincidence that 75 is the requirement for journey).

The focuses of the game should be character progression and item hunt. Both of them are non-existant in current D3. It's still a good hit-n-run game for when they add random stuff, but nothing more than this.

Two Blizzcons without relevant new informations are a farce. A timed event for Diablo 20th anniversary is a joke and that istance will be played for 2 hours this January then ignored forever because you got everything from it the first time.

The new Necro DLC looks awesome - it's pretty clear that it's Blizzard last tentative to have a steady revenue from D3 to make future support viable. But a new class won't solve anything of the issue list above; it will bring actually more balancing issues and the possibility of it being OP may raise a huge uproar (we all know how forums are) about how Blizzard "puts OP classes behind a paywall" and "D3 has become P2W".

The things stated above are just facts. It's how the game currently works. And it's simply not on par with the long term experience provided by older Diablo games, while doing some things definitely better.

I won't go playing D2 (actually i do every once in a while but not for long). But i played D2 for years straight every day, now D3 is played for 3-4 hours each season for cosmetics every 3 months, which says a lot about the game state.

[Dispirit]

Thank you, Coldkil, for taking the time to explain everything in detail. I agree with everything you just said except I honestly can't remember ever having honest fun in D3. I've had fun while drunk but I'm not sure that counts. I always get bored of the game so fast which never happens in D2. After 2 minutes of the exciting combat, I always ask "what's the point?", which can be said of any game, but for D3, I just feel no attachment, no investment in my character. Everything is just spoon fed to you in Blizzard's never-ending attempt to appeal to the masses rather than old school gamers. I understand why they do it from a business standpoint. It's just disheartening to watch their games devolve into mindless short-term satisfaction.

[Coldkil]

their games devolve into mindless short-term satisfaction

Yeah, it's the same feeling i get. I plan to return for S9 with new life force because the Wizard free set is Firebird and it's been a long time that i have designed a build i want to absolutely try with it. It should be good enough to grant me the ability to complete the Journey kinda easily.

Anyway, i know already that the fun will go away as fast as it came. I'll do the stuff i want in a very short time and then the game will be left there. This didn't happen with D2 - i'm not saying one game is inherently better than the other because i think they're just too different; but i loved D2 for its long term playability while D3 is all about very short sessions which honestly i find pretty streamlined and with no soul. But this is a personal opinion so it has very limited value.

[Chemii]

Not being funny but some people need a reality check.

You paid how much for D3?

How many hours have you played?

End of fucking discussion. Blizzard don't owe you anything and like most people, you've definitely had your moneys worth.

[Khain]

If D3 now days is the way it is, it's because of community feedback, unfortunately you can't please everyone. In Vanilla D3 people wouldn't stop crying about seasons and competitive game play, so now you have it, the game now is a GR arcade, and the people who enjoy it and play the whole season are people who like to push and compete in those GR rankings. To be honest, there's no going back to the roots of D2 at lease for D3, they'll risk loosing their current public for another one that is not even that big. So if you're a D2 lover why don't you just leave D3 alone (cuz it won't change) and go look for a game that suits your taste better, like PoE or Grim Dawn?