Thoughts on Diablo III?

Thormodr

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I didn't see any threads on Diablo III so I wanted to hear people's thoughts on the game. It is supposed to be released at the end of 2011 if the beta test goes well.
Supposedly the beta test will start somewhere between July 1st and September 30th I believe. If there are snags with the beta then it will be pushed back to 2012. Ten years in the making. Heh heh.

I usually like turn based strategy myself but I also love a good mindless hack and slash and the Diablo series are my games of choice for that. Well, Torchlight too as well. (Made by the original creators of Diablo I and II.)

There appear to be some interesting changes to the game. Some I think are good and some not so good. For example, limiting PVP to a PVP arena is good. Let IOwnzALL and HAkZOrKinG duke it out there. Not being able to choose your stats when you level up doesn't sound quite so good as well as no stat requirements for items. Region locking is lame as well.

Seems to be some fear by people that even with a simplistic game like this, there is too much hand holding or that with the rumoured console port, the game will be dumbed down. Not saying this is true or not but I do
see some discontent about the game creeping in. Any criticism will be shouted out on the official forums (horrible BTW) and you can be darn sure that the big game reviewers will all give it extremely high marks regardless of
whether the game is up to snuff or not.

Any thoughts on the game from the information given out so far?
 
Waiting for it anxiously. I was a big Diablo buff, D1, D2, played these games to death. I just love mindless monster bashing and especially random loot gallore. I can't wait to see this new one. Since D2, not a game could hold a candle to it. Sacred 2 comes close enough and has been my to-go game for the past few years when I need that random-loot and big world exploring and killing-machine feel.

I don't mind dropping the stats req. and stats increase selection. I frankly always found that either very arbitrary, or very planned out in advance anyway. Either you sort of eyeballed it, or you made calculations, none of which was fun to me. I'd rather plan on what skills I want to focus on and the equipment and general build of the character, than to make some calculations trying to plan in advance the stats I will need to equip the stuff that I know in advance I want to have for this specific character, which will force me to grind a boss until that unique item or rune drops. Meh, I like the random aspect of these games, and I just don't like how diablo 2 builds actually told you "and also you need this equipment to be useful with this build". Grinding and grinding to get specific equipment, meh. I think they are addressing that with D3 to some extent.

Frankly everything I've read about the way it's evolving from D2 has been good. The only slight worry I have is the toned down "darkness/horror" feel of the game. And the graphics don't look so hot but meh, I'd rather have a game that runs smoothly; important with this sort of game.
 
Yeah, the artistic direction has been criticized. I'm kind of on the fence about that one. I thought the graphics looked pretty decent.
I do agree though that the graphics should be dark and gothic like. If I wanted bright and happy, I'd play Torchlight. (and soon Torchlight II. :))

The followers look to be an improvement on mercenaries from Diablo II in many ways but not being able to use them in multiplayer is not so good I think. Also, there is no penalty if they die and supposedly they will be semi useless to totally useless in Nightmare and Hell. All they are a handholders for WoW people coming over to the Diablo series to help them through normal.

I was never a min/maxer in the games and liked to make wacky characters. For example, I had a Barbarian who focused on magic find only. In the end he got to level 99 and had equipment that could raise his magic find to 1400%. Or I had Avarice, another Barbarian who was focused on gold find. It was fun getting 75,000+ gold drops. Lol.

I had friends who had characters like BowBarian, a bow wielding barbarian or Teethomancer, who maxed out teeth. It was fun adventuring together with such a motley crew. :p

I'm not so sure that I'll be able to create such wacky characters in Diablo III. Not to mention, not being able to play with people from different regions. That seriously blows. :(
 
I thought the art looked great when I saw it but you can't pick your stats at level up? WTF is this, some kind of ghetto version of World of Warcraft? Sounding like a pass now, maybe I'll just reinstall Diablo 2 and play that so I can actually build interesting characters. I'll be willing to give the game a chance to redeem itself though if Blizzard releases some more information that makes it sound good again.
 
I thought the art looked great when I saw it but you can't pick your stats at level up? WTF is this, some kind of ghetto version of World of Warcraft. Sounding like a pass now, maybe I'll just reinstall Diablo 2 and play that so I can actually build interesting characters.

There definitely are some WoW touches added to it.

It'd be nice if they kept the two games distinct but I think they feel they need to lure the WoW players over to Diablo III by making it more familiar.

Another thing I don't like are health globes. The reasoning behind it is good. They don't want massive spamming of potions. However, fighting undead and having little health globes pop out healing your whole party seems kind of dumb to me.

Health Globes (AKA Orbs) are red, floating globes of life energy that "drop" from slain monsters or spawn in certain locations (including in the Arena). Health globes are "used" when a character passes through or near one, and grant the same full bonus of healing (hit points) to all friendly characters and minions in the immediate vicinity. Each orb refills a character's health globe for a set percentage of their maximum hit points, with the same bonus granted whether a character uses the orb themselves or shares the benefit from a friendly player activating it.

Health globes are the main source of life replenishment in Diablo III. There are some hit point refilling bonuses on equipment (such as LAEK), but nothing like the omnipresent and overpowered life leech of Diablo II. There are also healing potions which grant instant life replenishment, but they are only for use in emergencies, since they have a considerable cool down time between uses.

During the early development of Diablo III, there were blue Mana Globes as well as red Health Globes, but these were removed in mid-2009, and the classes were given skills that could enable them to gain mana from health globes. As only the Witch Doctor still uses mana, that is the only class with such a bonus, now granted by traits.

http://www.diablowiki.net/Health_Globe

The game to me is frustrating. Upon reading up on it more, it appears that there is a lot of cool stuff added and improved upon but also a fair amount of not so good stuff like these cheesy health orbs.

Apparently you have to be logged into Battlenet 2.0 even to play singleplayer now. Ubisoft eat your heart out. :rolleyes:
 
I dunno man I agree, there is a lot of cool stuff and the character classes all sound cool, but there is so much questionable design included with it as added baggage that I'm just not sure this is a day 1 purchase anymore, it might be a "wait until it's $20 on Steam" purchase.
 
I dunno man I agree, there is a lot of cool stuff and the character classes all sound cool, but there is so much questionable design included with it as added baggage that I'm just not sure this is a day 1 purchase anymore, it might be a "wait until it's $20 on Steam" purchase.

Definitely doesn't sound like a day 1 purchase for me either.

Shame really.

At least Torchlight II will be out soon. The Schaefers still know what they are doing. :)
 
I'm sure it'll be all polished to a mirror shine, but I dunno, from what I've seen there's not really much joy to the proceedings, like they've polished out all the actual fun. I'm sure it will have nice cutscenes and all, but I reckon I'm putting my money on Torchlight 2 for my mindless hack-n-slashery.
 
The complaints about not being able choose your stats is ridiculous. There are only like, what, at most three effective builds for most classes in D2 anyway, and even then the minor variations you can do with a few stat points here and there are overshadowed by the already random bonuses from the phat lewts you get anyway. This is just cutting out the middleman.

As for wacky characters, I'm sure there are other ways to gimp yourself if you try hard enough.

Obviously we have different ideas on what's fun in Diablo games, and that's fine. Personally the most fun I had with D2 was creating non-standard builds and seeing how far I could get with them before killing monsters became an impossibility. Standardized stats severely lower the ability to do that. I'm glad that you're happy with the way the game is looking, hope you enjoy, but Blizzard is going to need to reveal something truly awesome to get me back on board.
 
Diablo 3?

Such pumping excitement, might disappoint only because of such high expectations. ^_^

Or it might actually suck..
 
None of the classes look appealing to me :/
 
Apparently you have to be logged into Battlenet 2.0 even to play singleplayer now. Ubisoft eat your heart out. :rolleyes:

If it's anything like SC2 you'll only need to be logged into battlenet to keep track of your achievements. If you don't care about those you'll still be able to play singleplayer offline.
 
If it's anything like SC2 you'll only need to be logged into battlenet to keep track of your achievements. If you don't care about those you'll still be able to play singleplayer offline.

I don't care too much about achievements so that's good to hear.
 
The complaints about not being able choose your stats is ridiculous. There are only like, what, at most three effective builds for most classes in D2 anyway, and even then the minor variations you can do with a few stat points here and there are overshadowed by the already random bonuses from the phat lewts you get anyway. This is just cutting out the middleman.

As for wacky characters, I'm sure there are other ways to gimp yourself if you try hard enough.

Makes perfect sense. Blizzard says, everyone wanted the perfect build apparently and that people chose the same stats. Min/maxed.

To compensate for this, they have taken away the ability to choose your stats. It sounds like all the stats will be the same anyway as the computer will choose them for you.

Both ways, players will end up with the same stats. So why do it?

Why punish honest people who like to have fun? I never built perfect characters in Diablo II. Still seems stupid to me.

Plus, it isn't about gimping. It's about challenging yourself by making interesting characters.
 
I've never played Diablo ever, and I don't care to. :)
 
I've never played Diablo ever, and I don't care to. :)

You're loss, the games are great! I remember asking when D3 was going to come out back in the early 2000s. Glad to see it's finally happening.
 
The idea behind health globes may be partly to reduce potion spam and change strategy in battles so that you can't just sit there and heal too easily. But I think it also has something to do with reducing trips to town.

I agree with flyingchicken about the stats, I already explained why in my original post.

I didn't really like Torchlight that much, was very very bland to me.
 
I urge all of you to try out the Median XL mod for diablo II LoD.

when I tried to play vanilla LoD again this year, I got bored in under 15 minutes.

Median XL otoh, lots of fun and many, many interesting builds.
 
The idea behind health globes may be partly to reduce potion spam and change strategy in battles so that you can't just sit there and heal too easily. But I think it also has something to do with reducing trips to town.

I agree with flyingchicken about the stats, I already explained why in my original post.

I didn't really like Torchlight that much, was very very bland to me.

I understand the reason behind the health globes. It just seems stupid to me, though. I kill a skeleton (an undead creature) and I can get a health globe? Not that these games are supposed to be realistic or anything but that's kind of dumb.

Battles will be more interesting I think without the potion spamming, I agree. No town portals either. Should definitely provide more of a challenge.

The stats, I still don't agree with. Just because some people min/max, they take away our ability to customize a character? What happens if I want to make an extremely dextrous Barbarian? (ie BowBarian) Yeah, it's suboptimal but a lot of people find that fun. Not everyone is a munchkin. So instead of having most people with the same stats, we now have all people with the same stats. Wonderful. Personally, I think they weren't creative enough in redoing the stat system so that there wasn't one obvious best build. Surely with the basically unlimited budget they could have come up with something better than what they did. To their credit though, with runes, characters should act noticeably different as well as looking different at least.

The game looks very nice and the special effects look great. I do think they are trying way too hard to win over the WoW crowd and newbies and casuals though. Style over substance. (See Civilization 5)

As far as Torchlight goes, I know the Blizzard fanbois on Battlenet love to bash it (not saying you are one) but they did take only 11 months to put it out. The next iteration will be much more polished and balanced and over 3X bigger. The world will definitely be more alive. Think of it as Runic's Diablo II. Small one town area with a dungeon ---> 3 huge areas with towns and a final fight area.

I'll definitely be getting Torchlight II. Diablo III is a wait and see.
 
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