Diablo 3 announced

The wizard has so many cool looking spells and they only use the freakin lazor beem.
 
Bad^Hat said:
Gosh, that beam attack looks and sounds remarkably like the Alchemist's beam attack from Torchlight. Seems just a boring and spammable, too.
Click to expand...

I was thinking magica, but yeah, Torchlight too.
 
Some guy posted a video with some in-depth comparisons between Diablo 3 and 2. I took some notes while I was watching, not sure how much of this is new information but whatever. All subject to change, of course.

  • Ten character slots.
  • Auction house, arena team creation and other things accessible from main interface.
  • Similar controls as before, skills bound to left/right mouse and hold shift to stay in place.
  • Extra skills and potions are mapped to the 1-5 keys. Key maps overall seem a bit more simple and compact.
  • Stamina gone, characters always run.
  • Active skills - similar to Guild Wars, you assign up to six skills (starting at two, slots unlock up to level 24) to use at a time. Can currently switch them out anywhere, but may change to town only.
  • Instead of levelling skills you socket them to modify their effect.
  • Potions now refill health/mana instantly, but have cooldowns to avoid spamming.
  • Stats no longer customizable, fill out instantly upon levelling.
  • Tetris inventory is back, expanded to 60 slots from 40 in #2. Items seem smaller on average, however, using mostly (or only?) 1 or 2 slots.
  • 13 equipment slots, up from 10. Weapon swap isn't in.
  • Three new items which go in your inventory beside your gear -
  • Cauldron of Jordan: allows you to sell items anywhere, no apparent difference in profit from selling in town.
  • Nephelim Cube: allows you to disenchant items for crafting materials.
  • Stone of Recall: a hearthstone, basically. Ports you back to town after a short cast animation, doesn't deplete like portal scrolls. Not sure if there's a cooldown.
  • Using the stone also creates a town portal which takes you back to the location you ported from. These portals cannot be shared amongst players in multiplayer, you're only able to use your own, meaning no more infinite back-and-forthing through other people's portals.
  • You allow other players to port to your location by planting banners. Using someone's banner in town will take you to the last location they dropped it in the world. There don't seem to be any restrictions on where/how often you can plant it.
  • Mobs don't seem to follow you as aggressively. (He was running past slow-moving zombies though, which didn't have much luck following you in #2 either.)
  • Stash is shared between your characters, and can be filtered to show only gear from certain characters. Looks small, but seems to have slots to expand? (Edit: Looks like you buy extra space with gold.)
  • Loot is local - anything that you see drop from a monster is only visible to you, so no more scrambling for loot. Can privately trade items afterwards, or drop them on the ground for all to see/pick up.
  • Blacksmith now has a list of items and their ingredients to craft. You gain new recipes by finding tomes of training to give to your smith. Once you improve your smith on one character, it's improved on all of your characters.
  • Can resurrect other players somehow - ability has a cooldown.
  • Some mention of random items that grant experience?
  • Companions collect gold for you. ^_^

Pretty dubious about some of these changes, others are nice, others I couldn't really care less about. Opinions? Here's the video in question if you want to see this stuff yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty16K9fispk

Also Giant Bomb have an hour and a half long "quick" look where they play through with a few different classes. Haven't watched it yet but it's bound to be pretty enjoyable. http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-diablo-iii-beta/17-4931/
 
Bad^Hat said:
[*]Stamina gone, characters always run.
[*]Active skills - similar to Guild Wars, you assign up to six skills (starting at two, slots unlock up to level 24) to use at a time. Can currently switch them out anywhere, but may change to town only.
[*]Instead of levelling skills you socket them to modify their effect.
[*]Stats no longer customizable, fill out instantly upon levelling.
Click to expand...

I don't like any of this. Essentially changes the whole game for me.

I'm not sure why the stamina thing bugs me, but I felt like I had something to conserve when there was stamina. Like I could only run so far without getting tired and leaving me to get overrun by demon thingies.
 
I'm not so worried about stat customization being removed or leveling skills, they were things that were always on my mind in D2, in that I'd always be thinking "was that a bad move? should I have allocated them elsewhere?" So not having to worry about that suits me. I can see how people who know what they're doing with that sort of thing might dislike it though. As for the lack of Stamina, eh, I guess I don't really mind about that either. It always seemed to be an annoyance.

Thanks for summarizing all that, BH _b
 
Huh. So basically it's Titan Quest: Diablo's Throne with smaller items and less stats customisation.
 
ray_MAN said:
I don't like any of this. Essentially changes the whole game for me.

I'm not sure why the stamina thing bugs me, but I felt like I had something to conserve when there was stamina. Like I could only run so far without getting tired and leaving me to get overrun by demon thingies.
Click to expand...

Stamina I couldn't give a **** about, it was always a pain in the arse. Stats I'm relatively indifferent about personally, but I can see how people would feel that it was taking a dimension away from the game. The skills I'm less sure about, since I think there's a merit to building a unique character and having your choices somewhat persistent. I'm all for respecs, but being able to change out your build on the fly makes those choices kind of trivial, as does being restrained in the way you can build a certain type of class. All depends on how in-depth the rune system is I guess. In any case I'm not totally opposed to the way the skill system is laid out now in principle, as I hated the blind choice of Diablo 2, and never used more than 5-6 skills at once anyway.
 
Blizzard's commitment to polish their games hinges on the neurotic.
 
So there's a chance Diablo 3 comes out this Q1. Has anyone else planned anything special for the release? I decided that I'd pull out an amazing nerd combo and play 2-3 days in a row without sleeping, even getting a new computer just before the release.
 
Oh good, more streamlining.

To summarize:


  • Scrolls of identification are gone, now you just right click unidentified items and wait a second. Compelling!
  • The fifth ability slot is now a dedicated potion key.
  • Removed the mystic artisan... I didn't even know that was a thing.
  • Removed the Cauldron of Jordan and Nephalem Cube. Hell, they already made town portal a non-item ability, so why not? People love revisiting town constantly.
  • The Blacksmith artisan will now salvage items, but not white ones. **** whitey.
  • The stats have been further simplified. I guess you might be thinking this means you get to assign them yourself now, right?
  • Nope, the character screen has now been rolled into the inventory screen, just to drive this point home. Customization? Pff, grind more purps. (Or buy them on our RMA which has nothing to do with these design decisions!!)

I am not filled with hope.
 
After reading the post I feel like Q1 is impossible for them, hell even Q3 sounds unreal. God damnit, I even bought a new computer because of this :<
 
Why? The game hardly looks taxing, graphics-wise. :p
 
Because I want to make sure it runs 100fps everything cranked up to eleven :D
 
Bad^Hat said:
  • Scrolls of identification are gone, now you just right click unidentified items and wait a second. Compelling!
  • The fifth ability slot is now a dedicated potion key.
  • Removed the mystic artisan... I didn't even know that was a thing.
  • Removed the Cauldron of Jordan and Nephalem Cube. Hell, they already made town portal a non-item ability, so why not? People love revisiting town constantly.
  • The Blacksmith artisan will now salvage items, but not white ones. **** whitey.
  • The stats have been further simplified. I guess you might be thinking this means you get to assign them yourself now, right?
  • Nope, the character screen has now been rolled into the inventory screen, just to drive this point home. Customization? Pff, grind more purps. (Or buy them on our RMA which has nothing to do with these design decisions!!)

I am not filled with hope.
Click to expand...

Annnd I quit. Thanks for dumbing down yet another game, Blizzard.
 
I so mad (or I would be if Torchlight 2 wasn't in the pipeline :V ). Everything sounds like they've designed the game from a perspective of social media and microtransactions. The fact that they've only just discovered the uselessness of the Nephalem Cube does not bode well for this game having rigorous design.
 
BabyHeadCrab said:
lol u guize mad? Beta is fun--give it time. You'll play.
Click to expand...

**** fun, I want mechanics that are balanced and satisfying in the long-term.

L1TAg.png


Then again, I could always wait and see how the game does in South Korea.
 
The RMAH is optional and rather boring and unused--the gold AH is fun and the gamble of unidentified items in the economy remains, right now they have stripper bucks (blizzard cash) that's handed out for feedback and such to test the RMAH. Scrolls of identifications were objectively stupid, shit cheap, took up inventory space and bloated the game.

The game is more challenging than D2 if you want it to be. Massive changes in game mechanics are still underway. Things are still very malleable and feedback is being listened to. Rumors of restarting development completely are floating--or at least massive delay due to skepticism even on Blizzard's end. As it stands the game is fun as hell--though, just a shame that the beta is so short and content trickles in so slowly. I'm sure the internal builds are more indicative.

An HD version of Diablo II seems to be all the loyalists want. The same folks that pan Call of Duty for using tired game mechanics--also the same folks who haven't even tried the game or just find any reason to complain.

I realize that I sound like I'm in the Blizzard Defense Force(tm), but I just want to remain hopeful, dammit.

:v
 
Creeps are designed for more movement/tactics/CC and more intelligent in general. The plethora of abilities at hand at any given moment means more decisions in order to stay alive, and more attention to the way you gear your character and what abilities you want to have active (no, you can't just have everything on hand like in WoW, you do have a limit of three active abilities end game, which can be swapped in town at the stone only). These need to be adjusted and fine tuned for your build, gear and what content you're actively tackling.

This also adds synergy to multiplayer mobs as Diablo's minions become stronger. You actually have to rely on each other and your abilities. There's incentive to play with friends besides PVP, gear whoring, etc.

Potion spamming is no longer viable so movement again becomes more important in order to collect orbs (yes, believe it or not, this makes things harder--as you often have to jump into near suicidal positions to do this). On the higher difficulties settings these all fall into place bigtime and the clickfest method of playing becomes obsolete.

Oh yeah, and the removal of SotP, or any ability to just instantly teleport out of combat during a fight is now impossible. There's no cheap ways of escaping fights now. The return to town object is now ooc only, with a casting time. This is all tightening that D2 could have used--it comes together very well.

The game overall is just more intelligent.

And off topic to your question, crafting is fun as **** and a simple, effective way to have up to date gear while leveling--and not too overpowered. It gives you a method of stacking vendor trash without selling everything in your inventory, though selling gear to NPCs is obviously still an option. It's fun to find rare recipe pages, tomes and rune pieces.
 
That all sounds great (non-sarcastically :v), but I still don't get the "if you want it to be" bit.
 
I guess I was just referring to the fact that the difficulty varies based on how you want to play the game. My wording was a little off.
 
Is that another way of stating, "The game's design allows you to circumvent difficulty with certain character builds"? :p
 
Got into the beta. Not sure how I feel about it. It's definitely dumbed down, developed with a hint of WoW and the modern gaming world in mind (achievements? really?). But at its heart, it's still Diablo.
 
I don't understand private loot. Even WoW had group loot. I guess it was a bit heart wrenching when you see a bot pick up a Gul rune before you yet it was ten times the feeling when you did. I wonder if the game will allow you to recognise if another player has found something truly expensive.
 
There is so much I hate about this game and there really shouldn't be. I don't get why some of the decisions were made to remove the things that made Diablo great. Diablo is a very simple RPG as it is, but removing any sort of stats system, scaling each inventory item to just two slots, and making it a linear, "follow this arrow" game are just terrible. It's like a sick joke.
 
While waiting for my new computer to arrive I bought Diablo 2 + LoD and started playing them. I'm now at around level 90 - farming in hell. During the play-through(s) I really started to like the changes made in Diablo 3. Inventory tetris for example, it's just beyond stupid. Stamina - sure maybe when playing the normal difficulty it might run out, after that it's just a pointless mechanic. Can't assign stats - so now you don't know whether you get strength to 80 and then max vitality, clicking +300 times on two buttons, now that's what I call a good game mechanic! Jumping back and forth to get potions is not fun it's god damn annoying.

Difficulty is one thing I hope will stay the same. I f'd up my build near the end of normal and killing Baal was damn hard, though I was on ladder, not sure if it's harder there. I really hope that D3's inferno, and the one before that, provide a good challenge. But most likely we'll see someone finishing the whole game in less than 12h, including inferno.
 
Those are all mechanics that could've been streamlined without just removing them entirely. Actually, potions are a good example of this as I agree with the changes they made there. Potion spamming was pretty dumb, so cutting down on potion usage and introducing another way of replenishing health that requires more movement in combat is not only a good solution, but creates another facet of gameplay to fill the void. How have they compensated for the other things they removed?

The core gameplay still sounds fun, I'm just worried that they're butchering everything around it.
 
Blizzard confirmed at the conference call that it will not ship any products in Q1. They haven't even clarified if Q2 is the target.

My guess is Q4 but wouldn't be surprised to see it slip to next year. I almost feel like I should boycott this game and not buy it, though I'd be pretty much alone with the decision. :D
 
So I've had some time to play around with the beta. I usually play summoner classes or caster classes... and the witch doctor is pretty fun but wow the monk is like so much more fun to play (followed closely by barbarian). The rest of the classes cannot compete... its so satisfying to bash enemies so hard they fly off your screen... its like being neo in the matrix... I worry that if they don't make the other classes just as fun we'll be seeing nothing but monks and barbs. There no other class that makes me want to constantly jump into a horde of enemies and set new records for a combo score.
 
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