I figure that's the sort of stuff they're taking until 2011 to sort out so that it all works.Originally Posted by Rock8man
I personally think that in regards to graphic improvements the industry has started to reach the pinnacle of what is possible. This isn't the late nineties where every new FPS had a huge improvements over the one released a year before. Focusing on proper art direction seems a much safer bet these days and D3 is doing that.
Yeah, that's my thought as well. Like I said, good looking games that came out two or three years ago don't look noticeably worse than good-looking games coming out today. Does TF2 look dated? Like, even a little? It doesn't to me. Frankly, even Half-Life 2 holds up really well from a visual standpoint, and that came out five years ago. It's not like the early days of 3D games, where games coming out a year or two from now will look an order of magnitude better than today's games.
On top of that, good art always holds up over time, even when technology marches on. I guess I just don't see that much to worry about WRT Diablo 3. It looks fantastic right now, and the reasons that it looks fantastic don't have much to do with cutting-edge technology, so I don't any reason to think that impression will change in the next few years.
Examples?
I'd love to hear people's ideas on D2's flaws; I thought that game was pure gaming crack, and the only reason I eventually stopped playing it was because I put in enough hours playing it to have gotten another college degree if I had used my time more wisely.
Man... even now, the thought of the D2 clickfest makes me almost want to reinstall it. I never did give the bear druid form a fair shake.... maybe I can make it work this time......
I hope the graphics aren't as bad as Diablo 2 felt. It was a pixelated mess and even Diablo 1 character models looked better than D2. Ultimately graphics won't matter much but I still like me some eye candy.
hmm... If I had to name something I would say that the story was weak. the atmosphere, setting and CGI were awesome. But the actual storyline of your character was lacking.
But its definitely one of my top 10 games of all time so I cant give it to hard of a time.
Diablo 3 "might not even make it out in 2011"?!? Wtf? Seriously? I mean, I know that games take a long time to develop and Blizzard games take a LONG time to develop, but 2012? And the game footage they've already shown looks really polished/far along too. Crazy.
~mink~
It's Blizzard. What did you expect?
Knowing Blizzard, the best case scenario is 2013 and that is if everything goes according to plan.
It's not like they're going to run out of money in the meantime. :P
They're waiting for the exit polls from the 2012 election before they commit.
My theory: They're trying to temper expectations. That way when they DO come out in 2011, they can be all "hey look, surprise guys! Guess who finished a game earlier than expected for once?"
If I remember correctly, at the latest Blizzcon they admitted that they weren't even sure what they really wanted to do with the design of the remaining unrevealed class, so they're probably not really as far along as people might have hoped.
and i pre-orederd (and paid in full) for this turd ? mmmmm, mommy.
How can an unreleased game be a turd?
No, don't answer.
P.S. You may want to look at the release schedule for Blizzard games before pre-ordering in the future. Here, I'll even help!
1994: WarCraft
1995: WarCraft II
2002: WarCraft III
1995: Diablo
2000: Diablo II
2011: Diablo III (estimated)
1998: Starcraft
2010: Starcraft II (estimated)
Note that with one exception early in Blizzard's life, it has been anywhere from 5-10+ years between each sequel. Pre-ordering a Blizzard game when it is announced is essentially locking your money away for years.
The cynical part of me wonders if Blizzard will announce that some of the acts in D3 will be spun off into expansion packs, ala the way they divided Starcraft 2 up.
D. L. fucking C. The "Diablo" genre was made for it. I need only the flimsiest of excuses to play Diablo I or II again, a minor new tile set would be more than sufficient.
This is in sharp contrast to DLC for games like Fallout 3, Oblivion, Dragon Age, etc which for a variety of reasons I rarely bother with unless it came out at launch, and that has it's own problems/irritations.
If Blizzard isn't stupid, and I don't think they are, they will design D3 to take advantage of years of DLC.
That's entirely possible. In fact, it seems more likely than them splitting the game up. All speculation at this point, of course. They may very well deliver D3 as a complete package, whenever that may be.
They could have released a new expansion pack for Diablo II every couple of years (only with a higher resolution plz!) and I'd have gladly snapped them up.
Can't speak for Ben but. . .
1. Stamina.
2. It seemed like the game had lots f quests at the time but it really didn't. Worse, a number of the quests have shit for rewards. No debatebly poor rewards, but uttershit for rewards. Worse, the more difficult ones don't have proportional rewards (ni-what'shisface and his suicide bombers, e.g.).
3. The characters each had different builds, which was awesome. But the skill trees were clumsily constructed, with purposeless prerequisites. The synergies added in 1.10 didn't really improve this. I expect we'll see huge improvement here in D3.
4. The item requirements, even in 1.10, were often wonky. Many unique items weren't useable until long after they were any good. I'm not talking about things like Sigon's, where you had to alter a build somewhat to focus on strength (and maybe get a hold of a nice blue ring with + str) to use the whole set as early as possible.
Really, I've never liked the equipment requirement systems that appear in action RPGs.
5. Storage space. What a joke. And yes, this matters in a loot and scoot game, where the lack of storage space forced you back to town often, even if you were being picky about what you picked up.
6. IDing sucks in a game like this. It's not a big thing on paper, but again given the nature of the gameplay it's a noteworthy speedbump where none is needed.
7. Normal difficulty was an absolute snore fest. The escalation in Nightmare and Hell was fantastic. But they need normal to have more going on this time around. Also, drop the "finish the game" requirement for hard core, but that's an aside.
8. Potion belts - another set of seemingly small but still obnoxious micro. Let consumeables stack plentifully in my inventory and give me keys to use them, and that's that.
#8 is becoming genre convention. But Blizzard should also include vaccuum looting if they go per-person drops like Hellgate (and I think they are?). With a set of filtering options that would please Roguelike players.
Not sure why everyone is surprised about the news that D3 is not coming out in 2010, I remember hearing this a few months ago already. Not sure when exactly, Games.com possibly?
Yeah, that was a weird addition to the game. When Diablo 2 came out, all unique items had no level requirements. So you could use really strong unique items really early in the game. I loved that. It made unique items, well, unique. So even the crappy unique items in the game were awesome because when your hardcore character died, you could pass on his unique items to the new character and this new character would suddenly be decked out in this awesome stuff.
Unfortunately, one of the patches that came out before the first expansion pack added requirements to uniques, and really stringent requirements too, so that the poor unique items weren't even worth having anymore because by the time you got to the requirement, you were ready for something better than that. So yeah, that changed patched in was really bizarre. I loved the original system with the uniques for low level characters that could start using them right away.
Um, if you read up, the surprise is that it might not make it out in 2011...
Didn't war3 effectively have dlc?
That's crazy. If that's true they annouced the game 3 years too early.
I agree with your suggestion to not lock away the hardcore mode from the start (Torchlight does this right) but I'm confused as to why you feel the need to make Normal harder. If it's not hard enough for you, you can play on a harder difficulty. I'm sure there are lots of players that felt that Normal was just right for casual playing.
Oops, sorry, that was a typo. I meant 2011. But, its not really important when this became public knowledge, I also think its pretty messed up to hype the game and then make the fans wait 4 years for the its actual!
Yeah, I agree. Normal is just right, now that it's been patched up a bazillion times. When the game first came out, I'd say Normal was a bit too hard. It was only when they made lots of changes in patches and the expansion that normal difficulty has become what it is now: a fairly easy ride if you know what you're doing, but still challenging for new players. Some of the changes they made to make normal difficulty easier include the frequency of gems (which were really rare when the game came out), runes (even rarer), being able to resurrect your hireling (this is HUGE), and other small changes that all add up to making the game much easier on Normal, and much more fun too.
Yes, I won't deny that for someone who has played the game for a while, normal difficulty is a walk in the park. But that's not the person who should be the target audience for normal difficulty IMHO. When the game shipped, normal was too hard, but that has been rectified over time.
Didn't you have to play normal to get to the harder difficulty levels though, since they were really just play through 2 and 3 respectively instead of true difficulty settings?
Don't you see? Blizzard has an iterative development process.
And by that I of course mean, "spend way too long and way too many cycles on making meaningless little tweaks to their product long after they should have shipped"
I'd argue part of what makes their games so great are the "too many cycles" and "meaningless little tweaks".
You don't mess with a proven recipe.
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