Diablo 3 Discussion Thread

I've been playing through the first Diablo for the first time on GOG and it's amazing how it's so much better than Diablo III.

Hopefully they didn't fuck it up like Warcraft III. What am I saying, they did.

I'm not really sure how I feel about it. The atmosphere is certainly better, but I've grown accustom to so many quality of life things that modern hack and slashes have that I had to put it down after I got to the Butcher.

And as far as screwing it up, well, let's wait and see. I wouldn't place money on either side yet.
 
I'm cautiously optimistic for a D2 remaster but I could see them screwing it up. I wouldn't mind running through it again and farming some bosses like the good old days but I'm not getting my hopes up.
 
That seems like massive hyperbole to me. In what ways was Diablo better than Diablo 3?
It's my opinion that the original game is much more:
  • Focused in its design
    • The game being simplistic, like many older games, means the mechanics and systems are simple and over-designed. This leads to a great amount of depth to the limited gameplay loop that always feels rewarding. D3 is exhausting at always a fixed point in your character development, and then it becomes overly simplistic past that point in how you approach post-game content. I also do not like the fact that the story campaign has been made completely superfluous.
  • The gameplay is much slower and more deliberate
    • You have to think more on how you are going to approach a room full of enemies in how you manage your movement and resources. Each class feels unique in how it plays. Compared to D3 where you just find the right setup to right-click blaze it and steamroll everything.
  • The aesthetic fits the atmosphere much better.
    • It looks much more dark and grim while the soundtrack gives a constant feeling of dread. D3 is bright and colorful. They could make the whole game look like Whimsyshire and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
 
It's my opinion that the original game is much more:
  • Focused in its design
    • The game being simplistic, like many older games, means the mechanics and systems are simple and over-designed. This leads to a great amount of depth to the limited gameplay loop that always feels rewarding. D3 is exhausting at always a fixed point in your character development, and then it becomes overly simplistic past that point in how you approach post-game content. I also do not like the fact that the story campaign has been made completely superfluous.
  • The gameplay is much slower and more deliberate
    • You have to think more on how you are going to approach a room full of enemies in how you manage your movement and resources. Each class feels unique in how it plays. Compared to D3 where you just find the right setup to right-click blaze it and steamroll everything.
  • The aesthetic fits the atmosphere much better.
    • It looks much more dark and grim while the soundtrack gives a constant feeling of dread. D3 is bright and colorful. They could make the whole game look like Whimsyshire and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
played better too. i played through d1 twice, d2 once but only put about 4 hours into d3 and tossed it aside.
 
I thought Diablo 3 was excellent. One of those games where you can mark down some shortcomings and find yourself coming back to it 80+ hours later.
 
I thought Diablo 3 was excellent. One of those games where you can mark down some shortcomings and find yourself coming back to it 80+ hours later.
It's not a terrible game, I just think its shortcomings and criticisms are made more obvious after I was able to experience the original games. I have something like 3500 hours in D3 between all platforms it was released on, including the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.
 
I'd rather see some kind of custom engine for it, D3 engine is too cartoony for D2. I wouldn't be opposed to it, but I'd prefer something with a bit more realism. That or they just do what they did with Starcraft remastered, and use the same engine with new sprites.
 
I would not count on that last part seeing there is not source code or original assets left : https://blizzardwatch.com/2020/05/08/heres-probably-wont-get-diablo-2-remaster/
I have no idea why people continue to believe a single sentence from Blizzard current, past, or future employees.

I'm not going to wade through all their bullshit but I will say the major, recent nonsense they expected their customers to believe includes losing the complete source to WoW and then "finding" it fifteen years later, re-using WCIII's engine while simultaneously bastardizing it into something no one wanted, and now the laugh and a half claim that they similarly "lost" the source and all art assets to Diablo II.

Why would they have no backup? We kept backups of our 8bit porn back in the 80's.
Why would the game's source and the art assets be on the same hard drive? Just a lone game dev working on everything from the game engine to modeling on his home PC.
If the source/assets were lost, how did they release a Mac client?
If the source/assets were lost, how did they release patches, a full expansion, and updates to run it on modern OS/systems?

The only things we can say for certain about Blizzard is they lie when it's convenient and take US customers for granted. Notably the only game and remaster that didn't reek of crap is/was SC but, of course, isn't for a US demographic.

If anyone wants to play Diablo 2 I would suggest reconsidering. Instead, play Grim Dawn, which is developed by an awesome team formed from Iron Lore (Titan Quest) and Eric Sexton (artist/designer from Blizzard North). They released the game to Steam's early access in 2013 after a successful kickstarter and the game was officially released in 2016. Over the four years they've released several DLC/expansions that have been well-received and continue patching it including their most recent patch at the beginning of this month. It regularly goes on sale for $5 bucks on the major distribution platforms and the lowest I've seen the DLCs was is 30% off one time. At around $30 bucks it's good for 100s of hours without the vast mods that exist for it including, as someone mentioned earlier, a D2 mod.
 
I'd rather see some kind of custom engine for it, D3 engine is too cartoony for D2. I wouldn't be opposed to it, but I'd prefer something with a bit more realism. That or they just do what they did with Starcraft remastered, and use the same engine with new sprites.

Back in the day we had the Darkd3 mod that fixed the cartoony color issue for the users that wanted it. There were like 5 presets that you could use to adjust sharpness and color saturation and it looked quite good.

 
Back in the day we had the Darkd3 mod that fixed the cartoony color issue for the users that wanted it. There were like 5 presets that you could use to adjust sharpness and color saturation and it looked quite good.


Changing the light maps doesn't address the underlying asset issue, so this was pointless in my opinion.
 
I thought Diablo 3 was excellent. One of those games where you can mark down some shortcomings and find yourself coming back to it 80+ hours later.
It's not a terrible game, I just think its shortcomings and criticisms are made more obvious after I was able to experience the original games. I have something like 3500 hours in D3 between all platforms it was released on, including the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.

I agree on both statements. I have negatives to say about D3 now and in the past but I have certainly got my money out of it. Queue up some music, start up game and let the mind go while dungeon clearing.
 
Yep- I'm in the 'hate is overblown' group. Was it perfect- heck no. Was it decent at the start and one of the best by the time the reaper DLC was in? Pretty much. But then again, I'm one of the weirdos that thought Wihmsyshire wasn't a big deal. It's not like it was a requirement. And I thought Greed's domain was beautiful enough to make up for it.
 

What does that mean I wonder. They are just doing a visual update and releasing D2 lol.

I just started playing Path Of Exile recently because I was laid off work and have been having fun with that. POE is way more complex than D2 could even dream, probably overly complex. I was a hardcore D2 player on and off for years.

I think the D2 remaster would need to be like a completely new game for anyone to give a shit... just to be honest. Why would anyone go back to play D2 again, its dead.

This is another marketing gimmick to make more money, where as Path Of Exile is FREE.
 
Changing the light maps doesn't address the underlying asset issue, so this was pointless in my opinion.

Well it took the cartoony edge off the game and it was quite popular at the time for doing so. Blizzard's official style seems to have become some sort of Disney-Protoss-WoW mash-up no matter the genre, and their Blizzard World OW map is a pretty good indicator of the company's current identity.

latest?cb=20171103212212.jpg

The closest thing I've seen to D2 on a new engine is the POE2 gameplay demo, which pretty much captured the vibe perfectly:

 
Well it took the cartoony edge off the game and it was quite popular at the time for doing so. Blizzard's official style seems to have become some sort of Disney-Protoss-WoW mash-up no matter the genre, and their Blizzard World OW map is a pretty good indicator of the company's current identity.

View attachment 256538

The closest thing I've seen to D2 on a new engine is the POE2 gameplay demo, which pretty much captured the vibe perfectly:


Ironically, companies were trying to copy Blizzard in the MMO space in the past, including their art style. Now, Blizzard is copying Epic's Fortnite art style.

tenor.gif
 
Well, since the new season is starting next week:

My 41 minute practice leveling run (I'm averaging 45 minute 1-70, my fastest time being 38 minutes).:



With another player, and a little practice, it should be possible to hit 70 in under 30 minutes of the season start. Sadly, the game is at the point no one is really playing it anymore.
 
Ironically, companies were trying to copy Blizzard in the MMO space in the past, including their art style. Now, Blizzard is copying Epic's Fortnite art style.

View attachment 256549
It evokes Fortnite, but that's due to both using cartoon styling. I'd say it's rooted in Blizzard's own style all the way back to Warcraft and that particular screenshot appears to be a cartoon rendition of Stormwind from WoW. It's really unfortunate they've taken OW in that direction, imo.
 
Honestly, if you really need a dose of grimdark, try Warhammer40k - Martyr. But if you prefer fantasy, PoE and Grim Dawn are both really good. I have played the hell ouf of D3, and am excited for D4 and pretty sure the WoW graphics will not transfer, since that was about half of the complaints against D3.
 
It evokes Fortnite, but that's due to both using cartoon styling. I'd say it's rooted in Blizzard's own style all the way back to Warcraft and that particular screenshot appears to be a cartoon rendition of Stormwind from WoW. It's really unfortunate they've taken OW in that direction, imo.

The map doesn't feel out of place in OW - I just thought it was possibly an interesting look into how Blizzard thinks of itself. It's a WoW company first and foremost and it seems to infect all of their other games in one way or another...so a dark and dirty D4 might be possible, but the gear has to be right as well, and it looks like they want to go more in the MMO direction (what a surprise).

At this point a D2 "remaster" might be nice, but what would be the goal of the end product? A true 1:1 representation of the original game? The original game with QOL enhancements? Would the item drop rates be the same? D2 was quite fun, but it would certainly benefit from many modern ARPG designs. People loved the rune system in D2, but the only reason anyone was even able to use most of it was because people ran bots 24/7; people played thousands of hours and never found a Jah, Zod, etc. Is that something that gets "fixed" in the remaster, and if so what else gets fixed and where do you draw the line?

It's a lot like when any live service game gets updated over time: you reach a point where things go awry and people start wishing for the game as it was when it was released...well, not release - maybe after the first major update. No! The second major update! But we definitely need to keep feature X that was released in the fifth major update! No, the game was perfect at release! ....................
 
Lol, it pains as someone who grew up playing Warcraft Orcs & Humans, Blizzard is a dog shit company now and no one should expect anything good out them ever again.
 
Decided to level up at WD in this latest season and the power levels are just hilarious now. Torment X was once the highest difficulty, and now I'm walking around with a non-ancient weapon and a lvl 25 Bane of the Powerful one-shotting everything. I think you can go up to Torment 21 or something now, although I'm not sure what the incentive is to do so.

The S21 theme is a total bust, so if you were planning to check it out for that alone then I wouldn't bother. Every 90 seconds or so you get a buff that shoots lightning, rains poisonous meteors, summons whirlwinds, or conjures a firewall - you have no control over it whatsoever and it almost always misses everything on the screen (or triggers at a utterly useless time). The firewall creeps along so comically slowly that enemies just walk out of the way.

S20 had no limits on Kanai's Cube, so you could use any 3 perks you wanted no matter the category. Wish I'd caught that instead of this one.
 
This game still relevant? I haven't played in probably two years. Path of Exile gets...tiresome. Running three monitors for trading, the game itself, and Path of Building following a build. Could kind of use a game that's a simpler grind while I can have a movie on or something.
 
D3 is active, relevant in it's genre.

Also try WH40K Inquisitor-Martyr for the WH40K vibe ARPG.
Like $20 on Steam.
 
Eh, I played this game in the past so I'm familiar with it. I really don't want to have to learn another game all over again.
 
Eh, I played this game in the past so I'm familiar with it. I really don't want to have to learn another game all over again.
Not much effort needed honestly, these are simple games. Except PoE that has reached a whole different level of "Customization"
 
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