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[forsaken1111]

Not to be the bearer of obvious news but, that argument you guys are engaging in is two months go, drop it. The reason the threads active again is because of the beta E-mail D3 scam, not because of what he said two months ago.

Killjoy. I was enjoying watching them argue with the past.

[Choose username]

I knew there would be an action house in it, and honestly I liked the idea because it'll take the shady third party item dealers out of it. But the fact that skill trees are removed and replaced with a system of ruins, which I'm not doubting you could just buy, along with the lack of modding just sucks. Blizzard and Valve were my two big name companies that I truly trusted for my gaming, but now only Valve is left it seems. This really sucks.

[Neonivek]

I knew there would be an action house in it, and honestly I liked the idea because it'll take the shady third party item dealers out of it. But the fact that skill trees are removed and replaced with a system of ruins, which I'm not doubting you could just buy, along with the lack of modding just sucks. Blizzard and Valve were my two big name companies that I truly trusted for my gaming, but now only Valve is left it seems. This really sucks.

Yep... Blizzard was one of the good ones. Though remember they have LONG since stopped being the Blizzard you knew. The same people who made Blizzard great are not the same people who are still working for them.

[Darkmere]

I knew there would be an action house in it, and honestly I liked the idea because it'll take the shady third party item dealers out of it. But the fact that skill trees are removed and replaced with a system of ruins, which I'm not doubting you could just buy, along with the lack of modding just sucks. Blizzard and Valve were my two big name companies that I truly trusted for my gaming, but now only Valve is left it seems. This really sucks.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, I honestly don't understand this argument. Currently you can pick 7 active skills and 3 passive traits per character. With 5 possible runes per skill, that's 35 different options without re-speccing the character, ignoring the other skills you didn't take. (20-ish per class, I think). I can't think of many builds that used more than 5 skills total, unless you're counting synergies as useful ways to spend points (they weren't).

How is having more freedom to build a character worse than being forced to put 40+points into useless synergy skills?

[Lagslayer]

I knew there would be an action house in it, and honestly I liked the idea because it'll take the shady third party item dealers out of it. But the fact that skill trees are removed and replaced with a system of ruins, which I'm not doubting you could just buy, along with the lack of modding just sucks. Blizzard and Valve were my two big name companies that I truly trusted for my gaming, but now only Valve is left it seems. This really sucks.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, I honestly don't understand this argument. Currently you can pick 7 active skills and 3 passive traits per character. With 5 possible runes per skill, that's 35 different options without re-speccing the character, ignoring the other skills you didn't take. (20-ish per class, I think). I can't think of many builds that used more than 5 skills total, unless you're counting synergies as useful ways to spend points (they weren't).

How is having more freedom to build a character worse than being forced to put 40+points into useless synergy skills?

I think the main argument is that you would get to respec whenever you want, as many times as you want, making long-term planning irrelevant. At least, I hope that's the primary point.

[ChairmanPoo]

Blizzard has been dumbing down their games for a while. I suppose it was a matter of time they turned Diablo into an arcade. Sad, but that's what sells nowadays. All sorts of games are being dumbed down to semiautomated shows of flashy graphics. It prolly isn't even the worst offender.

Anyway, for me the deal killer was the always online feature. The rest of things just add insult to the injury.

[Darkmere]

Respecs:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Are in Diablo 2 now. I think you get 1 free one for the den of evil, and cubing some material dropped by act bosses lets you make more. So, after a day or two you could stock as many as you wanted, for farming you were already doing. Or not, the option was there, with a cost. Which brings me to "free anytime" thing someone apparently made up somewhere. All I can find from a Blizzard source is: A discussion about cost and limiting respecs.

I didn't follow Blizzcon much this year, if something's changed, link?

Dumbing down:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not sure what this means either. Bowazons spammed strafe/multi, barbs spammed WW, pallies spammed hammer/smite, necros spammed amp/CE, sorcs spammed meteor/FO/teleport.

The goal for any character was: get leech/regen so mana is infinite. Spam crowd killer. spam boss killer. Loot. Stat allocation was all the same (str for gear, dex for max block or base, energy base, vit everything else). So, no resource to manage, no skill variety to choose from (enforced by synergies), one single meaningful stat choice.

If D3 is more dumbed down than this, it'd be a sitcom.

Always online:
Valid. Doesn't bother me, I played WoW for a couple years just fine, but if others don't like it, I won't begrudge them.

[kcwong]

Always online:
Valid. Doesn't bother me, I played WoW for a couple years just fine, but if others don't like it, I won't begrudge them.

I play other online games, so I do have a pretty decent connection. But it did and will went down once in a while, like the last time Taiwan got hit by an earthquake, ripping the undersea cables apart. I'd hate to be unable to play what is essentially a single player game when the network goes down.

Another thing is the region locking thing - I am not sure how it works. Early news said the game will be region locked; but then I read the game is not region locked (ala Diablo 2's system, you can choose which server to play in).

Yet -- the news also said the auction houses are region locked. Which could very well mean your characters are region locked - you can have characters on USEast, USWest and Asia, but they can never leave the servers they are created on (otherwise you can just login to another server and use the AH there).

Which means another annoyance for me - if I want to once in a while play with my friends in the US (I'm in Hong Kong), I'd often have to play on the US servers, suffering from horrible ping, so my character won't be under-leveled compared to my friends. I can't play on Asia server with lower ping and switch to US to play with them.

[ChairmanPoo]

Not sure what this means either. Bowazons spammed strafe/multi, barbs spammed WW, pallies spammed hammer/smite, necros spammed amp/CE, sorcs spammed meteor/FO/teleport.

The goal for any character was: get leech/regen so mana is infinite. Spam crowd killer. spam boss killer. Loot. Stat allocation was all the same (str for gear, dex for max block or base, energy base, vit everything else). So, no resource to manage, no skill variety to choose from (enforced by synergies), one single meaningful stat choice.

If D3 is more dumbed down than this, it'd be a sitcom.

Yeah, I actually meant to say that Diablo 2 had been dumbed down already to begin with. It has been going on for a while

[Briggsy16]

Getting this free through my WoW subscription anyway so can't complain about much

[SirStrange]

Not to be the bearer of obvious news but, that argument you guys are engaging in is two months go, drop it. The reason the threads active again is because of the beta E-mail D3 scam, not because of what he said two months ago.

Posts as eloquent and deeply meaningful as mine sometimes take a very long time to type. 

[Cuckoo]

I don't know, I just don’t see Diablo 3 having any relation to Diablo 1 or 2. I mean, when you fire up Diablo 1, what do you see? Dark night, fire torches, people who actually look like people, there are goblins running around with swords, skeletons shooting arrows from their bows, there’s blood, gore, oil splattered all over the game, it is dark and gothic in its appearance, it has superb (at least for its time and for the resources available) artistic style... It has a specific atmosphere, it is kind of depressing, but not enough to make you depressed. Diablo 2 takes the same atmosphere, takes it outside and improves decorations and character art a bit. Nice.
Diablo 3? Cartoon about an edgy blob throwing fairy lights around? Seriously? Diablo used to be something that looked serious, when you shoot a fireball, a ball of freaking fire appears in front of your character moving in the direction of your mouse pointer. In Diablo 3, you get a christmas tree for a character, and when you shoot a fireball, a pretty circle of light around them, a ball of fire starts flying in the general direction of the mouse pointer, and cool little stars jump around your character to signify that they just did something cool. All it is missing is pink numbers in a comic font rising from every killed enemy and the periodic exclamations “Oh yeah!” “Damn!” “That hurt!” “Superb!” and shit like that.
When I first heard “Diablo 3”, I imagined something like that:

Spoiler: Screenshots from Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (click to show/hide)

Instead, we get a freaking cartoon about how shiny blobs fly around leaving bright trails of questionable origin and nature. Seriously?

[Darkmere]

I honestly have no idea what shiny blobs and Christmas trees are referring to. Are they worse than the chaos ice bolts from phoenix strike? The sparklies from frost armor? Frozen Orb? Fist of the Heavens? Charged Bolt? (smirk) Teeth? Have any screenshots/gameplay movies to illustrate these things?

Diablo 1 was a gear chase with no options, you wanted Obs/Zod jewelery, godly/whale armor, KsoH/ whatever the bow option was, or fireball/chain lightning spell books. Full health/mana pots filled your bubble instantly so there wasn't much of a threat if you weren't stupid. Warriors/Rogues only had 1 basic attack. This was the smarty-pants version compared to D2's dumbed down 5 (later 7) classes with 3 talent trees each, dozens of weapon types, itemization and blah blah?

I do miss the gritty realism of mummies that burped poison on me and slashed me with their bone scythe arms. Or midgets riding other midgets that stabbed me with knives bigger than they were. Or those foul crow nests... the walking tree things that spewed rat-bat things. Or forest yetis with clown hands. Or Diablo scampering up to me like a puppy and swatting me.

Diablo 3 shows someone getting decapitated. You see the head bounce and roll on the floor. Seems a bit harsher than those neon green car-sized desert maggots.

My Diablo 1 disc here is copyrighted 1998. Battle.net has been running 13 years and all I had to do was buy one copy of the game once. Yeah they're pretty horrible for making an optional service that might recoup some costs from that. 

[Cuckoo]

Of course, I can show what I am talking about.

Spoiler: Diablo 2 whirlwind (click to show/hide)

Against

Spoiler: Diablo 3 whirlwind (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Diablo 3 barbarian fight (click to show/hide)

I am not sure if this is not a skill, but it seems to be just a normal hit... Seriously? A shiny trail after the club? I couldn’t replicate that in D2...

Here’s another one:

Spoiler: Diablo 3 some barbarian dash/charge kind of skill (click to show/hide)

Is this a physical skill or what? What’s with all those trails? Is there a secret light source in the character’s backpack? Holographic projector?

Spoiler: Diablo 3 Leap attack (click to show/hide)

I couldn’t replicate the same effect in D2, all I got was a small circle of tiny dust clouds around the character.

Sorry for not posting many D2 screenshots, but my stupid notebook keyboard involves pressing three keys in opposite corners of the keyboard to take a screenshot. I’m not sure why, because the primary purpose of the screenshot button eludes me completely.

Spoiler: Diablo 2 dudu (click to show/hide)

Against...

Spoiler: Diablo 3 witch doctor (click to show/hide)

That looks an awful lot like a christmas tree to me. Even the pigmy witch doctors in D2 were so much more conservative.

Spoiler: Diablo 2 dudu casting a fire element spell (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Diablo 2 dudu protected by cyclone armor (click to show/hide)

In D2, you wave your swords, make walls of fire, get things explode into a bloody mess once in a while. In D3, you get a firework spectacle and a dance every time you fart. I wouldn’t call that gritty realism, there is inevitably going to be nonsensical stuff, but I think D3 is far beyond an overkill. Just too much spectacle, too much cartoon. Everytime I watch D3 gameplay videos, it is just a light show, there are shiny bubbles all over the place and half the things on screen leave trails, even things that shouldn’t — claws, arrows...

When I talk about artistic execution, the atmosphere of the games, I imagine Diablo 1 and 2 as game equivalents of Bosch’s paintings (which are completely surreal and mad), and Diablo 3 for me associates with something like Sailor moon or Pokemon (which is outright primitive)...

Although, I do not really understand the dumbed-down argument either. Especially for D2, consider all the gear mechanics, sets, gems, cube crafting. And especially the Grapes of Wrath add-on, with a far more elaborate cube scheme and tons of items. You can make like half a thousand different builds of “the ultimate death machine” and each one will be just as efficient as the other. I don’t know much about D3 gears/skills, but I don’t think it is going to really be a one-button game. Even if the devs say so in the videos, they underestimate hardcore gamers’ need for efficient keypressing, number crunching, and theorycraft. Every “simplification” in WoW has brought up tomes of discussions about how to build characters now that these changes are in effect, and which buttons to press first, how to time keystrokes right, and stuff like that.

[PsyberianHusky]

I honestly think D2 has some of the best sprite work in games, and I am disappointed D3 doesn't have that unique of a visual style.