So they don't want people to play solo games online? Thats pretty much how I only play diablo 2. The only reason I play online is so I can trade or play with a friend every now and then. Like, rarely.
No, they just don't want it to be extra lucrative to play solo for the purposes of farming like D2. One of the best implications of the individual loot dropping system is that you can presumably go farming/MFing with a full game and everyone will be richer for it.
Regarding Followers and difficulty:
Without looking up the quote, I'm pretty sure Bashiok said that in Nightmare your will immediately notice your follower being dramatically less effective, and in Hell he will be one-shot back to back if you try to use one. There is no mechanic stopping you from trying.
One of the posts had the dev saying they would go out of their way to nerf followers if they turned out to be remotely useful in hell difficulty.
I'm not seeing the appeal of having them at all if they only thing they are going to accomplish is be an extra set of training wheels when you already have and excess of training wheels in normal difficulty.
Because there is no appeal in it for us. It's for the people who buy the game, play it for a week, then stop. This is supposed to get them to play more. Which apparently make up a great percentage of the playerbase. I don't think this will change that, but it's Blizzard's game.
Because there is no appeal in it for us. It's for the people who buy the game, play it for a week, then stop. This is supposed to get them to play more. Which apparently make up a great percentage of the playerbase. I don't think this will change that, but it's Blizzard's game.
This is a pretty good point. Check out the achievement statistics on a few games on Steam sometime. Sure, many of them were bought and played to death before getting achievements added, but even ones released post-cheevos often show that a very significant portion of the playerbase will just drop off steadily across the game's duration. This is obviously more noticeable with games that have fairly regular achievements for completing levels/stages/chapters/acts/etc.
As hard as they're trying to pimp people playing online (hopefully together), it makes sense to do everything they can to make that (even played solo) as painless an experience as possible.
While I'm sure that with their history (people playing D2 over a decade later, etc) there won't be any risk of the game servers going dry within 2 months of release as is the fear with many heavily multiplayer games, but enhancing the community retention isn't a bad idea regardless of that likely buffer against stagnation.
For us they may just be a way to help us speed through Normal when friends aren't around, for others they may be the impetuous to try out having actual humans to play along with at all.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I actually like that followers won't be useful in Hell difficulty. It emphasizes that it's the hard mode of the game, and makes your character more of a badass by comparison. To me, that's worth the loss of greater endgame build intricacy, as long as the skill rune system turns out to provide as much variety as it seems like it will.
Because there is no appeal in it for us. It's for the people who buy the game, play it for a week, then stop.
Not sure why this is so confusing for people.
Edit: Maybe they didn't play SC2...
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ZarathustraEckUbermenschnow with stripes!Registered Userregular
edited May 2011
Head over to the Blizzard D3 forum sometime and see the steaming pile of threads regarding followers. I actually had the foolhardy idea to throw my hat in the ring and see if I could talk a little sense.
I gave up shortly after.
The sense of entitlement and the posturing of the forum "regulars" is astounding. I asked simply that someone cite a source on one piece of information, and was told they didn't have time to do that for "some noob" on the forum. Rather than compare Blizzard ePeens, I searched and found the source myself.
That said... the system for Followers is actually pretty damned cool. The story is only really going to matter on the first playthrough (on Normal difficulty). They've said that the Followers will enhance the storyline and have their own arcs, so I could see how that wouldn't be a concern on Nightmare and Hell. They're also meant as a tutorial of sorts to teach the new people how to play with others.
That's a great idea.
I just don't want to get back to the days of D2 Mercs where it was assumed that every class was a pet class. It stripped some of their identity unfairly. I mean, I loved the fact that my Elemental Druid had a Barbarian merc on hand who was healed by lightning. It made LEBs cake. But that doesn't change the fact that it changed the class dynamics.
Heres something to look at if your bored. Quite a few shots of item tool tips and stat tool tips and info and etc. Its an article about a something on a Chinese site, so go there to actually see all the pictures. But, this gives a nice quick rundown of it all.
Might be old (at least to some people) but they posted a link to some Runestone info on Facebook, figured it'd be worth adding here since Followers got the conversation rolling again. Haven't read it yet, but from the teaser it sounds promising.
Edit: okay, the whirlwind video alone is a nice example of graphical changes Runestones bring. Yes, in some ways it's a palette swap, but the extra touches sell me on the idea moreso (along with the obvious tactical considerations each boost/change brings).
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
Might be old (at least to some people) but they posted a link to some Runestone info on Facebook, figured it'd be worth adding here since Followers got the conversation rolling again. Haven't read it yet, but from the teaser it sounds promising.
Edit: okay, the whirlwind video alone is a nice example of graphical changes Runestones bring. Yes, in some ways it's a palette swap, but the extra touches sell me on the idea moreso (along with the obvious tactical considerations each boost/change brings).
It's actually brand new and probably the first real demonstration of how runes directly effect skills.
....I love it. Ray of frost looks awesome, and life leech on the grenade blast for the demon hunter should prove useful.
I wasn't sure if I would want to play demon hunter or monk more. I think this video sealed Demon Hunter for me.
The problem with DH was that the abilities seemed... boring. Mind you, I was hopeful that it was just the 5 they chose to show in all their videos, and the rest were better, but I think the DH runes on that ability were the best overall.
The problem with DH was that the abilities seemed... boring. Mind you, I was hopeful that it was just the 5 they chose to show in all their videos, and the rest were better, but I think the DH runes on that ability were the best overall.
DH is anything but boring. And that was at level 10 with like 4 skills.
What they've done with runestones is absolutely delicious. Blizzard's typically good enough with their math to make all the choices viable in some form or another, I have ♪ hii-ii-igh hopes ♫
It's actually brand new and probably the first real demonstration of how runes directly effect skills.
Its been demonstrated a few times before, but this has a lot of new examples so its still awesome.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure the page itself is new (or at least updated), but I figured saying it was "new info" was the fastest way to get someone saying "nuh-uh, it's like super old, like so old dinosaur bones were found next to the press release", hence my attempt to placate those who live and breathe a fansites front page. >.>
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I cannot decide between Monk and Witch Doctor. The Witch Doctor has cool shit, like fire bats, but the Monk has cool stuff like destroying people's hearts with his fist. How do I even begin to choose.
I do like that as we get to see more and more of the UI revealed it looks really well done. It's actually something I enjoyed looking at.
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
It's actually brand new and probably the first real demonstration of how runes directly effect skills.
Its been demonstrated a few times before, but this has a lot of new examples so its still awesome.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure the page itself is new (or at least updated), but I figured saying it was "new info" was the fastest way to get someone saying "nuh-uh, it's like super old, like so old dinosaur bones were found next to the press release", hence my attempt to placate those who live and breathe a fansites front page. >.>
Didn't mean to come off sounding like that if I did. There IS a lot of info floating around that most people dont realize is out there, though.
The system itself is old news, but the page and the examples are all brand new.
Man, the more they press the 'fuck you if you don't want to play online in a group full of 1337 dickheads' the less interested I get in buying a new PC to play this game. I'll just wait until the expansion's out and someone's modded everything I need into the SP side before I buy it, I guess.
Didn't mean to come off sounding like that if I did.
Nope, not at all. That goes without saying, good sir. I was just referring to the other denizens of the interwebs to whom everything is so old it might as well have been from a long lost civilization.
Man, the more they press the 'fuck you if you don't want to play online in a group full of 1337 dickheads' the less interested I get in buying a new PC to play this game. I'll just wait until the expansion's out and someone's modded everything I need into the SP side before I buy it, I guess.
Err... what did they do/say now? Where are they pressing the 'play grouped online or your a loser' button? Because I imagine I'll spend a lot of time solo'ing personally, but while I appreciate functionality included to improve the grouping experience for people, I'm not expecting to build a raiding guild around this or anything either (been there, done that, lost half a decade doing so, etc).
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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EvilBadmanDO NOT TRUST THIS MANRegistered Userregular
Blizzard's typically good enough with their math to make all the choices viable in some form or another
Eh? Maybe after a few years of fucking with things...
Keeping in mind that they've already said "yes we're including arenas, no we don't care if someone breaks the shit out of them" (hyperbole noted; I'm sure they care but aren't going to balance it nearly the way SC2 and WoW are) so I imagine balancing for co-op/solo play ought to be an order of magnitude easier.
Edit: And I say this as someone who played a corpse explosion necromancer pre-nerf. Those were good days, and while I felt at the time that they went a bit too far in the other direction, I'll admit the other 7 players in the game were just background noise in other zones for a while there.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Well, I can say from feedback and testing we've made the decision to pull the Talisman from the initial release of the game.
It was a cool idea at its core, but right now it's just really too basic and doesn't provide anything you can't get from the armor and weapons you're equipping. It requires a lot of the player to invest time and energy into finding and storing yet another type of item just to add player stats. When they do all that, it's just to do something pretty boring that they can already do with awesome things like armor and weapons. Originally the Talisman had a much deeper design, but it proved very ambitious and it got whittled down over the years to a very basic +stat per single square. We like simplicity in our designs, but charms became superfluous in their purpose.
We really like the core idea, but we don't want to stop everything and spend a large amount of time trying to fix the Talisman, although we do have some great ideas already. So, it'll very likely come back in some form or another after the game ships. And be awesome.
Blizzard's typically good enough with their math to make all the choices viable in some form or another
Eh? Maybe after a few years of fucking with things...
Keeping in mind that they've already said "yes we're including arenas, no we don't care if someone breaks the shit out of them" (hyperbole noted; I'm sure they care but aren't going to balance it nearly the way SC2 and WoW are) so I imagine balancing for co-op/solo play ought to be an order of magnitude easier.
Edit: And I say this as someone who played a corpse explosion necromancer pre-nerf. Those were good days, and while I felt at the time that they went a bit too far in the other direction, I'll admit the other 7 players in the game were just background noise in other zones for a while there.
I was referring specifically to PvM gameplay, neither I nor Blizzard give a shit about arena balance.
When looking at skills and asking "Is this useful for some builds?" the answer should always be yes.
Well, I can say from feedback and testing we've made the decision to pull the Talisman from the initial release of the game.
It was a cool idea at its core, but right now it's just really too basic and doesn't provide anything you can't get from the armor and weapons you're equipping. It requires a lot of the player to invest time and energy into finding and storing yet another type of item just to add player stats. When they do all that, it's just to do something pretty boring that they can already do with awesome things like armor and weapons. Originally the Talisman had a much deeper design, but it proved very ambitious and it got whittled down over the years to a very basic +stat per single square. We like simplicity in our designs, but charms became superfluous in their purpose.
We really like the core idea, but we don't want to stop everything and spend a large amount of time trying to fix the Talisman, although we do have some great ideas already. So, it'll very likely come back in some form or another after the game ships. And be awesome.
Good.
Talismans and Charms were a terrible edition to D2 and I'm glad they aren't going to be in D3, at least initially.
If they can make them interesting? Sure.
But as he said, they ended up just being bag space stealing stat sticks that served zero purpose. Put those stats on things that are on you or leave them out.
I'm fairly sure some runestone combinations will be garbage coming into hell, but that's okay. Can't have 1/1 awesome ratio between them. That's what makes experimenting enjoyable. If every skill's perfectly viable without some specific gear setup it wouldn't be nearly as fun in my view.
Man, the more they press the 'fuck you if you don't want to play online in a group full of 1337 dickheads' the less interested I get in buying a new PC to play this game. I'll just wait until the expansion's out and someone's modded everything I need into the SP side before I buy it, I guess.
I'm confused. How do Runestones force you to have to play with people online?
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
Jihad you realize that they design this for both in mind right
Also glad to see the talisman go. It would have been rather annoying once full, comparing each new charm to the 13 you already had. bleh. Sounds like there's enough customization already with traits, skill choice, runestones, gems...
On that note, I hope they keep rank 14 gems. Being able to unsocket the gems makes working up to the high ones a pretty cool goal.
I think he's talking about stuff like shared stash that was being discussed a page or two back.
Wait, there's a shared stash? Was this confirmed?
Yes, but currently online only.
I believe the word is that D3 isn't intended to be particularly mod-able, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone didn't work it into SP eventually or some other form of workaround.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I think he's talking about stuff like shared stash that was being discussed a page or two back.
Wait, there's a shared stash? Was this confirmed?
Yes, but currently online only.
I believe the word is that D3 isn't intended to be particularly mod-able, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone didn't work it into SP eventually or some other form of workaround.
Sounds good to me.
If I want to play "solo" I can simply set up a room and lock it out. That's pretty much what I did in D2 anyway.
I'm just gleeful about shared stash. That is my only lasting complaint about D2, the lack of shared stash and the necessity of an absurd amount of mules. Everything else in the game still holds up today, for me anyway.
Posts
No, they just don't want it to be extra lucrative to play solo for the purposes of farming like D2. One of the best implications of the individual loot dropping system is that you can presumably go farming/MFing with a full game and everyone will be richer for it.
Regarding Followers and difficulty:
Without looking up the quote, I'm pretty sure Bashiok said that in Nightmare your will immediately notice your follower being dramatically less effective, and in Hell he will be one-shot back to back if you try to use one. There is no mechanic stopping you from trying.
I'm not seeing the appeal of having them at all if they only thing they are going to accomplish is be an extra set of training wheels when you already have and excess of training wheels in normal difficulty.
This is a pretty good point. Check out the achievement statistics on a few games on Steam sometime. Sure, many of them were bought and played to death before getting achievements added, but even ones released post-cheevos often show that a very significant portion of the playerbase will just drop off steadily across the game's duration. This is obviously more noticeable with games that have fairly regular achievements for completing levels/stages/chapters/acts/etc.
As hard as they're trying to pimp people playing online (hopefully together), it makes sense to do everything they can to make that (even played solo) as painless an experience as possible.
While I'm sure that with their history (people playing D2 over a decade later, etc) there won't be any risk of the game servers going dry within 2 months of release as is the fear with many heavily multiplayer games, but enhancing the community retention isn't a bad idea regardless of that likely buffer against stagnation.
For us they may just be a way to help us speed through Normal when friends aren't around, for others they may be the impetuous to try out having actual humans to play along with at all.
Edit: Maybe they didn't play SC2...
I gave up shortly after.
The sense of entitlement and the posturing of the forum "regulars" is astounding. I asked simply that someone cite a source on one piece of information, and was told they didn't have time to do that for "some noob" on the forum. Rather than compare Blizzard ePeens, I searched and found the source myself.
That said... the system for Followers is actually pretty damned cool. The story is only really going to matter on the first playthrough (on Normal difficulty). They've said that the Followers will enhance the storyline and have their own arcs, so I could see how that wouldn't be a concern on Nightmare and Hell. They're also meant as a tutorial of sorts to teach the new people how to play with others.
That's a great idea.
I just don't want to get back to the days of D2 Mercs where it was assumed that every class was a pet class. It stripped some of their identity unfairly. I mean, I loved the fact that my Elemental Druid had a Barbarian merc on hand who was healed by lightning. It made LEBs cake. But that doesn't change the fact that it changed the class dynamics.
-Z
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/diablo-iii-item-tool-tip-gallery/#comments
And good news! Looks like we CAN use a spear/shield combo, since there are one-handed spears in the game!
http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/world/systems/runestones.xml
Edit: okay, the whirlwind video alone is a nice example of graphical changes Runestones bring. Yes, in some ways it's a palette swap, but the extra touches sell me on the idea moreso (along with the obvious tactical considerations each boost/change brings).
It's actually brand new and probably the first real demonstration of how runes directly effect skills.
....I love it. Ray of frost looks awesome, and life leech on the grenade blast for the demon hunter should prove useful.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
The problem with DH was that the abilities seemed... boring. Mind you, I was hopeful that it was just the 5 they chose to show in all their videos, and the rest were better, but I think the DH runes on that ability were the best overall.
What they've done with runestones is absolutely delicious. Blizzard's typically good enough with their math to make all the choices viable in some form or another, I have ♪ hii-ii-igh hopes ♫
Its been demonstrated a few times before, but this has a lot of new examples so its still awesome.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure the page itself is new (or at least updated), but I figured saying it was "new info" was the fastest way to get someone saying "nuh-uh, it's like super old, like so old dinosaur bones were found next to the press release", hence my attempt to placate those who live and breathe a fansites front page. >.>
I kid. I kid. Looking good, though some of the melee skills are looking a little uninspired.
I do like that as we get to see more and more of the UI revealed it looks really well done. It's actually something I enjoyed looking at.
Might want to remove it form the OP
Didn't mean to come off sounding like that if I did.
The system itself is old news, but the page and the examples are all brand new.
Fixed. Thanks for the heads up, sir.
Nope, not at all. That goes without saying, good sir. I was just referring to the other denizens of the interwebs to whom everything is so old it might as well have been from a long lost civilization.
Err... what did they do/say now? Where are they pressing the 'play grouped online or your a loser' button? Because I imagine I'll spend a lot of time solo'ing personally, but while I appreciate functionality included to improve the grouping experience for people, I'm not expecting to build a raiding guild around this or anything either (been there, done that, lost half a decade doing so, etc).
Keeping in mind that they've already said "yes we're including arenas, no we don't care if someone breaks the shit out of them" (hyperbole noted; I'm sure they care but aren't going to balance it nearly the way SC2 and WoW are) so I imagine balancing for co-op/solo play ought to be an order of magnitude easier.
Edit: And I say this as someone who played a corpse explosion necromancer pre-nerf. Those were good days, and while I felt at the time that they went a bit too far in the other direction, I'll admit the other 7 players in the game were just background noise in other zones for a while there.
Someone asked how internal testing was going and got this response:
When looking at skills and asking "Is this useful for some builds?" the answer should always be yes.
Good.
Talismans and Charms were a terrible edition to D2 and I'm glad they aren't going to be in D3, at least initially.
If they can make them interesting? Sure.
But as he said, they ended up just being bag space stealing stat sticks that served zero purpose. Put those stats on things that are on you or leave them out.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I'm confused. How do Runestones force you to have to play with people online?
On that note, I hope they keep rank 14 gems. Being able to unsocket the gems makes working up to the high ones a pretty cool goal.
Wait, there's a shared stash? Was this confirmed?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Yes, but currently online only.
I believe the word is that D3 isn't intended to be particularly mod-able, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone didn't work it into SP eventually or some other form of workaround.
Sounds good to me.
If I want to play "solo" I can simply set up a room and lock it out. That's pretty much what I did in D2 anyway.
I'm just gleeful about shared stash. That is my only lasting complaint about D2, the lack of shared stash and the necessity of an absurd amount of mules. Everything else in the game still holds up today, for me anyway.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand