Diablo V Teaser
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Diablo V Teaser
Prepare for the next era. Diablo V has been announced. Visit Diablo5.Blizzard.com to sign up for future updates.
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Did people really dislike 3 that much? I’d heard it was pretty rough at launch, but I only jumped in around Reaper of Souls and had a blast with it. I’ll admit the writing was a little busted but I thought the gameplay loop was excellent.
I played through the campaign for 4, and while it had its moments, I couldn’t stick with it for longer than that. I think their biggest mistake was making it an online open world. If they go that direction with 5, any excitement I may have had otherwise will be dead on arrival.
Personally I liked D3 after it got rid of the AH bullshit. For the same reason that a lot of people disliked it: It’s relatively low complexity. People will look down on that as dumbing it down, but to me it’s just getting rid of uninteresting filler. I can’t stand those giant skill trees full of +x% this and +y that. It’s boring AND overwhelming. I have no interest in trying to make my own build in those games. D3 had a small number of choices that for the most part felt distinct enough to understand why you’d choose one over the other.
I also really liked that brief period in WoW where they changed the skill trees to those sets of 3 choices each level breakpoint. It was really interesting thinking about which choices would be most useful for any given situation instead of just looking up a guide then forgetting about it until next expansion.
Alas, they went back to boring number increases because people mistake complexity for depth. This is why I really enjoy roguelikes. The well designed ones give you those bite sized choices with big impacts on your run and the depth comes from understanding the system and your current situation rather than mathing out the optimal set of stat increases.
I’m not a fan of the Path of Exiles skill tree, but I was so incredibly bored with Diablo 3s skills. There was literally no choices, just switch whenever you want something else. I don’t think the skill trees from diablo 2 were too complicated to expect an RPG player to manage.
To me the skill tree in Diablo 3 was saying “our player base is too dumb to make a single character choice, so we’ll just get rid of all choices except ‘number go up’ when looking at new gear”. It was absolutely a dumbing down.
I liked it gameplay wise, but the story … urgh. Typical comic book villain tropes. Taunting you with how awesome and cunning they are, just to vanish and leave you with one of their henchmen that you then slaughter. Repeat a few times, until they finally pretend to be really pissed off now and decide to spill their whole plan and why you have no chance of stopping them … just to be stopped.
The only thing the villains in D3 had was arrogance. Everything else was forgettable (to me).
I’m with you. 3 was great, I played from RoS on as well. 4 was trash. My specific gripe is it was way too much to get decent drops. Insanely hard. Yes you could get a set going but actually finding a perfect stat set for your build was a ridiculous grind.