08-18-2006, 09:26 AM
Quote:What good is it to get rid of interesting items in the name of balance, and then unbalance the items on purpose?
The difference is that not everything is rigidly preplanned for you. You just may find a Gull on your hardcore character in early Act 1, or you may never see one. In WoW, you basically progress from one item to another at predefined points, with no room for randomness or creative input. It's just 'here, take this item. It's better than what you're wearing because its ilvl is higher. So use it, newb'.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. A game should never be a black box and try to hide important information. (By the way, anybody figured out the resistance formula yet?) Even if you didn't know which boss has a 25% chance of dropping the item you want and which hundreds of other monsters have 0%, the fact would remain that you still needed to Farm Boss X to Get Item Z.
Eh? it's same in WoW with random world drop epics. Then I level my first char to 60, I never ever got an epic drop. Since the game was released I have maybe got 6-7 world drop epics total with all my chars. In D2 if you push the evilness magic find high enough. You would find the most pre elite uniques. Sure your hardcore character wont find it. But, on bnet you would for sure be able to trade your Gull, with same reason as you will be able to buy, trade your world epics in WoW.
Quote:In D2, once you are at the end game, your favourite levelling ground is high enough level to drop any item in the game. Or maybe you won't ever see one of your target items. Or maybe you will. The randomness is what keeps people wasting their money to lotteries and into slot machines. You never know, if you kill just one more pack of sirens, they might drop a Zod. It's addictive.
Oh, that much is true. You could always... wander around, pick up some quests way below your level, grind 50000000 rep, or drive a tonk around.
D2 created its own replayability by making a lot of content random. While WoW seems intent on putting people on a rail and just slowing them down enough to keep them from hitting their head against the content cap. The developers of Hellgate London may have weird ideas about laser guns and may suck at communicating their game concept to prospective players, but they did get one thing right:
D2 have semi-randomness. The it comes to world itself it's not much of randomness. Then it comes to items, it's where d2's strength is. But, not because of it's random affixes, but the huge amount of different unique items with in many cases fixed stats. But, the most affixes, items in d2 is useless in high end gaming.
If we look back to pre 1.10. How did the game look? special in 1.09x.
Player's did endless of Cow-grinding, or memphisto runs, that's it. In 1.11b I can't say, since I haven't play it on realm. Lost interest in realms long time ago because of all farmer-bots.