01-20-2004, 12:02 AM
Quote:I agree entirely -- I think a big reason is that in going from D1 to D2 they went from fighting individual monsters to fighting mobs (with a corresponding emphasis on mass killing skills), and apart from the difference between swarming mobs and ranged mobs, it's all pretty much a big mush.
Part of it's due to the fact that you *can* get horribly, horribly mobbed. D2 has too many tiles. In D1, at most you can be attacked by 8 melee critters at once. (Okay, 9 if you manage to teleport onto a tile that already has a monster in it.) It's almost always possible to back into a corner and limit that to three. With use of dungeon objects you can often break that down to 2 or even 1 critter. Everything mattered: the shape of the dlvl, monster mix, the placement of chests, and closable doors.
In D2, on the other hand, if you stand near a doorway the game will cram a minimum of three monsters in that doorway AND a bunch of his buddies will lag-teleport behind you. Slamming a door on a monster never seems to be practical because 1) They open it and 2) It's virtually impossible to shut a door! You have to be standing just *so*, locate the part of the doorframe that displays "Close Door" (or "Screw You: Blocked Door" -- then why doesn't it look blocked?!), and then click a half-dozen times before the PC/server gets the message to shut the door. And then sometimes a door will look shut but really be open. In SP, that's just wrong.
Quote:I don't know why they did that really (unless they felt players would feel better and more powerful just becuase they could kill monsters ten-at-a-time instead of one-at-a-time), but it wasn't an improvement.
Yeah, but what was? Graphics? Well, Lut Gholein is pretty. Items? Huge quantities of things that will never be of any use to anyone. Quests? Plenty of rant fodder there. Randomization? Flew out the window. It's a heap of good ideas done very poorly. Yet, overall, it can be strangely entertaining under certain circumstances.
[o: *LEMMING* :o]