The Diablo Formula and how Diablo 3 falls short

[Kevin]

When you are geared at a level where normal enemies are challenging, the game is actually really fun. The different abilities of all the enemy types are really interesting, especially when you must engage a few different types at once. You have to pick targets intelligently, position yourself well, and most of the skills can really be useful. If that's the case however, elite enemies are just too powerful and aren't fun to enounter at all.

I think this is your real problem and one that others have touched on. In D2 All mobs were trash mobs. Champions, uniques, everything was handled the same way, which was generally spam an AoE, and maybe use a single target skill. The only mobs that weren't were some of the bosses, which created a feeling of excitement for the bosses. D3 bosses are actually a bit more interesting but since they are easier than some of the trash stuff, even if they are harder than D2 bosses, it gives you dissonance.

Because of this gear didn't matter as much and the tons and tons and tons of crap that got left on the ground for the odd upgrade wasn't noticed as much and an upgrade became more noticeable and pushed the reward button. Since most mobs were easy and most gear didn't you could find cheesy ways to win encounters (suck a bunch of potions, tp out and back in, exploit bugs, over level it by a lot if you are playing some sort of variate, get better gear, or learn to play better).

In D1 most mobs in a level were of similar "power" but in general the same well executed tactics could be used to be beat them all. Activate and run to choke point, port and trap, potion suck, or get better gear so that hits did no damage or you could hit recovery lock everything, or knock it off the screen, or learn to play better, etc. Again bosses provided a different type of challenge, but again in reality were pretty limited and could be cheesed or what not when understood. But it made them feel a bit more special.

Again since the mobs were all pretty much dumb, and you could cheese chug potions, gear once again didn't matter so finding a piece that did matter was cool. Of course creating games over and over or zoning in and out of levels and spending what felt like 20 minutes to walk over to wirt was often the best way to farm for a piece of gear.

For me both D1 and D2 and D2/LoD tended to wear thin after beating Hell Diablo/Baal with a toon. Playing the other classes or other builds added value, and then of course multiplayer and leveling groups and self imposed rules were fun, but without multiplayer both games would have only lasted a few months. D2 without multiplayer would have only made it a few weeks for me because much of it felt tedious and the "oh cool" newness factor would have worn off. Even with multi I went back to warcraft 2 and starcraft before LoD came out. I just got tired of holding onto skill points while leveling to try out a new build and using cheesy methods to level quickly did nothing for me. I found the stat system to have no value and just be a source of "oh I was an idiot for putting points there because I didn't know better on my first play through".

D1 was such a unique experience that the uniqueness factor took a long time to wear off. But MOO II drew me away from it frequently. It was fun, but the replayability was mostly linked to multi player for me again.


So what did D3 do? They tried to improve on the bad aspects of both of the games and for many people (not me) they produced something where while the parts are generally better the sum is not. I saw tons of people rage quitting D2 when it first came out and only lasting a few weeks in it too. Though most of those were because it simply was not as unique as D1 was. Of course what is as unique as something that creates a new genre?

But in D3 getting rid of the tedious and generally pointless stat allocation is mostly met with good reviews. The skill system is generally viewed as better than D2 and offering more choices. What it doesn't have is forced replay if you wanted to try something else. This is good.

If you don't have uber gear (you don't use the AH and you don't have a fully leveled blacksmith) white labels mobs are much closer to D1 white label mobs than they were to D2 white label mobs. This is good when taken by itself. Champions and uniques are certainly more interesting and while there are some problems they aren't because of bugs like in D2, which was very frustrating. The most common complaints I hear about D3 special mobs is when you get a combo on a base mob type that effectively makes it feel like they have 5, 6, or even more affixes instead of just the 2 or 3 or 4 they are supposed to have.

I could touch on more points but I don't think I need to.

What happens when all this gets pulled together is that, as others have pointed out, the game feels spiky. For me this isn't a problem, in fact the variable challenge is part of what makes the game less boring for me than D1 and D2. Now factor in that in general the mobs have been made smarter, and more interesting, and a little harder to kill compared to D1 and D2 mobs and the removal of the cheesy potion spamming or same old same old environmental abuse and you are left with learn to play, out level it, or get better gear.

Out level it goes away as an option much sooner. Some of the mob combos end up feeling so cheesy that you can't always learn to play, but in general that isn't the case. Though again remember I'm talking about the balanced part of the game, not inferno which they are balancing after release. The people having problems prior to Inferno generally are because they have to learn to play. Your point about Hell/Hell in D1 is exactly what happens in D3. The difference is a lot of people didn't realize there WAS a Hell difficulty in single player D1 because you couldn't just select it. You had to make a multi game then go back to single player. So they had all the options outside of learn to play at their disposal.

So what D3 got wrong was making the game harder, and making the game spikier. They limited your options to gear and learn to play, and because of some current balance issues l2p can in fact go out the window. They also added a difficulty level that was designed to give you something to do with the gear you farmed. In D1 there wasn't anything to do with that after you beat the game. In D2 it could be used to help you get L99 faster if you wanted to do that.

I actually see more useful gear drop in D3 than in D1 or D2, but since the game is harder and you need gear you are thinking about gear and seeing something cool isn't as rewarding. As others have said most of the "cool gear" from D2 was from the runewords and uniques (in 1.10) that made the rest of the gear even that much more pointless.

So D3 became a better game for me, because they enhanced all the things that I valued from D1 and D2.

D3 became a worse game for a lot of other people because they liked the simpler games that D2 and D1 were. Things that forced replay on people (the skill system) are removed and that is viewed as bad by some because it covered up much of the boring.

I don't think any of the games were designed from the start to have infinite replay. Players created a lot of replay for them though out of many of the flaws the games had. If those flaws didn't bother you, you had replay, if they did bother you, you didn't. D3 tried to get rid of those and succeed in some cases and it killed the game for people that liked that stuff. Though D2 forced replay from the skill system. D1 had some replay from skills being drops and that making a character play different but it was designed to played through once.

D3 was going to do the D1 thing with runes dropping. It was going to give you that for the replay through the same areas by making the same class play differently each play through. But they scrapped that because people were complaining they wanted to be able to plan like they could in D2. So they took a game that was designed to only be played through to the end of Hell, like D1 kinda was, and then slapped the modified planned skill system from D2 on it, but without the forced replay of having to rebuild the toon. Then they slapped an untested difficulty on the end to try and give people something to do with the cool gear they were getting.

I think D3 would have been a better game with skill runes dropping and ending at kill Diablo in Hell. This is the game they designed, but they listened to people and tried to add other systems that don't quite do what they want them too. But I still like the game a lot for what it is, but it does eliminate all the options that let people play D1 and D2 for the games they weren't supposed to be. Blizzard though has always tried to quash those options via patches, in all their games. They just weren't always as successful in the past.

So I agree that D3 has problems, but I think your original post actually failed to hit on what they really are.