10-19-2006, 06:45 PM
Quote:I was struck again by the replayability and enjoyability factor of DII
What? Wherein lies the replayability? Building wealth? It certainly isn't in playing the game (bots exist), leveling to 99 (after the initial rush of the competitive coffee junkies, virtually nobody bothers without aforementioned bots), or "discovering" new stuff, regardless of how random the maps and spawns may be. I find myself (and a lot of other people) playing increasingly weird variants just to keep the game interesting. And I'm pretty sure that if replayability exists only because we force it to, it can exist on another game which allegedly has MORE item mods/skill components.
even if it is perhaps a bit of a cotton-candy version of DI
Sounds about right, but then, why is the Diablo I forum so dead?
a) Random environments
This is the most crucial difference, I think. Playing through epic TQ with exactly the same maps, quests etc. (the addition of one or two new bosses in epic hardly counts) as normal became stultifying even on my second time through the game. Doing it again on legendary difficulty would seem almost inconceivable.
Erm...I point to maphack here. Though I (and I expect all of you) avoid it like the plague, the sheer number of people that do not suggests something about the random nature of the spawns. Perhaps we're taking a bad sample there, but don't tell me you haven't been frustrated running through the jungles of act three and always grabbing the wrong path (before you learned to see the patterns). Indeed, many players who consider themselves legitimate often elect to skip this entire portion of the game. Now I could be wrong, and perhaps we all really enjoy the random factor, and these maphackers only use it to spot items and far-away enemies, but I've always been a fan of Ockham's Razor.
I really don't understand your points about hacks and bots. That's an indictment of a human tendency to make things as easy as possible even at the cost of long term benefits, rather than of game randomization. While Blizzard does have a lot of responsibility for the vast scope of this behavior in D2, the problems lie mostly in their security architecture and enforcement of their own EULA.
Quote:even if it is perhaps a bit of a cotton-candy version of DI
Sounds about right, but then, why is the Diablo I forum so dead?
You'll note an even greater lack of activity in the LL TQ forum, despite that game being a few years more recent.
Silly reply, I know, but only proportionally to the initial comment. Seriously, was that intended to support a conclusion?