Quote:My computer probably doesnot play titanquest...but apparantly I don't miss much. At the moment I play a bit of warcraft3 and still some D2.
A question I have is why do many of you find D1 better than D2? I played it once, and after I finished I never looked at it again. Much less playability, no life bars on the monsters, lot less options. Or am I missing something?. I know it is a matter of taste but what do you like about D1?
There are numerous reasons, most of which are readily apparent if you look at the personality of the poster.
-The game presents a degree of strategy beyond "find good gear, put it on, and click on things", which is essentially what Diablo II boils down to. Diablo II is about slaughter. Diablo I is about survival, until you hit the high levels.
-Nostalgia. Can't argue with this one.
-Better soundtrack (arguable (but not really))
-More in common with other players--people who (still) play Diablo I tend to be older and calmer, not the adrenaline-pumped guys that you see ruining Diablo II. Now that it has lost popularity, there is less "griefing".
-The setting is infinitely better. Diablo I is eerie. You're in an abandoned church, alone in the dark, not sure whether you're the hunter or the hunted. Diablo II involves running around in broad daylight cracking saturday morning cartoons on the head with a stick. This is a tremendous draw to some people.
-The game isn't based exclusively on items. In fact, most of the variants played are about limiting items while still surviving, and are quite doable. This essentially translates to a good player still able to best a bad player, either head-to-head or in terms of killing monsters, without spending years of his life and gallons of coffee hunting for something useful. I'll take the naked mage over the blinged-out tank into my squad any day.
-Despite the 1996 graphics, the game still looks GOOD. And it doesn't look tacky the way just about everything Blizzard's done since Starcraft does.
-PLING!
Surely that is enough, but I'm willing to bet people will chime in with more if you want it. I'm also not sure where you get replayability out of Diablo II but can't even see that of Diablo I. Diablo II is essentially the same game, but with (in my opinion) several steps taken in the wrong direction.
Quote:The "degree of chance" is exactly what's rigged. Because there IS no "random chance" when it gets down to that guess as to which of those 2 squares has the mine, and there's no clues from surrounding squares. (If you've played the game at all, you know this happens a lot.) Whichever square you choose to clear, that's the mine - game over. If that isn't rigged, I don't know what is.
Ye gods! A game that I can't win every time!
Quote:As to the whole "vast majority" bit: If you can't win, there's no point in playing. End of both the discussion and the popularity of the game in question.
This is exactly what we, the power gamers, are after. You do whatever you want to the first three or four difficulties, or 90% of the explorable area, but you give us that zone, or Far Beyond Hell mode, or whatever you want, so long as it's there. We don't want the tacky, overpowered items, because those hurt both the principle of the area (being rigged against the player) and draw the kind of people we don't really want to be gaming with.
Diablo II is sharply lacking in this area, unless one feels the urge to create challenges out of nothing (See: Bonesnap Necromancer, Hardcore Ladder, season 1). Blizzard has attempted to add some areas that are "hard", but they don't represent a real challenge. Diablo II is ultimately about damage taken to life ratios. If you do more damage than your enemies have life before they can do the same to you, they win. Except it's stacked in your favor with large purple bottles. Check out some other games, where there's more than brute strength involved. It IS possible to use strategy to compensate for force in Diablo II, but the default is the fist. There is no real reason to flee, and if there is, it represents no real change in tactics, as you can outrun everything but Moon Lords.
So it wasn't designed that way, you say. It's not meant to be strategically appealing. That's fine, for the first 95% of the game, but I want my Uber Tristram, but for everything, with random spawns, mode. I'm convinced that the majority of Battle.net would not be able to defeat those three if they didn't spawn exactly the same way each time. You don't even have to go as far as rigging it for the monsters. Just don't stack it for the players. Maybe sometimes you should go down there and they have minions who do nothing but cast level 50 Meteors, or minions that all explode like Undead Stygian Dolls, or they have Might, Concentration, Fanaticism. Conviction may well be the best aura in the game, but it shouldn't be the only one.
With all of the random seeds in Diablo II, they're not used where it really counts.
I'm so bad with the rambling of late. Especially on this topic.
--me
Edit: I suck at life...I mean the quote function.