My opinion on difficulty.

[Professor Frink]

Most people play d2 as a farm game. In multiplayer, that's certainly the case. You do exp runs, etc, get better gear, make twinks, etc. Ultimately, the game loses the higher purpose and becomes a simple "gain level"/"get item" program.

The 'higher purpose' is to defeat baal in hell difficulty, one time, to get your title and complete the game.

This is mostly how i treat the game; except it is rare for me to beat hell baal (i've done it exactly once), particularly since I often play hardcore and often play in permanent parties where one character dying probably means the survivors won't be played again. The only time I do the item/exp runs is when a character is having difficulty proceeding due to being far too low level or needing a certain item (i.e. a venom-bow assassin needing a bow of correct type and ilvl to be socket-quested and a small pile of emeralds).

If you look at diablo 2 /players 1 like an actual epic fantasy game (don't laugh), then spending 20 hours to clear each act on hell difficulty makes sense. You're bludgeoning through the forces of evil, slowly, but surely clearing a path towards your ultimate goal.

So it takes 5 hours to clear the worldstone keep. That sounds fair to me, it is afterall the final area of the game.


The problem with this, of course, is that there's no way to save game state. Waypoints are really halfassed. I mean, really halfassed. If you go back to a previous act while playing single player, but in a new game... you can redo the entire act. Rekill all the bosses. Even the big bad boss you just killed in the last play session. Danger, walls of the virtual world crumbling.

I suppose the save system requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. I always found that skinny sorceress's ability to carry around a few full suits of plate mail but not being able to wear them a little incredible as well...

Even a (great, imho) game that saves global world-state like Fallout 2 lets you repeat "random encounters" as needed to get exp and items. A fixed number of "bosses" that can only be killed once and an infinite supply of faceless goons to bump into makes no more sense to me, roleplay-wise, than a world that reloads itself completely every time I log out. At least you have to chop through a sane number of minions to get at the big guy, instead of the "if there's hundreds, thousands or more enclave goons patrolling the wasteland, why are there only a few dozen when you attack their outpost? Shouldn't they call them back for help?" issue.

A game that didn't give you an infinite supply of profitable opponents to face through some mechanism would require that the total world population be "balanced" for a certain style of play, which would make less efficent variants much less viable and hurt varieity and replayability.

It would be more realistic, but I fall pretty firmly in the "playability over realism" camp.

And back to the 'virtual walls collapsing' train of thought. Does anybody else feel ridiculous changing difficulty levels on the fly while playing single player? Hm, 1 player is too easy, let's turn on 4 players. Wow, this section is hard, let's set it back to 1. Holy crap, this new skill kills everything in one hit even in 4 players, let's ramp it up to 8!

Yes, the secret word you say to nobody in particular that suddenly gives the monsters more hp, experience, and loot is kind of silly. I like how it works, if it had been in the game since day 1 perhaps they could have found a way to integrate it into the gameplay better. (belt of raw steaks: attracts stronger monsters +25%)

The ability to set /players in single player is nice in that you can increase the challenge for strong characters, or simply level faster. But, consider this. Using even /players 4, especially /players 8, a character can reach level 25 in act 2 easily. In classic diablo, I've finished act 4 with characters lower level than that. You're not supposed to have fire wall when you kill andariel. You're not supposed to frenzy duriel to death. The council was not supposed to have to contend with Lightning fury.

Virtual walls caving in.

You don't have to use players n to get high-level in low acts, just avoid actually doing the quests and hang out in the wilds killing small furry creatures over and over. Will it unbalance the game? sure. Should you feel like a dork for needing to be level 30 with leet itams to kill normal andariel? probably. Unless you're playing an intentionally underpowered variant or the like where that behavior might be normal or necessary. Aside from the townspeople getting irked by your cowardace, that doesn't seem like a breaking roleplay at all though.

So, I guess what I'm saying is... the game tried to make multi and single player interchangable, and it failed miserably. Single player should have had a persitant world with a fixed difficulty level and unlimited storage space. Good gear should be several times more common than it is now.

Multiplayer should be as it is now, only balanced for the very best equipped characters or for parties. You should have difficulty in late nightmare and hell difficulty if you are playing multiplayer without multiple players.

And if you don't like that... why are you playing the game? When you throw the absolute best gear on a character and say "See how well this build works? I can do anything and it's trivial", you miss the point...

I guess I don't really like single player d2, so I don't play it, so much as I play multiplayer alone, with the "unlimited storage space" of mules and the accumulation of good items as a way of unlocking increasingly challenging (or sometimes merely different) builds and playstyles. Some characters play well untwinked, some need a dozen previous characters worth of godly loot bestowed on them to get anywhere. That sort of varieity is what I look for in a game; if d2 forced me to play "the way it was meant to be played" I probably wouldn't.

-- frink