f13.net

"Diablo 3 director retires from games industry" (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-06-diablo-3-director-leaves-games-industry-after-17-years).

 :grin:

I, for one, look forward to the future novels written by the man responsible for Diablo 3's plot.

Fucked up a big IP until it was rescued after he was moved off the project, worked on a project so bad it was scrapped, and helped make by far the worst WoW expansion. What a resume. If this is the guy behind Diablo 3's "plot" I don't have high hopes for his writing career.

The only positive thing I can say about him is "he sure looks like the guy that would produce what was produced."

I'd agree with most of that except I rate Cataclysm as the worst thing to happen to WoW and then it's a toss-up between MoP and WoD.

I hope the folks in charge of Reaper of Souls get to build D4 from the ground up. Much like the guys who unfucked Civ V.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Peter Principle.

Diablo III, at least, wasn't ruined beyond repair. It's a great game now.

If this guy had a significant role in Warlords of Draenor, then I agree. Fuck that loser.

Now fire Metzen and Blizzard might actually turn this ship of fools around and stop looking like the red-headed stepchild of ATVI.

Doesn't matter what they look like with the money they make. I just wish their games had soul on the same level and polish and intuitiveness.

Didn't want to make a new thread because this won't be applicable for 7-10 years, but looks like Blizzard is hiring a game director for a new Diablo project:

http://diablo.blizzpro.com/2016/06/29/unannounced-diablo-project-hiring-game-director/

Diablo 4 in 2035, then.

Optimist!

And it'll be awful until the first expansion.

I heard about Diablo 3's development starting in, I believe, October 2004. So, I guess it took them nearly a decade. So, yeah, Diablo 4 in ~2025 would be a fair estimate.

Still a closer release date than Half-Life 3.

I never thought Half Life would turn into the new Duke Nukem joke.  But here we are.

D3 came out around 4 years after the AVTI merger, so maybe they'll accelerate it slightly to get another product out there on the market. I'd say 2022, 10 years after the last release.

I just wonder what you could even do in Diablo 4... Other then another expansion I feel that story is kind of over.

Would be cool to do more in that "world" I guess... even if it is pretty bland.

I kinda feel like Diablo 3 was "that world" because the story is just horseshit to get to adventure mode, which is the world.

They really need to just make a diablo MMOG and stop dicking around.

World of Diablo!

Diablo 3 pretty much is Diablo MMO already. The second they start dicking around with "MMO" features, the game is going to go to crap. Remember how great the AH worked out the first time?

I have no interest in living in a world where 100 adventures are packed into a tiny Tristram town square saying "LF2M Baal Run, must have key".

The AH would have been fine if they understood the game economy. They didn't at all. Instead they created a scenario where they had almost no gold sinks, and an insane amount of drops. They also should have increased the AH cut for lower tier items, and now that they have added more gold sinks it would likely work better. Also the real money AH fucked things up too.

But more than that, I think they need to take Diablo into the 3D world beyond just the top-down game. You can still have it be the clickfest it is now with a few abilities, and some specializations, and shift the focus. It maps perfectly to small team grouping for dungeon running. It has the kind of scaling where you can work that into levels (something MMOs have struggled with for a while when it came to scaling fights).

3D or not isn't a deal breaker to me, just so much as maintaining the general moment to moment gameplay of Diablo. Not that any of the following is inherent to MMOs, but I don't want to slow down for looting, or worry about enemy density being low because they need to design zones/quests a certain way, etc.

How do people actually imagine a Diablo MMO working? Mostly just interested in the conversation here - I'm definitely willing to be convinced its a great idea.

I already played that game, and its sequel.  They were amazing.

I disagree. The very essence of a Diablo game is ruined by an AH. Because with an AH every drop you get immediately just becomes gold because there will always be better items on the AH than the one you just looted. The entire random aspect of the loot system is nullified when you have access to *all the drops* of 1000s of people.

And turning it into a 3D MMO, similarly, would just strip the franchise of all it's distinguishing features.

We had the discussion back when Diablo 3 was new. As I recall I was one of the few people who did a lot of trading in the original, but that is one of the reasons the AH didn't bother me too much. On the other hand, the fact that everything except high end items were basically worthless was a little disappointing. Bartering took time and effort, and it wasn't always obvious how easy it would be find a perfectly rolled whatever. I think forcing people to barter in this day and age would annoy people, but the AH did something potentially worse.  So we've ended up where we are now, where you basically just can't trade at all. I don't love that about the game right now, but at least it allowed them to change the way drops work to make running dungeons a lot more fun.

There is an in between though.  The auction house was extremely non-personal and I think they can be successful not having an auction house but also only allow in person trading.  Sure you will end up with external auction house websites but it won't contain every piece of incremental garbage that you collect.  That combined with the extra effort needed to actually facilitate the trade means that it will be restricted to higher end/more costly equipment while also facilitating the community aspect of trading.

Would be nice if they cherry pick the best elements from CoX, Warhammer, Guild Wars 2, Torchlight maybe even Hellgate.  Basically there is an "adventure" mode that randomly stitches together X-blue/X-yellow/purple mobs to overcome - like CoX missions, and/or Torchlight treasure maps (that opened a succession of portal to maps that you had to conquer).

They need to let creativity back into equipment choices.  I dislike how set items have become the be all, end all of equipment.  I also want a degree of crafting with the equipment itself.  I'd like to be able to remove specific abilities from an item and add them to another item (as gems, or runes, or what have you).  So maybe there are abilities that are intrinsic to an item (not removable), but items also have a number of runes that you can swap out with runes you've harvested from another item.

This is basically what ruins the game completely for me.  You are your set items, that's your build, that's the character you are playing.  It's incredibly lame, I want to make a build and collect items around it, not have the items dictate the build i must use.

I think the current way set items work was in direct response to players wanting their items to define them more - especially since we no longer have set builds and can respec freely in Diablo 3 (when compared to Diablo 2).

Prior to set items being buffed in this fashion everyone was just maxing primary stat, crit chance, crit damage on every item and the only difference between uniques and anything else was that they rolled better stats, with a few things being different.

Now the uniques you use (or cube) have effects that actually do make a difference in your build - but that build is definitely defined by set items.

I'm not sure they can solve this problem when you can respec freely, and the other option is locking people into skillpoints again, which people didn't like apparently.  When you can respec at will you can't really have characters defined by their skills/build - so what's left? Defined by the gear itself.

Gear defining the build is fine by me since the entire purpose of the game is to collect items.

If they made a Diablo ARPG, something like Diablo Souls, I could get on board with that.

Heh.  The term ARPG came about when Diablo originally arrived.  Action RPG?  Or is Dark Souls something else?  Awesome RPG?

Eh, I'd rather the next iteration just be a new setting/classes with better graphics and maybe a better physics model/more destructible terrain. The system they've arrived at with D3 works for me rather well. Sure it can still be refined, but they need to not go back to the drawing board. It took a long time to unfuck what they came up with for vanilla. 

So basically, I just want new shit to stare at while I blow up tons of mobs and collect loot. We could go with Future-Tristram or Wild West Tristram or Samurai Tristram.  Could always go to one of the areas mentioned in the the lore I don't pay any attention to.

Yes please.  I'd love a Wild West Diablo with guns, horses, and shit.

I'm mostly with Rasix here. If they'd keep releasing new acts/zones/whatever every so often, I'd be pretty happy.

One of the things that WoW did well with its expansions was make me feel like I was going somewhere new. Reaper of Souls is a great expansion for a variety of reasons, but Act 5 didn't really have much gravitas for me and I haven't really spent much time there the way, for example, I spent time in Shattrath when the WoW expansion came out, then Dalaran, and well you get the idea.  I can't even remember what the town in act 5 is called off hand.

I agree entirely. There's other games for other things. Don't turn my Diablo into something not Diablo.

Yeah, I played Wild West Diablo already as well, it was just set on another planet.

What the hell games are you talking about Yegolev?

I have no idea either, he's the rambling man in the corner making no sense!

Truly the only rule is "Diablo never dies," for any story, so what happens in D4 is just a rehash if D2 with Tyrael in the Deckard Cain role.

By the time a D4 comes out, people will be back in love with "hardmode" games where "choices matter" and respecs will be removed.

As for a Diablo MMO: Why ruin a good thing? D3 is as close to an MMO as it needs to be. You want to build a house in New Tristram? Do grindy ! quests? Kill the same boss over and over and over hoping for a good drop? Have a billion shitty crafting items you need to grind through to make the good ones? Turn Crusaders into a "Healing class" that has to spam auras alongside the Witch Doctor to keep the Barbarian's health up while the Wizard, Monk and DH do all the damage?

The only thing you can really add is hubs or larger groups without turning it into World of Diablo, which would be terrible. Strip the bullshit timesinks out of MMOs and you've pretty much got D3 as it exists, lacking only 'housing.'


Borderlands 1 & 2

No idea about the western one, though.

The free respecs at any time does feel like cheating to me. I would rather there be some conditional price as a gold sink.

No

Bad monkey.

Traditionally when Blizzard has resorted to making their games less accessible for the reasons of design <insert excuse here, likely "purity">, it hasn't turned out well. Scaling back QoL improvements is universally dumb.

(http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/borderlands/images/b/b0/Nish2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141018172242)

I think that is my role here on the forums.

Boy, that didn't help, are you talking about Seed?

That's Borderlands Pre Sequel. Fun, but the gravity effects are annoying as fuck.

Oh, yeah, I lasted 4 hours in that shit.

I have been begging for a decent PC Wild West game for longer than this site has existed. Shit, I still fire up Six Gun Shootout every couple of years for grins. Count me in.

Still waiting patiently for a Deadlands MMO.

I'm still waiting for a PC version of this.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/35/BootHill.jpg/230px-BootHill.jpg)

Gunslinger Call of Juarez was a decent time, FPS though.

I just want more Diablo.  I fucking love Diablo.

Borderlands was western enough for me all through the run.  Set it on Earth in 1885 and it's a western.

The point is the loot anyway.  Is the setting relevant?  A little, I guess.  Less so than loot and the first-person perspective, which is what started me on this nonsensical string of posts.

Adria?

Gold Sinks Matter.

I might be doing it wrong, but my toon is swimming in gold. It's even easier now that my little pet will run to all corners of the screen to gather it.

They're going to have to make respecs so expensive that they cause complaints, or else not bother.

If they really want to gold sink, they should add something that's both expensive and desirable. Making us pay for something that's currently free is the kind of you're-having-fun-wrong thinking that I expect from the WoW team.

Empowered rifts are a pretty decent use of money. Anyhow, I think they're tweaking gold gain for this patch/season.

First 3 parts of an interesting interview with Jay.

"What does a game director do"
http://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/diablo-3-post-mortem-jay-wilson-pt1

Why they made an auction house
http://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/diablo-3-post-mortem-jay-wilson-part-two

Why they picked the classes they picked
http://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/diablo-3-post-mortem-jay-wilson-part-3

Edit Part 4 (Why there is no PvP, talismans and town killing):
http://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/diablo-3-post-mortem-with-jay-wilson-part-four

so, uh, cliff notes?

"Even though I was the Game Director ideas came from everybody and decisions were made as a group and, uh, really it wasn't my fault. Oh and the AH was so people didn't have to resort to dodgy 3rd party sites to trade stuff. That is all."

yay blizzard

Not to cliché here, but fuck that guy.