Diablo III Wild Speculation and Rumor Mongering Abounds

[birdsguts]

Um.  Let me float something.  I kind of DIG going back to town to sell shit.  The thing is, as so often with life, is a question of balance.  And that's going to be different for everyone.  I don't dig town portaling every 5 1/2 minutes.  But every 30 minutes or so of hard dungeoning maybe feels right.  It's a nice change of pace.  There's a satisfaction involved with selling your spoils and realizing the fruits of your labors.  Of identifying all those tasty magic items.  Of girding yourself once more for battle via repairs, food, new equipment, and whatever else you need depending on the game you're playing.  

Riiiight but. Provided they don't entirely remove town portals (or a similar system), you can just handle that yourself...
You don't have to only go back when the bags are full, just take a break when you feel like it.
Why hardcode in something that people can just manage themselves?
Screw wasting time balancing "trips to the fridge".
Just make sure the inventory space is sufficient.

edit: forgot the "thesis"

[Ingmar]

I'm with Mal and Duse, I think the built-in breaks are helpful/desirable, they just need to be spaced out a little more than they were in D2.

[Malakili]

Um.  Let me float something.  I kind of DIG going back to town to sell shit.  The thing is, as so often with life, is a question of balance.  And that's going to be different for everyone.  I don't dig town portaling every 5 1/2 minutes.  But every 30 minutes or so of hard dungeoning maybe feels right.  It's a nice change of pace.  There's a satisfaction involved with selling your spoils and realizing the fruits of your labors.  Of identifying all those tasty magic items.  Of girding yourself once more for battle via repairs, food, new equipment, and whatever else you need depending on the game you're playing.  

Riiiight but. Provided they don't entirely remove town portals (or a similar system), you can just handle that yourself...
You don't have to only go back when the bags are full, just take a break when you feel like it.
Why hardcode in something that people can just manage themselves.
Screw wasting time balancing "trips to the fridge".

Leaving the pacing to the player is a sure fire way to make a crap game though.  Pacing is incredibly important.  Also, I think they ARE removing town portals.

[Shrike]

I've heard the town portal is DoA.

Pacing...dunno. This sort of depended on how your character was set up. About the time I quit playing, my amazons of the moment had maybe 6-9 open spaces in their inventories. The rest was ammo and trinket-thingies. If it wasn't gold or a good socketed item, it didn't get picked up. Now if you keep the stupid shit out of inventory, then, yeah, pace it out. I guess.

Back in the Amazon Basin days, the group would go until everyone was full up. Then we'd hit town, dump anything that looked remotely desirable, and head back down to wherever. Repeat until run was done. Then everyone would repair to town and poke at the goodies to see if there was something there you might want. And shoot the shit. Then vendor the remainder and figure out what to do next. Worked well, but there were no outsiders in these groups.

[Yegolev]

No TP = item grinder.  Makes sense.

[waffel]

The thing about removing TPs is that I see Blizzard railroading more because of it.

Say you're playing with a few friends, or you join a friends game. Using D2 as an example, lets say your friend says "Hey, can you help me kill Nihlathak?"

So you run to the waypoint in town, find the closest one in the game world, port in and kill monsters and make your way down to Nihlathak and kill him. In D2, you'd just pop open a portal and port out. OR, you'd run down there yourself and open a portal for your buddy. Without TPs, the game would require you to both run down there, kill everything, kill Nihlathak, and then run all the way back to the waypoint. I doubt Blizzard wants that kind of backtracking. To solve this, I see them railroading all quests so you run into them during battles and/or they're near waypoints and not off the path.

They effectively remove a bigger open world and somewhat discourage exploring and/or 'making your own content' types of things.

[Ingmar]

From what I've played at the last two Blizzcons the zones didn't seem to be any smaller at all, but they do keep redesigning it all the time so who knows for sure, I guess.

[birdsguts]

Oh wow no TPs.
Sorry, guess I missed that.
That was the entire thing my "pacing" comment hinged on.

Now I'm interested to know how they actually plan on laying out the maps.
I need to go read up a bit more I obviously bypassed some information somewhere.

I actually really enjoyed being able to portal people to places and rush.... but I'm always open for something new.... if it feels good anyway.

[dusematic]

Don't worry I think the no TP thing is new.  I mean, I usually wait to allocate skill points and such for when I have a moment to really analyze shit back in town and don't have to worry about a gremlin sneaking up on me or something.  As someone mentioned, the town was where you'd really have a chance to talk with your buddies.


For a larger point, this is also one of the many reasons I'm out on JRPG's these days.  The town used to be sort of like an oasis or a "safe dungeon."  You'd be excited to find another one.  It meant more things to explore, more information, more weapons, armor, and spells.  In a lot of games there'd be cool items hidden around that you could find.  


After the initial run through, it switched over to more of an oasis vibe.  After you had exhausted your strength, you'd return to town and hit the inn and replenish any consumables.  Maybe reconfigure your party/equipment.  And I think you can remove the town to streamline the game.  Towns aren't strictly necessary.  But I think it just all comes down to pacing.  Towns feel  right.  And that brief moment of respite where you can sort of take stock of your situation allows you to sort of admire the progression of your character(s).

[Mosesandstick]

No TPing kinda sucks. What happened to getting a Sorc to run your newb character through everything.

[dusematic]

They got rid of combat exploits surrounding TP but added a slew of logistical problems.

[Typhon]

I bet they add it back, but limit it's use to "portal stones", so they can control were you TP to/from.

[Mosesandstick]

Yeah, was it 1.10 or 1.11 that limited things? Even then, you could get a character to have beaten the Hell Ancients by ~ 40/50? No more level 10s in the cow level... 

[Malakili]

I bet they add it back, but limit it's use to "portal stones", so they can control were you TP to/from.

I could deal with that, but it seems like a clunky answer to the problem.  I mean, I can see wanting to streamline potion chugging a bit, but I never really felt like Town Portals were ruining the game for me.  In fact, in created some pretty tense moments when you would try to get a TP up and get the hell out of dodge.  Ah well, we'll have to see what they come up with before being a total downer about it, but the town portal feels very much a part of the genre to me.

[Typhon]

Was more wishful thinking on my part because, like you, I don't want to see it go.  I do realize that it's cheesy that players pop a TP prior to engaging with a tough boss so that they can cheese him down.

How do you balance that as a dev?  Do you make the bosses harder, to compensate for the TP cheese that you know most of your players will be using?  If you don't, how do you create a tense boss battle?

I guess you could say that bosses (and maybe named mobs) are able to interrupt the ability to town portal, so once you engage you cannot flee until either it's dead or you are.

Or you could make it so that the TP was treated like a pet, and could be destroyed.

Whatever they do, I hope they don't get rid of them entirely.  The journey out is fun, the journey back... no so much.

[Malakili]

How do you balance that as a dev?  Do you make the bosses harder, to compensate for the TP cheese that you know most of your players will be using?  If you don't, how do you create a tense boss battle?

I think its the wrong question to be asking.  You shouldn't really be thinking about balancing particular fights of a boss in a Diablo-esque game, you should be thinking about balancing that boss over say 10 or 50 runs.  I think the balance between game and meta game in Diablo 2 was just about perfectly struck, and I hope they manage to hit the nail on the head in a similar manner in D3

[Kail]

Was more wishful thinking on my part because, like you, I don't want to see it go.  I do realize that it's cheesy that players pop a TP prior to engaging with a tough boss so that they can cheese him down.

That was kind of necessary, IMO.  I played a necromancer specced heavily into skeletons, and if there was some way for him to beat bosses that didn't revolve around cheesing town portals, I never discovered it.

I always thought it was a fairly reasonable solution, given how gimpy some builds were and the lack of a respec option.  You may not be able to blow through a boss in one run, but you also won't have to delete your character when you get to act IV and simply cannot get past Diablo at all.

I don't know much about the respec option in Diablo 3, but removing the ability to TP back and forth puts a lot more pressure on balance, so that every build can be viable in every part of the game.

[Rendakor]

Was more wishful thinking on my part because, like you, I don't want to see it go.  I do realize that it's cheesy that players pop a TP prior to engaging with a tough boss so that they can cheese him down.

That was kind of necessary, IMO.  I played a necromancer specced heavily into skeletons, and if there was some way for him to beat bosses that didn't revolve around cheesing town portals, I never discovered it.

I always thought it was a fairly reasonable solution, given how gimpy some builds were and the lack of a respec option.  You may not be able to blow through a boss in one run, but you also won't have to delete your character when you get to act IV and simply cannot get past Diablo at all.

I don't know much about the respec option in Diablo 3, but removing the ability to TP back and forth puts a lot more pressure on balance, so that every build can be viable in every part of the game.

This. My first playthrough of the D2 I was so bad at it, that if I couldn't have TP cheesed bosses down, I never would've made it past Act 1 without rerolling. Hell, I killed Duriel using a sword that put a never-ending DoT on him; he killed me and I went to grind a few more levels, then after about 10 minutes I got a 'Quest Complete' message. 

[ezrast]

a sword that put a never-ending DoT on him

what

fake edit: oh, are you referring to the emerald-stacking cheese? Or is there some way to actually deal infinite damage in one hit?

[Rendakor]

This is the sword I had been using; early in the game it did not have a duration.

[Typhon]

How do you balance that as a dev?  Do you make the bosses harder, to compensate for the TP cheese that you know most of your players will be using?  If you don't, how do you create a tense boss battle?

I think its the wrong question to be asking.  You shouldn't really be thinking about balancing particular fights of a boss in a Diablo-esque game, you should be thinking about balancing that boss over say 10 or 50 runs.  I think the balance between game and meta game in Diablo 2 was just about perfectly struck, and I hope they manage to hit the nail on the head in a similar manner in D3

At anything beyond normal level, I agree (i.e. hard or hell).  At normal level you don't want any particular boss to be so tough (for the weakest character against that boss) that people rage quit your game.  And that applies to the first run-through, not the 50th.

[Ingmar]

Yeah it is pretty imperative that normal difficulty be accessible. The segment of players that you need to make it accesible for for the most part won't even try to move on to nightmare/hell so you can go nuts there.

[Shrike]

Yeah it is pretty imperative that normal difficulty be accessible. The segment of players that you need to make it accesible for for the most part won't even try to move on to nightmare/hell so you can go nuts there.

This is pretty much now Diablo and D2 were balanced. It worked well, though the 1.07 revamp for LoD put a lot of characters on the skids in both NM and particularly hell difficulties. I know a couple of mine never really did fully recover from that. Too advanced and too many things got nerfed/changed.

I'd expect D3 to be about the same as D2 in this regard. Stupid easy normal diff, kinda nasty in NM, and really ugly in hell diff. Actually, I'm counting on this. 

[Malakili]

How do you balance that as a dev?  Do you make the bosses harder, to compensate for the TP cheese that you know most of your players will be using?  If you don't, how do you create a tense boss battle?

I think its the wrong question to be asking.  You shouldn't really be thinking about balancing particular fights of a boss in a Diablo-esque game, you should be thinking about balancing that boss over say 10 or 50 runs.  I think the balance between game and meta game in Diablo 2 was just about perfectly struck, and I hope they manage to hit the nail on the head in a similar manner in D3

At anything beyond normal level, I agree (i.e. hard or hell).  At normal level you don't want any particular boss to be so tough (for the weakest character against that boss) that people rage quit your game.  And that applies to the first run-through, not the 50th.

I just kind of assumed normal would be easy peasy to be honest and was talking about "end game" or at least, the phase of the game when boss running for loot becomes a viable option, nightmare mephisto -ish for D2 I suppose.  Whatever the equivalent of that is and beyond is what matters to me.  I kind of just assume normal is easy and isn't really even part of the game to my mind. 

[birdsguts]

Which is why no TPs is slightly sad. Means you actually have to play through Normal now instead of just rushing to NM. *Weeeeeeping*

[dusematic]

huh? 

[birdsguts]

huh? 

Nothing, nevermind... I just only used to play MP with friends and we'd rush each other. I tried to spend as little time in "Normal" as possible.
Just bemoaning the loss of nothing for no reason.

[Mosesandstick]

Standard way of levelling a character up for most of LOD was to get a sorc to party with you, and to kill every single boss from Act 1 Normal to Act 5 Hell. Then as a completely inappropriately levelled character, join a hell cow game, party up (this was standard so nobody had issues forming a party with the level 15 barbarian) and you'll gain a retarded amount of levels. With a bit of experience you'd get a character to over Level 80 in a day.

[Malakili]

Standard way of levelling a character up for most of LOD was to get a sorc to party with you, and to kill every single boss from Act 1 Normal to Act 5 Hell. Then as a completely inappropriately levelled character, join a hell cow game, party up (this was standard so nobody had issues forming a party with the level 15 barbarian) and you'll gain a retarded amount of levels. With a bit of experience you'd get a character to over Level 80 in a day.

For some reason I really liked it working that way, though I have a feeling we won't be seeing anything similar in D3.   I liked that you could get a character to a real high level fast if you wanted to, and I like that no one minded if you ran a level 15 character with your in Hell cows and gained 40 levels in an hour.   Its sort of the anti-WoW, now that I think about it.  End game was easy to get to, you could farm for decent gear without being max level (you could actually never hit max level if you didn't feel like it).  I liked that building characters and collecting the loot for that build was point in itself, rather than "oh I need this loot, so I can go kill the next boss which has arbitrarily more hit points than anything in this raid instance."

I guess to summarize, keep WoW out of my Diablo as much as possible.

edit: I'll play d3 regardless of course, but Torchlight 2 is looking better all the time.

[birdsguts]

Exactly ...AND on top of all that, if you were in the mood you could fire up a Hardcore character and have some fun taking forever to get to cap but doing it flawlessly.
It was a really cool system.

Still... change is good. Just hope it's good change.

[Yegolev]

So, would D3 suck or rock if you could make a new character at whatever personal max level you had already achieved?  Say I got to lv80 the hard way and wanted to roll up a new character at lv80.  Minus the gear, but to me the actual game is collecting gear.

[Sjofn]

I wouldn't care if it existed or not, personally. I prefer the act of leveling to loot collection, though, so I wouldn't use it. I mean duh, of course I want loots, it's Diablo, but I prefer it to be a happy side effect of my leveling rather than the only reason I'm playing.


EDIT: Bear in mind too that I would almost certainly not play the hardest setting or feel bad about ignoring that as hard as I can as well. So I am like. The worst possible person to answer you. I don't even know why I did! 

[K9]

As someone who will probably play this almost entirely single-player, the levelling, the new skills and abilities, and the item loot is the game for me. Unlike WoW, where endgame is the game for me, in Diablo 3 I'm much more into the levelling side of the game.

[Mosesandstick]

I've already kinda stated what I want from the game. I'm looking forward to the gameplay and the killing (with friends). The only way I imagine doing any sort of 'end-game' is PVP.

[Musashi]

So, would D3 suck or rock if you could make a new character at whatever personal max level you had already achieved?  Say I got to lv80 the hard way and wanted to roll up a new character at lv80.  Minus the gear, but to me the actual game is collecting gear.

Do not.  No.  You can't take away ding grats.  This is crazy talk.  What kind of monster are you?  It's bad enough you're getting respecs.  God damn heathens.