Diablo III Wild Speculation and Rumor Mongering Abounds

[Murgos]

Balance is impossible with a class game pointless.

There, I think that's more accurate.

Edit:  Let me put it this way.  A game where everything is equal isn't worth playing.

[Sjofn]

Perfect balance is impossible, sure, but "balanced enough so everyone can play what appeals to them and still finish our game" IS, and it's stupid to wail that developers shouldn't even try for that, especially because of some pants-on-head-retarded reasoning like "a game where everything is equal isn't worth playing." Hell, if a game has shit that's so unequal to the point where one thing shines clearly above the rest is effectively making "everything equal" because everyone is only going to play that one thing. And lo, the game is now "not worth playing." Because who wants to be the person who picked the shit class/spec? No one.

If it can't be balanced within reason (see: isn't gimping themselves so bad they can't complete the game on a normal difficultly), it shouldn't exist.

[birdsguts]

Sounds like a good change. The "player confusion" point they made was weak but it's not the important one. Bottom line: Less occurrences of pointless stat weapon drops.

[Sheepherder]

It's not like they couldn't do that with a little bit of coding tailoring drops for the classes it's dropping for.  But that would make no sense, because if +strength stuff doesn't drop for your Witch Doctor there even being a +strength stat to not increment is useless wank.

[Murgos]

Perfect balance is impossible, sure, but "balanced enough so everyone can play what appeals to them and still finish our game" IS, and it's stupid to wail that developers shouldn't even try for that, especially because of some pants-on-head-retarded reasoning like "a game where everything is equal isn't worth playing." Hell, if a game has shit that's so unequal to the point where one thing shines clearly above the rest is effectively making "everything equal" because everyone is only going to play that one thing. And lo, the game is now "not worth playing." Because who wants to be the person who picked the shit class/spec? No one.

If it can't be balanced within reason (see: isn't gimping themselves so bad they can't complete the game on a normal difficultly), it shouldn't exist.

I disagree that this statement even resembles balance.

"Every class should be able to finish the game".

Every class could vary wildly in situational effectiveness and have some be more 'optimal' than others and yet all may still be able to finish the game so as a criteria that is not a very useable ideal.  Being able to finish the game may be necessary but it is not sufficient, i.e. a class that under no circumstances can finish the game is obviously broken.  Not unbalanced.  Balance, as generally implemented, seems more to be when all classes are reduced to being equally effective in all situations, which ultimately implies that success is meaningless because you can not, not accomplish the objective.  No risk of failure is the same as no success.

You seem to think that lack of 'balance' implies one best.  I disagree, I don't think a mechanical objective evaluation should be able to indicate relative strength at all, because if they are similar enough to be measured successfully in units of equivalence then I say they are the same thing.  If all the tank classes can all tank all the mobs equally then regardless of the pattern of button presses they are all the same.  There is no flavor there, no room for identity, no soul, no ability to achieve, no success.  Or in a single player game if all classes are equally good at clearing each dungeon and mastering each challenge and completing each objective then again, there is no mastery and no difference and no success because anyone could do it with any class.

I think lack of balance implies that people can bring their own unique strengths to a game of skill and use that synergy to achieve great things.  If there is no leverage for your personal talents to magnify then where is the achievement that YOU accomplished?

Not everyone is equal at all things and attempting to make it so that all people can do all tasks equally regardless of the decisions they make means that no one is providing anything useful.  Everyone is just a replaceable cog that when the part breaks you just pick another out of the pool, slot it in and continue on without notice.

Blech.

[Typhon]

If all the tank classes can all tank all the mobs equally then regardless of the pattern of button presses they are all the same.  There is no flavor there, no room for identity, no soul, no ability to achieve, no success. 

If there are three tank classes, one is straight up damage resistance, one uses positional control and slows and one uses stuns and health regen.  The tank that uses positional control and slows has a higher skill requirement, a higher skill ceilng, and in the hands of a skilled player is probably 20% better than any of the other tanks.   All can tank all mobs assuming they are piloted by a player with a minimum level of skill with that particular tank.

That is an example of what I would call 'balance and flavor'.

Where the conversation goes awry is 1) people have different definitions of balance 2) there are players with agenda's (or just have a low skill ceiling with a particular tank) that start the "this tank sucks!/that tank is OP" threads. 

Your definition of balance would be my definition of homogenization.  It's not my definition of balance.  f13 has had this conversation so many times I don't understand why I hit reply.  I am more broken than I thought.

[Paelos]

I don't want balance and I don't want specs. Specs give the illusion of differentiation in a game where you are different because of of your loot and level. Specs revolved in D2 around the type of damage you did or the type of weapon you wanted to use (or pvp, which I don't count). Why not just let people swap and call it a day without having to worry about that nonsense. Pick a class, gear up, and go go go. This was what Torchlight did well. It cut out the mircromanaging meta-game wanking in favor of actual game.

Balance is and always be the impossible dream of a developer for some reason I haven't grasped. Nobody gives a shit if it's balanced when the game is fun. If a necro did half the damage of a barb, but was a fun class to play, people would still play it.

[Ratman_tf]

Was anyone really confused by it in Diablo 2 though?

From what I saw from my fellow travelers, yes, they were.

Not many of my friends played D2, but enough did that the refrain I heard continuously was, "I don't want to think about math". So they'd just ask what was good--to which there usualy wasn't a simple answer--then they'd just go with whatever you told them without much further thought. This worked well in normal, OK in NM, and generally would get you roflstomped in hell diff.

I only ever made it to NM in D2, with a bit of dinking around in Hell mode, and that with a great deal of mental fortitude to stick to the game and keep playing.

[Murgos]

Your definition of balance would be my definition of homogenization.  It's not my definition of balance.  f13 has had this conversation so many times I don't understand why I hit reply.  I am more broken than I thought.

No, I think we are in agreement just that your definition of balance isn't what it's commonly defined as.  Your definition of balance is that individual skill combines with mechanics to make something better than you can achieve otherwise, so if more skill => better than consider less skill => worse.  That means that lack of skill implies that objectively you are not as good at playing the game as some one else playing some other class and that means you risk FAILURE.  To too many people risk of failure means the class is unbalanced.

So, I say, give me the unbalance.

[kildorn]

If a class is tuned so that 95% of players will fail with it, and 5% will succeed brilliantly, I think the mechanics need looking at.

Basic idea being, why waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in development work on a class that only 5% of your user base will ever be able to see/use. This is the same logic behind blizzard's move away from only releasing new 40 man raids: why waste all that dev time on something barely anyone will see. It's a game, people pay for the game.

I'd be pissy if I bought something that demanded I beat a nearly impossible achievement just to unlock half the game.

There's a point where balance discussions basically become "did we fine tune this too much" just as much as "can this ever beat the game", the goal isn't everyone be exactly the same, it's that everyone be in the same general ballpark and not wind up with a class that can stuggle just to put out enough damage to beat natural health regen, versus a class that can two shot any target in the game.

[Shrike]

One thing in D2 (and Diablo itself, but to a much lesser degree) is what difficulty you're planning on playing in. Any stupid thing you pick, spec, and/or build into can finish normal difficulty. It's easy enough that it's possible by literally auto-attacking your way through (ask any young bowazon--that's pretty much all they do until they're around 30).

When you hit NM difficulty is when you start having to pay attention and make some reasonable decisions. If you've done stupid shit with your class, you're going to start really feeling it in Act5 NM. However, at this point you've completed the game almost twice and probably have at least 50 hours in it. That's not a bad thing, really.

In hell diff, you're not really doing anything all that much different from what you've done in NM. You've got to have a very focued build and you have to know what you're doing, but it's nothing you haven't really seen before. Now building characters that could solo in 8-player hell games wasn't for everyone, but it was certainly possible. Some classes and subclasses were better at it than others, but you have to really want to do this sort of thing. Characters here can have hundreds of hours in them and you've been through the game many dozens of times farming gear and working out tactics. You could call this an endgame, but the fact is you're not really seeing anything you didn't see in NM; it's just more highly tuned. This changed some with v1.10, but we're talking changes made after something like 6 years after the game came out. Most have moved on before this particular ruleset came out.

I don't really see D3 being that much different than what we saw in the previous two games. You'll have seen the game and all it can offer by the end of NM. Hell diff is for the over-achievers that simply can't leave it alone and like incessantly fiddling with their characters. Some classes will be better at this than others--probably the classic Blizz bias to ranged and avoidance types--but it'll still be the same sort of thing we've seen before.

[Malakili]

I don't want balance and I don't want specs. Specs give the illusion of differentiation in a game where you are different because of of your loot and level. Specs revolved in D2 around the type of damage you did or the type of weapon you wanted to use (or pvp, which I don't count). Why not just let people swap and call it a day without having to worry about that nonsense. Pick a class, gear up, and go go go. This was what Torchlight did well. It cut out the mircromanaging meta-game wanking in favor of actual game.

Balance is and always be the impossible dream of a developer for some reason I haven't grasped. Nobody gives a shit if it's balanced when the game is fun. If a necro did half the damage of a barb, but was a fun class to play, people would still play it.

What does fun to play mean?  For a lot of people I bet a barb killing things twice as fast is going to be more fun.

[Typhon]

[...]Nobody gives a shit if it's balanced when the game is fun. If a necro did half the damage of a barb, but was a fun class to play, people would still play it.

This lasts right up until the moment you stop playing by yourself.  Playing the class that does 50% of the damage of the class your friend is playing gets old very quickly.  For me, all of these games are just much more fun when played with someone else.  Probably because I equate single player with a thin story told poorly through cut scenes and dialog trees. 

I agree that balance doesn't matter in a single player game.  In fact, there is more re-playability if the classes are specifically not balanced because this gives you the easy, medium and hard modes just by choosing a different class.

[Rendakor]

I don't want balance and I don't want specs. Specs give the illusion of differentiation in a game where you are different because of of your loot and level. Specs revolved in D2 around the type of damage you did or the type of weapon you wanted to use (or pvp, which I don't count). Why not just let people swap and call it a day without having to worry about that nonsense. Pick a class, gear up, and go go go. This was what Torchlight did well. It cut out the mircromanaging meta-game wanking in favor of actual game.

I'm the exact opposite. Having choice in how exactly my character plays is one of my favorite elements in RPGs. Give me MORE things that I can tweak: stat points, skill points, talent points, etc. My only complaint with the D2 system was the lack of respecs, but I'd rather be able to build a gimp character and be stuck with it than have no choice at all (see: WoW 4.0.1 talent trees).

[Paelos]

And that's fine that you want that. There's a section of players in all games that want depth, and depth means more numbers: RPGs, Strategy games, or Puzzles.

I think it's a bad design decision if you want to your game to have mass appeal or sell well. It's also my opinion that your game becomes less accessible and desirable the more number crunching and statistical decisions you force on the player. I'm not arguing against choice, but I am arguing against adding more math to your game as the choice. I think Blizzard is gunning for more than just the players of Diablo II. They are gunning for gamers who may never have played an RPG before (outside of maybe WoW), and those players simply won't put up with running spreadsheets or feeling like they've fucked up because they didn't understand the system in the beginning.

[Tebonas]

You can put that depth at top of the accessible game and everybody wins.

[Sheepherder]

Which is exactly what they're doing, by increasing the number of stats and culling ones only useful to some builds, or with arbitrary and hard to guess break points in usefulness.

[Malakili]

And that's fine that you want that. There's a section of players in all games that want depth, and depth means more numbers: RPGs, Strategy games, or Puzzles.

I think it's a bad design decision if you want to your game to have mass appeal or sell well. It's also my opinion that your game becomes less accessible and desirable the more number crunching and statistical decisions you force on the player. I'm not arguing against choice, but I am arguing against adding more math to your game as the choice. I think Blizzard is gunning for more than just the players of Diablo II. They are gunning for gamers who may never have played an RPG before (outside of maybe WoW), and those players simply won't put up with running spreadsheets or feeling like they've fucked up because they didn't understand the system in the beginning.

I'm the kind of person who is always searching for that "one" game that can be my main game for a long time, and the game just being "fun" isn't enough for that.  While I don't particularly care for literally spreadsheeting, I do like to have  fairly solid understanding of the underlying mechanics such that I can learn to make good choices about builds and gear when I am playing a game like Diablo.

I suspect the game will have enough depth though, regardless of what they do with the stat names.

[Shrike]

Which is exactly what they're doing, by increasing the number of stats and culling ones only useful to some builds, or with arbitrary and hard to guess break points in usefulness.

Heh. This would weigh pretty heavily on improved attack speed mods then. Amazons had massive graphs and tables dealing with IAS interactions with their talents. Zons are no more, but this stat was the cause of much wailing and gnashing of teeth in D2.

I'm so looking forward to this game, but the first couple of months are going to be a real trial while everyone figures out what does what in what circumstances. They can talk simplification all they want, but previous experience suggests a lot of stuff will be going on behind the surface of the game. Like I said, if you're just looking for a hack-and-slash fix, normal through nightmare will cure what ails you. For those of us that can't leave well enough alone, you have hell difficulty and endless stat juggling.

[Sheepherder]

Blizzard has always had trouble striking a good balance with haste, critical strike, armor ignore, and the like.

[Sand]

I think its funny you guys are arguing over stats and balancing...when you all know polearm barbs owned your ass in D2!

[K9]

Apparently Blizz had a go at a version of Diablo III back in 2005, which was set almost entirely in Heaven and Hell.

It was basically a 3D reskin of Diablo II

Some screens here

[Shrike]

The D3 that brought Blizzard North down. I recall reading a lot of speculation about this, but Blizz will never confirm anything, so it's simply grist for the rumor mill. Apparently, it failed the "is it fun?" test at some point and North came tumbling down.

Regardless, I really do hope we see D3 late this year, but somehow I think it's going to be a 2012 release. Late 2012...

[K9]

I thought it was Q1 2012? There was a purportedly leaked release schedule for Blizzard's upcoming titles floating around somewhere that seemed pretty valid.

[Yegolev]

What did I say about bumping the DIII thread without an actual date or product download?

[K9]

Noted

[Malakili]

Saw those shots the other day - I can't decide if I like them or not though.  I have to assume I would have in 2005 or whenever, but I think I like the direction they are going now a bit more.

[NiX]

Noted

Do it again. I want to see how many pictures he can come up with to express his anger.

[K9]

Noted

Do it again. I want to see how many pictures he can come up with to express his anger.

is my favourite

[Ratman_tf]

Apparently Blizz had a go at a version of Diablo III back in 2005, which was set almost entirely in Heaven and Hell.

It was basically a 3D reskin of Diablo II

Some screens here

#1. Man, that looks like a lot of work put into a failed project.  

#2. I want to play it.   That's probably the "You never will get to play it" factor though.

[Malakili]

#1. Man, that looks like a lot of work put into a failed project.  

Thats why Blizzard retains its credability, most gaming studios would've released it anyway to recoup what they could, and moved on.  Blizzard says, fuck it, this didn't work, cut the losses and start over.

[Musashi]

Noted

Do it again. I want to see how many pictures he can come up with to express his anger.

The animated one is clearly the best.

[Yegolev]

Do it again. I want to see how many pictures he can come up with to express his anger.

[NiX]

Do it again. I want to see how many pictures he can come up with to express his anger.

You win.

[Minvaren]

Diablo 3 "on the home stretch"

Blizzard has also not announced a release date — or year — for Diablo III. But as Mr. Wilson put it: “We’re definitely in the home stretch. We’re crunching. This is when the magic happens.”

Wonder if we'll start to see beta rumors here before too long...