DiabloFans

Have D3 seasons always started on a Friday? I feel like most games this kind of thing happens on a Tuesday.

Quote from Rebjorn»

Quote from Mestiphilous»

I wish that D3 was available offline, since most of the time, I try to log on, & it keeps disconnecting me. Other times, I complete the 5 bounties, but get disconnected when I use my Town Portal before I can collect my cache.

I think a lot of players would want that. These disconnects are likely on your ISP or local setup btw, so you may have to look into that. But btw NICE necro of an 8 year old thread ;-D -- Anyway if they for some ridiculous reason all of a sudden decide to make Diablo II: Resurrected 'Online Only' then I think I might sue them for aggravated assault.

Man do you remember like 10 years ago when they said D3 would be only only I think the term they used was DRM people went NUTS. I think part of it was intellectual property security since forcing online connection would mean continuous validations of copies, so markets like China where software (Windows among them) are typically jailbroken and mass redistributed would be slightly less troublesome.

Regardless my feeling is that D2R won't go this route since I think they said modding should be possible--someone brought it up in some other thread. With release being as near as it is I doubt that stance could change before launch, but I've been wrong about a lot of things.

You get them really fast at first I think because they're all the high drop chance ones. I think after you get most of those high drop chance ones they get rarer.

It's kind of jarring because the game vomits them at you early on.

Based on the response, it doesn't look like Blizzard's reaction was really about modding, it was about (using this term for simplicity) hacking and redistributing their product.

I remember years ago before D3 came out I ran a thing interviewing a bunch of preeminent D2 modders and they all expressed the sincere hope D3 would allow modding with full support, akin to a worldbuilder/map maker like recently released SC2 did. The conversation was very different back then, though. DRM was what big corporate game makers thought was the future, Blizzard was still very much in its heyday, etc. I think we even reached out to the D3 team a couple times for confirmation of modding support. This was back when Bashiok was still with Blizzard, I think we reached out to him and some others.

I was never personally into mods, myself. I tried MedianXL and some others but I just liked the structure of the official game more. I know for many people they added replayability and enjoyment--I was content to farm until I had perfect gear on the base game, which was literally years.

Zhuge spent a lot of time fleshing out our wiki at the time for mod content--sadly, it looks like the wiki has since been split from Dfans. It still has our old logo on it, though, if you go to it.

Quote from Fresiki»

How would I play Diablo Immortal? You download it on your phone, then use some kind of bluetooth game controller to play it? I've never played games like this on phones. Feels like a stupid question but I gotta ask. Also, how new does your phone need to be? I have a Galaxy S9 I think.

A Galaxy S9 should probably be fine. The S10s only came out in 2019 and Netease said it was basically ready for release that year. The S9 came out only a year before that. I doubt they would design it for technology that wouldn't be relatively common to the avg consumer by release.

Imo third-party controller support is inevitable. Blizzard was kind of dodgy about it recently, but honestly esp on an Android phone people make stuff third-party for situations like this all the time.

I'm pretty out of the loop on the game. I was pretty negative about it after that Blizzcon. Was excpecting D4, etc etc. I've since come around a little, and I am trying to understand whether this is for me or not.

That's not uncommon. Most people were expecting a D4 or a D2 remaster announcement in 2018 and instead DI headlined it to some tone-deaf (if well-intentioned) rhetoric. I was put-off by it--it felt like a company I had always loved as being one of the most in-touch with its fans really dropped the ball.

That DI was primarily worked on by Netease added to it, although there is some complexity to be discussed here. China is the world's largest consumer of mobile games by more than double the US in a 2019 stat and the IP will have to do much better than it currently is there to capitalize on this largest market. Also, some things are complicated by their state-owned privately-run sector.

Definitely washing the Netease logo across the mainstage screens did not help, nor did Wyatt's now-infamous comment. I cannot back the follow opinion up with stats, but I strongly feel that the mass layoffs of support staff and the consolidation of PR/HR/marketing with greater Activision-Blizzard over the two-ish years prior to the 2018 announcement likely contributed to this. These positions were staffed with people whose specific jobs would have been to sell this game to a demographic they would have known intimately and likely avoided this blunder.

The items (that I found using google image search) seem to have a lot less attributes per item, so it's mostly just some basic stats + legendary abilities. So it's basically Diablo 3 with less item stats and a whole new set of skills for classes with a whole new set of legendary abilities on items.

I played it a bit with the demo in 2019 but I never feel demos are a good representation of a game like this where there's a certain high level of cohesion needed to sell it on the actual market. But I know some people who play it right now and have put a number of hours into it--people who have streamed D3 since it came out and grew up with the franchise like us as kids, and they basically say it plays much better than D3, although there's concerns about itemization impacting PvP over time. Idk, take that how you will.

Personally? I might play this a little, but I cannot for the life of me get into mobile games, and not for lack of trying. I just don't get attached to them--the way I like to experience games is not consuming them in quick, digestible spurts. I'm also not a big fan of an IP which has a large selling point of aesthetic and immersion being experienced like this--it felt to me very unattached.

But that's just me. For anyone that enjoys it, more power to them. I'm much more excited about D2R and D4.

I went through a D3 phase hard for 2 weeks, got over that, and now I'm on a Civ6 kick.

Quote from HypMic»

The entire Diablo 2 Soundtrack is masterpiece. Apparently, the artist experimented with the orchestra and choirs for a long time and could not come up with anything. Eventually he found a guitar theme and then everything picked up pace.

Yup! The informal, moody, ambient soundtrack really solidified the type of game and tone Diablo became known for. The tracks in Act 5 went a very different turn, which I think made sense since it was the climax of the story and a pretty epic conclusion, but woof--I completely agree. Esp in Act 2, I've always felt swept away on an adventure as grand as it was unassuming, and still rife with danger.

Well, good to see ya again. o/

XD

I actually went through a D3 phase really hard over the last week, but I get to the endgame and do that for a few days and then...meh.

What happened to your post count?

I *think* there was some rumor that the D2 remaster was going to be announced a year earlier than it actually was--I'm glad they didn't. This feels like the right amount of lead time for release. Very excited

Also, it is highly validating to see it succeed in streams like it did. It has always had strong brand recognition/loyalty. It's good to see that is still true and that the thing itself is also good.

It's been a LONG time, but in a sort of yes thing on the ubers comment, this is why ebotdz was good for fighting ubers (i think it was usually on a smiteadin--i tried on a fury druid and it felt like i just couldnt keep health up but that may have just been because i was a kid and didnt understand what was going on lol). i dont think it applied open wounds per say but it did prevent enemy healing.

i think poison does this too but enemies can be immune to poison.

Oh nice! Thanks!!

The way the light works with the ground textures is just so good x.x I can't wait to see A5 stuff with how detailed the art was for that entire xpac. Or like Travincal and the temples in A3.

Yes, that was one of my gripes with 3--the first two (esp 1) were structured such that humans (and the player) are sort of swept up in a small part of a cosmic drama that begin long before them and will likely continue long after them. This sense of mortality, isolation, unknowability, and a sort of helplessness all hit on what it means to have Gothic storytelling.

Much of the greater story for the first games couldn't be known or understood until the final acts, and much of the (very good) lore could not be understood unless you analyzed NPC dialogue, in-game art in various locations, out of game books, bits from other sources outside the game, etc. In most games I would say this is a problem, but Diablo was sort of a fringe experience where the gameplay was good but if you were really into it, you had to dig--which would lead to communities like this one and many others.

It also extends to the magical arts and the cosmic forces. The idea of a character like Deckard Cain--a highly knowledgeable guide, sage, teacher--was inherently valuable not because we thought he was funny or quirky as a character, but because his role was intrinsic as gatekeeper to cosmic and magical knowledge that he didn't necessarily practice but devoted his life to understanding.

Diablo 3 (again a good game in many ways) went the direction of just overtly telling you you're the chosen one, you're a super hero--the whole time you know about nephalem, you know about angels and demons, you know about these great mysteries that honestly should not be common knowledge, and it seems like every villager does, too. You're already a supercharged Mary Sue. The Gothic dialogue about mortality, about isolation in a vast and unknowable and uncontrollable universe, about limited understanding of the great mysteries and cosmic powers, does not apply to you, the player, and very loosely applies to the NPCs.

I think the idea of trying to imitate another game's aesthetic gets away from the core problem, which is that Diablo 3 got away from the identity of the franchise by a wide margin.* It doesn't need to imitate something else, it needs to be itself. Many of these games people cite were, themselves, largely derived from the original Diablo.

*Still v fun game, not saying it's poorly designed or even that it's visually bad, just not Diablo imo. The xpac definitely returned to some idea of it and I applaud the passion of the whole team that put everything they had into it. Wyatt Cheng I think feels like he (along with many others) really steered it back after launch, but Jay Wilson was not a good choice for 1.0.