Wait until Blizzcon is over and then be angry or bitter.
Most likely scenario is that they ARE working on something, but will NOT show it at Blizzcon... so, the latter won't tell us much, except whatever it is won't be coming soon.
That's what POE's tempest (HC) league is like. It's more difficult. Monsters can do more damage, have more hp, have resists to certain types of damage, their mod system is very detailed.
This would be kind of pointless in modern D3 because you have a difficulty slider you can adjust at any point in character progression. Particularly now that Torment 10 is being added.
Much ado about nothing. Most of these are likely tweaks that their Chinese corporate partner negotiated for. Squeezing every last dollar with China-exclusive features itself isn't necessarily worth the Studio's time, but they have to play ball with the company that gets to run the servers in order to sell anything in the region.
If other regions get MTX, it will follow on XP2, when there'd be enough of a returning fresh base for it to matter. I imagine such MTX would look very different by that time compared to what China is getting now.
The truth is that there are far more pirates than interested PC gamers without a reliable internet connection. You see they took the exact opposite tack on the consoles because, in their words, most of them aren't connected.
Anything about "sanctity of online" is bull at this point. Hackers can mine the console version if they wanted to find exploits, most would transfer over with a little tweaking.
No, the whole point of the current setting is to eventually make t6 be a joke. If we were to increase the torments you will simply do so over and over again, and eventually you will have 10billion damage and the mobs will have their life and potency increased accordingly, which is a nightmare from a designing and codding point of view, and ultimately useless. What's the difference between 2 mil damage and level 70 and the future you like of 2 billion damage and level 200? Nothing, just numbers and more time wasted to get there. It's the perfect example of a slippery slope.
"Nightmare form a designing and coding point of view".... what are Grifts then?
This is what difficulty levels do in the first place. Get bigger number loot to kill bigger number monsters to get even bigger number loot. Isn't that more or less Diablo?
D2Mods were nothing like the custom arcade. You made toons on your own computer or unofficial servers, quite often completely new toons for playing just in the mod. Taking existing realm characters for a spin in custom games is a different beast entirely, and the big problem is how you control progression. Neverwinter tried with custom dungeons and its still a problem there.
Its also worth mentioning that D2 mod tools were entirely community-developed. Anything like an arcade would imply a lot more support than any iteration of DIablo has ever given. And unlike some very popular UMS in SC and WC3, D2 mods have never had quite the same popularity. (Then again, from what I understand, neither has SC2.)
Campaign mode basically only saves checkpoint/quest/waypoint progress. It doesn't remember what mobs you killed or even what spawned. Assuming they aren't going through the work to implement full zone saving just because you complained about it, you can't really get much more than remembering which bounties you did towards completing an act. For example, saving rift progress wouldn't work because you could just farm the same rift mobs all day long minus the rift boss.
What would be more reasonable/likely is a reconnect feature. Keep a game alive for a short time if it would've ended due to disconnect, and let players rejoin it on login. Wasn't something like this eventually implemented in D2 even?
Game incentivizing people playing alone in parties is indeed a "problem." Simply because you aren't really cooperating if you aren't anywhere near each other, and there's no reason to reward that behavior over single player.It was a sorry state of affairs in Diablo 2, they tried hard to avoid it in D3 for a while, now its back but I doubt it will be around for ever.
With talks about ladder going on I think that this amazing thread once again needs some attention.
Okay.
No progression = Dead on Arrival.
The number of people willing to spend a lot of time on single-player competition will be very, very small if they can't progress during it. You check out a challenge every now and then, but then get back to farming 24/7 bored out of your mind till you get a substantial upgrade to test a challenge. And it's questionable spending a lot of dev time on something that only sees a little use.
By contrast the whole point of D2 ladder / PoE races, IS nothing but progression. The resets let you experience dramatic progression again that inevitably tapers off in the eternal endgames. Sure there's some similar cosmetic reward at the end, but you push towards that reward by progressing.
I liked this idea just to imagine the siliness of your existing characters retiring and you have to go fight them with new ones... but its exactly that which makes a D1->D2 repeat unfeasible. People expect to keep growing their existing toons in expansions.
But I imagine the point of the ending is more that, in general, the nephalem are an issue. Without the worldstone there will just be more and more of them getting powerful, and they have evil in their nature so can always be a threat. Therefore the real xp2 bad guy will be a nephalem making a bid to ascend to power, possibly even Kulle (who is notoriously hard to kill, even the crusader comments on it now).
Of course events might still be manipulated that your char ends up taking out a good portion of heaven for some reason.
A big part of the futility theme though has been ongoing sequelitis. Every previous ending was a cliffhanger, in part because the teams had in mind the sequel they were developing. (see what Blizzard North was doing on "their" D3.) If they aren't in any rush to push out a Diablo 4 that is basically more of the same (and I'm not sure they would be), then they might not choose that kind of ending for xpack2.
D3's ending was the first time we had some "finality" or even happiness, even if there was in fact unfinished business for the expansion to pick up. So if Xpack2 wants to pull something more "final" like D3 vanilla did, they certainly could. And they can just as easily make something up later to continue the series as well.
Even if Demons/Angels are not eradicated for eternity, I am expecting some kind of radical turn or change that significantly weakens them for a long time, with the implication that humanity now stands on their own. For how long who knows, and of course humans/nephalem by nature are not necessarily good, but it seems to be the conclusion we are driving for after having killed THE most powerful demon and angel. Again they can always twist it much later when they decide they want to exploit the franchise again.
The GAH is what "ruined" the game, because people went gold hunting and selling items to progress rather than finding anything for themselves. The real-money side has been a purely ideological issue that few actually playing the game ever gave a damn about. Some people surely "ruined" the game by buying their way out of upgrades, but I can't recall even seeing one person actually complain about that, whereas tons of people complained about the other situation I described. There's a reason that we're looking at a total AH shutdown, not just the RMAH side.
Every ARPG games you will play will have trading (PoE, Diablo, Dungeon Sieges, etc. - the list can go long).
There is no point in item binding for non-secure systems (I.E. lacking servers to store characters) because there are no real economies in such games. Legit trading never amounts to anything more than between friends or relatively small communities, and "black markets" never develop in the majority of ARPGs where you can train up anything you want instantly.
I honestly think it's a PTR and/or possibly downloadable beta. That's not a patch but it's meaningful. This is the path they followed with all the 1.10 changes, they may need something similar just to stress test the stash upgrade.
D3 doesn't have a world, it has 4 players. :/ This kind of dynamic is appropriate to an MMO but not really here.
Most successful MMOs that do this seperate the groups into factions rather than free-for-all, which immediately identifies who is your ally and who you have to watch out for. There's also the possibility of teams going against each other instead of being out for themselves, which makes pvp a form of cooperative play. Again the games here are too small for that to emerge.
In the end we can see how Blizzard is cutting any "unneeded" complexity from the game (lol weapon swap), so any convoluted pvp system that benefits a small minority seems like a non-starter.
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This would be kind of pointless in modern D3 because you have a difficulty slider you can adjust at any point in character progression. Particularly now that Torment 10 is being added.
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Most who *really* want good items will just hack/dupe them anyway, so there's no point in disabling casual trade on consoles.
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^
Much ado about nothing. Most of these are likely tweaks that their Chinese corporate partner negotiated for. Squeezing every last dollar with China-exclusive features itself isn't necessarily worth the Studio's time, but they have to play ball with the company that gets to run the servers in order to sell anything in the region.
If other regions get MTX, it will follow on XP2, when there'd be enough of a returning fresh base for it to matter. I imagine such MTX would look very different by that time compared to what China is getting now.
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The truth is that there are far more pirates than interested PC gamers without a reliable internet connection. You see they took the exact opposite tack on the consoles because, in their words, most of them aren't connected.
Anything about "sanctity of online" is bull at this point. Hackers can mine the console version if they wanted to find exploits, most would transfer over with a little tweaking.
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"Nightmare form a designing and coding point of view".... what are Grifts then?
This is what difficulty levels do in the first place. Get bigger number loot to kill bigger number monsters to get even bigger number loot. Isn't that more or less Diablo?
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Its also worth mentioning that D2 mod tools were entirely community-developed. Anything like an arcade would imply a lot more support than any iteration of DIablo has ever given. And unlike some very popular UMS in SC and WC3, D2 mods have never had quite the same popularity. (Then again, from what I understand, neither has SC2.)
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What would be more reasonable/likely is a reconnect feature. Keep a game alive for a short time if it would've ended due to disconnect, and let players rejoin it on login. Wasn't something like this eventually implemented in D2 even?
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No progression = Dead on Arrival.
The number of people willing to spend a lot of time on single-player competition will be very, very small if they can't progress during it. You check out a challenge every now and then, but then get back to farming 24/7 bored out of your mind till you get a substantial upgrade to test a challenge. And it's questionable spending a lot of dev time on something that only sees a little use.
By contrast the whole point of D2 ladder / PoE races, IS nothing but progression. The resets let you experience dramatic progression again that inevitably tapers off in the eternal endgames. Sure there's some similar cosmetic reward at the end, but you push towards that reward by progressing.
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But I imagine the point of the ending is more that, in general, the nephalem are an issue. Without the worldstone there will just be more and more of them getting powerful, and they have evil in their nature so can always be a threat. Therefore the real xp2 bad guy will be a nephalem making a bid to ascend to power, possibly even Kulle (who is notoriously hard to kill, even the crusader comments on it now).
Of course events might still be manipulated that your char ends up taking out a good portion of heaven for some reason.
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D3's ending was the first time we had some "finality" or even happiness, even if there was in fact unfinished business for the expansion to pick up. So if Xpack2 wants to pull something more "final" like D3 vanilla did, they certainly could. And they can just as easily make something up later to continue the series as well.
Even if Demons/Angels are not eradicated for eternity, I am expecting some kind of radical turn or change that significantly weakens them for a long time, with the implication that humanity now stands on their own. For how long who knows, and of course humans/nephalem by nature are not necessarily good, but it seems to be the conclusion we are driving for after having killed THE most powerful demon and angel. Again they can always twist it much later when they decide they want to exploit the franchise again.
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