I don't believe there are forced builds that is my point. So far we know one class with 2 min cooldowns. All of which are the 7 tier. One is a summon, one is a "super nuke," the last is a buff and that is how I will look at them until I see them in action anyways.
So we have buffs we have to constantly refresh (seriously, how outdated is this?) and a nuke that is either going to be OP or useless.
The Summon and the Buff could just be CDs to relate to how long they want you to have those benefits, not so much super nukes as everyone talks but benefits that should only be felt for 30 seconds out of every 2 minutes.
I believe many here also were talking about teleport.
And, speaking of teleport, from what I understand there are ways to spec/rune it to decrease the cooldown to something small. Which, to me, implies we will be able to decrease the cooldown of most such skills. This is going to cause some issues if the nukes in question are relatively spammable resource wise.
I'm worried about nukes (Earthquake), reasons were given.
I'm worried about buffs, because I freaking hate buffs. If the buff lasts 2 minutes and the cooldown is 2 minutes just make it a passive. Summon at least I can somewhat understand - it's your job to keep it alive for that long. But buffs? Please no, I had enough with resetting Burst of Speed every 5 minutes... unless the game has a debuff system or something, I just don't see the point.
From what I understand, these buffs are very shortlived, and amount to nukes.
And teleport. I'm sure some people will spec into it in PvP, perhaps some in PvE, but without a spec it seems to be in a very strange position.
In any case, considering possibility to decrease cooldowns, and the supposed strength of these tier 7 abilities, why would you not pick a tier 7 ability? Why would you get a bunch of level 1-5 abilities if the end abilities are stronger?
You could try to argue that using cooldown runes on tier 7 abilities will make them equal to tier 1 abilities with damage runes, but we have multiple tiers of abilities without cooldowns, + if we have buffs then those buffs don't need their cooldowns lowered anyway. Which brings us back to tier 7 skills being OP compared to lower tier.
If these abilities complement other abilities (e.g., tier 7 is buffs/supports only), it may be manageable. E.g., higher tier cannot provide any damage.
What I'm trying to say is that in the WD's case how do you define 2880 builds as limiting. If 10% of those builds are viable for end game that is still 288 builds. If it is that people should be able to pick any number of powers in any order I'm just lost for words because then the only true thing to look forward to is the same powers.
You seem to be ignoring the post I just made.
So barb has these skills here: http://www.diablowiki.com/Barbarian
I don't know how many points you can put into each, I'll just consider them as 1-point skills. That's 23 skills. You need 7. I suck at statistics, so I can't give you a precise number, but that number is very large, and I'm happy with it.
The problem is, though, tiered skills may skew how many builds we actually get. For instance, if everyone always takes the skills in tiered order (from most to least), that essentially halves the number of skills. And a big chunk of those skills are either necessary or useless to specific variation in builds. + add imbalances.
Now if every skill is available at the beginning I don't think that will disrupt bottle necking builds at all either. Usually in any game a limited number of builds will float to the top, that is more out of social pressures then reality and hard math. Other builds are viable and the few that rise to the top are just the limited scope that players believe to be the "only" builds.
Skill availability is rather irrelevant, it just delays complete build freedom until w/e level you can get all skills at, I believe the argument was that the tiers categorize skills by power.
The reason a number of builds float to the top is both unbalancing and lack of choices. A large amount of choices generally blurrs build power, and unbalances make some builds useless while others OP. It's Blizzard's job to minimize the amount of OP and UP builds, leaving more builds in the "viable" sector. The problem with DII was that many builds that should have been viable, weren't, mostly due to unbalances. Builds in DII were heavily limited due to synergies. Here, we see something similar to synergies, but a more hidden concept.
Basically no matter what you do there will be about 5 builds perclass regardless if the hard math proves it isn't necessary.
And what do you base this on? I played games with a lot more builds than that. And builds shouldn't lend themselves to math. The most high damage build should get you killed.
Did you saw the mic part off like the previous guy said to?
...no. I don't think that would work. I just wear my headphones on my ears and wear the mic on my neck lol. Probably looks stupid but I am alone in my room.
Apply this to computer graphics. GPU and vRAM have increased exponentially since D1.
Which is honestly not that relevant. The edge of graphics capability, in my opinion, occurred somewhere around 1998. The edge for 2D games is even earlier than that. By edge, I mean that graphics after that point became good enough to cease needing improvement. Specifically, this includes resolution adaptations and high color palettes, which games like DI and SC didn't have. Even then, games with Windowed mode I don't really care, even. Just with all the recent monitors and I have a laptop monitor, resolution is a bitch.
So has the ingenuity and available tools of graphic artists.
No.
Your example is faulty because you're comparing Diablo 1 to McDonalds it seems. For me it's more like this:
Joe spent a while going to this little non-franchise burger shop in his home town where they made really nice burgers, because they loved their craft. Then some friend took him to a 4-star restaurant. The restaurant looks a lot nicer, with waiters and everything, and the burger may even look prettier w/e. It is backed by this rich famous company that has access to all this, I don't know, cutting edge technology. It also costs a lot more. But the burger still tastes the same, if not worse.
Good graphics design trumps technology every time and SCII and DIII are proof of that IMO. Especially these games also suffer in the audio department (I'm not talking about Matt Uelmen). If they could update resolution and color palette on SC1 + add all the mechanical modifications (auto-mining, etc.), I'd rather play that. SCII is slow, WCIII'ish, and has awful sound work and animations compared to the original. Among newer titles, it's greatly inferior to AoE III, for instance. The only reason it gets anywhere for me is because it's, well, SC.
This raises the collective consciousness, and thus the collective standard, for what games can look like. This tends to inform the gamer's expectations.
The collective consciousness also runs after the most recent fad out there and demands the latest little thing because it's considered cool. I don't know why you bring up the collective consciousness here since it's extremely dumb. I'm not talking about whether most people will like Diablo III's design. This is very hard for me to judge since I lack figures on SCII.
The collective standards sees only shaders and nothing else. They do not see design at all, for them it does not exist.
I think it's really admirable that you are less affected by the impact of raised expectations.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I believe you should be aware that I am not a die hard Diablo fan at all. I am here because I like the series, just like any other series, and looking forward to it. My expectations for DIII are not different from expectations for SW:TOR or TES 5. But my expectations are typically high, both for gameplay and design. I can accept a game that doesn't meet my expectations, play it, and enjoy it, but it will lose the title of great game for me, and I want every game to be great.
Which means I'll whine about graphics, cooldowns, and everything else.
But logically, if you're aiming for small things you're making small cursor movements.
Not logical. You're aiming from where you just were to where the target appeared, which may actually be a rather decent distance. Unless you're sitting still aiming in the same location for half an hour, which DOES happen in SOME FPS, but not too often, you're not really going to be making small movements. And the amount of time you're spending moving your slow ass mouse is generally pretty important, and I used slow mouse for 6 years, they're still slow.
Granted, people also talk about picking their mouse off the pad which I never do.
Ent1ty, I do have one question. How many possible choices do you need till you don't feel limited. I've written down the varied amount of options you will have already and I will just say its a good number of options. I fear your creating limitations because you see a build that isn't available.
That is just the factors of life really.
We're discussing gaming, not life.
As I have said before, there should be a build, per every skill, per every number of points in the skill. If you were able to write down the options that means there are too few. And there should not be too many forced linearizations per skill, nor should top tier skills be superior (in terms of most return for points invested). This is basic balancing, nothing complicated.
Possible builds number may still be very high. But the viable builds number shouldn't be reduced to 5 per class, you know.
If you don't have an issue with forced builds that's your opinion but do not hide behind fallacies like "it's the factors of life" when the discussion has nothing to do with that. Keep the discussion where it belongs.
A lot of the new gaming mice have a bit of negative accel. Especially when run in their high DPI mode which is why the FPS guys run the mx518 at 400dpi.
No idea what this means.
I don't get why people play at low sensitivity, though. For me, the high sensitivity makes it easier for me to aim at small things like headshots.
I use Labtec LVA-7330 as my mic (no idea how "good" it is but gets the job done and nobody complained) because it got leftover after mom's Skype conversations... and very very old Sennheiser HD 590 as headphones, because I doubt any cheap mic will approach that sound.
2. The importance of graphics absolutely pale in comparison to the actual gameplay.
No, they don't. There are some people for whom they do (people who only care about numbers and PvP) but many of us prefer to take games as a whole not as an incomplete half-finished thing. If a game has bad graphics (by bad I mean really bad, DIII is not in that category), I'm not going to look at it for too long, and the game needs to be FREAKING INSANE (so far, I haven't seen many games with bad graphics and good gameplay).
Diablo I was one of the most brilliant games ever made, and its graphics, my today's standards, are pathetic. But we still loved that game. Is it possible that the problems you see lie not in the graphics themselves, but your own expectations?
I think Diablo I still looks great, because it's a 2D game, and 2D games are essentially immune to aging. The only thing DI needs is a higher resolution and maybe a better color palette. I still like the look of AoE games, SC. So, you argument, I neither understand nor agree.
"By today's standards" what are these standards, which version of shaders it's using? 2D = bad, 3D = good? Is that all you care about? Because that's not what I'm talking about, that's something I don't give a shit about, I don't care what technology it uses at all, only if it looks good or not. DII, for instance, looks horrible and very little could save it.
I don't see how "expectations" are a problem. I've played plenty of even recent games with good graphics styles that fit the game and work well. So far, most of what I have seen in DIII looks like a repeat of the 3D problem from way back, which time and time again proves Blizzard has a horrible graphics department that lags 5 years. I remember loading up WCIII when it came out "What is this crap???"
It's still an improvement over the graphical abomination that was Diablo II, and I'll still play it, but 10 years down the line, I expected better.
1. These are pre-alpha renders. Not until Blizzard properly scale tests and optimizes their engine will they have the final graphics.
I've seen in-development screens of SCII and the like. They didn't really change that much. We have an example of a Blizzard game in development, you can't fool us anymore. Maybe these are not final, but they definitely indicate where it's all going.
Who said that these 'nuke' skills will wipe the entire screen?
Do I really have to explain how utterly useless a 2 minute cooldown skill is in a game of DIII's pace if it doesn't wipe the screen or have a long active time?
A lot of these sound like buffs, if I think about it. And resetting buffs all the time is very annoying.
Diablo 1. It was, overall, a more solid, and refined game compared to DII, which seemed like it never left beta stage.
DI had vastly superior atmosphere overall and on quests and bosses. It was also a lot more difficult, but not in a way that was defined by whether or not you're using the correct build, which is all DII seems to be about. DI allowed for better balance of difficulty, its overall smaller size is what made it such a great game.
DIII is obviously going farther from DII, but it's not taking anything from DI at all from what I've seen. The atmosphere is definitely not there, the playstyle as they said is "fast paced" while DI was always more on the strategic side.
I think the "atmosphere" most of you are talking about is an atmosphere matched also by other games in that era. It was gloomy, dark, and all that, but so where many other games. It was pretty much a standard back then for that type of game.
I miss that, tbh.
I mean, it's a game about demons, if it's not supposed to be gloomy, what is it supposed to be?
If you're on a budget and really want a headset I would recommend you Sennheiser PC151. Sennheiser is at least an audiophile company and not a gaming one.
This.
Granted, I use separate headphones and mics lol...
You don't need a legal game to play with friends, you only need Hamachi - that's what I'm talking about. Currently, with old games, it only makes sense to play with friends or on private servers like PGT, because all other places, hacks everywhere. Even StarCraft! WCII and WoW work, but I play neither, so I can only wait for Diablo III and StarCraft II to buy, so far, no multiplayer for me, unless I get a friend who plays Diablo II/StarCraft...
The bad thing about Blizzard is their support of old games. I bought Diablo 1, could have as well downloaded it - after I went to the multiplyer, people in there were copying items, giving themselves 99999 health, casting apocalypse on level 1, etc... impossible to play properly.
Well, I think Blizzard won't let us down. Add a few classes, redo the old ones, change damage calibrations, add something new in, Blizzard always had wonderful ideas. Of that, I do not worry.
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I believe many here also were talking about teleport.
And, speaking of teleport, from what I understand there are ways to spec/rune it to decrease the cooldown to something small. Which, to me, implies we will be able to decrease the cooldown of most such skills. This is going to cause some issues if the nukes in question are relatively spammable resource wise.
I'm worried about nukes (Earthquake), reasons were given.
I'm worried about buffs, because I freaking hate buffs. If the buff lasts 2 minutes and the cooldown is 2 minutes just make it a passive. Summon at least I can somewhat understand - it's your job to keep it alive for that long. But buffs? Please no, I had enough with resetting Burst of Speed every 5 minutes... unless the game has a debuff system or something, I just don't see the point.
From what I understand, these buffs are very shortlived, and amount to nukes.
And teleport. I'm sure some people will spec into it in PvP, perhaps some in PvE, but without a spec it seems to be in a very strange position.
In any case, considering possibility to decrease cooldowns, and the supposed strength of these tier 7 abilities, why would you not pick a tier 7 ability? Why would you get a bunch of level 1-5 abilities if the end abilities are stronger?
You could try to argue that using cooldown runes on tier 7 abilities will make them equal to tier 1 abilities with damage runes, but we have multiple tiers of abilities without cooldowns, + if we have buffs then those buffs don't need their cooldowns lowered anyway. Which brings us back to tier 7 skills being OP compared to lower tier.
If these abilities complement other abilities (e.g., tier 7 is buffs/supports only), it may be manageable. E.g., higher tier cannot provide any damage.
You seem to be ignoring the post I just made.
So barb has these skills here:
http://www.diablowiki.com/Barbarian
I don't know how many points you can put into each, I'll just consider them as 1-point skills. That's 23 skills. You need 7. I suck at statistics, so I can't give you a precise number, but that number is very large, and I'm happy with it.
The problem is, though, tiered skills may skew how many builds we actually get. For instance, if everyone always takes the skills in tiered order (from most to least), that essentially halves the number of skills. And a big chunk of those skills are either necessary or useless to specific variation in builds. + add imbalances.
Skill availability is rather irrelevant, it just delays complete build freedom until w/e level you can get all skills at, I believe the argument was that the tiers categorize skills by power.
The reason a number of builds float to the top is both unbalancing and lack of choices. A large amount of choices generally blurrs build power, and unbalances make some builds useless while others OP. It's Blizzard's job to minimize the amount of OP and UP builds, leaving more builds in the "viable" sector. The problem with DII was that many builds that should have been viable, weren't, mostly due to unbalances. Builds in DII were heavily limited due to synergies. Here, we see something similar to synergies, but a more hidden concept.
And what do you base this on? I played games with a lot more builds than that. And builds shouldn't lend themselves to math. The most high damage build should get you killed.
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No.
Your example is faulty because you're comparing Diablo 1 to McDonalds it seems. For me it's more like this:
Joe spent a while going to this little non-franchise burger shop in his home town where they made really nice burgers, because they loved their craft. Then some friend took him to a 4-star restaurant. The restaurant looks a lot nicer, with waiters and everything, and the burger may even look prettier w/e. It is backed by this rich famous company that has access to all this, I don't know, cutting edge technology. It also costs a lot more. But the burger still tastes the same, if not worse.
Good graphics design trumps technology every time and SCII and DIII are proof of that IMO. Especially these games also suffer in the audio department (I'm not talking about Matt Uelmen). If they could update resolution and color palette on SC1 + add all the mechanical modifications (auto-mining, etc.), I'd rather play that. SCII is slow, WCIII'ish, and has awful sound work and animations compared to the original. Among newer titles, it's greatly inferior to AoE III, for instance. The only reason it gets anywhere for me is because it's, well, SC.
The collective consciousness also runs after the most recent fad out there and demands the latest little thing because it's considered cool. I don't know why you bring up the collective consciousness here since it's extremely dumb. I'm not talking about whether most people will like Diablo III's design. This is very hard for me to judge since I lack figures on SCII.
The collective standards sees only shaders and nothing else. They do not see design at all, for them it does not exist.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I believe you should be aware that I am not a die hard Diablo fan at all. I am here because I like the series, just like any other series, and looking forward to it. My expectations for DIII are not different from expectations for SW:TOR or TES 5. But my expectations are typically high, both for gameplay and design. I can accept a game that doesn't meet my expectations, play it, and enjoy it, but it will lose the title of great game for me, and I want every game to be great.
Which means I'll whine about graphics, cooldowns, and everything else.
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Granted, people also talk about picking their mouse off the pad which I never do.
To each his own, indeed.
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Better example of bad graphics: http://nichm.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/runescape_great_war.png
http://www.atriarch.com/images/screenshots/screenshots/043002/AT_bolera_caverns_shot_0075.jpg
http://www.xsyon.com/components/com_joomgallery/img_originals/screenshots_1/xsyon_mmorpg_darkhand_20110118_08_20110119_1116930615.jpg
These are rather difficult to find, though, since they don't get far.
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As I have said before, there should be a build, per every skill, per every number of points in the skill. If you were able to write down the options that means there are too few. And there should not be too many forced linearizations per skill, nor should top tier skills be superior (in terms of most return for points invested). This is basic balancing, nothing complicated.
Possible builds number may still be very high. But the viable builds number shouldn't be reduced to 5 per class, you know.
If you don't have an issue with forced builds that's your opinion but do not hide behind fallacies like "it's the factors of life" when the discussion has nothing to do with that. Keep the discussion where it belongs.
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I don't get why people play at low sensitivity, though. For me, the high sensitivity makes it easier for me to aim at small things like headshots.
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I think Diablo I still looks great, because it's a 2D game, and 2D games are essentially immune to aging. The only thing DI needs is a higher resolution and maybe a better color palette. I still like the look of AoE games, SC. So, you argument, I neither understand nor agree.
"By today's standards" what are these standards, which version of shaders it's using? 2D = bad, 3D = good? Is that all you care about? Because that's not what I'm talking about, that's something I don't give a shit about, I don't care what technology it uses at all, only if it looks good or not. DII, for instance, looks horrible and very little could save it.
I don't see how "expectations" are a problem. I've played plenty of even recent games with good graphics styles that fit the game and work well. So far, most of what I have seen in DIII looks like a repeat of the 3D problem from way back, which time and time again proves Blizzard has a horrible graphics department that lags 5 years. I remember loading up WCIII when it came out "What is this crap???"
It's still an improvement over the graphical abomination that was Diablo II, and I'll still play it, but 10 years down the line, I expected better.I've seen in-development screens of SCII and the like. They didn't really change that much. We have an example of a Blizzard game in development, you can't fool us anymore. Maybe these are not final, but they definitely indicate where it's all going.
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A lot of these sound like buffs, if I think about it. And resetting buffs all the time is very annoying.
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DI had vastly superior atmosphere overall and on quests and bosses. It was also a lot more difficult, but not in a way that was defined by whether or not you're using the correct build, which is all DII seems to be about. DI allowed for better balance of difficulty, its overall smaller size is what made it such a great game.
DIII is obviously going farther from DII, but it's not taking anything from DI at all from what I've seen. The atmosphere is definitely not there, the playstyle as they said is "fast paced" while DI was always more on the strategic side.I miss that, tbh.
I mean, it's a game about demons, if it's not supposed to be gloomy, what is it supposed to be?
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Granted, I use separate headphones and mics lol...This person is trying to buy something on a budget, not chasing a stupid fad.