Hwurmp posted:

Diablo III failed because they didn't call it Triablo

drat Dirty Ape posted:

Diiiablo

exquisite tea posted:

Because the simple act of killing a monster in D3 is pretty fun at any level.

Light Gun Man posted:

if you can make a good game that all occurs after a storyline, why waste dev time on the storyline to begin with?

Blattdorf posted:

On a different note, I now understand all the praise for Northern Journey. I thought the glowing reviews of it were overblown, but no, they were right on point. It's a bit like one of those Half-life 1 mods where you don't quite know what to expect, yet it all constitutes a highly compelling whole.

Phigs posted:

ARPGs essentially have 2 audiences: the people who like the campaign, and the people who like the loot grind (and people who like both). This happened because they started out with Diablo 1 inspired by traditional roguelikes where the point of the game was to play through the 'campaign'. Diablo 1 was very much in this spirit, but it also had the level-gated Nightmare and Hell difficulties for multiplayer, presumably because they didn't have difficulty scaling for player numbers and they wanted to keep up the challenge for multiple people. There wasn't any real reason to play higher difficulties beyond this as the way leveling worked made higher levels kinda pointless and there was no new loot.

Diablo 2 expanded on the higher difficulties, including it in singleplayer and actually adding in items that only dropped at higher levels and putting in a skill tree that benefited from higher levels. This essentially created a sub-audience who focused on high level builds and farming high level zones for loot for those high level builds. For these players the campaign was just something in the way. Eventually, across a decade, they became the largest audience of active Diablo 2 players because of course grinding focused players played the game longer and so Diablo 2 came to be seen as being all about the loot and high level builds.

Enter the Diablo 3 team who were not at all the developers of Diablo 1 and 2 and so had to go look at what Diablo was all about. And what they saw was a bunch of people who treated the campaign as an obstacle to cross in the way to farming endgame. Diablo 1 and 2 had campaigns so they couldn't just drop that aspect but unlike the developers of Diablo 1 and 2 they didn't treat the normal campaign as a reason to play the game in and of itself, so we got a game with a campaign not worth playing for itself stuffed into in a game otherwise all about the endgame.

Orv posted:

As mentioned earlier in the thread this isn't true at all and is weirdly revisionist or just only aware of post-RoS. D3 was extremely true to D2 at launch in the sense that the running the campaign on higher difficulties was more or less the endgame. It didn't have runewords to farm or anything like that though and basically lacked any substantial reason to do that unless you really wanted to make use of the RMAH.

Phigs posted:

Endgame in release Diablo 3 was farming for gear at the highest level you could manage (well, buying from the AH was more efficient, either by grinding gold, running the AH, or using real money, but still...) so you could take on higher Torment levels. The Normal campaign was mind numbingly easy and didn't really become worth playing until at least Nightmare. I wasn't saying release Diablo 3 had its current endgame, only that the endgame it had was the focus, which was evident in how easy Normal was. In Diablo 2 you could have a bunch of fun just running the Normal campaign because it was a decent challenge in its own right, whereas Diablo 3's was a warmup to the real game of grinding higher difficulties.

Orv posted:

I still think D3 is the pinnacle of how ARPGs feel to play,

Orv posted:

Ah okay I misunderstood you. Yeah the first run of the campaign was an absolute snooze fest (and we'll leave out how I feel about how D2 handles higher campaign difficulties, it's more heresy from me) and then it was just grinding really uninteresting gear forever. I still think D3 is the pinnacle of how ARPGs feel to play, maybe a case to be made for Lost Ark but it fumbled basically everything else.

Orv posted:

Ah okay I misunderstood you. Yeah the first run of the campaign was an absolute snooze fest (and we'll leave out how I feel about how D2 handles higher campaign difficulties, it's more heresy from me) and then it was just grinding really uninteresting gear forever. I still think D3 is the pinnacle of how ARPGs feel to play, maybe a case to be made for Lost Ark but it fumbled basically everything else.

mmkay posted:

Because when D3 came out 10+ years ago, the gameplay loop was similar to D2 and you were supposed to run the campaign at different difficulties. It was changed since then and the story was left as a different mode (even though nobody really plays it, also the story isn't that good to warrant playing D3 just for it).

Mordja posted:

*grins wickedly* actually, it's Wolcen.

Phigs posted:

Have you played Diablo 4? I've heard people say the same kind of thing about that game's gameplay which is a shame because I agree that Diablo 3 had really awesome base mechanics and if Diablo 4 is even better that's saying something. I wish they could deliver that in a better overall package.

Major Isoor posted:

How do you feel about other ARPGs in the same vein, out of curiosity? Like, back in the day I always way preferred Titan Quest and the original Dungeon Siege over any Diablo game. D3 wasn't too bad, but it was still a little 'meh' to me

Mordja posted:

*grins wickedly* actually, it's Wolcen.

Light Gun Man posted:

maybe i should actually do a full run of the van helsing games sometime

The Lone Badger posted:

After Diablo Immortal blizzard were going to really have to try to get me interested in a new Diablo game. And they have done absolutely none of that. Not a single thing to budge the needle.

( I can only imagine how much worse it must be for people who actually played D:I )

Phigs posted:

ARPGs essentially have 2 audiences: the people who like the campaign, and the people who like the loot grind (and people who like both).

Jack Trades posted:

Phigs posted:

Endgame in release Diablo 3 was farming for gear at the highest level you could manage (well, buying from the AH was more efficient, either by grinding gold, running the AH, or using real money, but still...) so you could take on higher Torment levels.

Zereth posted:

I am pretty sure "Torment" didn't exist before Reaper. It went Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and The Italian Word For Hell for difficulties.

Blattdorf posted:

Maybe I'm the outlier because I usually find 2-3 games in the Humble Choice that make it worthwhile.

On a different note, I now understand all the praise for Northern Journey. I thought the glowing reviews of it were overblown, but no, they were right on point. It's a bit like one of those Half-life 1 mods where you don't quite know what to expect, yet it all constitutes a highly compelling whole.

Another game that surprised me was Fidget Spinner RPG. I thought I'd get some kind of idle version mash-up between spinning that fidget and fighting imaginary dragons embedded in light RPG mechanics. Instead, it's a literal acid trip.

Aphex- posted:

As soon as I reach the 'endgame' of a game like that I basically immediately lose interest. I've spent the last 10 or so hours having a nice steady rate of progression and levelling up with at least some kind of narrative then I reach the endgame and suddenly it's a brick wall of grind and repetition. I genuinely don't understand it. Diablo, Destiny, The Division etc, it's all the same.

Jack Trades posted:

I tried playing Grim Dawn and I did beat the vanilla campaign but it was exceedingly boring because the builds just amounted to picking a damage type and stacking damage numbers and resistance removal numbers of that type.

Jack Trades posted:

I tried playing Grim Dawn and I did beat the vanilla campaign but it was exceedingly boring because the builds just amounted to picking a damage type and stacking damage numbers and resistance removal numbers of that type.

Aphex- posted:

As soon as I reach the 'endgame' of a game like that I basically immediately lose interest. I've spent the last 10 or so hours having a nice steady rate of progression and levelling up with at least some kind of narrative then I reach the endgame and suddenly it's a brick wall of grind and repetition. I genuinely don't understand it. Diablo, Destiny, The Division etc, it's all the same.