Poll of the Day > I don't really understand the Diablo games.

(+) Yeah! (+)

They're just kind of mindless fun? Like I have a great time playing them, but they're mind-numblingly easy. If you play on normal it's literally just click to win, maybe some times use hot bar abilities.

I like it, it's fun, I just don't get why people are obsessed with it.

The best gameplay experiances I ever had with Diablo and Hellfire was when I put the "The Dark 5" mod on it, making it one of the hardest games of it's type I'd ever played.

Having to think through every move and resource expendature while the monsters were sometimes literally hunting for you, so good.

But yes, that's why people obsessed, not because of the base gameplay, but the other options. Try a hardcore run. Try a hardcore ironman run. Get an old version of d2 and try a players 256 run. Try a pasifist necromancer.

The newest Diablo game is nearly 10 years old and the first one is nearly 30 years old. Gaming environments change a lot over time.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

They're just kind of mindless fun? Like I have a great time playing them, but they're mind-numblingly easy. If you play on normal it's literally just click to win, maybe some times use hot bar abilities.

I like it, it's fun, I just don't get why people are obsessed with it.

People used to say the same about shmups in the arcade. They were just "pay to win"

The general idea behind having different difficulties is that you can select a harder one if normal is too easy to be entertaining. That said, difficulty settings in ARPG's tend to be mostly a matter of stats, with relatively little difference in the complexity of the basic "don't stand in the ow" gameplay and instead just increasing the penalty for standing in the ow such that you either need to build/gear to mitigate it or do a better job of avoiding it, so in many ways that's more the kind of difficulty that stretches out the game (by being a gear check or making you try multiple times) than the kind that provides a genuine skill challenge. High difficulties have a tendency to turn into "rocket tag," where anything you don't kill instantly will one-shot you, even with the strongest available defensive measures.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

They're just kind of mindless fun? Like I have a great time playing them, but they're mind-numblingly easy.

This describes most games

I like it, it's fun, I just don't get why people are obsessed with it.

You'll find fans - including extreme, "obsessed" fans - with just about every mainstream game under the sun. Again, this describes most games. Nothing special about Diablo. This topic is kinda pointless

Nah D2 and the expansion had plenty of difficulty, the new D3 is easy as fuck, which is partly why alot of people didn't like it (me included). They eventually allowed you to skip playing through the story and start having more difficulty faster, but it's still pretty freaking easy even post game.

D2 LOD though, had plenty of difficulty especially till you got some really good equipment/rune words etc. You could make it much easier by trading, farming GC's etc, but it still was hard as balls by Hell difficulty and not all characters could make it there.

D2 was the perfect mix of having enough difficulty to make building a good character worthwhile, make farming/finding good equipment very rewarding etc, and that was just to even finish the game fully (forget end game content etc).

Each char you made, you got to see how far you could take it. The internet was around back then (in fact it was one of the main boards I posted on) but not like it is today, so people experimented themselves and had real fun with the game, as in thousands and thousands of hours. I have no clue how anyone plays thousands of hours of D3, but people do.

SmugRickMoranis posted...

Nothing special about Diablo

I beg to differ, I'll say the first Diablo was innovative a bit, but the second one was the real start of multi-player RPGs (action type) along with Phantasy Star Online. Both let multiple friends play together (although D2 let you actually fight them and started pvp outside of MMO's (mostly muds back then).

D2 was.....ground breaking, and one of the games that started what is so common now for many genres, group playing/partying/pvp etc.

wolfy42 posted...

D2 was.....ground breaking, and one of the games that started what is so common now for many genres, group playing/partying/pvp etc

In a way, it's the Citizen Kane of ARPG's: It seems unremarkable by modern standards, but that's because almost everything that is normal in modern ARPG's started with D2.

Try playing D2 untwinked on hardcore if you want a challenge.

Play original Diablo 3 on PS3 or Xb360, on hard mode.

The way the game was SUPPOSED to be played.

Do not get any of the updated versions etc.

The plus side is this game is very cheap to buy now to my knowledge, like a few bucks

Look at Money Bags icecutter17 with their wanton disregard for fiscal responsibility

Must be nice to be so free with your money

kind9 posted...

Try playing D2 untwinked on hardcore if you want a challenge.

Honestly, hardcore modes never really feel like "challenges" to me so much as they just promote excessive caution and defensive play. The game doesn't get any more difficult, the penalty for failure is just increased.

I play ARPGs because I can spend hundreds of hours making a build that ends up being something like this (This is my build I worked on for 4 months in late 2021 / early 2022):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG2H8OTeyOQ
Only need to activate a skill, once, can just mindlessly walk through the game. It's "fun" planning something out and doing long term progression. I have a binge/purge cycle with them because it's hard to frequently find a reason to play a game / genre you've played for thousands of hours. The feeling you get when you're mindlessly blasting shit is like nothing else I've felt when playing a game in the past 25 years I've been gaming.

adjl posted...

Honestly, hardcore modes never really feel like "challenges" to me so much as they just promote excessive caution and defensive play. The game doesn't get any more difficult, the penalty for failure is just increased.

I think you also have to put much more thought into your equipment. Traders, gamblers, and cube recipes become much more useful. You have to pay more attention to stats like hit rate, block rate, and resistances. In D2 in my experience playing this way requires a much more strategic approach to the game. If your goal is to reach Baal or Diablo in hell mode then it's pretty challenging.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

but they're mind-numblingly easy

it depends on the game (I'm including clones), and I've only played certain ones, but they can eventually become extremely challenging and the fun is in how you can still manage to survive despite how hard it's getting, just by knowing how to use your abilities the right ways. it takes a while to get to that point though, and it is "mind-numbingly easy" at first (the fun then is in learning and growing your character).

Examples I'm familiar with:
Diablo 3: on the harder difficulties, the elite enemies are stupidly fast and tanky. you have to use a good combination of CC and DOT just to be able to whittle them down (varies with class, I mostly know mage), all while not getting creamed by their attacks. I'm not sure if I'd call it "good" gameplay, because it's actually kind of tedious, just fast-paced tedious, but it's definitely not easy either.

Dungeon Siege: very specifically Dungeon Siege 1, without the expansion installed, on Hard difficulty. (installing the expansion makes the game easier just by installing it, reducing enemy damage by 25% or something like that; I'm not sure it's even possible to play without it anymore since most editions come with it preinstalled). The game starts off excruciatingly slow, but is decently challenging on hard. It never really gets crazy challenging though (except for a few particular places, like the AOE rock golems or trying to get across the horizontal elevators) and is kind of just a good solid medium challenge throughout (without it being on Hard, you might say it's "mind numbingly easy" throughout). The fun is in the constantly changing environments and enemies (snow forest, into ice-cavern, into swamp, into golden forest, into undead wasteland, into scorching desert, etc.etc.) and the slow steady progression of your party including the large amount of variety you can have with a surprisingly large party size of IIRC 8.

Darkstone: pretty old game these days, I'm not sure if I could get into it again, but the game gets harder and harder almost without bound, and unlike Diablo games you don't really get high-level abilities, so much as you learn to use your regular "boring" abilities in new ways. something you thought was just a nice-sounding but fairly useless ability to reflect spells all of a sudden becomes your most important ability when you have to clear out a dungeon filled with hundreds of fireball spewing teleporting mages. at the harder difficulties it's almost a different game than when you started, there's just so many enemies and they're so strong, but you've learned the right tactics to deal with them anyway. the dungeon is swarming with so much death but you can just manage to survive by using the exact right abilities the exact right ways.

The question is which Diablo are you talking about because the third one is made for children while the second one is limited by what character you're playing since in hell difficulty both your character and build can make or break you.

No clue about the first.

aHappySacka posted...

The question is which Diablo are you talking about because the third one is made for children while the second one is limited by what character you're playing since in hell difficulty both your character and build can make or break you.

No clue about the first.

The first was still really good for it's time, and inspired many clones because of that, but it was limited in it's impact compared to the second.

The second was a innovative gem that inspired tons of creativity and could be played for thousands of hours, which was fairly unique still (most games lasted less than 100 unless they were arcade style games like dig dug etc where you just tried to get higher scores etc).

The 3rd was World or Warcrafted to be made for the masses and allow 4 year olds to play the game. It existed/was created in a world that included walkthorughs/builds for everything so the creators figured nobody cared about building their own caracters anymore. The difficulty was set to such a low level that it could be used as a sleeping aid (no joke, it was one of the easiest ways for me to fall asleep).

I hope the next one is better, harder, faster, with more character creation/leveling/tactics etc. They should learn from PoE and go freaking overboard with how many ways you can customize and build a character.

More you do that, the more people like me will play your game. I'd play a updated version of D2 (and have) way before playing D3, and the graphics of even the original were still good enough for me (didn't need the remastered upgrades).

So don't waste time on super insane graphics (although obviously you can upgrade them a bunch without investing much time at all now), focus on the gameplay, on having many different characters you can play, and many ways you can play each character. Focus on having tons of good loot and making it worth it to run for it.

That is Diablo, that is what we need and honestly it's insane that the closest we have at this point to a really good D2 type game is Path of Exile. Don't get me wrong, it's great, but it's free to play, and so much more could be done by a big company that builds a great engine, releases the full game and then releases DLC etc every 6 months or so.

SmugRickMoranis posted...

Look at Money Bags icecutter17 with their wanton disregard for fiscal responsibility

Must be nice to be so free with your money

??

kind9 posted...

I think you also have to put much more thought into your equipment. Traders, gamblers, and cube recipes become much more useful. You have to pay more attention to stats like hit rate, block rate, and resistances. In D2 in my experience playing this way requires a much more strategic approach to the game. If your goal is to reach Baal or Diablo in hell mode then it's pretty challenging.

That's mostly what I mean by promoting caution. It's not actually "hard" to grind for an extra hour for fire resistance gear before moving into a volcano zone so you don't get one-shotted. It counts as putting more planning into it, certainly, but that planning isn't particularly demanding, especially if you aren't going in fully blind and you therefore know when you need to upgrade your gear to reach whatever breakpoints are needed to survive the next zone.

wolfy42 posted...

Don't get me wrong, it's great, but it's free to play, and so much more could be done by a big company that builds a great engine, releases the full game and then releases DLC etc every 6 months or so.

Realistically, a bigger budget than PoE's (which isn't exactly low-budget to begin with; F2P games can be quite lucrative) wouldn't help an ARPG much. Improving on PoE would be a matter of making different design decisions, which aren't overly demanding as far as budget goes (and, in fact, are probably actively hampered by a larger budget because then you have executives meddling with the process to ensure that design promotes engagement and greater revenue over entertainment). Bigger budgets generally just translate into more and higher-fidelity art assets.

An ARPG's fun level lies in how deep it's battle mechanics are and how dedicated the game's development team is willing to keep things fresh. This is why a game like PoE has lasted for so long, and also why I'm wanting to move away from it in general.

icecutter17 posted...

??

Don't play coy

Bragging how you can throw a few bucks down on Diablo like it's nothin' while the rest of us are wondering if we can scrape enough pennies together to feed our children