Time Capsule from PoE Closed Beta -- a classic PoE vs D3 thread circa 2012

Indeed it is sad, games companies have realised the avergae dumb kid today is happy smashing his head into the controller / keyboard and seeing *you get a new thing mr awesome! man your good*. As such they make very easy games with lots of sparkles and non-achievements

*congrats you turned on the console!*

*well done you pressed a button!*

*Man your awesome you clicked new game*

*super cool you selected easy mode*

*my god your so good you skipped the cut scene*

*your god like!! you moved 1cm*

*hell yea! you moved 2cm*

And so on and so on. I remember when games had awesome gripping stories that made you want to play to know what happened. Now they are all utter crap where people play so they can say they played it

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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Drakenoog wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Allot of things in the hole thread

Interesting points i must say. Great to se more ppl that can actually just have a nice conversation with constructive rather then bashing words :)

I LOVE YOUR MOVIES. I have them running when I'm meant to be doing other things, when I say to myself 'oops, shouldn't play PoE, should be writing...ooh pretty.'

Oh why thank you kind sir ^^

Maybe can do some co-op at one point =)

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WarBarney wrote:

Indeed it is sad, games companies have realised the avergae dumb kid today is happy smashing his head into the controller / keyboard and seeing *you get a new thing mr awesome! man your good*. As such they make very easy games with lots of sparkles and non-achievements

*congrats you turned on the console!*

*well done you pressed a button!*

*Man your awesome you clicked new game*

*super cool you selected easy mode*

*my god your so good you skipped the cut scene*

*your god like!! you moved 1cm*

*hell yea! you moved 2cm*

And so on and so on. I remember when games had awesome gripping stories that made you want to play to know what happened. Now they are all utter crap where people play so they can say they played it

Planescape: Torment. Nuff said.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

There's another factor. I'm an old, old roleplayer. Tabletop D and D back in highschool, I never played powerful characters, just goofy ones that occasionally did something really effective. I enjoyed that. I think I carried that attitude into computer gaming, even well before Diablo. I played those old TSR Forgotten Realms games, Wizardry, Ultima...all those. Somehow, I was less concerned with power than with doing unusual things.

The Elder Scrolls games *really* indulged this behaviour!

I think it's highly indicative of where gamers are now that even Dungeons and Dragons in its current edition, 4th Ed, has stopped really encouraging 'roleplay' and has turned into a fairly action-orientated experience. Kind of sad to me, but there you go. We play earlier editions, when we do play (which isn't often; Life...).

Unfortunately I can't play 'earlier editions' of Diablo without noticing how painfully outdated they are graphically. Thus, Path of Exile...

Well I don't mind the graphics at all, the saying 'Graphics don't make a game' is probably the most applicable on the hack and slash RPG genre. I would still be playing diablo 2 regardless of it's graphics, if I had not had a high level character with practically every single build and gear possible.
If they came out with new content for it, I would be playing it again for years.

Graphics do make the game in some cases though, worms for example would have been a failure I imagine if it was super realistic, and of course sonic and mario graphics are iconic. Yes ultra realistic graphics aren't needed but the general style of graphics is very important and thats something I feel poe does a lot better, especially zoomed in D3 has more cartoony graphics than warcraft 3 did

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WarBarney wrote:

Graphics do make the game in some cases though, worms for example would have been a failure I imagine if it was super realistic, and of course sonic and mario graphics are iconic. Yes ultra realistic graphics aren't needed but the general style of graphics is very important and thats something I feel poe does a lot better, especially zoomed in D3 has more cartoony graphics than warcraft 3 did

That has nothing to do with the saying though.
The graphics are not what make the game in those games, the gameplay is.
In Crysis, however, the graphics played a bigger part. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay is insanely good in crysis, but the graphics add so incredibly much immersion and feel to it.

@CharanJaydemyr:

heh, it seemed like Bashiok read your thread and replied to you ^^;;

http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/rko6y/youre_going_to_be_smashing_your_face_against_act/

Path of exile, i need a key beta.

Since a saw POE i dont want anything more than that awesome game.

POE>DIABLO3

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

None of this is unknown, of course -- though you put it very clearly and I think it bore 'repeating' here. We'll let my book/game comparison slide off the table, somewhat ashamed of itself, although it still feels it had a point. Somehow...

My best friend is a website designer. To put it bluntly, sometimes some very, very dumb people pay him quite a lot of money to do things they don't like. To convince them to like it. Because he's the designer, they're the client. It amazes me how often he'll put his foot down and say to the client, one way or another, my way is better. I'm sure he's very persuasive about it, but the base reality is they are paying him to do what they can't, and that includes envisioning something they want but don't quite know how to make.

The point is, I'm completely with you as regards 'clients/consumers are drones.' BUT if you're good at what you do, you can draw lines in the sand. Way back in my first post, I made a silly little pun about the current Blizzard 'panda-ing' to its player base. Pandering makes money. It can make a lot of money. But not every company does it. Why? Maybe because they haven't been offered enough money!...But equally as likely, because they just don't want to. Same reason why not every author writes a Twilight clone...

HEY, Book comparison! We TOLD you to stay off the table...grrr...

RTFM is my favourite short-lived acronym. I still use it with my family when I'm on woeful friends-n-family IT support. Unfortunately, TM, as it were, often doesn't exist any more. And RTFPDF just doesn't have the same ring to it. The manual has, in a game's case, been absorbed into the gameplay experience. It's all very disposable, and disposable words (as you may have guessed) bother me. But such is the way. I don't think PoE needs a tutorial but I don't think it would suffer from some pop-ups during the beach introduction and perhaps into the Terraces.

I think an in-game version of the website's passive 'skill tree' would be amazing. Something that calculated the path, had a search function and highlighted similar skills. I wouldn't be surprised to see it sooner or later.

By the same token, a lot of games still assume a player will access external resources. Demon's Souls, for example, was virtually unplayable without constant reference to its fan-made wiki. I think some measure of extra-game research is still assumed these days -- or maybe that's part of why Demon's Souls was considered a very hard game! :)

I appreciate that you believe GGG making PoE more accessible is essential to procuring a sufficient player base to make it all pay off, but...well, we'll see. Never underestimate the resources of a small but devoted fan base...

Personally, I tend to always read up on the game before I play anyway.

Being a sort of powergamer (I don't play to be the best, just to be my best) I enjoy doing this, as it's just something I like to do. I'll spend more time developing a character the playing it, for example (oh the days of D&D).

However, I understand many gamers won't do that nowadays. Honestly, I'm before my own time. I used to play heaps of old games simply because my computer couldn't handle the new ones (it can now but that's another story) but also because much of them were simply "better".

Their biggest problem, though? Not accessible. Accessibility is key, at least in my opinion.

I can understand your friend's hesitance to listen to a client's every whims (especially since I've done web design and am doing further digital design study now) but unless the idea is excessively bad, I still find their will be room for accessibility either way. Even if it's not immediately obvious, I find there's always some way to improve the user experience for virtually any feature you have, without having to rework that entire feature to achieve it.

There's nothing really more for me to say, so I'll just expend the rest of my boredom by further justifying why I'm so hung up on accessibility. There are three major reasons, in no particular order:

1. The first reason is because, as I said, I used to play very old games due to having a very shoddy PC (it was a laptop not built for gaming, like most laptops). I simply made due with what I could get until I got something better, but I know what it's like to miss out on cool games because of outdated hardware.

2. The second reason I am a huge supporter of accessibility is because of the advent of digital services such as Steam. I don't like Steam, but let's not get into that argument. The simple fact of the matter is that any game with an "always online" style of DRM or a "must play once before offline mode is activated" style of DRM (ala Steam) is not accessible. Living in a rural area for a time, without internet, truly gives you a higher respect for those without internet access. That, and low data caps do, too.

3. The third and final reason is that I can simply relate to the confusion people feel about new games. I might be a powergamer, I might strive to know how to play the game, my class and work with people effectively, but I'm not an elitist. I don't shove my knowledge in peoples faces and I don't forget that I was once a newbie, like so many people do. I understand exactly what it's like to know nothing about a new game, I understand how confusing and intimidating a brand spanking new game can feel if you've never experienced anything like it before.

Anyone who's ever played Diablo-style games might be familiar with Path of Exile, as I am. But to assume everyone will be is very foolish, and it's why we're told never to make assumptions to begin with. That's why programmers and designers, in particular, are told to treat their clients/customers with respect, but as drooling babies.

Both games sound good to me.