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

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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Aklyon wrote:

Well said OP, well said. Bit curious why D3 took out ID scrolls, but thats not the point of this thread.

I disagree! The point of this thread is to generate and maintain thoughtful discussion about anything related to Path of Exile -- and if that means discussing another game's treatment of ID scrolls in light of why Path of Exile should keep theirs, then I see this curiosity as entirely relevant!

This response is all about how you can overwork a game, polish out the flaws and make it perfect, and in the process lose the imperfections that charmed everyone in the first place. It's about how you just can't please everyone, and when you try, you end up alienating far more people than you projected. You lose true friends but gain the masses.

From what I can tell, the removal of ID scrolls was a removal of something considered unnecessary. You're going to ID everything, whether it's with an NPC in town or by stocking up on ID scrolls. In that light, let's just make it a single 'extra' click. This preserves the feeling of 'unwrapping a present' without cluttering your inventory.

...It's like a lot of the changes from D2 to D3 in my opinion. Blizzard have optimised and simplified things, dressing them up as 'presents' for the player (look, no more loot-hunting for runes; no more ID scrolls in the way; no more complicated skill trees to make mistakes on; no more permanent builds to regret), not entirely realising that some of us actually liked it a bit messy, a bit complicated. A bit...imperfect.

And that's where Diablo 3 has REALLY gone wrong as a game, I think (RMAH aside, as ever). It's too perfect. It's too shiny. Too polished. In saying that, I feel I've gathered together so many of the concerns people have expressed over the past year: the changes to the aesthetics, the constant refining of the skill system, the removal of certain npcs, the streamlining.

Diablo 3 is too perfect.

I realise this is an easy statement to negate. But let me reword it slightly in a few ways and then address them.

Diablo 3 is the perfect hack 'n' slash game. It has removed everything that might be considered a hindrance, a bother, a confusion or a problem. If Diablo 1 was climbing a mountain with only a grappling hook and a bottle of purple water, and Diablo 2 was discovering a bigger mountain beyond it (but this time you've got more gear), then Diablo 3 is like coming back years later to discover someone has carved some stairs up the slope. It's a long set of stairs with branching paths, and it doesn't have a safety rail, so it'll still be dangerous and it'll still take a really long time...but it won't be real mountain climbing. You won't be finding your own way up.

Another way of putting it: Diablo 3 is overworked. Ah, now I'm back into more obvious 'bashing' territory, no? For any game designer, artist, writer, any sort of creator, the hardest part of making something, and I mean the absolute hardest, is knowing when to stop. Not knowing when it's finished (because it's never finished -- someone very famous said something about that, probably quite a few someones really, it's bloody obvious), but when to say, 'that'll do, pig, that'll do.' Usually it's due to a deadline and you're frantically trying to do EXACTLY what you intended within the remaining duration available. Nothing tightens a piece of writing like a deadline.

Diablo 3 had no deadline for...how many years? And once it hit closed beta, it still really had no deadline. Patch after patch, things were changed, toyed with. Simplified in some ways, complicated in others. Any doubt that a change would result in some imbalance or problem led to another change. What is it they say about too many cooks and broth? Diablo 3 feels like it was made, arbitrated and 'perfected' by a committee. By people who didn't necessarily agree on key points but...compromised with the end result. I imagine someone in the design team really wanted those awesome skill runes to stay; someone else is probably gnashing their teeth at the removal of ID scrolls. And another again is probably quite annoyed that weapons have become semi-restricted by class.

BUT they had to bend, because the D3 closed beta sort of did create a deadline -- players had a taste for it, and demand for full release rose to deafening pitch. So hey, May 15th! (They said on March 15th.)

And I can imagine this reaction too: "What? That's only a few months away! SHIT we don't even have PvP done! We haven't got the skill rune system balanced and in-hand! Never mind, there's always DLC, right? Sure. They want the game now, they can have it now. We'll fix it later."

Ah, the grand abomination that is post-release DLC to *fix what should have been fixed before release*. Another rant altogether.

So what you have is this very weird result of two very unproductive situations: all the resources in the world to create the sequel to the greatest hack and slash game ever made for several years but no real vision of 'when' you need it by; and then an abysmal release date only two months after its announcement when the game clearly isn't anywhere near ready for that.

Diablo 3, the product of 7-10 years' work, Lord-knows how many man hours, how many arguments, moments of epiphany, struggles and revelations, is too perfect. It lacks the charm of its forebears, both of which had magic on their side -- be it the bolt-from-the-blue magic that caught everyone by surprise of Diablo 1, or the fact that lightning can strike twice with Diablo 2. Both games had a crazy number of flaws. D1 you could hack effortlessly and duping was so rampant even the official guide made an unwitting reference to it as a legitimate strategy. Diablo 2, well, that's more recent and I don't need to list what was wrong with that. Diablo 3 plugs all the holes beautifully, and in doing so has become pristine. But not virginally pristine -- no, Ice Queen pristine. Remember when I said Diablo 3 will be untouchable? That's another way of taking it.

And YET Diablo 3, the game that was announced on march 15th 2012 to release on May 15th 2012...How could it be so incomplete, so full of last-minute fixes, given the former factor? Ah, that's easy to answer: tell someone 'I have a gargantuan task for you, but take your time, because I want it to be perfect' and they will. And no matter what, it'll never be finished. Come back ten years later and say, 'good lord, aren't you finished yet? I need it in two months!'...oh dear.

Now, I do believe they knew they their release date well before March 15th. Well, some of them did. But it couldn't have been much more before it, else they would have settled on a rune skill system (and gotten PvP into the mix) well before then. Priorities and all that.

Of course, the hilarity of PvP+RMAH might also have been a factor. (yet another rant, one I'll leave to someone else...)

...Path of Exile also has no deadline, and so is also susceptible to the 'take your time but make it perfect' trap -- but for a start, it has a much smaller team who repeatedly display focus and self-discipline. They exhibit an understanding of time as a seemingly unlimited and yet very limited resource. Chris himself said they had a ten-year plan, and I figure that started not long after the garage-born idea. Unlike Blizzard, GGG doesn't have what I consider to be an impossible standard to maintain. Sure, we have pretty hefty expectations now but the pressure for Diablo 3 to be PERFECT must have caused a few breakdowns. PoE feels like it's evolving to some semi-obscured but definite schedule. There's no rush, but there is a finish line, and Path of Exile is headed towards it, and when it gets there, it will be the game its makers wanted players to learn and enjoy, not the game with which its makers tried to please everyone.

I think GGG actually likes their players and wants them to have fun, be challenged but not frustrated; in short, they want us to play in their playground, which they themselves enjoy. I know, they're a much smaller company than most game makers and this affords an intimacy far less likely with bigger groups, but I'll tell you, ArenaNet (Guild Wars 1) and before them, Mythic Entertainment (Dark Age of Camelot) both achieved the same thing.

I am not convinced Blizzard likes us any more. I think I've said more than enough on this thread to support why I say that.

That's just how I feel.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

I see a LOT of really good ideas in the d3 forum being ignored by Blizzard employees or shouted-down by what seems to be a resident army of pro-Blizzard beta testers who think things are fine just the way they are. Heck, if I were active in that community, a thread like this would either not exist or it would have been buried under hundreds if not thousands of other posts. That's just the way it is.

So I can't say whether or not you're right -- just that I don't get the same vibe of community-feedback appreciation from Blizzard. The statement 'you can't please everyone' can go both ways too -- tough choices had to be made, and were. I don't agree with how they were made, but nothing I say is going to make even the slightest dent in what's coming. That's not why I'm saying it.

Okay, you need to clarify what you mean by 'not very manageable' and 'cluttered'. Do you mean from the player's perspective or from a design perspective? Because as a player, I had *mules* full of runes in Diablo 2. I had more mules full of gems. There were five basic gem types, five grade: chipped, flawed, normal, flawless, perfect. I can't quite recall how many runes there were, let alone how many rune combinations and runewords.

We managed just fine. Heck, we revelled in it.

And you're going to tell me that five rune types modifying any given skill would be hard to manage?

Ignore the rank business. A rank 1 crimson rune is made utterly obsolete by a rank 2. There was no reason to keep a rank 1 crimson rune on a character if you had a rank 2 UNLESS you wanted multiple crimson rune modifications to your skills.

Yknow, just talking about the details is reminding me of what builds I had planned and that's depressing.

Why are we arguing a skill system that we'll never see anyway? My argument was always, and will always be, for why we should have seen it. That's a valid argument, give that we're seeing something very much like it in Path of Exile. Arguing that it was not viable *after it has been scrapped* seems a little less important -- unless you're arguing it's not viable in Path of Exile as well.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

...That said, Skyrim took me much longer to realise it wasn't quite the same experience as earlier Elder Scrolls games. I played Skyrim for easily over a hundred hours. Then I took a...look at smith-chanting and it was all over.

I think Skyrim's a perfect example of a very flawed masterpiece. It was bugged to hell, relied on post-release PC mods to really feel complete and more easily broken than a fishstick with a katana. But it was and is glorious to experience.

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Tagek wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

...That said, Skyrim took me much longer to realise it wasn't quite the same experience as earlier Elder Scrolls games. I played Skyrim for easily over a hundred hours. Then I took a...look at smith-chanting and it was all over.

I think Skyrim's a perfect example of a very flawed masterpiece. It was bugged to hell, relied on post-release PC mods to really feel complete and more easily broken than a fishstick with a katana. But it was and is glorious to experience.

The difficulty ruined it all for me, even without smithing and enchanting the game is a cakewalk on MASTER difficulty.

The worst part about it is that the developers give exactly 0 fucks about it. They haven't patched it, and they won't.

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Ragnar119 wrote:

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Tagek wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

...That said, Skyrim took me much longer to realise it wasn't quite the same experience as earlier Elder Scrolls games. I played Skyrim for easily over a hundred hours. Then I took a...look at smith-chanting and it was all over.

I think Skyrim's a perfect example of a very flawed masterpiece. It was bugged to hell, relied on post-release PC mods to really feel complete and more easily broken than a fishstick with a katana. But it was and is glorious to experience.

The difficulty ruined it all for me, even without smithing and enchanting the game is a cakewalk on MASTER difficulty.

The worst part about it is that the developers give exactly 0 fucks about it. They haven't patched it, and they won't.

That's why mods exist.

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Tagek wrote:

A game shouldn't have to rely on mods to be good, that's why oblivion shits all over skyrim for me, just because I had better memories about that game.