Diablo II: Resurrected

I'd buy D2R if it was at Patch 1.09, maybe even for one ladder season only.
I've just no desire playing anything 1.10 and beyond.

I played D2 for about 5 years straight after Launch and the most fun I had besides Vanilla was in 1.09. I mean 99 was very easy back then, but the upside was that PvP was able to be balanced around every1 being 99. That gave u kind of a level playing field and with some item restrictions, a pretty balanced competitive PvP experience.

Sadly I know those times won't come back, so I keep those fond memories and play the superior modded versions.

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Mikrotherion wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Is that purely a financial decision Therion? D2+LoD alone is basically what d2r is. Heck you can even play Vanilla and disable LoD altogether. But I agree that it is not a cheap nostalgia trip. Obviously I think it's worth it but eh...curious why you'd opt out when what you say you'd choose is straight up inferior.

Financial decision... yes and no.
On the one hand, I have no idea what D2r will cost and unless it's more than a sold game usually costs, I don't really care.
But I do not intend to "support" Blizzard, so no matter the cost, I'm hesitant to pay it.
Moreover, I can play D2 and LoD any time I like with my old copies and enjoy real nostalgia, dated graphics and all.
Another reason is that I'm not sure it will run on Linux, whereas the original D2 does.
So... if it runs on Linux and some friends are getting it, I'll probably cave in and get it as well.

Btw, I agree with most things you said above about Diablo 2 having just the right mix for an arpg and that many other games are "too much", especially PoE (which I still like playing - probably "so much I want to try" is a subset of "too much").

Fair enough old friend. I already negotiated the support blizzard thing, albeit poorly. I know VV will get paid either way...

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Mikrotherion wrote:

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I think people overestimate PvP, but I only have anecdotal evidence.
However, of all the people I know who played D2, no one was into PvP, myself included.

I used to say the same thing. Out of 10 or so years of me playing D2 on and off, I spent about 30 minutes total dueling people outside of the act 1 town.

But...

There was also player-killing in public games. I never went around aggressively attacking people in public games, but I did purposefully make public games all the time... even when magic-finding mephisto over and over again. I liked it when someone popped in and tried to track me down and murder me, or grab the loot before I could from a boss kill.

It was always fun when a baal run turned into a slaughter because someone 30 levels above us went hostile and knew exactly where to find us,

or when we managed to group together and kill the pk (possibly with some casualties),

or when the pk just couldn't find us because we were 2 and a half acts past the name of the game we were in (where we started).

The only hardcore characters I ever played were public-games only characters, and over 90% the deaths were to other players. D2Resurected will get old to me eventually, but if I feel bored I think I will just play a HC character until they get murdered.

Rose=tinted glasses on the memories, sure. But in my experience I have not seen any multiplayer action in POE since the open beta days. Performance just never seemed good enough for me back in the day, and then more recently (admittedly, 2 or 3 years ago) the visual clutter was unbearable when I was the only one in the game: no way I was going to multiply that junk by more players.

That and I refused to participate in trade outside of the game (in a browser? what?) and POE for me should never have even been online.


I'm looking forward to it, for nostalgia mostly, but still. It will be fun.

The promised TCP/IP-support has been removed btw. So - no offline/non battle.net multiplayer possible and a hard time for modders and mod players:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXxgomkQBlE

I wonder what is going to happen when they have all their money...

What does it matter? It's a buy to play game. Not a game as a service. The Devs can fuck off to Tahiti as long as the game works as sold.

I dunno...I can't be the only person here old enough to remember a time when games were one time purchases and no one really cared about what the Devs did after that other than say keeping an eye out for future projects.

I get the appeal of turning Devs into celebrities. Of course I do. I remember the Williams and Lord British and even Romero. But damn, there is something nice in the idea of a straight up transaction: my money for your game, and no real follow on or involvement. Maybe a few clean up patches but that's about it. If I love a game as it is now, I'm probably going to love it for the same reason later on. PoE had a lot of room for improvement for sure but part of why I am so glad I quit is because you had no real stability. What is fun today might be useless tomorrow.

D2r very likely won't be that volatile. And that's perfect for people like me who don't want to make keeping up with a mere arpg an obsession and a job. I know plenty of you dig that and that's why you're here. That's why you are Exiles. You want that whole game as service thing and you care about what the Devs do with your ongoing support. You like the idea of shifting skill and gear, keeping it fresh from week to week, month to month.

Me, I'm way the fuck over all that. I'm very much a creature of habit and comfort. In that light, Buy to play rules. GAAS sucks. As a person who plays games rather than a person who self identifies as a gamer, that is my bottom line. I know financially that GAAS is the present and the future. That there is just so much money to be made in the whole clusterfuck, especially by influencers working with the service providers. But a game isn't "dead" if it doesn't have these. Especially not if it's not relying on them.

To me, "this game is dead" when talking about buy to play games is as meaningless as saying "the movie is dead" or "this book series is dead". As long as you can enjoy it, that shit literally doesn't matter.

And I think it's an unhealthy symptom of how pervasive GAAS culture is that people want to apply that standard to what is ultimately not subject to it.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I dunno...I can't be the only person here old enough to remember a time when games were one time purchases and no one really cared about what the Devs did after that other than say keeping an eye out for future projects.

I remember. And I am soooo grateful that I have a library of old games that I can hop back into and nothing has changed. They are the same games that they were when they came out 30+ years ago. And I still have just as much fun with them today.

Then the dlc wave started. Somehow devs figured out that they could make a full game, and sell it to you in pieces and convince the player that it was BONUS levels.

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Adrenicrome wrote:

Then the dlc wave started. Somehow devs figured out that they could make a full game, and sell it to you in pieces and convince the player that it was BONUS levels.

"Selling games in pieces" is substantially older than "the DLC wave". It was just called shareware back then.

I don't mind DLC that have full length , just like the old days standalone expansion, or the vanilla DLC of the Titan Quest and D2

The DLC of new game is the faction of a full game or standalone expansion, which sometimes it is skin , sometimes it is a single map (in Sniper Elite 2 case),

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

"Selling games in pieces" is substantially older than "the DLC wave". It was just called shareware back then.

Shareware and demo isn't the norm back then. NOW it is, unfinished beta, paid DLC, P2W, "pay for convenience", cosmetic skins. The difference is in its prominent.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

remember a time when games were one time purchases

I do.

I mean they have changed the promised TCP/IP to non-existent. What else are they going to change after enough purchases ?

It´s not like in the good old days where you bought a product and it was what it was.

Oh and you need the "service" of online only battle.net for multiplayer and probably for mods, if there will be mods at all. I guess also mandatory updates with the content they want or you cannot play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXxgomkQBlE