D2R might bring new PoE players

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Nubatron wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

D2 does ARPG better than PoE because that is all it does. It wears one hat and that hat still fits very well. PoE, in contrast, is a hydra, or at least a chimera. Point being, a beast with multiple heads seemingly should wear multiple hats.

Otoh maybe an arpg should have just one head.

Fun fact: 'spicy' is considered 'profane' by D2R's auto name filter. Somehow it was cool with SitOnMedic and ChokeOnMyBone.

Getting around weak name filters is so 1996. :)

I definitely had some I’m young and online terrible names when D2 first came out. Now just Nubatron.

The game is giving me terrible motion sickness though. I need to play with the settings to figure it out or my D2R experience is unfortunately over.

It has some weirdly specific issues. Friend of mine found it impossibly dim on his ps5, despite the beta being just fine.

At the risk of asking the obvious, might it be screen tearing? Cap framerate might help, since your character is always clear but for some reason the background can get really blurry. The game definitely has some inherent motion blur but you'd need to tweak the vid card settings to minimise it.

I guess Im 'lucky' here. My decision to play on a tv and a good four feet away means its much easier on my eyes. The game has a lot of old man options like extra large fonts, which is good because I have old man eyes.

Re names: I used my very first bnet name, the one I used to write necro guides and fanfic for diabloii.net, but since all anyone sees is the PlayStation id, only I get to appreciate this in the character list. Which is why the notion of 'profane' character names had me laughing. Clearly we console plebs are being held back by the pc masterrrace filters despite said names never even being seen by another player...hell, not even by me once I am online.

Anyway someone else on here said recently that PoE endgame is coming up with character names. If so, I quit fulfilled. :)

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

It has some weirdly specific issues. Friend of mine found it impossibly dim on his ps5, despite the beta being just fine.

At the risk of asking the obvious, might it be screen tearing? Cap framerate might help, since your character is always clear but for some reason the background can get really blurry. The game definitely has some inherent motion blur but you'd need to tweak the vid card settings to minimise it.

I guess Im 'lucky' here. My decision to play on a tv and a good four feet away means its much easier on my eyes. The game has a lot of old man options like extra large fonts, which is good because I have old man eyes.

Re names: I used my very first bnet name, the one I used to write necro guides and fanfic for diabloii.net, but since all anyone sees is the PlayStation id, only I get to appreciate this in the character list. Which is why the notion of 'profane' character names had me laughing. Clearly we console plebs are being held back by the pc masterrrace filters despite said names never even being seen by another player...hell, not even by me once I am online.

Anyway someone else on here said recently that PoE endgame is coming up with character names. If so, I quit fulfilled. :)

I always play with vsync on and frames capped in all my games. I've never really felt like it mattered in terms of gameplay. I think it's the background blur while moving, and I'm not sure there is anything to be done about that.

Still messing around with the settings, but I think I just need to play a little then stop for a bit. I found some threads about people having the same issue in beta, so I suspect it's not that uncommon.

I really like what VV did with the graphic overhaul in D2R.

But I strongly dislike the Lobby on PC. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy they implemented a Lobby in the first place instead of the Console/D3 system.
It feels terribly barebones tho... most of the screen is just clutter without any function compared to the old D2 Lobby.

#1 the characters at the bottom of the screen don't look good imo

#2 SC and HC characters have the same pose (unlike old D2)

#3 no mouseover for characters to see Level, Ladder/Non-Ladder, ect.

#4 No player profile or any way to inspect people or maybe even better inspect the character

#5 no Game list filter option

#6 the Refresh button no working properly

#7 no custom chat channels / Lobbies


I really hope they work on that, because right now that lobby is useless... they could just make the games list and ladder in the main menu instead.

I played D2 way too much. Yesterday bought and tried our D2R. A bit surprised that they apparently changed absolutely nothing. I just did a few minutes. Not sure if I'll finish this first character but it is kind of fun from a nostalgia point of view.

I'm not sure how attractive the game will be to people that never played it before though.

Most importantly... is the chat gem working properly?

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Turtledove wrote:

I played D2 way too much. Yesterday bought and tried our D2R. A bit surprised that they apparently changed absolutely nothing. I just did a few minutes. Not sure if I'll finish this first character but it is kind of fun from a nostalgia point of view.

I'm not sure how attractive the game will be to people that never played it before though.

They took 1.14 as launch patch. So caster meta with broken synergies, broken rumewords and paladins.

The nostalgia wont last long.

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Turtledove wrote:

I played D2 way too much. Yesterday bought and tried our D2R. A bit surprised that they apparently changed absolutely nothing. I just did a few minutes. Not sure if I'll finish this first character but it is kind of fun from a nostalgia point of view.

I'm not sure how attractive the game will be to people that never played it before though.

Were I not planning to play this on ps4 with an overseas buddy who never got to experience d2 back in the day (teacher parent=apple, not pc, poor bastard) I don't think I'd be that into it. Plenty of other games, as my current sig clarifies.

But he also did play d1 at my place back when taking turns on a pc at a mate's place was absolutely a thing, and we did play d3 together a few years back (just for a normal playthrough to give the beers and gossip some background) so I am intrigued as hell to get his impressions. As a follow-up to d1 it is still an incredible jump forward. As a tighter arpg than its sloppy, weightless sequel, it shows, ironically, what you are left with when you strip away the flab. Yes, d3 was at once weightless and flabby.

But naturally as a modern arpg it doesn't stack up. By design. Too many qol innovations in stuff as old as Titty Quest and Grim Dawn, not to mention the panda in the room. Thankfully my old friend is mature enough to play d2r with all this context in mind. I am sure we will have a great time. Our first 3 player session is today actually. He's going sorc, another old bnet friend turned rl mate 15 years back is going some sort of tank I hope...because I am playing healbot. :)

I have been playing my old meleemancer and sword and board dodgezon alone since release though, and both bring me a lot of old happiness spikes. I don't hate having to open my inventory every few minutes and manually removing white items. Part of the game. I don't even hate having to decide between a large charm or some inventory space.

So far all I really hate is the retention of the occasional desync that puts me into a room I definitely didn't want to be in, but if keeping that is part of VV's idea of d2, so be it.

But yeah, were I still on pc itd be other arpgs for me. Maybe other genres altogether. The nostalgia won't last long for most but so what? Its a buy to play game with no GAAS bullshit. You can take a break and come back and oh my GOD you can just get right back to it. No hefty patch notes. No nerfs or rebalances. No needlessly complicated gimmicks to keep people from getting bored and moving on. No mtxes designed to make the game less inherently punishing. Come on: this sort of simplicity and reliability has to count for something.

For me, it counts for a lot. You will see a few GAAS in my signature, certainly. I don't think they are intrinsically bad. They are the present and sadly they seem to be the future. I do think they work better for certain genres, genres where we expect a sort of living world because of the immersion. ARPGs never gave me that impression: they are all about comfortable repetition and frequent bursts of low to mid level pleasure via anticipated but not scheduled drops, which is actually almost the dead opposite of what PoE ended up doing: destabilised iterations making the familiar uncomfortable, with mostly little to no pleasure due to the pressure of that constant removal of reliability...and very rare explosions of rapture from a lottery win level drop.

At least, that is how it felt to me. D2r, in contrast, feels exactly the same as d2 did all those years and all those kilos and all those hangovers ago. That's all we ask of a good update and it's all they delivered. :)

I'm overjoyed I get to experience it with a newcomer too. One I know won't bitch or gripe about this or that, an old dog like me who can see why certain games, like people, age better than others. This turns it from a purely nostalgic exercise into something...actually new for me.

What is incredible is the level of effort that went in to revising and reworking the cinematics for D2. Meanwhile not even one cinematic for PoE to this day to enhance this game by doing what cinematics do best: create hype and enrich the lore.

Years ago Chris said that they had to choose between spending resources on a cinematic or content. At the time, He/GGG only saw value in content. However, GGG is now a big company; big staff with big funding from Tencent.

It's time. New skills that ride the rollercoaster of buffs and nerfs is great and all, but GGG should give its fans - and the world - something truly AAA.

All this said...

But playing D2R is fun. It's enjoyable. It's not micro-management stressful as PoE now is. It is, quite simply, still a better GAME, and now is not muddly and cloudy to look at.

Drops are worth checking - maybe masomode will get this back into PoE, but D2(R) didn't lose it to begin with. Mods fall on a curve, so low level mods are replaced by higher tiers., and higher still, and so on... and it's not "look to trade to get your next upgrade", it's "you could drop a better XXX".

Sure, once you get to 95, it's hard work and grind getting anything better... but who plays PoE at level 95 expecting to drop ANYTHING other than trading mats? (and if you don't trade, I guess you enjoy the grind. I can't play on that late.)

For sure, the economic simulator is much much smaller. Which to me is a good thing, because that should never have been the point. Undoubtedly the choice of things to do in the 1% endgame is far more limited. Maybe here *I* miss the point.
But as a game which can be played and enjoyed, with graphics which neither make my eyes squint or bleed, it's... it's better. It does what PoE did, smaller, cleaner, more purely and more enjoyably.
PoE was great after D3, especially 0.x and 1.x. D2R is great after too much PoE 2.x onwards.

Will I stick with it for 8 more years? Maybe not. Maybe. But for now it's a real breath of old fresh air.

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kaktttusikaa3 wrote:

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DarkJen wrote:

Ironically, d2r is way better in many things, than current poe version.
This is 2021 for you.

Surprise!

You're delusional. D2R is pure nostalgia. Graphic is suprisingly good for a 20 years + game but thats it. As a game and its mechanics it's a 20 years + game and it hurts.

Clunky movement, clunky mobs targeting, clunky object ineractions, weird mobsa distance targeting you, dumb companions (if someone says minions in POE have bad Ai try D2R), dumb and irritating flask system, hard to trade, legendary story is soo cliche, only 1 respec per difficulty. It's just old game with new graphics. And that is all.

I bought cause never played D2 back in the days. I regret 40 EUR, tried to refund but couldn't. I get it in 2000 D2 was smth big, now it's just old classic that looks better in memories than in real life. After POE or tbh any modern arpg i can't imagine anyone playing D2R more than 4 acts or max 3 difficulty levels.

QfT

Hype, nostalgia and curiosity. Reskinned game left to rot by Blizzard in all other respects typical Blizzard incompetence. 300k+ on release Twitch numbers 89k RN maybe better Sunday afternoon but as is 2/3 viewership lost in 2 days. Devastatingly telling. Tons left in Droves. Mods make it more POE like but Blizzard true to Blizzard style and destroy anything good. Poor 1 or 2 Devs still working on that game and not prepping for court.