The devs did not ruin diablo 3

This is a rant, I am aware nobody cares about my opinion but I wanted to talk about this because I think people forgot.

When D3 was being advertised they CONSTANTLY talked about inferno mode. It was the center piece to their game ( besides the RMAH of course), the intense and incredibly difficult endgame that was suppose to make players struggle.

And you know what? They nailed it, almost 2 months after release people were struggling to get past act 1 while the objectively better players killed diablo (and still sometimes died). But after a few months the majority of the forums was nothing but people complaining about the difficulty of the game and the devs cave in (which is their own fault I will give you that) and ANNIHILATED the difficulty. The game that people used to struggle to beat became a walk through the park and thus sparked the fire that eventually ended the game for a lot of people.

Disclaimer: I am aware more mistakes were made by the devs after and for sure they should have added more content to keep the game interesting.

BUT: the original idea was a tough slow progressive gameplay that the COMMUNITY ruined.


TL;DR Devs did as promised, the casual players were the majority and the game was catered to them and the game went down hill.

inferno was simply locked behind gear, nothing hard about it when skill and builds didn't really matter. back then at teh beginning I struggled on act 1 inferno like almost all friends of mine. One weapon drop later i easily cruised to act4 beginning. thanks to normalised values in spells and the uniques nessecary to zircumvent that behind dropgates (also known as the RMAH factor) there was no skillbased progress. just luck paired with a timesink. D3 was bad at the beginning, not only because of the auction house, because of bad gamedesign. nobody wants to fight a yellow mob for 5 minutes and then looting shit for that. (and exactly this is what you did fresh out of hell mode)

So no d3 core was bad, but hey, it got better. unfortunatly blizz was unoriginal and lazy in developing content which left game for dead.

I agree completely D3 inferno best game of all time screw haters.

I understand their views tho. Like poor itemization, poor randomness, poor drops like remember when legs where worse than blues? Anyway once you got past all that the difficulty was nice and punishing.

Anyways both "wilson's" Chris and Jay are gods in my book. Mucho hours played in both games. Much fun had.

I'll be honest tho both games took turn for worse. D3 started with patch 1.2. This one in Gen 3 (although abyss and Delve were decent)

Been too busy to play this one. Only like lvl 40. But so far it looks like a worse version of Breach.

It is worse than Breach, it cant really be denied.

Far as D3 goes I liked it much more before the expansion. The decision to only buff and never nerf only shows what types of people complained the most.

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tsunamikun wrote:

inferno was simply locked behind gear, nothing hard about it when skill and builds didn't really matter.

On the one hand, I completely disagree. A1/A2 Inferno were intense piloting challenges, even if you built your character ideally, unless you used trade to get items only available starting A3. It WAS possible, although very difficult, to progress without the gear.

On the other hand, this was a clear-cut case of the Rich Dark Roast Effect. You mean you heard thousands of Diablo fans say they want a truly difficult, challenging experience… and you actually believed them? Top kek, dev bros. In any game where there is a build component, there will be those who don't build to play but who play to build, and if you mention "skill" to those types they will see passives and gear, and never once consider the Korean StarCraft levels of APM they would never want to develop even if they could — at most they'd consider familiarity with enemy attack patterns. When "skill" means something entirely cerebral, D3's Inferno mode was the furthest thing fans meant from "challenging."

And although I certainly see the importance of designing an ARPG for mouse skills — as far as I can tell, it's the only exception to Laz's Law of Defensive Option Uselessness — using mouse skills as a barrier to progression is like getting rid of the potential for lucky streaks in a CCG like Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone: it turns poker into chess and thus crushes a bad player's hope of victory. While this might still be the right call for a strictly offline game, if your ARPG has an online player-to-player economy it's unnecessary because completing story mode is not the primary win condition — the primary win condition is farming the best loot in the shortest amount of time and becoming the richest player on the server. Give faster-killing, faster-looting build options to the players with fast eyes and fingers, and give mutually exclusive, slower-killing, game-difficulty-reducing build options to the people who think "skill" lies in passive tree choices. You don't need to go so far as to make the challenges unbeatable by the unskilled when making them take longer per run is sufficient punishment.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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tsunamikun wrote:

inferno was simply locked behind gear, nothing hard about it when skill and builds didn't really matter.

On the one hand, I completely disagree. A1/A2 Inferno were intense piloting challenges, even if you built your character ideally, unless you used trade to get items only available starting A3. It WAS possible, although very difficult, to progress without the gear.

butcher had a fixed enrage timer, no strategy or skill could help you with that. not enough dps -> encounter was unbeatable. and yeah i can remember the mouseskills.... kiting every frikkin yellow mob around obstacles for 5 minutes to kill it. wooobedoo^^

Diablo 3 Inferno had a lot of gimmicks to overcome, but wasn't particularly 'difficult'. While working 60-70 hours a week (and thus not having as much gaming time as usual) I still managed to get a Monk, Demon Hunter, Wizard and Necromancer through Inferno (and a Barbarian just into Inferno) without any difficulties before they nerfed it. That was with all the down time, and with playing enough Path of Exile to have a top 200 ladder character in the beta.

Once you knew how to gear your character, it was straightforward. I got bored of the game and fortunately Path of Exile easily replaced the Diablo series.

Well that's just it, they hit what they were going for really well, and it turns out that what they were going for kinda sucked.

They wanted a "hard" ARPG, and what they learned is that this genre can't really do that. They stonewalled progress for inferno behind gear and only gear, and the only place to get that gear was inferno. The thing was there were no real choices in gear either, pretty much all the gear was exactly the same bar the differing primary stats. The legendaries were laughable, they thought that static meant powerful, but what it meant was static and therefore always bad. Outside of boss fights there was no real skill based thing in the game, control impairing effects just happened and you lost control of your character, and the bosses had enrage timers for some reason.

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tsunamikun wrote:

yeah i can remember the mouseskills.... kiting every frikkin yellow mob around obstacles for 5 minutes to kill it. wooobedoo^^

Frankly, one of the biggest problems with ARPGs is that mousework is usually punished, not rewarded. Tanking is faster than kiting, when it really should be the other way around if anything.

If I was making an ARPG, I'd probably make it for console (e.g. PS4) where attacking doesn't (usually) lock your feet and controls are something like
left analog stick - move
right analog stick - aim
L1, L2, R1, R2 - active skills (default: where aimed, option: in direction currently moving)
∆,[],O,x - "town stuff" (e.g. menu, equip, interact)

That way kiting wouldn't be a ridiculous DPS hit — it'd essentially be "free."

(I guess one can manage a similar control scheme on PC using arrow-key or WASD movement, but let's face it, PC gaming is on its way out.)

One of the big problems with that is the always online part these ARPGs want to have. If you want really fancy movement you don't get that, think of the desyncing. I remember thinking, "Well I can never do Atziri because if I desync I'm dead."

Sure you can do lockstep like PoE, but then you're gonna make your game unplayable for anyone not near a server.