Diablo II: Resurrected

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Omnicide24 wrote:

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

The core reason why "Day 1 DLC" is perceived as a problem is because gamers have allowed themselves to be trained into a "completionist" consumer mentality obsessed with the idea of owning the "full" game.

I mean it's interesting that you think so but... no? I don't buy special/collectors/limited edition packages for extra money over the base game, and I would if your reasoning held up.

I just expect to get the whole game I'm buying instead of it getting chopped up for extra money regardless of the price tag. I mean it's fine, rather than give a company 60$ or whatever amount for the full game I'm happy to give them none if they pull that crap.

So you've openly admitted that you want to either have the full game — albeit for a reasonable price — or no game whatsoever, but when my man says you've developed an obsession with owning the full game, your response is "mmm... no?"

How about mmmmm yes.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Anyway last day of beta.

Hope you enjoyed your time with it. I was only able to play a few hours this weekend, but man oh man .. Playing fully-zoomed and soaking in the details was a religious experience. It felt like a brand new game to me, and I've been playing D2 since the old Barb demo; and smelling the roses at that slower pace felt almost like exploring Diablo 1 for the first time. I absolutely can NOT wait to go through the entire game like that. Blood Raven looked gruesome; the Smith was friggin' imposing; and I can't wait to see the other super uniques and bosses.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

So you've openly admitted that you want to either have the full game — albeit for a reasonable price — or no game whatsoever, but when my man says you've developed an obsession with owning the full game, your response is "mmm... no?"

How about mmmmm yes.

Well I talked about limited editions and such which I don't buy but do not deter me from purchasing the normal game package. In that case they are usually offering extra skins or some such that you can't normally get, which could be construed as not offering the full game but... It's not the same as cutting actual game content and areas so you can launch them as dlc day 1, or very soon after the base release. They don't want to price the base game above 60$ because they are worried they'll lose sales, so instead the sell you the game in multiple parts? I just don't care for that sort of business practice, I see it as a sign of what a game studio/publisher is willing to do to their game for more money and I stay away.

The thing I was fundamentally disagreeing with is that it is somehow a consumer entitlement issue. We haven't been trained into it, it was the industry standard to sell a complete product for an honest price for a long time. If anything gamers are being trained to accept shady monetization, so much so they'll defend it on the internet.

If you understood all that already then fair enough I guess. I think consumers ought to draw the line somewhere and I have.

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3DNeophyte wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Anyway last day of beta.

Hope you enjoyed your time with it. I was only able to play a few hours this weekend, but man oh man .. Playing fully-zoomed and soaking in the details was a religious experience. It felt like a brand new game to me, and I've been playing D2 since the old Barb demo; and smelling the roses at that slower pace felt almost like exploring Diablo 1 for the first time. I absolutely can NOT wait to go through the entire game like that. Blood Raven looked gruesome; the Smith was friggin' imposing; and I can't wait to see the other super uniques and bosses.

Dude I had such a great time. Unfortunately on console there was no zoom control but that wasn't something I had planned anyway. My first D2 experience was in a way too influenced by my battle.net social interactions. Not that I was constantly playing with others but there was always a chance of it. Playing D2R alone (and soon with close rl friends) gave me that same isolation that diablo 1 afforded in the weeks before I got a modem to play it online (hey, this was 1996 and I was barely 18 and still believed I might do something with my life). It felt...scary. I haven't had to use doorways so tactically SINCE Diablo 1.

Towards the last few hours of the beta I finally got some burnout. I'd taken out Duriel as my level 22 Sword and board Amazon, made a savage polearm for my Merc via a cube recipe I never actually used before, tested most of my favourite old skills, pushed a few I'd never really tried before (fissure, inferno, fire claws) and generally affirmed that this was an excellent little teaser.

I am very eager to really get the synergies and rune words going.

Now the wait begins. I do hope they use this time to iron a few things out but honestly I found the beta eminently playable and very well tuned for a console experience.

PS here's something interesting I found during the beta that you and other D2 affecianados might find worth a read. The url kind of speaks for itself.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/01/branching-out-how-limiting-skill-choices-made-diablo-2-more-fun/

Apologies for lack of link. On phone. It's an excerpt from a book charting blizzard through D2 and starcraft, and appears very well researched and sourced.

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Omnicide24 wrote:

The thing I was fundamentally disagreeing with is that it is somehow a consumer entitlement issue. We haven't been trained into it, it was the industry standard to sell a complete product for an honest price for a long time.

Products are still complete and prices are still honest, though. There are just other related products also available.

I bought, for example, Mass Effect 3 a little while after it came out. It had that DLC with a Prothean squad member in it. I didn't think that seemed like good value for money, so I didn't buy it. But the game I got was complete, and I wasn't misled about the price in any way.

I mean a dishonest price would be something for your consumer protection agency to investigate, surely.

so why Resurrected so much censored?

I'm a huge fan of Diablo 2, hence my love for Hack n Slash. I play PoE because it is the spiritual successor to D2. I once bought a W3 Reforged and the Beta was great, but the full version was inferior to the older original. I don't really believe in the new Blizzard, the only thing they do well is cinematics. First, I will see how people playing Diablo Resurrected, and then I will consider whether to buy it. Remember, no preorders

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Dude I had such a great time. Unfortunately on console there was no zoom control but that wasn't something I had planned anyway.

I didn't know that was going to be a feature either. I was checking out the Controls section of the Options menu just to see how they were mapping everything, and at the very bottom of the list I noticed the Zoom feature sitting above the Legacy Toggle. Given that I normally play D2 in 640x480 with Perspective turned on for maximum immersion, I had to try it out.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

...generally affirmed that this was an excellent little teaser.

Excellent beyond my expectations. I hate that I didn't have enough time to even get to Andi (I bet they made her model horrifying if Blood Raven is any indication), but what I was able to see has me jazzed out of my mind for the rest of it.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

PS here's something interesting I found during the beta that you and other D2 affecianados might find worth a read. The url kind of speaks for itself.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/01/branching-out-how-limiting-skill-choices-made-diablo-2-more-fun/

Thanks for that! I always love reading Dave's commentaries and perspectives on D1 and D2. And after reading this, I feel even more empowered to toss out any notions of min/maxing and just go with whatever I feel like doing, especially for classes I didn't really play much over the years.

I especially liked the bit where a dev said straight up it's not about the item collection or the customising. It's about the clicking. And he was dead right. At the heart of the Diablo phenomenon is the exact same simple compulsion we find in poker machines levers, Pachinko and early simple video games. The primal connection between pushing a button and getting a result.

PoE fails this for me because you have to do so much before pushing that button yields satisfying results. And in that it really is a totally different genre to any other ARPG. But I guess that's old news by now so no need to harp on it.

I also liked that the author pointed out that before diablo most computer RPGs were clunky affairs of party management and stat fiddling. The SSI games are a perfect examplele of this. I loved those but none had the raw addiction that Diablo presented. Although lack of mention of stuff like Gauntlet is a little disconcerting. Maybe the shift to real time was late enough into the development that Gauntlet wasn't actually that much of an influence even though we can see some shared DNA.

Anyway I think they left out the two trickiest classes for a reason. So it'll be interesting to see how Necro and assassin fare without any external testing


As for censorship, it still has inverted pentagrams, which I honestly thought were all but purged from most games these days. The reduction in boob size is amusing but not noticeable really. The changes to the character models are problematic for me only because the voice no longer matches, especially the Amazon.

And honestly we've all hopefully grown up a little bit from back when Diablo and fantasy in general was 100% male gaze and just a wee bit puerile, so I don't mind that everyone in D2 looks a bit more grizzled, a little more experienced. It's all very meta for a restoration of course but eh if it's a deal breaker I'd argue you were probably not the target audience for a D2 update.

I'm not sure I'd even consider it censorship when it's the creators themselves doing it for what seems to be more an aesthetic decision over external influences. But eh YMMV and ultimately it's up to you to decide how you feel about it.

D2r has bigger problems than that though. Much bigger. But only if you want to play it like you did the first one, or...PoE.

I'm for gaze diversity. If I was designing romantic interests for a game, I'd want to include at least four: the straight man gaze, the straight woman gaze, the gay man gaze, and the lesbian gaze. I get that, right now, I might not know a lot about a couple of those gazes, but the point is that I want everyone to get a little happy in the pants with what the game offers them.

I also get that those four don't cover everyone, because some are into That Seriously Weird Shit. Which is cool and all, but at some point I have to admit that some things are beyond my capability to grok.

What I'm not really happy with is gaze exclusion. Such as the idea that big mommy milkers are a bad thing only bad men want. Yes, yes, we don't want to do such a thing to the exclusion of all else — diversity, as I already said, is good. But sometimes I think I get a whiff of sexual puritanism from a game rated M, and that, to me, is sad. It's a fantasy genre; let there be fantasies.