Diablko 4 announced

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

and I say that as someone who paid very little attention to Diablo 3 so really I'm coming to all of it quite blind and fresh.

As somone who always dives deep into lore of any game, and grew up on Diablo 1 and 2, this is for the best.

The world writing, story writing, where some of the worst I've ever seen in any piece of media, including satire, was D3. Inarius and Lilith never came up in D3 (despite their mention in D2, and where alluded to in D1), despite the entire story centered around their offspring (D3 did add some of that well after with the addition of the Cube as they desperately tried to reverse course and set up ideas clearly central for D4).

Most of D3 was the bad guy of the act calling you up on magic phone to taunt you about his unstoppable plan, and how the last unstoppable plan you foiled didn't actually matter, roughly every quest, and the Lord of Lies getting called out as an obvious liar while he was prenteding to be someone else.

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

and I say that as someone who paid very little attention to Diablo 3 so really I'm coming to all of it quite blind and fresh.

As somone who always dives deep into lore of any game, and grew up on Diablo 1 and 2, this is for the best.

The world writing, story writing, where some of the worst I've ever seen in any piece of media, including satire, was D3. Inarius and Lilith never came up in D3 (despite their mention in D2, and where alluded to in D1), despite the entire story centered around their offspring (D3 did add some of that well after with the addition of the Cube as they desperately tried to reverse course and set up ideas clearly central for D4).

Most of D3 was the bad guy of the act calling you up on magic phone to taunt you about his unstoppable plan, and how the last unstoppable plan you foiled didn't actually matter, roughly every quest, and the Lord of Lies getting called out as an obvious liar while he was prenteding to be someone else.

To be fair...

Blizzard never could write a decent story to save their lives, the script on most wow exps, frozen throne, brood war are all flaming garbage. They are(or at least used to) legit good at making moments feel epic, but making a good plot as a whole was never their forte. Diablo universe was pretty much always a rather cliche central plot with tons of little shocking addons that are interesting by themselves but dont build a grander picture as you will struggle to even make every addon fit together

Not that this is a deal-breaker, most of the classic games felt awesome, because, again, they used to really know how to make epic moments and we mostly remember that and overlook at how if we step back and look at the whole... i kinda dont make sense...

PoE is hardly diffferent. Its very similar to diablo: A rather cliche central plot with tons of gory addons added over time, to a similar effect too: they dont combine to make a great whole. Most villians are hard to remember(i only could name piety after i finished my first story run...) because they are uber generic and outside social rank, you can pretty much swap one for another and it makes zero difference. GGG is stepping up with the atlas story, tho so maybe theres hope for poe2

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feike wrote:

To be fair...

Blizzard never could write a decent story to save their lives, the script on most wow exps, frozen throne, brood war are all flaming garbage. They are(or at least used to) legit good at making moments feel epic, but making a good plot as a whole was never their forte. Diablo universe was pretty much always a rather cliche central plot with tons of little shocking addons that are interesting by themselves but dont build a grander picture as you will struggle to even make every addon fit together

Not that this is a deal-breaker, most of the classic games felt awesome, because, again, they used to really know how to make epic moments and we mostly remember that and overlook at how if we step back and look at the whole... i kinda dont make sense...

PoE is hardly diffferent. Its very similar to diablo: A rather cliche central plot with tons of gory addons added over time, to a similar effect too: they dont combine to make a great whole. Most villians are hard to remember(i only could name piety after i finished my first story run...) because they are uber generic and outside social rank, you can pretty much swap one for another and it makes zero difference. GGG is stepping up with the atlas story, tho so maybe theres hope for poe2

Gonna take off my gleaming white armor here to make an observation about PoE: Some plot points about the storyline make NO sense. Remember when Lani sends you to the Oriath Reliquary to secure the Torments of Kitava? Then she ships them off to Ngamakanui, never to be seen again, and demands that you somehow defeat Kitava without them.

Then, Sin puts you through this long, elaborate quest to capture the souls of past villains, so he can secure the "Dark Ember" of the Beast. To do what with, exactly? It's never made clear, because, had you simply remained in Oriath, gone back to the Chamber of Innocence, and grabbed the Staff of Purity you ought to have noticed the first time you were there, none of the rest of his nonsense would have been necessary.

Had Sin explicitly stated that your character needed to gain the powers of defeated gods to have a chance against Kitava, fine. But as handy as some of them can be, a coupla Pantheon powers makes little difference in the fight with Kitava. Narratively, it's all a wash. ='[.]'=

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

and I say that as someone who paid very little attention to Diablo 3 so really I'm coming to all of it quite blind and fresh.

As somone who always dives deep into lore of any game, and grew up on Diablo 1 and 2, this is for the best.

The world writing, story writing, where some of the worst I've ever seen in any piece of media, including satire, was D3. Inarius and Lilith never came up in D3 (despite their mention in D2, and where alluded to in D1), despite the entire story centered around their offspring (D3 did add some of that well after with the addition of the Cube as they desperately tried to reverse course and set up ideas clearly central for D4).

Most of D3 was the bad guy of the act calling you up on magic phone to taunt you about his unstoppable plan, and how the last unstoppable plan you foiled didn't actually matter, roughly every quest, and the Lord of Lies getting called out as an obvious liar while he was prenteding to be someone else.

Yes the writing was atrocious but lets be fair. At least in Reaper of souls the whole sordid lilith affair was narrated through the storyblocks in the last fortress. Still strange that that stupid angel didn't tell you anything in vanilla D3 :>

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feike wrote:

To be fair...

Blizzard never could write a decent story to save their lives, the script on most wow exps, frozen throne, brood war are all flaming garbage. They are(or at least used to) legit good at making moments feel epic, but making a good plot as a whole was never their forte. Diablo universe was pretty much always a rather cliche central plot with tons of little shocking addons that are interesting by themselves but dont build a grander picture as you will struggle to even make every addon fit together

Not that this is a deal-breaker, most of the classic games felt awesome, because, again, they used to really know how to make epic moments and we mostly remember that and overlook at how if we step back and look at the whole... i kinda dont make sense...

PoE is hardly diffferent. Its very similar to diablo: A rather cliche central plot with tons of gory addons added over time, to a similar effect too: they dont combine to make a great whole. Most villians are hard to remember(i only could name piety after i finished my first story run...) because they are uber generic and outside social rank, you can pretty much swap one for another and it makes zero difference. GGG is stepping up with the atlas story, tho so maybe theres hope for poe2

I don't think it's fair to claim Starcraft 1 (including Brood War) was bad, perhaps not ground breaking or anything, but there's a difference between 'bad' and 'not good'. Heck I don't even think Wings of Liberty was 'bad', though it suffered immensely from the bizzare choice to make it non-liner, but constructed in a proper order, there's a good narrative there (that gets bulldozed by HotS).

And I'd disagree heavily with the points you add on PoE, the background characters of Daresso and just what was Merveil, the adventures of Fairgraves and just what the All-Flame is, who came to collect his debts, why the dead rise there, and 'who' the black spirit was (since that was the only term we had for it back prior to act 5) all made a really interesting world with threads to follow. PoE (and diablo), are FAR less about their story and about their world and mythos, it's an added layer of engagement with the media, in ways other forms of media struggle to use, it's not what the characters do (since in games, particlarly ARPG's there's often only one or two agents in play at a time, Bestal never goes out of town to do new stuff).

Diablo 1 is interesting mostly because it's seeing what happened, not seeing what's happening, the lore of the Sin War and the writing of Lazarus, how Leoric ended up that way, alongside Lachdanan, the mood in the Chamber of Bone, and the character moments, talking with Odgen's experiences of the towns raids, Farnams reactions to the poisoned well, or the Butcher.

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Raycheetah wrote:

Gonna take off my gleaming white armor here to make an observation about PoE: Some plot points about the storyline make NO sense. Remember when Lani sends you to the Oriath Reliquary to secure the Torments of Kitava? Then she ships them off to Ngamakanui, never to be seen again, and demands that you somehow defeat Kitava without them.

Then, Sin puts you through this long, elaborate quest to capture the souls of past villains, so he can secure the "Dark Ember" of the Beast. To do what with, exactly? It's never made clear, because, had you simply remained in Oriath, gone back to the Chamber of Innocence, and grabbed the Staff of Purity you ought to have noticed the first time you were there, none of the rest of his nonsense would have been necessary.

To counter point these somewhat, Lani asks you to get Kitava's Torments in her dialog to support the Karui lands against raids soon to be starting there, and to deny them from the Cult of Kitava (i.e keeping them far away). Her tone implies that she believes winning here is a fools errent, that she and the Exile are doomed to failure, and she's getting whatever insurence she can to at least keep things from getting worse in Ngamakanui.

To the latter, you're confusing two points in the game. You get the Sign of Purity the first time (A staff made from the Blood of Innoence, or at least, a significant portion of his power), while he was dead. This was used to fight Kitava the first time, presumably because Sin hoped you could beat him without needing to resurrect Innocence, that the staff's lingering power was enough to counteract Kitava's deific essence (of course proved wrong).

After, seeing he'd need his brother (and to himself power up to actually help this time, rather than sit on the sidelines), he has you kill the depraved three (and collect some gods yourself along the way), both to fill his motivation of keeping the divine out of mortal affairs, and likely to give him the power needed to pull Innocence back to physical form after his beating.

THEN in Act 10, you need to go to the Chamber of Innocence to collect the STAFF of Innocence (you only visit the Ossuary in 10 to grab some stuff for the Roths). This allows Innoence to take form again fully, so he and Sin can help you in the Kitava fight (we'll presume they where largely suppressing him as their mechanical aid in the fight appears to be mostly as cheer leaders, though they do take the death blow).

So your critisim here is conflicting quests in Act 5 and Act 10 and merging them because they both have similar objects.

Also Sin's reasons for going back to the beast might be him lying to you. He is a god afterall, and he's either the only good one, or he's not being fully honest about something. He does hire you to kill his wife and daughter afterall.

https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/The_Staff_of_Purity

='[.]'=

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

I don't think it's fair to claim Starcraft 1 (including Brood War) was bad, perhaps not ground breaking or anything, but there's a difference between 'bad' and 'not good'. Heck I don't even think Wings of Liberty was 'bad', though it suffered immensely from the bizzare choice to make it non-liner, but constructed in a proper order, there's a good narrative there (that gets bulldozed by HotS).

The original starcraft was decent, but brood war had too many points that rely too heavily on characters not stoping to talk or having infinite troops

Aldaris deciding to start civil war as first measure is just bad excuse to get rid of the character, the whole "convenient temple superweapon" with keys just abandoned was so bad, even kerrigan lampshades how little sense it made
The terran story fluctuated between letdown(they quite literally just poped, kicked the dominion front door and yanked mensgk out of the throne) to more bad getting rid of characters(the order to kill alexey mission was funny but the briefing was just hair-pulling with duran talking and the player character who SAW WHAT HAPPENED DONT SAY A GODDAMN WORD) to just weird(guess mensgk never really looked around to find the super convenient pulled out of nowhere disruptor-that was created by a confederancy just in a few years in the middle of a scenario where they were barely holding together, but its still a unique piece of tech nobody ever replicates)
The zerg story had multiple weird points. So mensgk had portable disruptors just... lying around... And just how many guys stayed with raynor and phoenix? Enough to raid a bunch of UED worlds(who took the dominion easy) for plunder enough minerals to fund a zerg force that could kick the UED front door, thats how many(i though the protoss were fearing extinction when they left those dudes behind? And how kerrigan even control her new forces? She was supposed to be struggling with the overmind). And the overmind assassination... a few DTs with kerrigan forces(how she could even have forces being next to the freaking overmind?)

And ofc, the issue that mensgk got played by pretty much everyone and their dog spilled into SC2, hard to take a villian seriously when he already got read like a book and played like a chess piece that hard(not that its even the worst point of SC2, the whole stats quo of wings of liberty feels it was written by people plain unaware brood war existed, yeah outside material supposely explains it, but its not good to place plot critical points on outside sources)

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

And I'd disagree heavily with the points you add on PoE, the background characters of Daresso and just what was Merveil, the adventures of Fairgraves and just what the All-Flame is, who came to collect his debts, why the dead rise there, and 'who' the black spirit was (since that was the only term we had for it back prior to act 5) all made a really interesting world with threads to follow. PoE (and diablo), are FAR less about their story and about their world and mythos, it's an added layer of engagement with the media, in ways other forms of media struggle to use, it's not what the characters do (since in games, particlarly ARPG's there's often only one or two agents in play at a time, Bestal never goes out of town to do new stuff).

But "less about story and more about the world" is kinda what i said isnt it? A bunch of interesting bits that dont really tie together into a good whole
There are tons of stories across every media that have a curious setting but fail to deliver on the main plot, it takes just one or two great ideas to create an interesting piece of lore, it takes far more work and inspiration to take all those pieces and tie into a good or convincing story