Diablo III: Reaper Of Souls Trailer Shows Off New Features

[Steven Bogos]

Diablo III: Reaper Of Souls Trailer Shows Off New Features

The trailer showcases the new "Adventure Mode," the new artisan: the Mystic, and the updated Paragon system.

Diablo III fans have been asking for a mode that unlocks all waypoints and simply lets them adventure as they see fit will finally have it, in the form of Reaper of Souls' "Adventure Mode." Blizzard has released a new trailer that showcases the new mode, as well as many of the new gameplay improvements that are coming with the dungeon crawler's expansion pack.

In Adventure Mode, players are free to explore the entirety of an Act's map, searching out bounties and finding "Nephalem Rifts" (portals to mini-dungeons). The trailer also gave a little more detail on what the new clan system will look like (spoiler: it looks pretty similar to how World of Warcraft's guilds work).

The trailer then showed how the Mystic and her two functions (enchanting and trasmogrification) will work, before going on to show us a bit more about the upcoming changes to the Paragon levels system.

It is comprised of gameplay mostly from the Crusader's point of view, giving us a peek at how he will play.

Expect to hear a lot more about Reaper of Souls over the weekend, when Blizzard's annual BlizzCon convention will take place. Reaper of Souls is currently slated for a 2014 release date on PC and PS4.

Source: Polygon [http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/7/5078510/diablo-3-reaper-of-souls-trailer-explores-new-features-like-adventure]

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[Chaos Marine]

Will it remove the always on requirement?

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Too little, too late. I wish I didn't play the original version, now I'm too jaded to have any fun with this.

Then try Torchlight 2, or Grim Dawn, don't let a single bad experience with DRM ruin a genre for you.

 

[Breywood]

I think that their trailer is likely more interesting than the game itself. I won't have to worry because I don't have hardware to run it, but I'm still having fun with Diablo II several years later mostly because there are mechanics and items which will allow you to level the playing field without removing the challenge, outside of a few character builds and items. The overpowered builds are something I avoid and I can still play in Hell successfully without having to beg for a cookie cutter Unique or an insane Rare. I may not faceroll like the teleporting Hammerdin or the Sorceress with the Infinity polearm, but I can still play in the hardest difficulty with an unusual character and feeling that the game is challenging, but not unfair.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

Too little, too late. I wish I didn't play the original version, now I'm too jaded to have any fun with this.

Then try Torchlight 2, or Grim Dawn, don't let a single bad experience with DRM ruin a genre for you.

What made you think I'll never play a similar game again?

I didn't even mind the DRM, it was how utterly boring the game got when you hit a brick wall around Inferno consisting of nothing but uninspired gear choices, terrible random attributes on monsters that may or may not make them impossible to kill and waking up in the middle of the night in the hopes of catching the end of some shitty auction for an item that had higher numbers than what I had on me. Add to that a completely dull skill system where the game made the choice for you, there was no specialization and being able to switch out at any time meant you never had any reason to make another character of the same class (not to mention reaching max level happened way before endgame and the skill progression abruptly stopped at max level). Oh, and we waited months on end for a pvp system that came well after we stopped caring about it.

Compare and contrast to Diablo 2 where killing an end-act boss showered you with interesting uniques and set items, max level required serious dedication and often came way after you'd beaten the game on the hardest difficulty, and where you had the possibility to invest time and effort in specific sets of skills in order to tailor your chosen class in unique and interesting ways.

I get sad just thinking about it. But no, it wasn't my first and it won't be the last hack and slash I play.

I had the same exact problems with D3 as you did (and apparently 90% of the game's population) and from what I've heard the Loot2.0 system is fixing most of that. Not going to get it at release, but probably eventually after the reviews come in.

 

[Flutterguy]

Considering I beat the campaign in 5 hours with only 1 hours enjoyment, and expansions are usually 30% or less of the original games content at 20$+... I'd much rather spend the money on indie and new-concept games.

 

[runic knight]

Eh, I bought the game shortly after launch and got bored with it. Nothing new here is enough to get my time when I have a long backlog of other games. Blizzard just showed they didn't understand what made Diablo 2 so great in the first place and squandered all good faith they had left in me with how badly the game was at launch, the always on DRM and the auction house. That they are fixing things this late down the line is nice, but honestly the game just wasn't fun enough for me to justify paying more money to play more when I have torchlight 2 for whatever D2 fix I get and a dozen games in waiting to get my time. It looks pretty and it plays well and as a game it functions admirably, but it also feels so much like nothing I do matters. I can't make builds that felt unique like they did before, items were nothing more then solely bits of stats devoid of personality or flexibility, gold spammers give me headaches and the entire game itself felt like a chore intentionally designed to encourage me to buy my gear instead of find it or trade for it. None of the changes mentioned here come off to me like they fixed that more then in a superficial way.

 

[Makabriel]

Awesome! Pretty darn excited about the expansion. More story line, another class to master. Loot, Loot, loot. Different game modes look pretty nice as well. Adds some flavor to the hours of monster slaying. Still playing D3 on occasion to this day. Just could never get into the Diablo clones like PoE or Torchlight. Just felt like a game trying to ride the coattails. They felt.. forced? I don't know. Especially PoE. That game just annoyed the heck out of me the first hour of playing.

 

[irishda]

Awesome! Pretty darn excited about the expansion. More story line, another class to master. Loot, Loot, loot. Different game modes look pretty nice as well. Adds some flavor to the hours of monster slaying. Still playing D3 on occasion to this day. Just could never get into the Diablo clones like PoE or Torchlight. Just felt like a game trying to ride the coattails. They felt.. forced? I don't know. Especially PoE. That game just annoyed the heck out of me the first hour of playing.

I just wish we had gotten an expansion where we tracked down Covetous Shen's gem. I love that guy.

 

[major_chaos]

I know I'm in the minority on this site, but I'm actually really looking forward to this. D3 was the best ARPG I have played in a while by a good margin, so I'm excited for more content and improvements to whats is already there.

 

[Riff Moonraker]

Looking forward to the expansion, but arent they missing something? PC and PS4? What about the Xbox? Is the 360 and the PS3 going to get this?

 

[Kashrlyyk]

....
I had the same exact problems with D3 as you did (and apparently 90% of the game's population) and from what I've heard the Loot2.0 system is fixing most of that. Not going to get it at release, but probably eventually after the reviews come in.

You don't need to get the expansion to get the Loot2.0. It's NOT a part of it.

 

[Steven Bogos]

Looking forward to the expansion, but arent they missing something? PC and PS4? What about the Xbox? Is the 360 and the PS3 going to get this?

It has only been confirmed for the PC and PS4 so far. They will probably bring it to the Xbox and PS3, but they're not ready to confirm it yet

 

[black_knight1337]

Reaper of Souls really is shaping up to be the kind of expansion that can rival LoD. The more they show of it, the better it seems. Tighter loot rolls, build defining legendaries, enchanting, transmogrification, adventure mode, revamped difficulty system (no more slogging through the same thing 3 times to hit end game), bounties (randomised targets, places to clear and events), nephalem rifts (Completely random dungeons), nephalem trials (challenges randomly appearing around the world), more and rebalanced skills, a new class, a new act, new paragon system and I'm sure there's more I've left out.

And for anyone interested, here's the other official video. It shows off some of the things you can expect in the nephalem rifts. Randomised mob distribution, tilesets and weather. Along with some unique buffs such as a lightning aura that one shots enemies, temporary invulnerability or a huge move speed boost.

And there's also a crusader gameplay video from DiabloFans.

Will it remove the always on requirement?

Nope, won't happen any time soon. If it ever did happen it will be when Blizz drops support for the game so they don't have to deal with the massive influx of hacks that would occur.

 

[geizr]

The trailer looks very interesting. I see a lot of things that I think could make the game much better than what it is. After watching the trailer, I got curious and reinstalled the game just to see what things are like since I've been away this many months. Holy hell! That game has seriously died. Only 986 public games, compared to 20+k back when the game first came out. Even the bots have mostly abandoned the game. Only saw one bot spamming in about 3 hours of poking around. AH prices are still insane.

 

[Kashrlyyk]

The trailer looks very interesting. I see a lot of things that I think could make the game much better than what it is. After watching the trailer, I got curious and reinstalled the game just to see what things are like since I've been away this many months. Holy hell! That game has seriously died. Only 986 public games, compared to 20+k back when the game first came out. Even the bots have mostly abandoned the game. Only saw one bot spamming in about 3 hours of poking around. AH prices are still insane.

This will most likely get even worse, since there will be NO more update until the expansion arrives. No changes to the game in the next 5-6 month.

 

[black_knight1337]

I just wish we had gotten an expansion where we tracked down Covetous Shen's gem. I love that guy.

After catching up on all of the panels I've come across something you'd be interested in. This is take from their Q&A on lore.

Covetus Shen - anymore plans for him or background to add?
Absolutely, yes.

He's indeed a very mysterious character. We love our side-characters and we definitely plan to go in more detail with their background stories. There are even going to be some adventure you can go with your Followers. You'll get to find about more about Eirena and the Prophet and what happened with her sisters. Covetus is looking for that jewel...

The Templar is also upset with the Order and wants to do something about it.