Blizzard: Diablo III About as Big as Diablo II

[trog08]

What I wanna know is, is it the same size as Diablo 2 before or after the expansion...

 

[Vhite]

Im happy with my Sacred 2, I stoped caring about Diabo 2 when I realised that you can reach level 80 or so in 3 daya just by doing Baal runs and then was endgame content about nothing but collecting random items. Unless Diablo 3 is gonna MUCH better, Im probably not buying it.

 

[seditary]

Damn, are people intentionally being pessimistic for D3?

I'm still totally excited.

 

[MrHero17]

This is a bit worrying. The point of RPGs, no matter how hacky-slashy, is to role play. I want to have fully control over my character, and that includes being able to make mistakes. I'd love for Diablo3 to allow for re-specs, as I'm sure I wasn't the only one who accidentally misclicked once and lost a valuable skill point, but I don't want to turn a fire sorceress (just for example) into an ice focused char, just because the the big bad final boss is resistant to fire. But whatever, let's wait and see. As long as it isn't too casual, I will buy and enjoy it!

The thing is, if a game tells you that you can play as a fire sorceress and then you get to a point in the game where all of the enemy's have extreme resistance to fire attacks which causes a massive jump in difficulty for the player isn't that bad design? That works in a game like Nethack where you expect to have all sorts of terrible things happen to your character. I think that Blizzard has come to the conclusion that most of their customers would be aggravated if there was no way to undo a miss clicked spell allocation and if the game railroaded them into avoiding certain builds.

It's just one of thous things where your going to be playing the game, having fun as a summoner witch doctor and then by the time you get to level 35 your kind of tired of it and want to see what one of the other specs plays like. Would you rather make a new WD or just pay a bunch of gold and respec?

 

[-Samurai-]

Damn. I was just playing D2..

Anyway, this all sounds great, except for the skill tree changes. I kinda hope there will still be prerequisites and definitely synergies. Prerequisites stopped you from being an "everything in the tree" character, and stopped you from having too many skill points.

Also, they made a wise choice with the respec. They added it in the latest Diablo 2 patch(10 years and still patching = you rock) and it has come in handy for a few experimental builds(10 years and still new builds are being discovered = you rock).

That, and it helped me fix my were-bear sorceress.

I'm happy with the map size. It's a big map. I'm confused as to wether or not the environment will be random as with the last games. How boring would that have been to have the Blood Moor or Dry Hills be the same every time?

 

[tomvw]

I'm happy with the map size. It's a big map. I'm confused as to whether or not the environment will be random as with the last games. How boring would that have been to have the Blood Moor or Dry Hills be the same every time?

Exteriors have non-random layouts but random distribution of events and monsters.

I guess they're going for more organic map-layouts, which are probably harder to randomize (unlike D2's more grid-like layouts). I do hope this means the terrain has tons of little details and flourishes. Dungeons are still randomized apparently.

 

[Hiphophippo]

In a related story, I bought the titan quest duo pack of D2D last year for 5 bucks and am just not installing it thanks to this thread.

Keep hearing how good it is, might as well get my lincoln's worth.

 

[jonnosferatu]

I actually don't really like the way D2 got so much shorter at the end. I was hoping for the 4th act to be huuuuuuuge and detailed, but instead it was a fairly monotonous wasteland without that much truly engrossing substance and just felt like an act of mildly-enjoyable filler. Some of the dungeons were nice, but that was about it (like, the main map sections were meh and the act itself just didn't feel long enough).

Act V made up for that, though, even if Baal was piss-easy compared to Diablo (admittedly, this might be because I played a Summoner Necro - Diablo could take all the stuff out at once very fast and then kill me, whereas Baals attacks weren't quite as good at killing the stuff that was actually attacking him).

 

[-Samurai-]

I'm happy with the map size. It's a big map. I'm confused as to whether or not the environment will be random as with the last games. How boring would that have been to have the Blood Moor or Dry Hills be the same every time?

Exteriors have non-random layouts but random distribution of events and monsters.

I guess they're going for more organic map-layouts, which are probably harder to randomize (unlike D2's more grid-like layouts). I do hope this means the terrain has tons of little details and flourishes. Dungeons are still randomized apparently.

I saw that part, but didn't know what "outside" they were talking about. There are some areas outside that lead to dungeons that were always the same. Blizzard talks in riddles sometimes.

Anyway, as you said, I hope that if it isn't randomized, it has loads of detail.

If they kept the environmental damage(knocking walls down onto opponents), random environments would be awesome. You could stumble across ruins that weren't there last time, and bring the things down onto monsters.

 

[Nosense]

Being able to respec right from the get go will be a godsend for players like me that love to experiment but hate starting all the way back to the beginning every single time.

 

[Vilcus]

And I can't play it sadly, lost the disk and such for D2, still have the expansion... and if i 'pirated' it, people would wag fingers, and id not be allowed onto B.net, which is no fun either...

Do you still have the CD key, because if you do then you can just attach it to your Battle.net account and download it anytime you want.

I lost my CD key for both, so I'm screwed, I wish I had it so that I dcould play again. Diablo II is a great game, and Diablo III will hopefully be just as awesome (knowing Blizzard it will be).

 

[twm1709]

nice to see we'll be able to re-specialize but this can in the end hurt the game replayability a bit. I think I spent hundreds of hours making different paladins and gathering decent equipment for each one of them back then.

 

[RvLeshrac]

I'm happy with the map size. It's a big map. I'm confused as to whether or not the environment will be random as with the last games. How boring would that have been to have the Blood Moor or Dry Hills be the same every time?

Exteriors have non-random layouts but random distribution of events and monsters.

I guess they're going for more organic map-layouts, which are probably harder to randomize (unlike D2's more grid-like layouts). I do hope this means the terrain has tons of little details and flourishes. Dungeons are still randomized apparently.

I saw that part, but didn't know what "outside" they were talking about. There are some areas outside that lead to dungeons that were always the same. Blizzard talks in riddles sometimes.

Anyway, as you said, I hope that if it isn't randomized, it has loads of detail.

If they kept the environmental damage(knocking walls down onto opponents), random environments would be awesome. You could stumble across ruins that weren't there last time, and bring the things down onto monsters.

The entirety of Diablo II was randomized, save for the specific event areas (towns, boss rooms). There were set-pieces, but they were attached to each other in different ways. In one session, you might have five areas to the north, and in the next you might have one in three directions and two to the south.

 

[-Samurai-]

The entirety of Diablo II was randomized, save for the specific event areas (towns, boss rooms). There were set-pieces, but they were attached to each other in different ways. In one session, you might have five areas to the north, and in the next you might have one in three directions and two to the south.

The entrance to the outer cloister is the same every time, as is the last floor of the forgotten tower. The Halls of Vaught, The Travincal, Upper and Lower Kurast, the outside of Nihlathak's Temple, The Valley of Snakes, and many others are the same every time. None of them include boss fights(unless you count quest people such as The Countess, but she isn't really a boss, and most quest people (such as Radament or Izaul) are in randomized areas), and none of them are towns.

 

[RvLeshrac]

The entirety of Diablo II was randomized, save for the specific event areas (towns, boss rooms). There were set-pieces, but they were attached to each other in different ways. In one session, you might have five areas to the north, and in the next you might have one in three directions and two to the south.

The entrance to the outer cloister is the same every time, as is the last floor of the forgotten tower. The Halls of Vaught, The Travincal, Upper and Lower Kurast, the outside of Nihlathak's Temple, The Valley of Snakes, and many others are the same every time. None of them include boss fights(unless you count quest people such as The Countess, but she isn't really a boss, and most quest people (such as Radament or Izaul) are in randomized areas), and none of them are towns.

While they are roughly the same layout, they aren't the same area. The randomization is used to keep you from following precisely the same path, but you'll be sent in vaguely the same direction each time (there have to be limits placed on randomized areas, otherwise you'll end up with unplayable sections of the game).

 

[-Samurai-]

The entirety of Diablo II was randomized, save for the specific event areas (towns, boss rooms). There were set-pieces, but they were attached to each other in different ways. In one session, you might have five areas to the north, and in the next you might have one in three directions and two to the south.

The entrance to the outer cloister is the same every time, as is the last floor of the forgotten tower. The Halls of Vaught, The Travincal, Upper and Lower Kurast, the outside of Nihlathak's Temple, The Valley of Snakes, and many others are the same every time. None of them include boss fights(unless you count quest people such as The Countess, but she isn't really a boss, and most quest people (such as Radament or Izaul) are in randomized areas), and none of them are towns.

While they are roughly the same layout, they aren't the same area. The randomization is used to keep you from following precisely the same path, but you'll be sent in vaguely the same direction each time (there have to be limits placed on randomized areas, otherwise you'll end up with unplayable sections of the game).

The ones I listed are exactly the same every time. They've never been different.

The Tamoe Highlands lead you to the door of the Monastery gate, and the Monastery Gate is the same on the inside every time. Just as the others I've listed. They've never changed and never will.(I included upper and lower kurast only because their shape never changed. The buildings do change(except for some), but the boundaries remain the same.)

That was what I was thinking of when they said "outside", since those areas are outside the areas that lead inside.

I'll have to wait and see though. Either way, I'm looking forward to D3.

 

[-Samurai-]

Post won't show until I post in this thread again. Sorry.

 

[Chase Yojimbo]

woah, wait, this is the game that took how long to make, and its only going to be as big as Diablo II?! wtf man! I would be expecting an act of bloody god in the game! How come blizzard take many years to create a game and they only come up with the original short commings from before! Sure Diablo 2 was kick ass, but we arn't looking for bloody Diablo 2, we are looking for act of christ and planetary alignment Diablo bloody Three! And look at the graphics, was it really hard to fix a camera in birds eye view over a character? its only 2D, not 3D. They probebly wasted all their time on making a story, because they can't really do that by itself.

I'm sorry Diablo Fanboys, im only venting.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

I bought 3 copies of d2 and 2 copies of LOD, full price, retail. But no lan play means no sale for this one (or starcraft 2 yet).