re: Fired Blizzard employee leaks all

2 sockets is the max on items and all rune words are 2 'letters' long.

It's amazing how utterly simplistic it is at every turn, at least at this stage.

it's sad how far blizzard has fallen but not surprising. greed wins again

See I’m not mad if it has d3 gameplay but looks like Diablo because that’s what everyone wanted in D3. D3 gameplay is great, it’s all the other stuff that sucks. It seems like they are fixing that stuff and keeping the best thing about D3

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Glad Lilith is back

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Where was she before? I remember fighting Andariel in D2.

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2 sockets is the max on items and all rune words are 2 'letters' long.

It's amazing how utterly simplistic it is at every turn, at least at this stage.

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The game is planned to release concurrently for consoles. That should tell you all you need to know.

There is a massive discrepancy in the expectations of a game like this between a dedicated PC audience and a more casual console audience.

The PC audience wants deep and meaningful itemization, massive amounts of build diversity, and they want to spend all night theorycrafting in online forums. The console audience wants to smash stuff for 20 minutes before they turn on the basketball game.

It's beyond obvious who Blizzard is catering to with this game. The dilution of baseline stats down to just "attack" and "defense" is almost insulting to any longtime fan of the genre.

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So activision is the new cancer in the gaming business.

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Since when is Activision being a cancer a new thing?

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The game is planned to release concurrently for consoles. That should tell you all you need to know.

There is a massive discrepancy in the expectations of a game like this between a dedicated PC audience and a more casual console audience.

The PC audience wants deep and meaningful itemization, massive amounts of build diversity, and they want to spend all night theorycrafting in online forums. The console audience wants to smash stuff for 20 minutes before they turn on the basketball game.

It's beyond obvious who Blizzard is catering to with this game. The dilution of baseline stats down to just "attack" and "defense" is almost insulting to any longtime fan of the genre.

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Agree with all of this.

They are destroying what makes PC gaming special. PC games can have a ton more complexity and depth to them console games typically, a mouse and keyboard UI lends itself to certain types of games you can't do on consoles.

The war against RPG elements in games over the past decades has been pretty disheartening. RPG's have always been a stat nerd's paradise. The people who want to min/max, optimize, experiment, theorycraft, find synergies, all that stuff.

Blizzard and most other gaming companies have been gutting all of that out of games.

They have almost made EA an afterthought with how Bungie escaped and how they're slowly killing Blizzard.

Another good point I saw someone raise raise in relation to where the Diablo series fell off

Characters in these new Blizzard games are just far too overpowered. They look OP, they feel OP. In the old RPG's (D1, D2, original WoW) the games made you feel like a regular old warrior (or whatever class you were). Sure you were tough, but your foes were too. Even the bravest and strongest knight doesn't charge into a hoard of 50 demons and live.

The world was dangerous, foes were intimidating. Staying alive and progressing was sometimes a struggle. Look at how D1 and D2 felt, when you are wandering around a dungeon you really don't feel particularly powerful. You often go around cautiously, there's a real sense of danger, if you run blindly into a room of mobs and get surrounded you are often just toast.

There's a sense of satisfaction as you watch your character grow in power. Unlocking a new powerful ability or finding a powerful new item, you can really see the difference and it feels good.

Now they essentially make you a f'ing Super Hero. Your skills from the beginning of the game are over the top and insanely powerful. You jump into a pack of enemies and send them all flying back 20 yards, you smash the ground and they fly into the air, you throw a fireball and they all explode. The gameplay is significantly faster paced and there's no real sense that the world or your fores are a threat to you. You're usually just an unstoppable chainsaw and they are piles of twigs to be torn through.

That sort of gameplay is mildly fun at first but gets boring quickly. You become numb to it. There's no sense of satisfaction.

Activating your "super" ability in video games is common trope because if you're struggling 95% of the time, that 5% of the time you finally get to be OP is super satisfying. Knocking over the enemies you've been struggling with like bowling pins is a great "YEAH F! YOU" rush.

It's like game developers looked at the moments people liked best and then tried to make games exclusively of those moments, which doesn't work. Making a movie exclusively of special effects doesn't work. Making a cake that's exclusively icing doesn't work.

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I just want to know why Blizzard thinks designing games around people who play them the least is a good idea.

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Because Activision said so!