Diablo 2 was frustrating. Bosses were incredibly difficult; when you managed to kill them they rarely dropped worthwhile gear. Simply guiding a character into a misjudged situation surely meant death; the player must always be careful and attentive constantly.
Once enough play time and progression occurred gear would help define the ease of play. It was earned. Rewards - profits, and frustration - loss, were given respectful to time invested. Both entities were smoothly applied as the game evolved. This balance will be difficult to replicate but if there is one group of people who are capable; it definitely looks as if Crate is on the right path.
Make GD as tough as possible. Think back to your first battle against Diablo in Act IV. I’m sick of pansy gameplay these days. I would rather get my ass handed to me; fueling a growth of levels and gear; knowing I will get that son of a bitch back and move on! A solid streak or break of ‘loss’ is good for the soul.
The challenge and the frustration that might occur in dying to a boss is not really what I meant by “loss”. At least, so long as you understood why you died and knew what you could do to improve.
In this context, frustration can be part of a larger cycle of reward that actually enhances the feeling of reward when it happens.
The type of loss I’m talking about has no long-term positive effect. For example, in one game I played a while back, it had gold auto-pickup but it was really touchy and you had to get right over the gold and sometimes pause for a second before it would pick up. It was incredibly annoying because picking up gold isn’t something you expect to be challenging and the auto-pickup “convenience feature” actually made it worse than having to click on it due to it’s inconsistency. When performing mundane tasks in games is more difficult than doing them in real life, there is a problem.
You expect boss fights to be difficult though and if they’re done right, when you die, even though you may feel frustration and direct it at the game, inside you’re really frustrated with yourself and want to do better.
The Andariel fight in D2 is one of my favorite. It always felt very challenging and intense when you got their early, with a lower-level character because she could kill you pretty quickly if you weren’t careful.
Heh that reminds me of an update they did to Tabula Rasa while I was playing that.
At first it had the classic mmo style looting of corpses where you walk up to it, interact with it, and click to loot it. Most of the time there was just some credits and other resources that didn’t take up space in any way.
Eventually they changed it to just dumping the cash in your inventory when the monster died, and some people (certainly not a majority, granted) were OUTRAGED at the game “no longer taking any skill”, “a game that plays itself is not fun”, and “I guess ncsoft finally supports botting now?”. I saw at least one person claiming to have cancelled his sub because of that change alone.
Also (more anecdotes, sorry!), I’m really enjoying Airmech lately, it’s a Herzog Zwei clone if anyone is familiar with that, but in a League of Legends format. It’s basically an rts where you deploy and command units using your character rather than a cursor. However to issue an order you have to pick up the unit, issue the order, and drop it again. The devs have said this is intended for balance reasons which really put me off the game alltogether. I can totally understand the reasoning, but the means is just microscopic instances of tedium and frustration, or “loss” as I imagine medierra would put it.
Ahh. I reread your post and see that you were considering details on a much grander scale. I suppose my thoughts were more of nostalgia than anything. :eek:
There are many critical thoughts about my years of gaming experience that have been considered after reading your post. Fortunately you guys have thought of/had experience with nearly every aspect of game design over the years that my insight is better suited >/dev/null.
I gain excitement each week for the thought of a dark, personal multilayer ARPG experience that isn’t another thinly skinned World of Warcraft clone. Hurrah!
For for my personal point of view, I continue to say that the big defect of Diablo II that give me no more interest of replaying it are the far too infrequent “save points”.
I would like to say that some of us enjoy the questing; that we like to learn the lore behind a game. So that’s a reward for us. But after the second or third, playthrough, not so much So for me, I’d prefer a way to space through conversations, rather than playing a game that doesn’t have any conversations.
A few things I found I liked in diablo 2 that arent in new action rpgs coming out are :
Killing is easy, dying is easy too; It seems going 3d they want to minimize the amount of enemies on the screen. So they say they are going for “strategic gameplay”, with enemies that kill/die slowly, switching the game to potion/health management. However I dont find making things die slower adds strategy otherwise halo would be more strategic than counter-strike, which it clearly is not.
Skills affect a wide area and are spammable, again they want to choke you into mana conservation thinking they can add strategy. Personally I find fun strategy is which way to herd enemies, which to kill first, which way to dodge an attack; not whether I should shoot a fireball or a meteor to conserve my meter.
Few skills, I guess this is tough because it is difficult to create spells however there ends up being so few choices.
Not making loot look nice, again a resource issue but diablo 2 had cool looking uniques that looked beefy and had a weight to them. I find I’m just looking at stats in these newer games and dont really care about what I use, add some new flesh-esque textures or something at least. Some webbing, something unique to look at is all it needs.
I definitely agree with the points made by the op about quests and stuff, I also think a lot of focus in diablo 2 was put into unique environments as well though. Quests dont matter as much as your going to unique places that look cool, sort of creating your own story as it were. Dont pull a hellgate london, we all know how much that game sucked.
I didn’t feel D2 had much incentive to conserve mana or use the lower tier skills once you got to the skill you were saving up for. When playing my sorc I always ended up just spamming a singular room-clearing aoe while chugging mana potions, which ties into how Energy was the most pointless stat and you were basically gimping yourself if you put any points into it.
Part of it was also how it was a bit of a hassle working with just one button for casting skills. Technically 2, but I never liked putting a ranged skill on left mouse as it made moving around in crowds a little awkward.
As much as I love D2 and I’m currently playing it with some friends in hc while waiting for D3, I feel it has a lot of problems, most of which have been addressed in D3 for better or worse.
I 100% agree with the opening post, especially the bit concerning the side quests.
There is another thing I’d like to add (I skimmed a bit through other posts, so if someone said it already, then sorry) is I really hate when I start a game and instead of being head first in action I am forced to play through an annoying tutorial mission. Let me give reasons as to why I hate tutorials.
It’s a very slow start to the game. I want to get out there and kill things. I don’t need the game telling me how to walk, jump, crouch, etc. I can work that stuff out in the first minute of some real playing. In essence, a tutorial treats you like a child. And the worst thing, tutorials in some games can last for anywhere between half hour and one hour, which is more than enough time to put a gamer off it.
Tutorials introduce all those hundreds of commands that you need to learn in the game, but once I start the real mission, I cannot simply remember them all. It’s like a massive information dump and they expect you to remember it all. Why not introduce it all bit by bit as I go through the game? That way you are not overwhelmed and can actually remember how to perform a certain command.
When I want to replay the game, I don’t need to play through the tutorial mission again, yet some games insist on you going through it every single time you start a new playthrough.
i think that the game should have some of the following:
many option on quests, thing you can kill, betray, doing some quests wich unlock or block others. and ofcourse with each different quest a different reward that will have impact on you.
making dungeons, caves, secret places and passeges randomized.
(unlike T.Q that we all knew exaclly where to go, and we had the same feeling of “deja vu”) - and in each different mini bossess that could spawn.
making lots of posibilities with your build, dont make a “magican” only cast magics, open it up for melee attacks or bows, or any other weapon, this way you could mix up an archer-mage char, a battlemage.
the thing is i know its a titan quest engine, but the flaw with titan quest was that there are not alot of diverse builds that will succeed on the harder levels of the game even though it apears that the posibilties are limitless. (in the end titan quest gave us almost the same gameplay with most chars just spam your spell, so it really dosent matter if you picked dream,earth,spirit… you get the point)
sorry for bad english.
Great post and it is really important. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the past couple of weeks as I have been playing my way through TQ. I picked it up after hearing about Grim Dawn and becoming a backer.
Anyway, what drives me absolutely crazy about TQ is that I struggle with the bosses. I tend to die quite a bit against some of them (others are really easy due to my build) and the length of time that it takes me to walk back to the boss is so frustrating. After I have made that minute and a half long walk 10 times against one boss with instakill (I’m talking about you Barmanu/Manticore), I become sick of playing the game and I just want to quit.
I don’t mind having difficult boss battles or dying, but the tedious walking back to the battle just to die again in 10 seconds is aggravating. Actually, walking in general is aggravating. Arcanum for all of its flaws was a big offender in my opinion with the giant towns.
Anyway, maybe it was made that way to prevent boss farming but for a person who just wants to play the game through it is frustrating.
Didn’t mean to turn this into such a rant… looking forward to GD
Diablo 2 are certainly a good game, but you shouldn’t worry much about it, I liked Titan Quest even with it’s flaws over Diablo. I imagine alot of fans think the same or why else would they play it right?
Speaking for myself i want “Titan Quest 2” a game that expands on the first one but adds new cool stuff.
I do not want much to change really. You already made alot of stuff better over orginal TQ, but i wouldn’t want it to turn into Torchlight or Diablo 3.
I have to agree, honestly. Diablo 2 is, in my opinion, the best ARPG there is. Its simply the best example of a combination of elements that nuance and accentuate each other.
I’ve been playing the Torchlight 2 beta, Diablo 2, and TQ recently, as well as some Diablo 3. Even in the face of these new shiny ARPGs, Diablo 2 still holds up extremely well.
One of the single greatest failures of Torchlight is their item progression, which is surprising to me since Diablo 2 had it down perfectly. The progression of base gear stats was easy to understand, visually identifiable, and statistically coherent to a predictable structure. In Diablo 2, there was a sense of what items you should have when. Off the top of my head I know that the armor progression goes - Quilted, Leather, Hard Leather, Studded Leather, Ringmail, Chain Mail/Breast Plate, Splint Mail - which is Acts 1 through 2. Torchlight devolved into item soup, where the numbers had no meaning to them, and gear had no predictable structure.
Titan Quest’s gear progression is now in the quiet category of ARPGs that didn’t break that structure, and thank you for that. Its an aspect that honestly doesn’t get enough attention in the ARPG. The gear metagame has largely been abandoned in a lot of ARPGs, which is sad as its a layer of complexity and character development that was a big part of the ARPG. If there’s one thing I hope for from Grim Dawn, its that it maintains a gear progression structure like TQ and Diablo 2 did.
Originally D3 was going to be made more like D2/TQIT mix and self hosted…
Then they dropped the bomb shell… Due to it taking SO damn long to develop new game systems came into being and they migrated it to online server only :furious:!!
Since that time I dumped my pre-order! I was SO looking forward to D3 but that really ruined it for me!
Now they are implementing a items shop for real money where people can trade items they want for cash! Minus the devs cut!
Many online games have turned into CASH COWS where making money is more important than fun/enjoyment. Its a shame.
Just look at the plethora of “free games” that end up costing a fortune!
That’s why I loved TQ/ITs method of hosting a game through a lobby … you could password it for buddies or BOOT annoying players! Even with online only games, how many people can you really play with at one time? Sure there can be thousands online but you wont really be able to play with them all! There will always be a spot for games like GD and TQIT… just go look in the lobby on a weekend… still LOTS playing!
TQ/IT was the greatest game of its type at the time. It even allowed you to learn HOW it was made through the toolset for mods etc! How fantastic is that? I feel TQIT was so great because of the modding it allowed! Just have a look at some of the great stuff that players came up with (Myself included heehee).
More importantly, games you host yourself only cost you the GAME… no annoying adds prompting you to buy the current “special offer” trying to suck your money.
Have to agree. TQ for me was (and is) far superior to Diablo. Graphically and gameplay. I much preferred the story as well. I love mythology, and the mythologies of Ancient Greece and Egypt with all their great stories and fantastic creatures was infinitely more interesting to me than the Prime Evils.
The only thing I disliked was the non-random levels.
Grim Dawn promises to address this issue with it’s partial randomization, and even if everything else is identical to Titan Quest I’ll still be a happy camper.
And the devs have said they will improving lots of other stuff too, so an improved Titan Quest will be better still than the big red guy…
Exactly; I thought the mythology was one of the coolest things, brilliant.
Can’t compare graphics though since they are from two different eras. Blizz definitely dropped the ball in all they had to do was make “more Diablo, only better” every year for the past 12 rather than playing catch-up now. (“A good plan today is better than the perfect plan tomorrow.” -Patton)
So…more TQ…only better! (TQ guts with a new world will be sweet)
Ah, I love reading game design thought processes like this. For me a huge part of the profit is coming to understand the synergies between skills and how I can use them.
So for me, I’d prefer a way to space through conversations, rather than playing a game that doesn’t have any conversations.
(Myself included heehee).