I’ve been wondering about Identify Scroll in Diablo and Torchlight, and why Titan Quest and Grim Dawn doesn’t have it.
The purpose of Id Scroll in rpgs and tabletop games as I’ve read from several sources is to:
Limits player’s progress for replayability
Limits player’s money for more challenge in acquiring money
Adds some tension before identifying item, so that player will feel bliss/indifference/excruciating pain of wasted time and effort after identifying said item
Lore reason
Make some class like bard/sage/blacksmith type have abilities that gives them bonus attributes/less cursed attributes
That’s a few points I’ve concluded about the purpose of Id Scroll. I hope you guys can add more thoughts to it and fix my mistakes.
Personally, I’m happy that Grim Dawn doesn’t have it. The game already has so much complex build and strategies, not to mention the need for grinding items and several characters to reach the apex of the game for me, that the nonexistence of Id Scroll is a small but necessary blessing for me.
In b4 “Repair - are you glad or sad that Grim Dawn doesn´t have it?” …
:rolleyes:
What´s the purpose of this thread again? Fight boredom?
On topic: I am sad that GD doesn´t have town and/or identify scrolls, because my characters are forced to wipe their asses with sratchy leaces and stuff. Ugh.
Yeah. To fight boredom as we wait for FG. Want to make this topic somewhat funny.
And maybe to make ex-Diablo players remember the annoying and useless feature of repair/id scroll/stamina bar. Thank God Grim Dawn wipe those features from existence to reduce time for managing loot and equips.
I have never seen it serve these purposes in an ARPG…at least not outside of the first handful of minutes (ie in diablo 2 when you were in early act 1 which items to identify mattered, but by mid act 1 it was just an annoyance)
Glad they got rid of them, and town scrolls. Really any excitement using the scrolls generated is still there its just between ‘oh purple!’ And ‘dang another golem boots’
Any possible tension offered by watching that little progress bar tick up would quickly give way to impatience and annoyance. What is it even meant to represent? That I can’t figure out that this giant flaming sword is a giant flaming sword until I rub a bit of magical paper against it? I should imagine my characters are a bit smarter than that. :eek:
There might be a purpose for them in some games, but…well, I’m glad GD doesn’t have them. I don’t see any reason for them here.
Hey, at least its an original discussion point. :rolleyes:
same as others, don’t like/understand them, glad they’re not in GD. feeling the excitation/disapointment whan you open the chest/break the orb is enough imo.
Yeah. Id Scroll are ultimately just nuisance in arpg.
We can try to imagine, that while the Id Scroll progress bar is ticking up, our char is scratching their head or chanting something obnoxious to make sure that giant flaming sword has +1% more fire damage than the previous giant flaming sword they found.
Thankfully Grim Dawn replace all that Id Scroll Stuff by waiting for the loot to be still on the ground after the pinata explosion.
There is still several seconds of waiting the loots to fall one by one and stay still on the ground after opening chest/loot orb though. But its way more time efficient than the Id scroll stuff.
it was groundbreaking and added a lot of immersion in D1 and D2.
lol at this but it would have added to a lot of atmosphere in town too if we have a deckard cairn shouting from time to time: "stay a while and listen, then identifies your item!
Maybe hangman jarvis can step up and take this role?
While it adds immersion in the early parts of Diablo, it becomes annoying feature that adds several seconds of trip to cain over a long period of farming stuff.
In my opinion, the only diablo arpg that had best implementation of Id Scroll is Zombasite. It fits well with the town/npc managing feature of that game. You could find an NPC who is really good at identifying, and you’ll save money and time that is used for identifying (there is an Identifying progress bar in that game).
Kasparov is more suitable as identifier than that hangman jarvis. But he’s busy chasing rats for experiments. (Maybe the ratman beasts we fought is the results of his experiments. We gotta thank him for the extra XP)
I have no idea what its purpose is, whatever it is, it does not accomplish it. I never felt they added any of your suggested purposes to any game. All they do is annoy players and waste time.
I am glad GD does not have them, TL at least had mods that removed them. They always were an awful idea that fortunately died out. If a game had them now, I probably would not play it for that reason alone.
If GD relies heavily on lore focused and slow paced gameplay, Id Scroll or some form of it might find a place in it.
But GD isn’t like that. GD is about theorycrafting char builds and farming those bosses asap to get that next +something items, while lore and aesthetic features is secondary. And I’m happy for Crate’s decision on this.
Truthfully, thats my interpretation of developers intention for Grim Dawn. But there are also some posts scattered about in the forums from the developers and top players out there that is quite close to my assumption. My statements might ring true if we only include min-maxer players that has completed ultimate difficulty and aim to break records on crucible or nemesis, but there are much more players out there that only finished normal and then move on to the next games. So don’t take my statement as an absolute truth.
I don’t really even know what this means. Sure, I see how ID scrolls could serve as a progression limiter, but I don’t see how limiting progression increases replayability in any scenario.
A temporary solution that really only suffices to create a temporary problem. The cost of an ID scroll will become negligible eventually. I can’t really think of any game with a money sink accessible from the start of the game that actually stays sink-like through to the end. All that this really does is dampen the new player experience and make things a little more slow.
I think this may have originally been the call but both D3/PoE managed to screw this idea up by giving unided uniques their own unique item art, so you still know what you’re getting before you burn an ID scroll.
I do think this concept, if well executed, can make for exciting (or at the very least, engaging) player scenarios.
…I don’t think this has ever been well executed in any game ever.
Doubtful, frankly. Especially not in ye olde days when development was tight, publishers were tighter, and only what was deemed absolutely necessary for a game would have been thrown into it. Also, I get the ‘lore’ of a character reading some magical spell of identification off of the scroll, but once you’ve done it 10,000+ times, it really just starts to feel like you’re tossing a tube of paper at a metal shield every time…because, really, that’s what you are in fact doing as a player.
This feels too creative to have been the original cause for the feature to be implemented…and, frankly, there’s no reason such classes couldn’t just globally affect the loot system as such. D2’s rolls were conducted on-drop, not on-ID, and I’m reasonably sure D3/PoE are the same. Having or not having an ID scroll wouldn’t really have much of an impact on the aforementioned feature.
Per above, D3/PoE still have them (and Portal Scrolls!), which is one of my (many) gripes with the titles. Although, if I’m not mistaken, D3 kind of streamlined the process out of your inventory and into an NPC/interactable world object.
Actually, GD sticking with TQ’s design of not having these features was one of the major selling points that convinced me to pick the title up in 2014! If I’m not mistaken, Force Gaming - in the video linked on the main page of these forums - goes on a little spiel on the ‘monotony’ of other ARPGS (involving other things in addition to ID’ing, like item durability) and praises GD for having done much to avoid any such issues (though Force still notes some monotonous features, which I can’t recall specifically). Here’s to hoping GD2 keeps the pace up, in this regard!
I don’t think this has ever been well executed in any game ever.
I think it worked well in phantasy star online. The item drops were represented by boxes, orange for weapons, blue for armor and green for materials/consumables. When a unique dropped it had its own sound fx IIRC, and the box was red and simply had the text “SPECIAL ITEM” or something so it was a bit of a mystery. The only way to see what it was, was to bring it to the tekker (crafter basically). It worked for that game and it was kind of a fun mechanic due to other reasons (rerolls and stuff) but it has no place in gd.
Kinda not terrible. I think ID scrolls can go a long way for identifying good stuff, but it’s tedious and annoying when it’s necessary for everything under the sun.
In GD, for instance, I wouldn’t mind it terribly if there were a system in place to quantify something as ‘good’ (e.g., a unique, a double-rare (MI or not), etc.) upon which you’d need to identify it and see how good your ‘good’ item actually was. Even better if this would only happen to uniques the first time you ever dropped them account-wide. Once you’ve seen a Final March you (as a player) will recognize it on-sight, but the first time you see one you have no idea what you’re looking at, and I think the identification process can reflect that to supplement your own immersion with the game and instill a little more of that wonder which is oh-so-rare in modern gaming.
