I’ve mentioned it before; about how I’ve been one of those critical of this development team in the past; OPUD (over promised, under delivered). Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. That feeling only festered from August of last year until even after their GamesCon preview. In the past though, I tried making constructive posts and what not about the issues I had with some of their design philosophies.
Back in January, I made the following post on the official forums regarding an open world/free roam mode with value added end game content to make exploring that open world, meaningful.
The main selling point behind that was that it had to make it worth the developers time to make these changes to the game, and to also justify the additional server side resources for tracking map data in an open way point system (keep players playing within that game world as long as possible to offset the current constant creation of games which adds load in a different way). This particular feature was not one of my biggest things that I wanted to see in the game (I just saw it often times requested on the forums but often times without much of a selling point except that it used to be like that in Diablo II).
This thread received no response by a blue (unsurprising since they never really acknowledged this except during a reddit interview early on where JW responded it would require a massive reworking on content). After GamesCon, a question was asked about transitioning between acts in the expansion, and the response at the time was that there would be no change. Thus my take was that a free roam mode was not even on the table for the expansion.
The point I’m trying to get at is if someone like myself could type that up on the fly, I pretty much presumed that the development team had already formulated similar design concepts on how they could implement such a system in the game, but make it even better than what existed before.
Adventure Mode goes way beyond what I proposed in the above. Take a look at the waypoint system for example; no need to hit a waypoint. Just open up your map, select a location, and teleport to it. The end game content I mentioned was basically just a rehashing of the Pandemonium Event in Diablo II. The development team in their version found a way to re-use content from Campaign/Story mode (plus add new ones) that would’ve otherwise been wasted, by using them for bounties, and then used the bounties aspect as one possible way to do further end game content in the form of Nephalem Rifts (the randomness of Rifts is something that piqued my interest).
So they killed several birds with one stone while finding ways to keep players playing within this entire world instance, making it worthwhile from some of the technical considerations that I touched upon in that proposal. It’s not all perfect but the game code is still in the very early beta stages. And as someone who normally works with operating system and application beta’s, the premise is the intent of the functionality (the bugs and cosmetic type of issues will naturally be addressed).
Even with all of this though, I was still sitting on the fence after BlizzCon because if the system level changes (especially loot) was problematic, there would be no need to continue playing and therefore no need to get the expansion (since it would be just another act with a new class and artisan, but getting into the same unrewarding feedback loop). I basically wanted the development team to show us not by talk, but by actually demonstrating a near complete version of the core systems that attempts to address the deficiencies in the vanilla game. This pre-closed beta is one such step.
It’s not the hype for me because as alluded to earlier, I’ve been equally cynical. However, I’m also rational and prefer to keep an open mind. Let’s just say that at this juncture, for myself, there is much to like in Reaper of Souls (again, the code has balance and tuning issues as well as higher drop rates). Rifts will provide a huge amount of replayability for me because it’s going to be challenging to not get my hardcore characters killed there. Then there is the aspect of finding those pieces of gear to round out my characters and to do the game in even higher levels of difficulty. I like that I have to pickup drops (when it drops due to less items dropping) because of how I can use those items elsewhere in the game by breaking them down.
The lack of an AH and soul binding aren’t big deals to me if I can steadily progress my characters via drops and periodic enchanting. The only aspect of not being able to freely trade legendary/set items that I will miss, is not being able to give them away (I used to do that on hardcore for items that didn’t sell at brimstone salvage prices and just gave them away to lesser geared players as a way of giving back to the community).
Having players pound on what exists early on, and revealing problematic mechanics and potential exploits, while providing a stream of data and statistics that will help the developers with tuning/balancing issues, will make the base foundation that more solid heading into a wider closed beta cycle.
tl;dr – the code has a ways to go, but wearing my QA hat, it’s my opinion that Reaper of Souls closed beta will be in a much better state compared to when Diablo III vanilla hit that cycle.
