This is why I have zero belief now that the PC design team will ever find a way to BALANCE the fun/challenge/effort/rewards aspects of Diablo III. The amount of time they are expending on trying to balance/fix stuff (which as mentioned before, is being done on top of an already flawed foundation), is taking time away from actually addressing those root cause issues.
They touched on the damage/resource ratio and their “solution” for dealing with this now (rather than constant number tweaking of those underwhelming skills), is to introduce new items. Thus there is one day, going to be some item (drop subject to luck as well as RNG with its rolls) that is supposed to make Arcane Orb better. Oh that’s just great <sarcasm>.
I do get that Cheng (as the technical lead) is trying to shield the others (the associate designers like Yang and Vu) in his team from being singly finger pointed to when it comes to design/balancing specific classes (thus the little tidbit about the misconception that only certain devs work on certain classes). But this is why I’ve always referred to the (PC) dev/design team as a whole (when it comes to the state of D3) since they individually do not operate in a vacuum.
The irony in all of this is that once again, the D3 console team got these things much more right than wrong. Going off on a tangent for a bit but several folks I know in Japan bought the Japanese version of the UEE for the Playstation (localization work done by Square Enix) and they are having a blast basically playing through it for the first time and getting to/playing at max level/end game.
I myself am not much into console gaming but after getting a bit of hands on play with the PS4 version of the UEE, the game actually feels better than the PC version. The fluidity is also better since it’s mostly offline (not subject to the nuances of a server/client architecture). For the PC version, my Mac Pro is able to run the game at its highest settings at 2560×1600 and even if I knock the resolution (plus settings) down to something lower like 1600×1200, the minor stutters aren’t graphics performance related; it’s mostly due to network induced latency.
Note that the desktop versions of the game (same goes for WoW, SC2, Hearthstone) doesn’t have Japanese localization (text and voice work) as Blizzard (in the early 2000’s) made a conscious decision to not market their games in Japan (since console and mobile gaming tends to be a larger demographic). IMHO, that was always a bad decision because the investment made in localization as well as local marketing (plus a direct presence in the country), would’ve allowed them a much greater mindshare. And even though at one point, console absolutely did rule, PC’s have made their way in more peoples homes (and Blizzard’s IP’s would’ve been able to do well carving out a niche in PC gaming in the country).
The Japanese console version of Diablo III would’ve been MUCH better had it all been done by Blizzard themselves (since everything would’ve been planned and designed as a whole; voice acting being one of the biggest since it can be difficult to find voice actors/actresses that can sound similar to the english versions – which is a huge component when it comes to the games character recognition down to the vocalization).
Digressing though, I did mention in another post there is that psychological component when it comes to the game play/reward/fun differences between the console and desktop versions (when it comes to games like D3). For many, the PC is considered the gaming master race. I’ve opined that those differences are narrowing (more so with the current iterations of the Xbox and Playstation); it’s becoming more about the interface (mouse/keyboard, game controller, touch and motion) where some games are much better in each of those respective styles. The D3 console designers did an excellent job in this area (especially the direct character control). They also had to balance the pace and rewards which is an intangible area that affects how fun the game generally feels. Operative word again -> FUN.
