http://whatculture.com/gaming/diablo-4-10-huge-things-it-must-fix-from-iii.php
While this article touches upon many things that longtime Diablo players have issues with in Diablo III, most all of these (the exception being that something like the auction houses will never be returning again as per the above) will NOT be addressed in a Diablo IV.
As I’ve written before, so long as the current design team remains in place, the franchise won’t reach its full potential when it comes to most everything noted in the above.
The oversimplified mechanics in D3 are a result of design iterations that were intentional towards making the game more accessible to a wider demographic of players. The general notion of character permanence and the frustration that caused (the devs rationale and not mine specifically) was a driving factor for the “on rails” design of the games core systems; everything from levels, skill runes on rails (and thus the removal of skill trees with assignable skill points and having damage scale off ones weapon), and items that are purely character level based were driven by that objective.
This also has an impact on the ability to synergize skills because of the above design decisions. The designers felt that skill trees and player assignable attribute/skill points (beyond what was bandage fixed with Paragon) were an outdated concept (missing the point completely that this is one of the most integral aspects in games of this genre when it comes to actual character building and progression). That isn’t to say that skill trees were perfect in D2 (they weren’t since you still had to dump points into prerequisite skills to unlock other parts of the tree that you were interested in). The designers have been slowly trying to rectify this self-inflicted wound with legendary powers and set items (since the above design meant that a character is defined more by their actual items).
The same design iteration occurred for the scripted boss fights to make them the way they are where you cannot portal out (and thus have only one chance especially in single player). The design decision behind that is they didn’t want anyone being able to cheese out of a fight (this is also why town portals are the way they are in D3, why there is 10 second countdown timer to remove yourself from the game when not in a town hub, why there is a cooldown when changing skills outside a town hub). I mostly agree with this decision except when it comes to the 10 second countdown timer implementation given the game does not handle network exceptions very well.
The enrage timer mechanic is also part of the gear check mentality the team originally placed a great deal of emphasis on in vanilla as all Inferno difficulty act boss fights were an intended gear check to make sure your character was capable of handling the next act. And part of that originally included having enrage timers on elite packs as a measuring stick (and to also serve as a deterrence to reduce rushing and/or cheesing the way to get to bosses).
Given the power creeping nature of Greater Rifts though (as well as how much “easier/faster” it is to get geared up to handle Torment), these are really no longer an issue. Even with patch 2.3, there are going to be a percentage of the player base that will already have Torment X trivialized. As for monster mechanics (with the new affixes), I don’t have a problem with most of them EXCEPT the cheap ones (those that temporarily remove all character control, that is just plain bad/lazy design).
If it’s not clear, many of these designs were a response to the “issues” that this design team saw with the game play in D2. I’m not saying D2’s game play was completely problem free; what I’m saying is the designers decided to just throw a lot of things away as opposed to really trying to build on top of those systems, and make them better in the process.
As for the storytelling side, none of Blizzard’s current IP’s offer any kind of remarkable story and plot. Chris Metzen has a certain way of telling stories and thus has teams across all of their IP’s that end up following that same formula (which is why the author mentioned the D3 story being somewhat reminiscent of WoW).
With regards to D3, they probably took it too far with trying to use far more conveyance (especially with Azmodan in Act III) since the first two games really only had fragments of story and lore in the game. Again, that somewhat “incomplete” aspect forced players to use their imagination (in many regards, fulfilling that intangible role playing element). Given the constraints that writers have to also deal with (depending on game design decisions) not to mention their own creativity, I personally don’t expect any storyline in their games to have a modicum of depth. Furthermore, it didn’t help that pre-Reaper of Souls, the only way to play the game was through the story line (so it’s natural to become annoyed at hearing the same stuff over and over again).
The music? It is what it is. Matt Uelman isn’t going to be producing any more music for the franchise since he is employed at Runic Games (that is unless he decides to return to work for Blizzard again). And that would be wishful thinking at this juncture since like so many other employees that had closer ties to the former Blizzard North studio, Uelman ultimately left Blizzard around 8 years ago to work at a smaller studio (the theme is fairly common as Blizzard Entertainment has turned into this big corporation with all the usual big company politics and organizational culture baggage). With that said, Blizzard still has unreleased tracks (at least 16) that Uelman recorded for the North version of the game while the franchise was in limbo that they could utilize.
As far as the randomized maps goes, the company is NOT going to return to the Havok engine. They went with their own custom design since it allows them more control when it comes to rigging and integrating with their own tools. Furthermore, their custom game engine doesn’t prevent them from making the entire map being completely procedurally generated. The lack of randomness at the outer edges (and also the central tile sets in some zones) was an intentional design decision. Certain areas like New/Old Tristram were static because the objective was to give these places a sense of place within Sanctuary.
With that said, the designers didn’t really place a huge emphasis on the randomness in their level designs either since pre-2.2, even Reaper of Souls newer “more random” maps really weren’t. Since then, the level designers along with the art team has created more tile sets to allow for more random arrangements (like the way the maps are done for Fields of Misery and Festering Woods tile sets in Rifts since patch 2.2).
The dark atmosphere, dynamic weather and time cycles, dynamic lighting including light radius, or the sheer lack of these are again a design and production decision. The lack of dynamic lighting is perplexing because it makes the environment feel flat (this is most noticeable in dark rift maps where it is just stupid dark). For those who don’t know, dynamic lighting is the effect that happens when you fire off a skill; the lighting from that (like an explosion of fire, dynamically lights the surrounding area). And as the article noted, the lack of light radius just makes the environment lose a key ingredient of the whole “dungeon exploration” aspect in this genre.
The final big one is the always online requirement. That isn’t going to go away no matter how much rational arguments are provided for an offline sandbox. Piracy is listed as a huge risk factor in their 10K filings so this online only DRM is here to stay with all of their desktop IP’s. With console, they have no options other than to allow offline play given that the assumption is that some consoles will be offline. This is also a driving factor to not providing actual controller support on the desktop version, nor providing keyboard/mouse support on the console versions. That’s a software abstraction layer they want to purposely with hold for the following reasons. And yes, I do realize the game play is tuned appropriately for each system since there are key differences (controller being direct control and less accurate when it comes to single target such that the combat is adjusted to compensate for these). The point is these can all be dynamically adjusted based on what input device is connected.
With that said, it’s going to be interesting to see how this all pans out at least on the Xbox One where Windows 10 universal application API as well as cross playability (scaling from mobile to console) will change the design meta. While Xbox games will still have its own development environment, the fact that Microsoft is pushing for more playability across their entire ecosystem, will mean the console version of the game, taking on the ability to be more PC playable in the future. And given the console has the game engine offline, means that eventually, someone will be able to extract that engine, decompile it, and utilize it to create one that will work with the desktop client (this is all dependent of course on someone finally breaking the encryption of either the PS4 or Xbox One).
There’s a lot more shared aspects between the desktop and console versions when it comes to what exists underneath the UI differences/abstractions as well as PC/console specific features (by this, I’m talking about how the engine does its calculations when it comes to skills and loot generation). That was one of the key problems with the Moeege emulator (which also provided a local emulation of the Battle.net protocol for authentication) as everything would need to be programmed from scratch to perfectly emulate what exists in the live game. I talked about the Moeege emulator a bit at the tail end of this previous post.
This is why there are no private Diablo III servers in existence (everything that claims to be is a fake meant to try and steal your Battle.net account information or some other form of malware – the same goes for ones claiming to be reverse engineered offline clients; it doesn’t work that way since the game is designed as a client/server combination where the game engine would still need to be reverse engineered and deployed as a local binary server process with the client reconfigured to talk to this local binary instead).
Given that the PS4 and Xbox One are effectively using desktop hardware, that unofficial offline engine emulation isn’t that far off from a reality as many would think (once the basic encryption is reverse engineered/broken on either console). The reason why the game engine from the already broken encryption on the PS3/Xbox 360 hasn’t been used yet it is their architectures; decompiling those engines results in assembly that doesn’t translate cleaning to the X86-64 architecture (someone was trying with the PowerPC output from the Xbox 360 but its a time consuming endeavor).
So an offline mode (both official and unofficial) are going to remain a pipe dream for a long time.
This is why I’ve been consistent (since part of the way through the Reaper of Souls closed beta) when it comes to having this absolutely low level of expectations with the franchise. The company lacks designers with proper ARPG experience and also no game designers left that actually played a huge role in either of the first two titles. That lack of involvement and history with the actual design and development of the first two games is a key reason why D3 is the way that it is.
It’s business success leans heavily on the name of the franchise but in reality, the game really shouldn’t even use the Diablo name (yes, I do know Blizzard can do whatever it wants since they own this franchise) when it is just mostly a shallow shell that was gutted even further when Deckard Cain was killed off the way he was.
