We forgot what make our games fun

Team 3 also forgot the important characteristics that define what makes ARPG hack-n-slash dungeon crawlers tick.  That is ironic – Kevin Martens was hired in 2009 because he was one of the few folks on the team that had actual ARPG design experience (Baldurs Gate).  Martens (as senior/lead content designer) along with the game director are the ones who set the strategic vision for the franchise (that is how Blizzard operates at that level).  Thus he bears some of the responsibility for signing off on many of the games designs and systems.

As designers, they do have every right to design and make a game that fits their vision while also doing what it takes to appeal to whatever demographic they are tying to sell into.  One challenge was making the game easier for the wider audience they were planning on going after (they already knew back in 2011).

Josh Mosqueira addressed this part at Blizzcon 2014 during the Evolving Reaper of Souls panel as they were “expecting to have legions of new players” (ones who never played the prior two games) come aboard to D3 (meaning this was a higher level executive mandate that the game systems appeal to a broader demographic).  See the following part when he is talking about his first experience with items play testing the game when he was hired for the console team back in 2011. (21m-23m45s for the above quote in its full context).

https://youtu.be/Co9kwsDPE-o?t=21m00s

This was pretty much the beginning of a non-stop dumbing down process.  Just to be fair, not all the designs were bad (IMHO, the health globe system to remove the need for potion spamming was one of the better iterations – most everything else though was an exercise in getting rid of the essence of character building/progression).

During the games development, they rejected far too much of the early feedback especially when it came to the games itemization system and the skill rune on rails design where there were quite a number of posts/debates with Bashiok articulating how their design (the one that shipped in 2012) would have an impact on the games natural longevity.  This same dev team (sans the old game director) effectively pooh-poohed most of this feedback as being one of misplaced nostalgia.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, they had to figure out designs that would appeal to Diablo’s core demographic (the ones who did play the first two games).  The entire game was balanced fairly well around the progression from normal through hell difficulties.  Inferno however was slapped on as a temporary end game challenge as a half-baked design with excessively stingy drop rates (or as Marten’s and company stated during last years Blizzcon; they originally designed that loot hunt to last out in the years).  And then Wyatt Cheng “tuned” the difficulty of Inferno to be effectively “doubled” based on feedback from their strike team testers (ones who were already getting creamed trying to progress through the content).

They didn’t want players doing the kind of boss runs that were prevalent in D2 because they wanted the act bosses to serve as the gear check (if you couldn’t get past the act boss, then there is no way you would be effective at dealing with the regular mobs in the next act).  What’s worse is that they completely tossed out the way the item progression model worked from normal through hell, and made it that you needed to be at least farming the act you wanted to clear (exception being Act 1 where you had a chance to clear it before hitting the noticeable Act 2 gear wall).

The problem wasn’t even necessarily to do with Inferno’s tuning either… it was the dismal drop rate of everything due to this completely misplaced notion that the loot grind was supposed to take years (not to mention that the other elephant in the room at the time was the auction house – that didn’t have an impact of drop rates quantity wise – what it had a major impact on was with the wild range of rolls on those items).  And the itemization system was terrible and we’re still stuck with it at the core because they decided to spend nearly 1.5 years trying to bandaid fix their way around it for loot 2.0.

This same team decided that going with an open waypoint system from the start, was not the way they wanted to go because they wanted the players to be immersed in the lore.  Hello, one of the objectives is loot farming…. and this team designed it to originally last in the years.  Non-sequiter (does not compute).  Going past the designer bullcrap talk, they went with the linear story line format because it was a server side resource saving move since map data would not have to be preserved across multiple acts.

Yet, that original decision resulted in all kinds of degenerative game play include game flipping which one could say created server load from the continual creation and deletion of game instances.  And we’re still paying the price for that because they ended up nerfing the rewards from many of these objectives to stop this kind of game play.  Thus playing the game outside the narrowly defined areas where they specifically have increased the rewards (bounties – rifts – greater rifts) means you’ll be getting less XP, gold, items over the same amount of time played.  And their implementations still haven’t gotten rid of this degenerative type of game play (rift fishing is a perfect example of this).

I still remember that post by Bashiok ahead of the launch telling the player base to lower their expectations (the one that caused Wilson to followup) because in retrospect, it turned out to be the truth.

Martens says they “consulted” with a lot of the folks on the World of Warcraft team?  No, really….  That isn’t surprising because their game systems miss too many points about the actual character building aspect of the genre.  And people seriously wonder why this game has systems that echo more of that of an MMO than an actual hack-n-slash where character building and progression isn’t just about reaching some arbitrary max level and then finding gear at that max level where the game really only begins.

Someone on the design team also has this thing for tedium and masochistic designs, which eventually leads to frustration.  Case and point is the hellfire event – the tedium involved would not be an issue if the reward justified the effort.  This team never did get the rewards aspect.  I mean look at quest rewards as an example – XP, gold, an item.  Not one specifically meant to permanently enhance your character (not even a simple imbue item quest).  Such rewards in D3 is normally relegated to dealing with layers of RNG (Hellfire Ring and Amulet).

They’re trying to figure out how to make the journey from 1-69 (or whatever the level cap will be in the next expansion) to be more interesting when they haven’t figured out their design is the culprit (because it is all about getting to max level where every lower level item you’ve found is useless).  This is something they cannot easily fix without a complete revamp of the underlying core design (and that isn’t going to happen with D3 since that is akin to writing a new engine or in other words, a new game).

Their entire core design dictates that all they can do is continue to apply bandaid fixes trying to “fix” those issues to make it more ARPG like when it comes to those particular characteristics.  And after reading this, it makes me wonder what other direction they intend to pull the games toward with the next expansion in trying to re-discover the “fun”.  This teams definition of “fun” is something different as far as I can tell based on the game systems they created (what I mean is go back to the start and look at simple stuff like crafting gems and identifying items – yes, they’ve finally been addressed but someone on the design team thought this kind of ridiculous time sinks was actually immersive in some way).

Personally, I stopped expecting anything remarkable (game play with actual depth) from this team and set expectations accordingly (lowered).  I’ve said it before, if you drastically lower your expectations, the game is worth the price of the entertainment it provides and nothing more.  The game has one of the best combat and physics engines around but its overall game play potential/depth is held back by a design team that has a lack of understanding the core essence of hack-n-slash/dungeon crawler style ARPG’s. Their actions have spoken louder than words when you look at the proof (generally underwhelming implementations).