One of the biggest design issues in D3 was its itemization (which as former game director Josh Mosqueira later confirmed,
was something they ended up simplifying since the game was going to be marketed at a wider audience and the items themselves needed to be easier to understand).
So it goes without saying that this is something that will be a design challenge where it won’t be as dumbed down while at the same time, not being overly complex. Dialing this in is still going to be key since that will determine how the rest of the systems (like Talents, Skill Tree, and Rune Words) synergize with each other and the actual items in order to really provide the sort of deep character customization experience (when it comes to builds) that players are looking for in this genre.
The following is a screenshot of the current itemization in D4 but it’s currently hard to determine (until the systems panel and Q&A’s take place on Saturday) if this is just a simple placeholder (adapted from D3) or if this is the actual road they are heading down (if it’s the latter, then it is going to be rather bland since it looks even more simplified; main stat has been removed for example). According to what I’ve heard, David Kim (who was previously with the StarCraft II team and was in charge of balancing), is part of the D4 team and might be working on this portion of the game…
I still believe the company has a lack of ARPG braintrust in their design teams and why I feel that having any of the previous D3 lead designers associated with D4 (in a similar capacity), will result in them
making the same mistakes.
The unveil was of course tagged with a catch phrase; “return to darkness” which revolves around medieval/gothic themes instead of high fantasy with not just a dark/moody world, but one that has characters that don’t go over the top when it comes to their effects (which would undermine that sense of darkness) and stories that aren’t always one where good wins.
After awhile, I felt they were taking some of the criticism levied at D3 (not being as dark as D1 or D2) way too literally similar to how D3 designers would say something to the effect about “epic loot” while they missed the mark on the entire reward and trading loop (due to the original auction house, how that impacted the original drop system with layers of RNG involved in what was a poor itemization system that itself, was tied to an on rails skill system. Even something like taking inspiration from D2’s character select screen (with the campfire) didn’t even evoke a sense of nostalgia for me (maybe it did for others) because bottomline, these are superficial things; a facade. What makes an ARPG tick are the underlying systems including the effort/reward loop.
To be fair, this leadership are checking off some of the boxes; the darker/grittier theme, the non-linear story/questing, the open (and seamless) shared world, the ability to complete the main story/objectives solo, going back to a more traditional skill tree system. But this all needs to be brought together with an itemization system that has synergy with a characters development (like what sort of leveling and progression will be implemented for example).
Echtra Games with all of the accumulated ARPG experience in the team that was put together, hasn’t really been able to dial in the horizontal and vertical progression systems (after several iterations and complete overhauls) in Torchlight Frontiers; I’m still not feeling the frontier design as of the most recent update (
Update 9). I know it’s an updated take on a characters level (and trying to evolve beyond the tried and true formula of the standard leveling system which gives attributes and skills points that you assign). As far as Blizzard goes, this is going to be one of their primary design challenges unless they managed to hire a few designers with prior ARPG experience.
