"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
D2 was just complex enough to be extremely interesting. The incredible diversity in skills, items and stats allowed an immense variety of viable builds, leaving players to hunt for specific legendary items which totally changed the gameplay experience (teleporting barbarians, whirlwhind assassins, etc etc).
D3 is the complete antithesis to this design philosophy. Everything was made so simple that there is zero depth. Gameplay is not altered by any acquired items. Your character's strength increases linearly as a value of a few stats. Boring, repetitive, and linear.
The failure of D3 was that it failed to capitalize on what D2 got right, and also failed to invent anything to replace that massive loss.
This whole "casual gamer" centered design is what became the plague of modern gaming.
But I remember the pre-expansion Diablo 1, and it was _sucky_ to be gentle. All the good stuff including runes, higher level uniques (remember there wasn't any uniques in nightmare & hell), runewords, hammerdins (argh!) came much-much later. So I am saving myself for the expansion, I am done with this one.
You mean the pre-expansion Diablo 2, I agree. I'll give it another shot when the expansion is released. I played D2 for 10+ years... waited for this piece of crap to be released.
Tying ability damage to weapon DPS was the worst mistake they made, in my opinion. Not only did it make zero sense but also made all character classes feel the same in terms of itemization.
You do realize, and I don't know if this is still true, but at one time the barbarians were, by far, the dominant class in D3? They do ungodly amounts of damage and they're super Tanky. There's an 8 second Azmodan kill on Inferno by a Barb.
Just saying, the barbs were actually imbalanced horribly.
I agree with this. I also believe removing the AH doesn't solve the problems with D3. It's D3's item/stat/skill systems that lead to the issues with the AH. Everyone was desiring the same items (using their class's 1 OP build).
In lieu of no Auction House the game will definitely need named-games or some sort of trading post where people bid on items with their own items. I hope they understand that Diablo was always about trading too, not BoA like WoW. We will see I guess! Good luck Blizz :)
D2 was just complex enough to be extremely interesting. The incredible diversity in skills, items and stats allowed an immense variety of viable builds, leaving players to hunt for specific legendary items which totally changed the gameplay experience (teleporting barbarians, whirlwhind assassins, etc etc).
D3 is the complete antithesis to this design philosophy. Everything was made so simple that there is zero depth. Gameplay is not altered by any acquired items. Your character's strength increases linearly as a value of a few stats. Boring, repetitive, and linear.
The failure of D3 was that it failed to capitalize on what D2 got right, and also failed to invent anything to replace that massive loss.