Jay Wilsons list of Diablo 2 flaws

I have rewatched the Blizzcon a few times & yes Jay did talk some pretty heavy steamers, I get angry watching that too. But did you not play the beta? The beta pretty much showcased the design of the game & the rest just scaled off it. We knew about the skill system & the auction houses, we also knew there would be no pvp on release (although noone expected it to take this long). I knew what I was buying after playing the beta & the only real surprise was that it didn't live up to my (maybe too high) expectations of it being the game I played exclusively for the next few years. I think we are all a little guilty of having too high hopes for D3 & I do think that there are some of us that could do with wiping our rose tinted D2 glasses a little and try to look at each game for what it is & not for what it isn't.

LOL, well then I am sorry Fire but you deserve everything you got. ;)

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Charan wrote:

Actually, I'd never seen anything Jay Wilson purportedly said about D2, so I found this quite an interesting read. (It could be all made up, but hey, it doesn't seem entirely outlandish.)

My thanks to stryker for entertaining and enlightening. This is what gaming fora are all about.

Pretty sure I read quite a few of those things (like the skill system etc) in previews of Diablo 3 in magazines and so on. Several of those quotes were new, though. Still, I stand for what I said in my inital post here. I think he made a lot of sense, and don't think Diablo 3 is nearly as bad as some people say it is. Imagine Call of Duty set in a third-person view with squad mates. It can be the "new" Ghost Recon and the best game by far in the series, but because it's too different from the old ones, most of the hardcore fans will hate it. That, and the real money auction house, is why Diablo 3 failed. It has nothing to do with the game itself. The game is awesome. But it's too different from Diablo 2 and uses real money in an optional auction house, so hardcore fans still go ballistic. If it really was as bad as hardcore fans say, no one would play it, Jay Wilson would be kicket out of the US in shame and the entire franchise would die in less than a week. ;)

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lethal_papercut wrote:

Charan might think he has his work cut out with whining babies now but he should be thanking his lucky stars that he isn't responsible for the same over at the D3 camp, there is no greater nightmare to man nor beast.

Actually I don't think that. This is a piece of piss as far as moderation goes, and half the time, if not more, I am afforded the chance to post as me, just me, rather than as a moderator. I'm a volunteer/conscript and reserve the right to step down at any moment should this no longer be the case.

I'll still have all my GGGold, access to the alpha realm, and fairly direct contact with some of the movers and shakers of the game.

So...it's a moot point really. You couldn't PAY me enough to deal with other games' message boards and communities, and I've said this many times over.

But when I see a little of what happens there bleed into here, that's probably when I like this 'job' the least. And you do sometimes represent that, papercut, so for now I do associate the less-cool aspects of my task/role with some of your scathing contributions. They can be incendiary and incisive, apt to arouse the ire of other users who might inadvertently slip over the line into uncivil behaviour. That's never any fun for me, but I completely see the need for such incendiary, incisive posts. It can't all be lalala happy land.

And it hasn't been. And it won't be.

I'll give my feedback to his statements since I played D2 for 10 years and have started it again. And also play PoE since April and can point out how they solved things and how D3 solved them.

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Everybody remembers Deckard Cain saying, “Stay a while, listen.” But the reason they remember it fondly now is because it was so damn annoying! He said it every time, and you had to talk to him so often!

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Jay: "In Diablo II, the most optimal way to play was to find the quickest boss you can do, and repeat that boss run forever. It’s our intent to create a system that encourage people to play a lot more varied amount of content, and have that be the most beneficial way to play, such that the boss runs are really mitigated as a primary things that people do and become more secondary."

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Jay: "One of the pieces of feedback we got during the internal alpha was that skill points as an element of our skill system didn't really suit the game, It created a lot of conflict in terms of what the players would choose to do. So what we had is this system that has these six – it used to be seven, now six – slots, that implies that you should have six skills, but a system with skill points? Well, you really want to dump every single point into one skill. "

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Jay: ""I feel that in a lot of ways the current system has more choice involved in it compared to Diablo II because that finite limit of how many skills you can take versus the number that you have means that you have to make a very restrictive choice, so we focused a lot more on restricting the number of skills you have and having that be the interesting choice, as opposed to skill points, which are really commitments before you even know what you're committing to."

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Jay: (Regarding DII's Skill System) "What you probably did was go up on a website and find out what the optimal build was, because there's just too much math involved for you to really get involved in it. A small number of players will go in and do the math… but the majority of players will go 'I don't know, I guess I'll just put it in whatever I already have'."

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Jay: (Regarding Stat Distribution In D2) "Stat progression as a system is very difficult for a lot of players to understand because you get these 5 points, but you don’t exactly know where to put them or what benefit you’re getting with them. You might make some obvious choices, for example, with Diablo II’s Sorceress, you might put all of your points into energy because that’s the obvious choice, right? Except that for almost every build out there, you’ve just made the wrong choice."

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Jay: "Any system where you have to go up onto the Internet to figure out what the right answer is, is not a good customization system. Any system where there’s a “right” answer is not a good system for customization. The truth is, with stat point systems, they are simple math. It’s not hard to figure out what the absolute best choice is so we decided we didn’t want that as a customization system. With that being said, we do have another system we’re working on. The specific intent of it is to capture the imagination of what stat point spending was supposed to do, which is, “I want to be stronger. I want to be tougher.” These kind of simple ideas are not contextualized well within a skill system. The skill system is about what the player is doing, not higher ideals about what their character is. So, we’re going to work on a system that really satisfies that feeling, but is way easier to understand and also has some true customization to."

KenshiD: "Melee DH? Melee Wizard? Not really.." No shit. I tried both, because as one of the earliest meleemancers out there, I feel it is my prerogative to try these things with each (a)rpg I come across. That and I freakin' love Fighter Mages. Spellsingers. All that.

I didn't make it past level 10 as either a true melee wizard or melee DH. It was spectacularly boring and inefficient. This cannot be said for D2, where you had access to great defensive spells as either the necro or the sorceress very early in the game, and could use the limited item customisation to buff your melee capabilities (topazes in weapons, oh yes indeed).

This is an old argument by now, but I'll iterate: D3 did not, in the slightest, encourage out-of-the-box thinking; it even punished it at times. The fact that D2 gave rise to my altaholism is just more irony I'd rather not think about.

Thank GGGod for PoE. That's all I can say there.

My god

Who doubles things that much?

Nobody but Jay Wilson

FACE

PALM