Quote (Vtrix @ Jul 14 2023 10:28pm)
Unnp tbh didn't play d3. Cudnt tell you.
I think it all developed under the direction of Jay Wilson after the original team and game was scrapped. Blizzard North was fired, so there's a version of Diablo 3 that's different from the one we know. I wouldn't be surprised if they borrowed many of the ideas, but it's obvious the game engine and graphics were changed dramatically. I'll give Jay credit of at least trying something different. The most recent team didn't take any risks and just reused ideas constantly from D3.
I think the biggest mistakes they made were some of the following.
Mob level scaling with players. It's overused and unnecessary in good game design.
Itemization: legendary aspects should have just been a bigger part of the skill tree. All the imprinting makes legendaries feel like normal items, nothing special.
Too many damage multipliers and big numbers. Creates severe balancing issues and difficulty of tweaking numbers because of the cascading effect of several bucket multipliers.
Lack of monster personality and area identity. This is partially due to monster scaling, but also includes sound design and mob ai. It's also the art style. Every area looks so bland and boring. I'm not saying it has to look cartoonish like Diablo 3, but trying to create a huge open world is a bit of a double edged sword as they couldn't focus too much time on a great looking tight knit story with creative level design that screamed gothic horror. If you look at Diablo 2 you can tell how much care each area was given in the level design, and also the randomization of it that created endless gameplay. Grid design is great for randomizers but D4 seemed to completely ignore that. They were more interested in creating a static, soulless open world.
This post was edited by BlakeXeal on Jul 14 2023 09:43pm