Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: gogis on July 02, 2012, 08:06:41 am

This build is wrong and horrible in many aspects. Try to watch videos from zrave at twitch.tv.  It's have alot of vids concerning barb builds/gear, pre/post patch.

I thought this is exactly the type of statement Blizzard was trying to avoid with this game...

If it's anything like WoW, it is true to an extent. You can plug your points anywhere and faceroll and that's good enough for 80% of the game. But Inferno, as with hard modes, are tuned for a different level of play and requires you to play 'skillfully.' That's not limited only to correct movement and skill use, but also skill planning and character builds. That could mean building for the correct survival skills, or it could be knowing that certain character attributes are mathematically more useful than others.

The only question as to whether this should be this way is whether you can consider "hard modes" part of the game that all players are intended to complete. It generally varies based on games: most players aren't concerned with getting a 100% clear in games which offer exploration or difficult achievements, but somehow in WoW and D3 (among other games), the expectation from players is that the content is there, therefore more than half the players should be able to complete it (even if they had completed it on an easier difficulty beforehand).

It is a very subjective thing, balance vs difficulty vs the players' entitlement.

I wish there was an apocalypse rebuilding game, somewhat like RTS mod for Fallout 3 and New Vegas. It would be randomly generated.

A DF game could easily be "rewritten" to follow apocalypse. Instead of worlds being created out of magic and being in the process of colonization/populization, each civ's capital is the vault or sheltered valley from which they survived the apocalypse. Doesn't necessarily need to be Fallout-style nuclear annihilation, but you'd probably want some kind of McGuffin to explain the extremely dangerous and hostile enemies (the ones that aren't just other competing civs, anyway).

Gameplay-wise you probably don't want to go explicitly with DF's 2D "literally carve out a small colony from the mountain", although extensive underground structures should still be possible.

Now that I think of it, gameplay wise, Anno 2070 is very close to what I'm thinking of. Think of it as SimCity with a rudimentary economy (e.g. "produce this and this so you can produce that, which will you produce that," including region-specific resources), research, and limited military goals. The maps are not procedural and you're artificially limited to islands of a flood earth, which I'd throw out - I'd rather that space be largely open territory and with a heavier focus on the possibility of combat or even military involvement (even going as far as SupCom RTS, depending on how much you want to force the player to rely on military power).

If I were a conspiracist, I would say that they intentionally went overboard with the restrictions, just to say "Oops, our bad." and dial it back a notch to save a little face. On the other hand: didn't the beta have the same sort of restrictions before going live? Not necessarily no chat/drop, but they could have used the same flag used to restrict access during beta for these accounts requiring credit authorization. (However, I'm not 100% sure on what exactly was restricted during beta or restricted now, so maybe I'm talking out my ass.)

How many towns are there currently? 3?
Also, is there any surefire way to get constant source of food without any of the 2 foodmaking skills?

Could choose the photosynthesis mutation. It is pretty expensive in terms of mutation points, but once you get it to about rank 4 or 5, you can generally handle diving deep underground before you have to come back up for energy.

I loathed enrage timers in WoW because it made some fights simply impossible to do.

As bad as I and my guild were at the game, this is obviously untrue. There were a few cases where content was of such an obscene difficulty as to be intentionally unbeatable, because it was released unfinished or was artificially gating other content that wasn't finished, but 98% of the content in WoW was beaten even in its hardest iterations. The hardest content is often made easier after the top players beat it, yet there will always be players who complain about the difficulty. Now granted, most of the top players beat the hardest content using exploits that aren't available to subsequent players (something repeated in D3), but generally speaking those weren't to make the fight possible, only faster in terms of the number of attempts it takes to beat it (versus having to waste weeks farming the RNG to gear the team to the maximum).

I will grant that enrage timers are a pretty uninspired way to add difficulty to a fight (and in most cases somewhat immersion breaking as the enemy begins using some absurd ability for which there was no reason - except "fairness" - to not use previously). But, there are only so many ways to tune difficulty. Enrage timers are no different than adding time limits or other "race against the clock" mechanics in other games. In might even be more appropriate in a game like Diablo, where you other avenues to improve your performance than simply mashing your buttons faster or learning perfect control.

.

One thing that does annoy me, though, is Blizzard's insistence that the game must be played their way. Any success that players might have in finding unconventional gameplay or tricks are quickly squashed. It is something that burned me out of WoW. Instead of giving us content that took thought (and yes, some benchmarks) to defeat, fights could only progress the way Blizzard intended. You couldn't drag the bosses through the entire raid zone to kite it, you couldn't split groups that were linked, you couldn't use player abilities or consumables in an unorthodox way (they'd get nerfed). As simplistic as EQ's early bosses were compared to WoW's scripted things, Verant didn't really care how you beat content, only that it was possible to beat it.

Why that philosophy should apply to a largely single player game, and one which they had admitted has (though possible) no focus on player versus player content, I have no idea.

I am completely unsurprised that Diablo 3 would have as bad or worse a problem of compromised accounts as that which afflicts WoW, RIFT, any MMO, and hell, probably any online game with more than a million players. Look deep enough and I bet you'd find an underground market for TF2 items.

I suppose you could argue that a compromised account isn't technically hacking. Certainly not on the scale of D2, with custom items, godmode, and other exploits running rampant despite whatever security measures online battle.net tried. It didn't stop things happening in WoW - though they were probably reduced - and banning accounts isn't much of a deterrent when the perpetrators still make enough money to just use or acquire new accounts.

Haven't read the thread, so might've been mentioned already, but given tantrum spirals, the civilization would almost certainly form cycles of population boom/civilization collapse, exactly like the aliens of Niven's The Mote In God's Eye.

Really, the parallels are quite strong.

Darn my best guy to date found pearl dragon armor on Level 6 of the Dungeon and he dies by being turned into a pig!!!

Heh. I like the implication that you had clarity even as you were a pig. I know that in terms of game mechanics one is meaningless to the other, but the idea is that even as you were transformed into an ambulatory, porkly meal, you maintained full awareness and and understood the situation to a depth rivaled only by the most disciplined of thinkers.