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Author Topic: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?  (Read 22908 times)

nocker

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #45 on: May 17, 2012, 01:38:11 pm »

I just dropped a $60 check to Tarn into the mail because fuck always online DRM.

I hate this misinformed opinion. It's not "Always Online DRM". It's an online game. The game physically can't be played offline, because it's only a game client for their servers. You don't see people complaining about having to be online to play WoW, do you?
Right. And Diablo's gameplay model, the one who got me interested on and playing D2, isn't online. It's a totally offline game, that I also could, for instance, play with my friends over my LAN if we wanted.

It was a business decision for Blizzard to take an entirely offline game like D2 and turn it into an online game. I understand their reasons, it's just that the reasons are all excellent for them and inconvenient for me.

So, zero dollars for them. I may make a donation for Toady instead (in pretty much the same vein, I bought the original Touhou games recently, to support another independent developer who does what he loves).
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talysman

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #46 on: May 17, 2012, 02:45:30 pm »

It was a business decision for Blizzard to take an entirely offline game like D2 and turn it into an online game. I understand their reasons, it's just that the reasons are all excellent for them and inconvenient for me.
I've got no dog in this particular fight, since I dislike Diablo's play style in general and the issue of offline vs. online is thus not important, but this attitude you describe -- making business decisions based on convenience for the company instead of desirability in a customer's eyes -- seems to be more common in the business world these days and usually doesn't result in better sales.

Remember about 12 years ago, when the big internet buzzword was "push"? And tech magazines like Wired and Byte were talking about how push technologies were going to change the way we experienced the internet, because people weren't going to go to websites when they felt like it any more, but would get products "pushed" to them when businesses felt like it?

What, you never heard of that? Maybe that's because it was something that customers didn't give a crap about and didn't want. Like that new degradable CD technology from about 15 years ago, where you could pay two bucks for a CD single that would play 10 to 20 times and then stop playing, making you buy another copy if you wanted to hear the song again. That technology changed the way we listen to music today!

Edit: I guess I should say that push technology still exists; it's just that the only push applications that succeeded were things like RSS subscriptions or weather apps, or other situations where the customer decides what they want and how often, as opposed to what the marketing buzz of the late '90s - early 2000s was claiming as the next big thing: targeted advertising applets.
« Last Edit: May 17, 2012, 02:51:22 pm by talysman »
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JohnieRWilkins

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #47 on: May 17, 2012, 03:23:37 pm »

If you want to go by a broad enough definition, Super Mario Bros. involves "Strategy" because you have to plan to maneuver your character onto floating brick platforms. 

The fact remains, I'm generally turned off by RTS games, and prefer "strategy" games that involve more of the actual "thinking before you act" type of strategy than spamming a pre-designed formula for troop ratios or macros. 

In fact, the very notion that you can make macros is a pretty good indicator that the game needs to have its interface and gameplay reworked, because any keypress sequence you're punching in often enough to need macros is something that has long since become far too routine.
First of all, I'm going to reaffirm my suspicion that you're saying these things because you have no macro. Second, it sounds like you willfully ignore the fact that some people actually go into an RTS match with strategies, which they made themselves, prepared.

To defend your point you can argue that:
1) People never go into a match with strategies prepared.
2) There's a single winning strategy that's best in all situations.

I can disprove both with one anecdote. Kill two birds with one glaive wurm, if you will.

The strategy for ladder is simpler than the strategy for a series of games played against one opponent. A good ladder strategy is one which allows you to defeat the largest amount of the most common strategies to provide you with the highest % win rate. I've caught several "big-name" players with their pants down with the following:

All protoss players send their pylon/gateway building probe to scout my burgeoning terran base, and then follow it up with a stalker/zealot poke up my ramp. The scouting probe will scoot across the map and catch me doing something that borders on the verge of hubris. It will see me taking a gas before a barracks. That opening immediately folds to something like a proxy gate, but that's an opening that's entirely uncommon at the top echelons of ladder play. The protoss players' response to this move is to punch their monitor in sheer repulsion at my smugness. This is immediately placated by their expectation of the super-easy to stop and super-predictable banshee tech.

The next thought on the protoss player's mind is to recall their training and remember what the best course of action for dealing with the fastest banshee is. The best course of action is to proxy a pylon and go to the safest build. 3gate robo. The protoss player naturally wants to apply strong pressure with their army and break the terran's ramp with the troops teleporting from their three gateways. This is a move that causes many terran players to sweat, or breaks them outright.

While this is going through the protoss player's mind, they are sending their zealot and stalker to my base as a scouting poke to reaffirm their suspicion of heavy tech. When they arrive, they see that they're causing me to sweat profusely because my bunker is only part-way up and I'm forced to rouse the proletariat to help my three insignificant marines defend against the two hideous foreign invaders. The bunker goes up and a surge of pure, vile hatred of all things terran that's so deeply rooted inside all protoss players' mind, strikes them at their sudden inability to continue the carnage due to some hastily cobbled-together defense as the coward marines take shelter inside a building and the workers return to their menial charges; safely behind the front lines.

The protoss player, now foaming at the mouth, finds that they are now in a good position to continue their advance up my ramp with their robo and warpgates nearing completion. They warmly welcome their round of rallying reinforcements, fresh out of gateways, right outside of my base and push up... only to find a pack of hellions, produced in a factory hidden in a corner of the map, now happily driving around their undefended base, roasting things. And also a second bunker with scvs on autorepair duty stationed closely.

I call the offensive GG and the protoss unplugs their modem furiously and uninstalls the game shortly after. Only to reinstall a patch after, when DBro, in all of his brilliance, decides to give destructible rocks hardened shield or something similarly hilarious and retarded.

Is this a common strategy? I've never seen anyone else use it. Is this the best possible army composition? Of course not. Hellions are one of the weakest army units in the game, and most players will forgo building them entirely.

---

Cheer up and drop at least some of the strategy-genre elitism. Even chess is pure pattern recognition when you get down to it.
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Mictlantecuhtli

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #48 on: May 17, 2012, 03:38:42 pm »

Play a game with heart and thought put into it for many years, or a puke-quality bastardization of a classic duo of games?

I'll stick with DF since I don't enjoy games that rely on pretty lighting and an auction house to call itself a 'game.'

Where is the gameplay in D3 anyways? Right clicking? Watching pretty magic decimate every enemy on the screen? Eh.
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gamewizard

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #49 on: May 17, 2012, 04:02:28 pm »

DF for sure
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kaenneth

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #50 on: May 17, 2012, 07:14:00 pm »

It was a business decision for Blizzard to take an entirely offline game like D2 and turn it into an online game. I understand their reasons, it's just that the reasons are all excellent for them and inconvenient for me.
I've got no dog in this particular fight, since I dislike Diablo's play style in general and the issue of offline vs. online is thus not important, but this attitude you describe -- making business decisions based on convenience for the company instead of desirability in a customer's eyes -- seems to be more common in the business world these days and usually doesn't result in better sales.

Remember about 12 years ago, when the big internet buzzword was "push"? And tech magazines like Wired and Byte were talking about how push technologies were going to change the way we experienced the internet, because people weren't going to go to websites when they felt like it any more, but would get products "pushed" to them when businesses felt like it?


Push failed because of the horrible security implications. Imagine how fast a virus could spread on the Internet if all the PC's out there accepted unrequested connections.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #51 on: May 17, 2012, 08:20:38 pm »

First of all, I'm going to reaffirm my suspicion that you're saying these things because you have no macro. Second, it sounds like you willfully ignore the fact that some people actually go into an RTS match with strategies, which they made themselves, prepared.

To defend your point you can argue that:
1) People never go into a match with strategies prepared.
2) There's a single winning strategy that's best in all situations.

-snip-

Cheer up and drop at least some of the strategy-genre elitism. Even chess is pure pattern recognition when you get down to it.

Actually - that's exactly my point. 

Any game that demands you make macros to even be able to play it, and pre-format your strategy entirely in advance has already failed to be a real strategy game.

An RTS, at best is a strategy game that you have to carry out in real-time.  The fact that this, alone, will always add in the notion that one player will as often as not beat another player simply because they can click more efficiently than another is already a major blow against it as a strategy game. 

What's worse is that it rarely adds any sense of enjoyment to the game, just the frustration that you have to go through and make all those macros, and the fact that you have to do all that oftentimes just leads to much greater shallowness of strategy overall.

In fact, even a game of Advance Wars has greater strategy involved than Starcraft.  The simple fact that they made the game turn-based makes every move more important and strategic, and the game was balanced to accommodate that. 

Chess, likewise, has its patterns, but you are never going to be able to sum up every twist and turn of a chess game as easily as you can sum up the overwhelming bulk of Starcraft matches. (Which often amount to "Both players were Terrans, used the tanks and flying buildings as spotters while fighters were blasting each other out of the sky.  One side ran out of fighters first.") This is because Chess is a deep enough game that the total permutations of tactical choices are great enough that no single overarching script can be applied from one chess match to another.  You can't do much more than script an opening strategy and then try to see how you need to react to your opponent from there ahead of time, unlike Starcraft, where what you scripted from the start is everything.

Besides, you can talk about how you need macros to even start playing the "strategy" of Starcraft, but that's all a moot point - the game is nowhere NEAR enjoyable enough to get anywhere near that kind of dedication to get what anemic strategy there is out of the game.  I'm disgusted with the game long before I'm even working out efficient routines, much less making macros to play the whole game for me.  I'll play games where I can get much more strategy without having to jump through some ridiculous hoops of being hyper-efficient with every nanosecond of my time in a way that has nothing to do with strategy for the slightest advantage in Zerg Rush speed.

I just plain don't enjoy RTS games, and you're not going to argue me into anything different.
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JohnieRWilkins

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #52 on: May 17, 2012, 09:25:14 pm »

I've never intended to convince you to start playing strategy games. I'm merely trying to illustrate that your strategy game elitism (the thing you said about starcraft not being a strategy game, which is a terrible untruth) is senseless and is pretty much on the level of what a casual gamer will say about DF to argue the superiority of his turret defense genre.

Macros don't exist in SC and you have it confused with some other game. The flying buildings, tanks and fighters may have been a true example a while ago, but you're really missing the point. How would one of the players get a lead in tank/fighter/building count on another player? After you've hit a certain level of macro skill, (you can get there in <500 ladder games in SC2, even if you've never touched an RTS before) you have the ability to efficiently spend all of your money at ALL points in the game. Then the question becomes: you've got an equivalent army to your opponent. How do you win? You must have some kind of a battle plan, or you will easily lose. SC2 isn't yet at the stage where the game is figured out and everyone knows the perfect response to every scenario. Sure you can read a strategy guide, (which is a really unfun approach to games in general) but those are usually written by low master league players. You could also emulate your favorite pro, but chances are, I could take advantage of some weaknesses you didn't know existed.

I was hoping the narration of a starcraft game I gave you would enlighten you a bit, but you missed the chief concept of the importance of changing your strategy on the fly based on scouting information. (which the protoss player did, and paid for due to misreading the situation)

The only other thing you've said that has any merit is the idea that the fast paced combat detracts from strategy. In truth, it makes for more strategic gameplay in the long run. When you're focused on base management and controlling a part of your army elsewhere, you may leave some flank unguarded and leave yourself open for drops. Then your opponent has an opportunity to seize the opening. If they do then your job quickly switches to crisis management, which is very much a strategic concept. It throws both players in a novel situation in which no other player has encountered before. Those situations accounts for the great majority of the fun I've had when I played the game.

I'll finally concede that it's true that StarCraft 2 is a game where you can increase your ladder ranking by just playing faster, but you can also increase your ladder ranking with better strategy. At some point the gains you get from improving your speed will become more and more marginal, but gains from having better decision making won't. This makes it a strategy game in my eyes.
« Last Edit: May 17, 2012, 09:28:35 pm by JohnieRWilkins »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #53 on: May 17, 2012, 10:49:25 pm »

I've never intended to convince you to start playing strategy games. I'm merely trying to illustrate that your strategy game elitism (the thing you said about starcraft not being a strategy game, which is a terrible untruth) is senseless and is pretty much on the level of what a casual gamer will say about DF to argue the superiority of his turret defense genre.

Macros don't exist in SC and you have it confused with some other game. The flying buildings, tanks and fighters may have been a true example a while ago, but you're really missing the point. How would one of the players get a lead in tank/fighter/building count on another player? After you've hit a certain level of macro skill, (you can get there in <500 ladder games in SC2, even if you've never touched an RTS before) you have the ability to efficiently spend all of your money at ALL points in the game. Then the question becomes: you've got an equivalent army to your opponent. How do you win? You must have some kind of a battle plan, or you will easily lose. SC2 isn't yet at the stage where the game is figured out and everyone knows the perfect response to every scenario. Sure you can read a strategy guide, (which is a really unfun approach to games in general) but those are usually written by low master league players. You could also emulate your favorite pro, but chances are, I could take advantage of some weaknesses you didn't know existed.

I was hoping the narration of a starcraft game I gave you would enlighten you a bit, but you missed the chief concept of the importance of changing your strategy on the fly based on scouting information. (which the protoss player did, and paid for due to misreading the situation)

The only other thing you've said that has any merit is the idea that the fast paced combat detracts from strategy. In truth, it makes for more strategic gameplay in the long run. When you're focused on base management and controlling a part of your army elsewhere, you may leave some flank unguarded and leave yourself open for drops. Then your opponent has an opportunity to seize the opening. If they do then your job quickly switches to crisis management, which is very much a strategic concept. It throws both players in a novel situation in which no other player has encountered before. Those situations accounts for the great majority of the fun I've had when I played the game.

I'll finally concede that it's true that StarCraft 2 is a game where you can increase your ladder ranking by just playing faster, but you can also increase your ladder ranking with better strategy. At some point the gains you get from improving your speed will become more and more marginal, but gains from having better decision making won't. This makes it a strategy game in my eyes.

But that's still glossing over the giant, gaping flaw:

Before any strategy I have will ever matter, I have to get at least close to as fast as the other players in punching out routine commands for getting the whole system running, or my strategy doesn't matter because I'm going to be moused. 

Before I can get that fast, I have to grind hundreds of hours into simply memorizing the interface and building up those macros. 

During that time, I'm not enjoying any strategy, and I'm not exploring any new or interesting concepts of game design. 

Meanwhile, turn-based games may not have the hundreds of hours before you figure out most of them, the way that Advance Wars only takes so long before you have that game pretty much figured out, but at least I was enjoying playing a strategic game before I completely wore Advance Wars out.

I can play turn-based strategy games and some games that are real-time but have enough strategic elements in them to make them different from games like Starcraft, and have fun doing it.  Starcraft, however, is just work.  You grind simply for the sake of getting a little bit more efficient just so that maybe you can get up to the level where some tactics might matter, and even then, you showed it yourself: the game was decided by very few decision points based around a couple recon actions. 

Hundreds of hours of training and a ten/fifteen minute game decided in two moves. 

Compare that to a game of chess - how many decision points are in a chess game?  Even a game like Advance Wars, so long as it isn't one of those maps where infantry and artillery are absolute kings, is simple but manages to be fairly deep. 

An RTS game of the Starcraft model just doesn't offer me any of the strategy I enjoy.
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JohnieRWilkins

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #54 on: May 17, 2012, 10:57:34 pm »

OK. You have no macro. But do you admit that starcraft is a strategy game? Even if for whatever reason you feel that a game is ended in two moves.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #55 on: May 17, 2012, 11:33:49 pm »

OK. You have no macro. But do you admit that starcraft is a strategy game? Even if for whatever reason you feel that a game is ended in two moves.

It is a real-time strategy game, which I consider its own genre, but then, I consider "4X" and "City Builder" and "Tactical RPG" their own genres, and a quick look at places like Steam tell me that most people aren't as precise as I am.

In the sense that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance or Civilization V or Sim City are "strategy games", yes, I'll call Starcraft a strategy game. 

But with that said, that genre doesn't have the specific type of play I enjoy in what I look for in a "strategy game", and because of that, "strategy game" as a genre isn't a sufficient term, because it doesn't describe what people want out of those games. 

Compare that to something like movie or book genres, where "Horror" or "Romance" or "Sci-Fi" genres can generally tell you a lot about what you're looking for in a movie or book. 

People pick up a game like Tropico or Fallout seeking core gameplay enjoyment entirely different from the things they'd pick up Starcraft for.



And again, the entire point I was making was not "Starcraft SUX", but rather that DF and Diablo offer its players completely different core gameplay enjoyment. 

This thread is based upon the notion that everyone who reads it would somehow want to play both DF and Diablo.  However, since playing both games requires that you be a fan of both the constructionist/simulationist gameplay with the "game" part increasingly fading away that DF has to offer, as well as the grinding loot hunting very-much-a-game gameplay that Diablo is offering, then the Venn Diagram is going to be drawn around a very narrow sliver of the playerbase. 

I (and considering the responses this thread has generated, around half of the other posters) just don't play any of the genres that Blizzard has been making.  Therefore, the whole question is moot - I'm not even considering playing Diablo.
« Last Edit: May 17, 2012, 11:42:12 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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Mictlantecuhtli

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #56 on: May 18, 2012, 12:46:20 am »

This thread is based upon the notion that everyone who reads it would somehow want to play both DF and Diablo.  However, since playing both games requires that you be a fan of both the constructionist/simulationist gameplay with the "game" part increasingly fading away that DF has to offer, as well as the grinding loot hunting very-much-a-game gameplay that Diablo is offering, then the Venn Diagram is going to be drawn around a very narrow sliver of the playerbase. 

I've seen you talk out of your ass before, Kohaku, but this simply must take the cake.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #57 on: May 18, 2012, 01:42:09 am »

I've seen you talk out of your ass before, Kohaku, but this simply must take the cake.

In that case, you might want to go look back at DF Talk 17, because it was Toady talking about how DF had started out as being "gamey", and its simulationist and constructionist elements have been taking over the game parts of DF, especially in comparison to the old 2D versions.

Spoiler: DF Talk 17 quote (click to show/hide)

It's in Toady's own terms and way of looking at it that he sees the game having moved from being "game" to becoming "simulation" as development has progressed, not just something I'm "pulling out of my ass".
« Last Edit: May 18, 2012, 01:48:54 am by NW_Kohaku »
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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #58 on: May 18, 2012, 02:42:29 am »

Spoiler: Continuation of derail (click to show/hide)
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alexandertnt

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Re: What are you going to play, Diablo III or DF?
« Reply #59 on: May 18, 2012, 07:59:11 am »

I was watching someone play Diablo III.
Does anything interesting actually happen?

Well, im off to play DF.

Spoiler: Derailing stuff (click to show/hide)
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