Posted 19 June 2012 - 05:29 AM
To my deep and abiding bitter amusement, I've stopped playing. The game was enjoyable. . . for a while. I liked the feeling of power that the characters gave you (Wizard firing Disintegrate, or the Archon version, for instance). But once you get to inferno, it's just a grind. The game ceases being challenging (depending on skill, Hell difficulty takes that title) and simply becomes a gearfest. You grind to get gold, which you then spend to get gear. If you refuse to obey this pattern, the game's difficulty will chew you up and spit you out in a globby mess like a half-chewed Mars Bar. For reference, in Act 3 Inferno 3 hits from a low-level demon will kill you. By comparison, you'd need about 7 hits over the same time period to kill it. However, if you have the gear, you can stand still and burn everything to the ground before they can even touch you.
Forget about good gear actually dropping; the sheer diversity of possible attributes (and the consequent likelihood of those attributes being rolled well enough to be usable) is so minute that you will end up using the AH. Maybe not the RMAH, but I suspect that temptation is what Blizzard is relying on; you need better gear, and the fact that a lot of people will try to make money off their lucky drops by selling them on the RMAH will probably draw you to said RMAH. It feels like the game veers dangerously close to the very worst kind of free-to-play MMOs (where paying more makes you more powerful) without ever actually going totally there. The choice is still yours to use or not use the (RM)AH, but the game has a number of conditions that push you towards it, very subtly. On a psychology level, I'm actually really impressed. It's a bit like guiding a rat through a maze, without the rat knowing the existence of the maze. That being the case, I'm probably not even seeing half the full picture of their psychological model.
But you know, even that is actually bearable. When I first saw their design, I (perhaps foolishly) thought that the elimination of stat points, of skill points, that whole system would be useful. For background, I hate theorycrafting; it takes all the damn fun out of a game (for me, anyway; others love it). Blizzard regularly said that many, many builds would be viable, all the way up to Inferno. And lo, I heartily call bullshit after quite a bit of time with it. Wizards have 2, maybe 3 builds that are viable. 2 out of those 3 require extremely good gear to work properly, and the third revolves around kiting enemies from one end of the map to another, and then back again. Not my idea of fun. Demon Hunters have 1 truly viable build, from what I've seen. I'm less sure about the other 3 classes, but from others who have played, it's much the same issue. It's not as if they even lowered the level of min-maxing and theorycrafting that you might see in many games; they just recreated the same problems via a different method.
For the record, the core game I actually like. The way they manage skills, the ease of learning and playing it, and so on is quite good. The different classes do really feel different, and I like the art style of the game a lot. If they were to alter the difficulty such that the game was readily viable without using the AH or variants thereof, I'd happily play it. Similarly, online-only doesn't really bother me (but we've talked that to death already). Certain aspects of the design like I described are the problem, and they are big enough that I'm not going anywhere near it unless they change. Which, frankly, I doubt will happen because it looks like they are part of their business model as well as the game's design.
"Sir, you are drunk!"
"Yes madam, I am, but in the morning I will be sober, and you will still be ugly."
Help
Mentalist, on 14 June 2012 - 04:24 AM, said:
(and they're definitely not repeaters 
)
).
