Diablo 3

[AEmer]

It _was_ pretty strange; but they did so much with that, though. It was honestly a brilliant hook, all things considered.

The worldstone shattering, I felt, was originally intended as the hook for the following game...but they didn't do anything with it, because lets be honest, Diablo 3 was released much, much later than they had anticipated it would be when diablo 2 came out.

[Jaedar]

It's also made by a completely different group of people. So yeah, no wonder it's inconsistent.

[AEmer]

Yup.

Also, re: Genre

Well, honestly, there's no academic definitions of videogame genres. That is to say, such definitions exist, but they're not accepted or widely used and there's so many weird ideas about what genre should mean that it's pretty much useless within academia.

Why does that matter?

Because in every other form of work, there's academically accepted normative genre definitions, and these are actually the ones people tend to use.

There's also descriptive definitions - for instance, you might call transformers 3 a summer popcorn movie if you wanted a common descriptive definition, or an action sci-fi movie if you wanted a normative academic definition - but what sets gaming apart is that it has only descriptive genre definitions, because the academic ones are useless and crappy and people don't actually know what they mean.

As such, RPG, FPS and RTS are fundamentally descriptive, common definitions: and RPG, FPS or RTS is a game which people call either an RPG, an FPS or an RTS.

But RPG in particular tells you fairly little because whereas FPS and RTS have tropes that are so common that the definition can be said to have normative elements (ie. something isn't an FPS if the perspective the game is played from is clearly not that of an individual human being), RPG's...don't really have those. There isn't really any one element which you can say is a must for an RPG, because you can quite happily find a game without that specific element that tons of people will call an RPG; or conversely you can find a game with that specific element which people don't call an RPG, leaving the genre without quintessential characteristics. I mean, that's a simplified example, but hopefully you get the point: RPG's tend have less tropes common amongst them than RTS games do, accross the genre. The genre appears to be wider, encompassing more, being generally looser.

And the thing with descriptive definitions is, you can't just go "well, I don't think that should be called an RPG, I think people who call it an RPG are wrong for this brilliant reason, therefore it isn't an RPG"...descriptive group definitions are ipso facto reliant on what people think belong in specific groups, and nomatter how wrong you think people are, that doesn't change what they think, and as such the actual definition simply diverges from what you think it should be, and you need to deal with it.

This doesn't mean that genre definitions are useless, or that you shouldn't use genre, or that arguing whether something is in one genre or another is meaningless when it comes to games...it's just not really that meaningful for it's own sake. Within certain groups, for instance the RPG codex and perhaps Jonas group of friends, genre discussions also take on additional meanings. The context of the discussion, what other games people personally associate with certain genres, what games people personally believe belong in what genres - all of that makes a genre discussion meaningful. The genre discussion becomes a vehicle in which to undertake deeper analysis and a tool for distilling important and relevant elements of the subject being categorized.

I originally assumed that Jonas and his friends were concerned with genre in relation to the diablo games because they felt like it was lacking elements that would've made it deep and wonderful, elements which other RPG's possessed and which they thought were more important and that more games should aspire to include...an assumption that appears to have been wrong. That's why I asked why they thought classifying diablo as a proper or faux rpg was a worthwhile thing to do and talk about.

Perhaps it was simply because such a discussion could potentially be fruitful and bring attention to interesting things and concepts, who knows, but at the time I couldn't really grasp where my assumption had gone off the rails, so I figured I'd ask.

[Jonas]

Yes but what was that reason though? Were you just trying to impress eachother with your powers of observation and deduction?

Powers of analysis yes, pretty much.

It was high school and we were tripping on tabletop roleplaying. My girlfriend was really into LARP. She was an elf.

Good times.

The first pirates movie doesn't really have memorable characters, but the 2nd and 3rd movies at least have something to work with.

Dude! Jack Sparrow

[AEmer]

Sparrow isn't a character, he's a circus act He's a clown, a sideshow. Which is why the third film sucked; they tried to make him a compelling main character.

[DDL]

I think it's just that when I think of Diablo (any of the diablos), 'compelling story' is not what springs to mind first (or even second or third). It's mostly all 'killing stuff to get better at killing stuff'. And in this it excels, and totally scratches that itch for mindless murder and making numbers go up. You can just drop in, murder some stuff, then drop out again, and rarely do you feel "oh shit, I've completely forgotten what my character motivation is here", because your character motivation is always 'murder everything'.

Now all this doesn't necessarily mean that there's no story, or that the story is lackluster, it's simply not the part that stands out in my memory. Constrast this with, say..most bioware games, where often the gameplay is secondary to the story.

So...say, Jade Empire might have me saying "the combat was awkward, the inventory system was messy but the story was good enough to keep me playing through to the end*"

whereas for Diablo I'd be more inclined to say "Yeah, the murder>loot>level-up mechanic is pitched at a perfect level of skinner-box addictiveness..possibly there's a story in there too?".

It's not what I'd perceive as the focus, is what I'm saying.

Plus there's the emphasis on newgame+ in diablo: it's not Start>murder>save teh world! It's Start>murder>save teh world>restart on higher difficulty>murder on higher difficulty>save teh world on higher difficulty>restart on nightmare difficulty....etc

Which tends to trivialise any story, anyway.


*yes, even Jade Empire. I have low standards.

[Cybernetic pig]

All Bioware games suck imo. Their only strong point- story, yet the storylines and how they are told fall short of games like DX too.
To be further immersed into a story you gotta be enjoying the game, but the gameplay sucks.
Choosing gender= just a marketing tool. A story turns out better when the main character has a pre-determined gender, history etc. Implementing the option to choose your characters history is a waste of development time and a bad design choice.
Even Deus ex: Invisible war is better than any Bioware game, same crappy style of storytelling/implementation however it has not too bad gameplay. Baldurs gate is the only half decent game they made, Jade empire maybe.

As for Diablo 3... Its just another classic franchise raped by incompetent idiots.
We need new a modern dev team to step in and save the day. OTP should take over the industry and fight majestic EA & Illuminactivision.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcG-_BEH ... el&list=UL

[AEmer]

@ DDL

I get what you're saying. You don't really need your kitchen sink's plumbing to have a brilliant narrative either to appreciate what it does. The sink has a specific purpose, a specific job to do, and so long as it does this job really well, everything else doesn't really matter. It's not just that it isn't an inherent necessity, it's that a narrative on a kitchen sink is actually completely superfluous to your enjoyment of the sink.

I mean you might enjoy a narrative, but at the end of the day, it's not what you're there for.

And you know, ok. I understand why you can apply that analysis to diablo...but I don't agree that the utilitarian aspect was ever the soul of the game. It might have been the only thing you found noteworthy, and indeed the only thing you needed - but way back in '96, I feel that the game was made to be more than the perfect skinnerbox, with an artistic intent that went significantly beyond great game logic, and attempted to craft a wholistic experience that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Now just to be clear, I never felt like diablo 1 was a great piece of art, but I did feel like it was a cohesive experience, and it's this exact bit I'm trying to get accross. Perhaps this video will illustrate how I feel about diablo 1 better than what my writing so far has done:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIx7Ot5Mq2Q

I actually felt like diablo 1 was pretty successful as a 'gesamtkunstwerk', whereas I actually felt like diablo 2 was lacking on cohesiveness.

In the third game, I feel like the diablo 2 trend has continued, and even though there's technically tonnes of lore, it seems to be that it fits badly together, is non-sensible, and doesn't actually make the gaming experience richer. It really is pastel water colours to diablo 1's oil paint, to me. Of course, I don't think they had much choice on the issue unless they wanted to start over completely, in terms of story and characters, but I don't really feel like it's that big of a deal. The game has many wonderful qualities, after all.

It's just, yeah, something else that I'd wished it'd have as well, because it really would mean something to my experience.

[Jonas]

So Jack Sparrow doesn't qualify as a character, but Wirt and Ogden do?

I think we may have an axiomatic disagreement

[AEmer]

Sure, he's a character, but he's not a protagonist, which is what I should've said, and probably would've said if I hadn't been so eager to exaggerate.

Jack sparrow woulda been fine to work with if they'd introduced a new protagonist, rather than having depp play both his own and blooms roles at once.

[Jonas]

Okay sure.

[AEmer]

So, I'm done playing diablo 3.
There's a pretty simple reason, and you all might not feel the same way, but here it is: There's no punishment on player death, and the rewards in the metagame are giving for boring stuff in the game.
The result is, it's boring. It's boring in the sense that you don't feel you accomplish anything, ever.

A dungeoncrawler has one main thing going for it, and that's a sense of accomplishment. Generally, dungeoncrawlers give you that sense by having you progress, but there's usually more to it than that: You overcome a challenge. You win. And you can generally attribute that win to the way you play.

This is all missing from diablo 3, particularly during the later stages. The levelling is fine for the standard play, and you know, there's original boss characters the first time you play the game, and new tilesets, and various cool things to move you forward; even a few plot twists here and there. And of course there's lore updates, if you're into that.

My roommate has found a way to enjoy the game at this point; he's hunting achievements. Those, I suppose, give him the sense of accomplishment he needs, but they only really work because of who he is and because he's decided to seek out a way to find accomplishment.

Because here's the thing: Diablo 3, during the later stages, has no sense of accomplishment in its core gameplay. The thing that comes closest is beating particularly tricky champions, but the game currently rewards you significantly less for doing this than for just skipping them. It takes maybe 3-5 minutes to go through the trickier champion and boss mobs, and you can skip them in all of 20 seconds. They ultimately slow you down, and there's no reason why you'd let them slow you down.

The metagame is how far along inferno you can farm; this also has a sense of accomplishment. This accomplishment is how much gold you posses. See, once you reach the level cap, there's only one thing which matters: How much gold you have.
Due to the auction house, you can buy everything you'd ever want if you have the gold.

But without any sense of accomplishment in the core gameplay, the metagame doesn't matter, because you're not going to be having fun nomatter how well you play the metagame. Only if you're in direct competition with someone, then you have another metagame - if you're trying to get better gear than your friends, say. Then that's fun of course, but you litterally feel like you're working as you compete, and why would you want to do that?

Anyway, the central design of diablo is, you win by progressing, so you're winning if you're playing in the fashion that gives you the quickest progression. This is currently always going to be the fights that you can get through quickest. I think that the quickest way of advancing right now is to sit down with 4 friends, and make new games, and hop to a specific waypoint in act4 inferno. 3 people are equiped with 200% magic find gear, and the last guy with decent kill gear. The guy with kill gear kills a specific boss and remakes the game after everybody get their loot. That boss will spawn 12-16 magic items every 2 minutes, and the 3 players can just chill and talk and hang out, they can even sort through the magic items. With a little bit of rotation and a 5th friend they can keep this cyclone of items going perpetually; and this boss gives the potential for the best drops in the game, so because of the ridiculous drop rate, this is what you do untill you have strong enough gear that you can whipe the floor with everything everywhere and then you're done.

You could say, well, this is a bug. This encounter should be removed. But the issue is, it's not the specific encounter, it's just a good example of what the game ultimately encourages. Remove it and players just find another most efficient way to grind, and it'll be equally ridiculous. And there's never any risk; even if blizzard managed to make it so you actually want to fight the toughest champions, the fights that are actually any good, they'd have to include punishment for dying because otherwise it's just a matter of how quickly you can do it (death is a very, very minor setback). You never have any hard incentive to play well and figure out the details of the mechanics; you metagame the shit out of the game so you don't have to actually perform well.

And of course, since you get so many items and gold is your only form of progress, you need to designate someone to play the auction house with your overflowing items. Turn them into gold for you. Split it, and progress.

It's such a tiresome way to win, and such a pointless goal (because it doesn't actually require anything of you other than patience), that it just doesn't make sense. As such, the endgame of diablo 3 is broken, or that's at least my analysis

[Jaedar]

I heard from some other players that to avoid grinding yourself retarded you have to buy stuff in the auction house. To reasonably get through act1 inferno(or whatever the last difficulity is called) most classes supposedly need gear from acts 2 and 3. This sounds very much like what you are talking about in your post.

[AEmer]

The auctionhouse just exacerbates the issue.

It's a good thing it's there, because otherwise it would be a lot more difficult to do buying and selling of items...but ultimately, it would still be done.

But since it is there, the whole concept of the game...what you have to do to succeed in the late game (and if we're being honest, what you have to do to achieve goals better earlier)....that whole concept is broken.

Fundamentally there's no fun, because there's no risk and no goals.

Binding of Isaac is a more successful dungeon crawler than diablo 3. Magicka has far supperior action gameplay.

It just doesn't really work-

[ZeroPresence]

I have fun playing Diablo 3, but nothing to write home about... so, I think I'm quite done buying Blizzard products after the expansions for Starcraft 2 are released. I bought SC2, so I'm kinda hooked into the story and want to see it through to the end.

But after that... they've just changed everything that they used to be far more than I would like. Gameplay, story writing, artistic direction... I do not plan on continuing to supporting that downward spiral...

I mean... back in middle school when I played Starcraft I basically made the SC2 storyline minus the Xel'Naga and the Dark Voice supposedly controlling the Overmind in UMS maps... come on, if a kid my age can even come close to making something similar you idiots need to get your shit in gear and stop writing children's stories.

I had you capture Kerrigan and use Protoss technology (instead of Xel'Naga) to remove her infestation so that her psychic powers could be used to save the universelololol.