The Diablo Formula and how Diablo 3 falls short

[MongoJerry]

Let's be honest, most of Diablo 2's gameplay was pretty simple - most engagements didn't require a lot of tactics, just spamming a primary attack. What it lacked in depth, however, it made up for in breadth. There was just tons of stuff to do in the game. When PvE got boring (which happened relatively quickly), you could do Baal runs for exp. When that got boring, you could do Meph runs with MF. When that got boring, you could do trav runs, pindle runs, countess runs, key runs, cow runs, try a new build, or even just chat on b.net. The point is, whenever the game got boring, there was always something else to do to have fun.

Let's examine this carefully. When D2 was first released, there was only one thing to do when once you finished hell difficulty. If you were a sorceress, necromancer, amazon, or (after the hammerdin exploit was discovered) paladin, you cleared the Cathedral and killed Diablo over and over again -- preferably in 8 player games where the other 7 people were playing in a different act than you. If you were a Barbarian, you were left out in the cold and had to settle for whittling Izzy down repeatedly. Loot was inconsequential. Uniques were based off normal difficulty items that could be gambled quickly, and it wouldn't take long to get your couple other items that would let you get through the Cathedral. The most difficult part of the runs were the Oblivion Knights and the occational MSLE boss, so you needed enough resistance to deal with those. Otherwise, Diablo himself was a piece of cake (at least for a sorceress, who could kill him in about 3 seconds).

But you're not talking about D2 when it was first released. You're talking about LOD. Right, then what you did then was clear the first area of Act V repeatedly in 8-player games, get to level 99 in one day as well as obtain all of the best items in the game without being in any danger, because most of the mobs were too busy fighting NPC's.

But you're not talking about LOD when it was first released. You're talking about after it was patched to make those runs less rewarding. Fine. Then, you ran Pindle, a pittifully easy boss right by a waypoint that dropped most of the best items in the game. He was so easy that botters wrote programs to run him all day long and flooded the trade channels and 3rd party RMAH sites with their ill gotten gains.

But you're not talking about *those* Pindle runs, are you? You're talking about after Blizzard finally fixed that. At this point, my memory gets fuzzy. The game either turned into cow level clears over and over or Baal runs. Cow level clears were tedious in that it was just a big wasteland of the same mob over and over. Once you killed the first group of cows, you were home free. Let's just skip to Baal runs, which had some fun features to them. Now, you zoned in with a pug group doing Baal runs. Forget randomness of maps, because there was always at least someone running Maphack who ran/teleport past every mob on the first couple of levels and threw up a town portal to the bottom level after a few seconds. Then, you cleared the bottom level, which could be somewhat fun, if you got a boss pack with a bad combination of immunities. Then, you killed Baal, his loot dropped and anything valuable went to whoever had the best connection and botting pick-up program. That was pretty much all you could do in the game to get the best items.

But you weren't talking about *that* LOD game. No, it sounds like what you were talking about was the D2/LOD starting with the 1.10 patch -- which was released a full three years after D2 was released. It was only then that you started to have a diversity of areas where you could farm for interesting items. And it was only then that you started getting interesting runewords, sets and uniques with powers that could completely alter the way you played your character.


Alright, I'll let you off the hook now, and I'll tell you now what I think really is the problem. It's not the difficulty of Inferno (thank God for that, I say), elite modifiers (take out Invulnerable Minions and we're good), or gameplay (which is excellent imho -- the player skill combinations and mob ai are light-years ahead of D2). It's the decision to have an easily obtainable level cap. Looking back on it, I remember why I played classic D2 so obsessively. It wasn't the item hunt. I doubt I got an upgrade in the four months before the release of LOD. But, every night I could see that little exp bar slide just a little further along.

After a few months of tinkering around with various classes, I got hooked on Cathedral runs with my hardcore sorceress and ran them night after night. It was fun to be able to tell people I had a level 93ish (?) hardcore sorceress, which had some meaning back then. I remember watching my sorceress slowly climb the USWest hardcore ladder. I forgot how high she got -- in the 40's by the end, I think -- but it was just fun watching her go up and seeing if someone ahead of me died. With the current model, though, I'm not sure if I'll ever get that. What can a person say now? "My hardcore Wizard has 30% crit!" It doesn't have that cache.

That's the piece that I don't know how to fix. The other stuff you mentioned is easily fixable. Blizzard has already said that they're working on genuinely legendary items (making me scared that they'll make them *too* legendary), and I'm sure runewords and jewels will come down the pipeline over time. It'll be easy to patch and tweak things here and there to vary the favorite item farming locations, modify boss encounters and rewards to make them more interesting, or even add levels here and there. But the one piece that I just don't know how to replicate under the current model is the excitement of leveling one's character gradually and steadily over time.