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No. 1844213
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>>1844208
>If item drops are going to be random, I almost feel like unique items shouldn't even be an included feature, just because of how innately frustrating that makes the loot tables.
This is a particularly fascinating problem when it comes to examining the conventions of the genre. What does it look like when you get rid of random drops? Bastion.
Doing something similar, making only specific items available and giving all players access to them would be the best, right? I'm not so sure about that. It makes for a worthwhile game, but with Diablo they are for better or worse trying to capture an elusive quality of being continually interesting. If you have finite, concrete challenges, then they will be satisfying and it will be done. For one of any number of reasons, Diablo's design decisions are centered on maximizing replay through unpredictability. You can either interpret this as a great mindhack or a devilish and underhanded tactic, but it ultimately becomes very clever. By making both enemies and loot unpredictable, you greatly expand the kinds of encounters the player will face. On paper, it allows for players to be continually challenged to make the best of what they have (somewhat like a draft in card games). In reality, what happens is people find out what they wish they had and get sore they don't have it (the checklist paradox). Solving that problem is going to be key for advancing the genre in the Diablo tradition's direction (but I would like to see more in the direction Bastion took, too).
Oh, right, the systems exploration issue ... that is also a bit of a problem, but as far as I recall, PoE doesn't really fix the problem, and the genre as a whole still suffers somewhat from the fact that there are always ideal solutions, so while making lots of different stats that do different things is easy, making stats that are uniquely interesting and meaningful is a far greater challenge.
That's not the only conundrum: in some ways it makes the game weird and contrary, having both this really active action and execution element, while also having an extensive planning element. While veterans spend lots of time planning ahead, for new players, and even for me sometimes, it feels like the game tells you you're not allowed to keep playing until you work really hard on some maths to figure out how you're going to enable yourself to do what you want to do. It's a major flow breaker.
A system like D3 seems to have too few things to choose from, which can be a bit frustrating for veterans. Torchlight as a counter-example, has a lot of different affixes that largely do about the same thing. Do you want 4 fire damage? Or do you want 4 ice damage? Lightning damage?
WoW actually had some moments where it's more structured upgrade system allowed for some interesting interactions with content. For example, splitting resistances into different elements seems like artificially expanding the number of stats that exist sometimes. But with Molten Core, there was a really structured reason to have a particular resist. For all people complain about Diablo 3 being "too much like WoW", sometimes being more like WoW would help give meaning to some things.
Anyway, you just reminded me that I need to make a number of big posts for feedback ... for Diablo 3 and also overdue HotS feedback. Because I could just keep going on about these things.
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