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Hugbees

If you hate Diablo 3, you probably hate Guild Wars 2*

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Hugbees
, 07-17-2012 at 02:22 PM (23987 Views)
*(Not necessarily, but just go with it)

I've seen a massive stream of hate on Diablo 3 in the past few weeks, and it only seems to get worse as time goes on. The main concern (and almost the only one since so many people go on about this) is the loot. I will agree with some of the complaints surrounding it, and for the most part the loot system does suck.

The main issue, at least for me, is that it doesn't encourage any real customization. The best attributes to look for on loot is +to your main stat and +vitality. This means that a weapon for a level 20 with +vit and +strength (Let's say you're a barbarian) is better than a level 35 weapon with +int and +dex (an overall sucky stat combination to begin with, as it has no vit).

But before I go off on an entirely different topic altogether, the other complaint that stems from the loot is that the lack of endgame. Because you can just buy all of your loot from the auction house anyhow, there's no real point to gear grinding to get past Inferno and no point to try to find better gear.

Now let's apply this to Guild Wars 2. Aren't they striving to remove gear treadmills? Aren't they striving to not fall into the MMO trap of releasing new content constantly just to keep players playing for the sake of paying? In my eyes, Diablo 3 is a game where you get to the end, and then you don't need to continue playing. You don't need to keep grinding for better gear just to have better gear. If we can apply what Guild Wars 2 is trying to teach us to Diablo 3, we can see that it's not trying to repeat what it did with Diablo 2 (for the better). I think that in itself is worth considering at the very least.

[Now there are a few things to keep in mind at the time of this blog post:

1. Diablo 3's pvp isn't out yet. That's the one edge Guild Wars 2 has right now when it comes to end game, and the constantly player vs player interaction adds a load of replay value for many people so I can only imagine it'd do the same with Diablo 3.

2. While I think Blizzard did a good job with the game as a whole, with them trying to fix the never ending grind issues of Diablo 2, I won't defend the loot system. I do feel it falls short in that department but not for all the same reasons others say it does.]

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  1. Metro's Avatar
    I played through normal on Monk on Normal in D3, and even that was a struggle knowing what was ahead. I bought the game based on the hours I enjoyed playing D2, but it seems that was a different time and my needs were less.

    Wrt to your argument:
    "Now let's apply this to Guild Wars 2. Aren't they striving to remove gear treadmills?"
    I don't follow how this applies, Isn't D3 all about the gear treadmill? i.e. unless you rolled Demon Hunter / Wiz or spent an extra 5 weeks grinding gear on Barb / monk, you were killed in 1-2 shots in inferno. Guild wars 2 is all about statistically equivalent gear which allows you to play the way you want to play and not (hopefully) have one statistical better build / stat point. Meaning you hit lvl 80 (which is not the end of the game or the start of a new one) and there is limited power creep even to the point where you can go back to low level and still be challenged.

    Which brings up the second point; "Aren't they striving to not fall into the MMO trap of releasing new content constantly just to keep players playing for the sake of paying?" My understanding / feeling is that they are attempting to remove the power creep from the game which makes large swathes of the game useless, we have heard about how they plan on implementing new dynamic quests constantly rotating them through all zones not just the one lvl 80 zone. The trap is pouring development hours into content that is seen by players once or twice in the characters life.

    It gets back to the point I made in the other GW2 blog post, a world that is alive and relevant.

    * reading through you blog again, this may have been what you were trying to say all along, that GW2 is not following in D3's footsteps and into the grind trap. Are you saying GW2 is not trying to repeat for D2 did?
  2. Hugbees's Avatar
    More so what I'm trying to say is that Guild Wars 2 is following similar principles (at least in my eyes) that Diablo 3 follows, which is the opposite of what Diablo 2 did, which is what a lot of people wish for the game to be... Diablo 2.5 if you will.

    The idea was that I saw the similarities in how GW2 is responding to other MMOs vs how Diablo 3 was responding to Diablo 2 and found that they weren't so different.
  3. InqPyre's Avatar
    Speaking as someone that spent more of my life than I care to admit playing D2 and, to a lesser degree, guild wars 1, I think that guild wars to and D3 both represent steps towards each other. However, they're coming from very different starting points.

    In D2 I spent the vast majority of my time replaying the same content over and over again, trying to optimize gear (and periodically remaking characters to optimize stats or skills). Basically, you played some for experience and mostly for item drops.

    In contrast, guild wars you spent a relatively short time leveling and effectively getting the functionally best gear. Much more of my time went into exploring the world and playing in new areas. In terms of grinding, it was mostly directed at the achievements and consumables that didn't have a real in game effect (full disclosure: I only started playing GW1 after all three expansions and the hall of monuments came out).

    Some of the features that I liked about D3 included the auction house, which let you by-pass hours of game surfing and forum reading to try to buy/sell enough to upgrade your equipment. I enjoyed the crafting system reasonably well. I also liked the fact that they implemented an achievements section. I really enjoyed D3 for the first few weeks, but ultimately it ended up feeling repetitive and boring. In fairness, they may have fixed some of that since I stopped playing, since I think some of it came from finding hell difficulty relatively easy with no chance of getting usable items and finding inferno impossibly difficult (there wasn't a steady increase in difficulty so much as a brick wall).

    Guild Wars 2 kept the achievements/titles aspect of the game, expanded the crafting system, and added in events. So, in bare bones, I would have to agree that D3 and GW2 are very similar, something that serves to emphasize how difficult it is to capture some of the intangible qualities that make a game fun to keep returning to.

    I think a major difference between the games that is both subtle and obvious is the social systems that they support. Fundamentally, both games (as with their predecessors) are fun primarily in groups and this is where GW2 gets a major advantage in implementing an open world where you encounter other players as you're going about your business, an event system that helps promote joining with strangers to accomplish a common goal, and a guild system to facilitate playing with a larger groups of friends. In limiting game sizes to 4 players and not providing guilds you push people towards playing primarily with their friends from outside the game and diminish their ability to make new friends in game. For me that meant that if the handful of friends I had that played D3 weren't online, it simply wasn't that interesting to play.

    Sorry for the length of the post.

    Cheers,
    InqPyre