[gyom]

Hacker News feels like a strange place to talk about video game appreciation, but here is goes.

I've played an insane amount of Diablo 1, an unreasonable amount of Diablo 2, but when it came to Diablo 3, I barely finished the game one time and I that was it. I had an okay time playing it. The overall experience was just "meh".

And it's not because I was sick of playing video games in general. I still played an unreasonable amount of Torchlight 1-2.

To me, Torchlight offered a better "Diablo" experience than Diablo 3.

I know that a lot of thought went into making Diablo 3 playable beyond the end of the game. Online auction and all that. But it's hard to want to play more of a game when the game is barely enjoyable in the first playthrough.

[Pyxl101]

Maybe it's not for everyone. D3 has improved considerably since its initial release. What I enjoyed specifically about the game was the process of leveling a character (repeated across many different classes), to unlock the new spell casting and action mechanics. Yet at the same time, you're not "stuck" with a permanent investment in any one skill tree, like you were in D2. That provided a good sense of exploration. I think D3 defined a better equipment model where skill damage is based on weapon damage. I was skeptical about this at first - What? Wizards can use swords and do just as much damage as with wands? - but it works out well. It makes items more portable across classes, and generally makes gear finding more fun. You'll use whatever you find, including big ridiculous axes as a wizard.

By the way, they have substantially changed gear drop balance since launch. Back at launch, item stats were completely randomized, so it might take a lot of grinding before you'd find the +mainstat attribute that you want. One area where I think Blizzard excels by making hard choices in game design is recognizing when "the game essentially makes this option mandatory", and then taking it out to improve the fun. So for example, Blizzard has been removing or redesigning castable buffs from WOW due to the theory that having to cast these repeatedly is not helping anyone enjoy the game. So now those effects are just built into the classes instead. Similarly with Diablo 3, they embraced the idea that most players will see +mainstat is simply being necessary for any gear to be viable, and they altered the drop mechanic so that it's virtually guaranteed as a property on most gear. No longer do Barbarians and Demon Hunters see +int gear.

This was part of the path to eliminating the auction house. Previously, getting the right combination of every stat you needed at high level required a lot of RNG across a marketplace. Now, D3's item generation has been redone in some subtle and clever way. I think they are doing something akin to what Valve did with the AI director in Left 4 Dead. That is, D3 tracks how frequently good items are dropping, that seem like an upgrade for you, and makes sure they are in fact dropping regularly. It ensures you get a legendary item drop every few hours. (Yes, that frequent! The balance is different now so that that's not insane.) Thus players can expect to get frequent upgrades and regular new gear sets just by playing solo. This is a big improvement for casual players.

One where where I'd criticize D3 was elements of unintentional bathos. For example, the player character's interactions with Azmodan and Belial definitely veer into bathos territory. Azmodan is supposed to be one of the great evils of the world, what he says amounts to little more than, "I'll get you next time, wascally wabbit!" The dialog there is not great, but the story and graphics are fun overall.

I've recently started playing Torchlight 2 as well, but haven't gotten very far. How does it compare to D3? Or rather, what would you say it excels it where D3 stumbles?