"So ultimately I have this game, and I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it and the expansions. I'm not proud of this. Actually, I'm really not proud of this. But really, the first step of living a true life is accepting our bullshit tendencies towards self-destruction, so who cares? I've got a boring 1000 DPS dagger to find before my journey will complete, and I can shoot myself in the head without any regrets."
Here's the amazing thing. Reaper of Souls is not terrible. In fact, it is genuinely good. The reason for this is that unlike every stupid game I've played recently, RoS actually recognizes the shortcomings of its platform and embraces the essential stupidity of the loot hunt.
The story is IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR STORY IS DIABLO 3. The only thing that deserves to be said about Act V is that the final map, which is a return to the Pandemonium Fortress. You might remember it as the staging area in Act IV of Diablo 2, but now it's a full dungeon. A dungeon that was modelled on The Arcane Sanctuary. If you played Diablo 2, that sound you hear is your soul screaming in agony. For those that aren't hip to the lingo, the Arcane Sanctuary was 5000 miles of single lane monster traffic, three out of four possible paths going absolutely nowhere, grey and tiley and a background of black because SPACE or something.
So, on the positive side, they removed the three dead end paths for Panda Fortress 2.0. On the negative side:
- They added some delightful portal/door things that randomly turn on and freeze you in place for a good five seconds for no other reason than Blizzard somehow felt that the core Diablo concept of "run constantly unless you're killing monsters" needed to be shaken up.
- The monster placement is 95% "two monsters that randomly pop up and will follow you to the goddamned ends of the earth so you better waste your time and kill them :D"
- The colorization is gray on gray on gray. Also lightning flashes i think.
The story mode is pretty dumb. But that's okay, because Blizzard did something I've rarely seen any game company do: they recognized their base game was total shit.
I can't overemphasize how fucking happy I am that the Auction House is completely dead. In it's place, Reaper of Soulz now has Loot 2.0, which at its core is "stat distribution on drops is now heavily weighted to the present class you are playing, also legendaries are not fucking impossible to find." The faustian tradeoff of this fucking item bonanza is that unless someone is in your party when a legendary drops, it is bound to your account. Alot of reddit fags are bitchy about this, and while I miss my days of Diablo 2 wheeling and dealing, I don't really have a problem with Diablo 3 being far more single-player oriented. Well actually I do, but it's not for that reason. Dot dot dot.
To explain why I'm mostly okay with the Reaper of Souls method of the loot grind, one has to look at the average experience of whenever I started a new ladder season on Diablo 2.
1) First, I made a necromancer.
2) I'd grind that necromancer to Hell difficulty. Depending on my drops, I'd either be able to start slowly plinking away at Act 1, or spend several hours on Nightmare killing Mephisto until my resistances weren't at -400.
3) Eventually I'd be able to sort of farm bosses. Since I always start off with a summon-based Necro, my farming speed would be entirely dependent on how cooperative my skeletons were being. Farm Den of Evil, Farm Prindleskin, Farm Baal, Farm Andariel, Farm Mephisto. Repeat hours upon hours of painfully slow killing. Hoard a bunch of gems and trade on B.Net or trading boards for chump change equipment upgrades so I could murder Baal a half-second faster.
4) Usually from some garbage mob I offhandedly smacked, would fall The Item. A socketed ethereal Herald of Zakarum. The 40% damage/15% IAS jewel. I wander into the market, brandishing it. I spy the merchant with the Ber and Jah Rune. The offer is made.
5) Regardless of whatever else I have, with Enigma my killing speed goes up a threefold. Now I can farm in earnest, racking up rare item after rare item. Eventually I'm able to build up enough material wealth to start fitting a second character. He wanders out into the world, bankrolled by my necromancer. Life is good. Empty, but good.
Here's the thing. Not even discussing the trading, which was always risky regardless of whatever board you used (or god help you, WUG WUW), most characters you played were dependent on just a few items in order to play effectively. If you didn't have those items, playing Diablo 2 on Hell Difficulty was just a fucking boring disaster. And you almost always had to trade, since even if you found a decent item for your class, it had to be something that fit your build, since until the twilight years of the game, there was no respeccing. On some ladders, I found the rare items I needed to put together an Enigma in a few weeks. One ladder took me several months.
To put things another way, Diablo 2 resembles an old-time slot machine. One day you may get the jackpot, but generally the gameplay experience was KACHUNK KACHUNK whoo whoo whoo *FAILURE*. Of course, this was superior to the vanilla Diablo 3 experience, which was a slot machine that electrocuted you every time you touched the lever, and deposited chips which required a doctorate thesis in order to determine their true value.
By comparison, Reaper of Souls is a pachinko machine. By that I mean that while the ultimate goal remains the jackpot, there's alot more going on between the time you're a fresh-eared welp and when you're basically able to kill anything by blinking. And while alot of the sturm and drang is ultimately empty, it's still entertaining and distracting, and that's all I want in my Diabolololo.
A large part of the appeal is the more noticeable powering up of your character. The fact that items are now heavily weighted to roll for what your character could conceivably want means that, at least starting out, you will regularly find items that, little by emasculating little, raise your damage and survivability. You'll get alot of legendary items, and while most are bland stat sticks, some have neat little effects that you can play with. Finally, being able to respec your character's skills is actually interesting! My witch doctor throughout the course of the game has transmogrified from a poison-based aoe nuker to a quasi pet/close ranged fire tank to a sit on my hands and watch some dots babyman to the promised land of full pets being able to murder anything better than I could ever accomplish by myself. You can also actually reroll a single stat of any item, which I'm sure makes purists scream in agony but finally makes the thin stab of pain when the set helm you've spent 10 hours farming for has a key stat roll of exactly the lowest number possible much more bearable. Difficulty levels have also been evened out to an absurd degree, culminating in Inferno being replaced with TORMENT, which is subdivided into six different strata, each progressively tougher than the last but also with better item drops.
Grinding is also less of a fucking soul destroying task from the Vanilla days, when loot runs were doing the boss monster of the last Act you're able to handle on Inferno mode over and over and over. Now we have Adventure Mode, where your characters goes on bite-sized quests around the game maps, the completion of five of these quests giving you a loot box which contains RIFT KEYZ (and other stupid things). KEYZ are used to open Nephilim Rifts, which are randomized maps filled with randomized enemy selections. Kill enough enemies, and a big bad boss appears. Kill him, you can get BLOOD SHARDZ, which are used to gamble for specific pieces of armor. It's a tidy little ecosystem, and one that lets the player engage in bite-sized pieces of joy.
So where am I going to complain? There are still lots of problems, though most seem to at least be recognized by Blizzard as the game is progressing and patches get shit out. Alot of legendaries are still crap, but there's a gradual move away from that, and there's always going to be best in slot items, and there's always going to be garbage legendaries that exist purely to be destroyed. Early on, certain Rifts were like a I Am Legend Simulator in terms of monster density, but that's been mostly fixed. Hell, Blizzard even removed the Pandamonium Fortress map from the possible rift map pool.
No, my big issue is simple. Think back to my description of the Diablo 2 Farm Journey. There, when you had your god character, you farmed to be able to gear out new adventure dudes and dudettes. However, Reaper of Souls presents a big fucking problem here. Loot 2.0, while great when you're building a character, is not so great when that character is built, since 75% of all drops are designed for your character. Put another way, when you're in the ultimate Torment level and killing everything without a problems, you are for all intents basically done with that character unless for whatever surreal reason you're wanting to make another character in the same class. I'm almost-not-quite at that level, but it's sort of depressing me that once I reach that level, my options are:
A) Be like those weird streamers that still farm at the highest level so they can possible get a new version of the best in slot item that already have with +4 more vitality
B) Roll a new character and start the grind nightmare all over again.
Blizzard obviously recognizes this problem and is planning to reintroduce ladders where everyone starts from scratch, but this seems pretty goddamned silly, to say the least. So this is where the dumb nerd with zero game design experience suggest something that, for whatever reason, I have not seen anyone else offer:
Give an option to remove Loot 2.0.
By this I mean making it so any legendary that drops (aside from those set and class-specific items) can roll any stat combination. This would result in alot of the same retarded garbage that I had to wade through in vanilla D3, and that's the point. This would be something that only completely pimped out characters would use and get any sort of farming efficiency out of, giving them a chance to find that powerful item to stick on a new character so they wouldn't waste ten hours in the kiddy pool before graduating to Torment school.
It's weird to say it, but I actually have high hopes for Reaper of Souls. If anything, Blizzard actually seems to have figured out the Élan vital of loot grinds, and while it's fucking absurd that it took a hundred dollars to get there, at least we're there.
To put things another way, Diablo 2 resembles an old-time slot machine. One day you may get the jackpot, but generally the gameplay experience was KACHUNK KACHUNK whoo whoo whoo *FAILURE*. Of course, this was superior to the vanilla Diablo 3 experience, which was a slot machine that electrocuted you every time you touched the lever, and deposited chips which required a doctorate thesis in order to determine their true value.
By comparison, Reaper of Souls is a pachinko machine. By that I mean that while the ultimate goal remains the jackpot, there's alot more going on between the time you're a fresh-eared welp and when you're basically able to kill anything by blinking. And while alot of the sturm and drang is ultimately empty, it's still entertaining and distracting, and that's all I want in my Diabolololo.
A large part of the appeal is the more noticeable powering up of your character. The fact that items are now heavily weighted to roll for what your character could conceivably want means that, at least starting out, you will regularly find items that, little by emasculating little, raise your damage and survivability. You'll get alot of legendary items, and while most are bland stat sticks, some have neat little effects that you can play with. Finally, being able to respec your character's skills is actually interesting! My witch doctor throughout the course of the game has transmogrified from a poison-based aoe nuker to a quasi pet/close ranged fire tank to a sit on my hands and watch some dots babyman to the promised land of full pets being able to murder anything better than I could ever accomplish by myself. You can also actually reroll a single stat of any item, which I'm sure makes purists scream in agony but finally makes the thin stab of pain when the set helm you've spent 10 hours farming for has a key stat roll of exactly the lowest number possible much more bearable. Difficulty levels have also been evened out to an absurd degree, culminating in Inferno being replaced with TORMENT, which is subdivided into six different strata, each progressively tougher than the last but also with better item drops.
Grinding is also less of a fucking soul destroying task from the Vanilla days, when loot runs were doing the boss monster of the last Act you're able to handle on Inferno mode over and over and over. Now we have Adventure Mode, where your characters goes on bite-sized quests around the game maps, the completion of five of these quests giving you a loot box which contains RIFT KEYZ (and other stupid things). KEYZ are used to open Nephilim Rifts, which are randomized maps filled with randomized enemy selections. Kill enough enemies, and a big bad boss appears. Kill him, you can get BLOOD SHARDZ, which are used to gamble for specific pieces of armor. It's a tidy little ecosystem, and one that lets the player engage in bite-sized pieces of joy.
So where am I going to complain? There are still lots of problems, though most seem to at least be recognized by Blizzard as the game is progressing and patches get shit out. Alot of legendaries are still crap, but there's a gradual move away from that, and there's always going to be best in slot items, and there's always going to be garbage legendaries that exist purely to be destroyed. Early on, certain Rifts were like a I Am Legend Simulator in terms of monster density, but that's been mostly fixed. Hell, Blizzard even removed the Pandamonium Fortress map from the possible rift map pool.
No, my big issue is simple. Think back to my description of the Diablo 2 Farm Journey. There, when you had your god character, you farmed to be able to gear out new adventure dudes and dudettes. However, Reaper of Souls presents a big fucking problem here. Loot 2.0, while great when you're building a character, is not so great when that character is built, since 75% of all drops are designed for your character. Put another way, when you're in the ultimate Torment level and killing everything without a problems, you are for all intents basically done with that character unless for whatever surreal reason you're wanting to make another character in the same class. I'm almost-not-quite at that level, but it's sort of depressing me that once I reach that level, my options are:
A) Be like those weird streamers that still farm at the highest level so they can possible get a new version of the best in slot item that already have with +4 more vitality
B) Roll a new character and start the grind nightmare all over again.
Blizzard obviously recognizes this problem and is planning to reintroduce ladders where everyone starts from scratch, but this seems pretty goddamned silly, to say the least. So this is where the dumb nerd with zero game design experience suggest something that, for whatever reason, I have not seen anyone else offer:
Give an option to remove Loot 2.0.
By this I mean making it so any legendary that drops (aside from those set and class-specific items) can roll any stat combination. This would result in alot of the same retarded garbage that I had to wade through in vanilla D3, and that's the point. This would be something that only completely pimped out characters would use and get any sort of farming efficiency out of, giving them a chance to find that powerful item to stick on a new character so they wouldn't waste ten hours in the kiddy pool before graduating to Torment school.
It's weird to say it, but I actually have high hopes for Reaper of Souls. If anything, Blizzard actually seems to have figured out the Élan vital of loot grinds, and while it's fucking absurd that it took a hundred dollars to get there, at least we're there.
