<story><title>Diablo</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2023/07/diablo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dleslie</author><text>&amp;gt; I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.&lt;p&gt;They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind.&lt;p&gt;Diablo 4&amp;#x27;s greatest flaw, IMHO, is that they apply difficulty scaling across all areas. At level 1 it can take two or three single hits to kill a goat man, and at level 60+ it can take two or three hits to kill a goat man; because the mobs scale to your power level.&lt;p&gt;If they&amp;#x27;d simply allowed some areas to be level-restricted with difficult mobs, then there would always be a sense of reward and victory. A player tired of the grind need only hop over to a slightly easier zone to feel like a god among mortals. But you can&amp;#x27;t do that in Diablo 4, so it just remains a slog.</text></item><item><author>themagician</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always loved this series.&lt;p&gt;The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the &amp;quot;endgame.&amp;quot; I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it&amp;#x27;s pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of times, all for an item with slightly different numbers. In Diablo 1 and 2 the item often doesn&amp;#x27;t even look different.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;ve always found the base game to be excellent. Fun, exciting, and a blast with 4 people.&lt;p&gt;I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.</text></item><item><author>musha68k</author><text>Diablo is the original &amp;quot;anti-souls&amp;quot; game.&lt;p&gt;The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it.&lt;p&gt;That said, the beautiful &amp;#x2F; dreadful &amp;#x2F; horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just &amp;quot;no there there&amp;quot; - and that&amp;#x27;s probably the point?&lt;p&gt;So I agree on many fronts with this article.&lt;p&gt;Diablo could have been so much more but they turned it into a highly engineered form of drug that can potentially destroy you, with little to nothing to gain for it. Nicotine? For sure it&amp;#x27;s more gambling than gaming - again to me mostly timeless yet inherently toxic coating - down to the systems level. So in a way, it&amp;#x27;s the original &amp;quot;mobile game&amp;quot;, the ultimate computer based life waster.&lt;p&gt;So depending on the person and with the right .mpq file in hand this could either mean getting addicted to or maybe getting off of &amp;quot;cigarettes&amp;quot; completely:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;diasurgical&amp;#x2F;devilutionX&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;installing.md&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;diasurgical&amp;#x2F;devilutionX&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Devilution&amp;#x2F;X is amazing and maybe more interesting than playing the game itself, complete clean-room reverse engineered version of Diablo).&lt;p&gt;Edit disclaimer: local &amp;#x2F; in-sync multiplayer is (probably?) not as life wasting</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There&amp;#x27;s a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn&amp;#x27;t a &lt;i&gt;great&lt;/i&gt; way.&lt;p&gt;You can lean into it, like Disgaea, which just embraces the brokenness and writes them into its mechanics. You can just sort of write a standard game, but then, in the end, the solution to all problems is grinding. You can scale the challenges with the level, but then, what&amp;#x27;s the point of leveling? In fact all you&amp;#x27;re doing is running the risk of showing just how busted the mechanic is when you have a hard time matching the levels correctly because of the exponential power gains; see Oblivion, for instance. And even after such a mismatch, the solution to all problems is &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; grinding.&lt;p&gt;Obviously many fine games have used this and I still play some to this day, so I&amp;#x27;m not saying it&amp;#x27;s never ever fun. I&amp;#x27;m just saying, the ways in which it&amp;#x27;s kinda broken seem fundamental and there seems to be only so much you can do with them. Were I designing a game today, rather than treating it as a default as so many designers still seem to, I&amp;#x27;d want to take a careful look at the disadvantages and be sure I&amp;#x27;m comfortable with them before proceeding. And as a gamer I do have to say more and more I&amp;#x27;m starting to mark a game using level-based mechanics down a point when I&amp;#x27;m figuring out what to play.</text></comment>
<story><title>Diablo</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2023/07/diablo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dleslie</author><text>&amp;gt; I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.&lt;p&gt;They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind.&lt;p&gt;Diablo 4&amp;#x27;s greatest flaw, IMHO, is that they apply difficulty scaling across all areas. At level 1 it can take two or three single hits to kill a goat man, and at level 60+ it can take two or three hits to kill a goat man; because the mobs scale to your power level.&lt;p&gt;If they&amp;#x27;d simply allowed some areas to be level-restricted with difficult mobs, then there would always be a sense of reward and victory. A player tired of the grind need only hop over to a slightly easier zone to feel like a god among mortals. But you can&amp;#x27;t do that in Diablo 4, so it just remains a slog.</text></item><item><author>themagician</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always loved this series.&lt;p&gt;The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the &amp;quot;endgame.&amp;quot; I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it&amp;#x27;s pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of times, all for an item with slightly different numbers. In Diablo 1 and 2 the item often doesn&amp;#x27;t even look different.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;ve always found the base game to be excellent. Fun, exciting, and a blast with 4 people.&lt;p&gt;I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.</text></item><item><author>musha68k</author><text>Diablo is the original &amp;quot;anti-souls&amp;quot; game.&lt;p&gt;The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it.&lt;p&gt;That said, the beautiful &amp;#x2F; dreadful &amp;#x2F; horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just &amp;quot;no there there&amp;quot; - and that&amp;#x27;s probably the point?&lt;p&gt;So I agree on many fronts with this article.&lt;p&gt;Diablo could have been so much more but they turned it into a highly engineered form of drug that can potentially destroy you, with little to nothing to gain for it. Nicotine? For sure it&amp;#x27;s more gambling than gaming - again to me mostly timeless yet inherently toxic coating - down to the systems level. So in a way, it&amp;#x27;s the original &amp;quot;mobile game&amp;quot;, the ultimate computer based life waster.&lt;p&gt;So depending on the person and with the right .mpq file in hand this could either mean getting addicted to or maybe getting off of &amp;quot;cigarettes&amp;quot; completely:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;diasurgical&amp;#x2F;devilutionX&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;installing.md&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;diasurgical&amp;#x2F;devilutionX&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Devilution&amp;#x2F;X is amazing and maybe more interesting than playing the game itself, complete clean-room reverse engineered version of Diablo).&lt;p&gt;Edit disclaimer: local &amp;#x2F; in-sync multiplayer is (probably?) not as life wasting</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tstrimple</author><text>The latest updated tried to address this somewhat.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  Level scaling inside dungeons and most overworld territories has been adjusted in World Tiers III and IV. Monsters will begin to trail behind the player in Level after a certain point (up to a maximum of 5 Levels behind). This change does not affect World Bosses, Legion Events, Fields of Hatred, Helltide, or Nightmare Dungeons.&lt;p&gt;Due to the nature of level scaling, if you&amp;#x27;re 5 levels over an enemy you basically vaporize them. There is still level variance among the world zones as well. So with the combination of the two, you should always be able to find someplace a bit more challenging and when you&amp;#x27;re higher level you can find areas with lots of enemies lower than you. I haven&amp;#x27;t played enough post-patch to know if it&amp;#x27;s made the experience any better, but I&amp;#x27;m not the type of Diablo player to seek out areas with weaker enemies.&lt;p&gt;What Blizzard wanted to avoid is having 4&amp;#x2F;5ths of the map no longer relevant because you&amp;#x27;re so far above the area level that you no longer get usable XP, loot or gold. In D3 there wasn&amp;#x27;t much to do at the high end other than run rifts. In D4 the entire world is a viable place to spend time during the late game.</text></comment>