Bashiok has come out of his long silence with a new post addressing concerns about characters’ stat points. Ever since the BlizzCon 2008 playable demo, it became widespread there wouldn’t be stat points customization anymore in Diablo III. However, Bashiok encouraged fans to dismiss the sentiment for there will be new means to customize your character. Not much was revealed here, but sometimes lack of info says quiet a bunch. This raises more questions than answers, but provides hope for fans who are nerdy about building their character’s power output.
Pyramid16 @ USEast: I think a good way for auto stats is build them up depending on what you do with your character. for example if you spend alot of time on low health, vitality goes up or stamina increase from running alot.
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| Bashiok: Systems like this are usually a bit too easy to game. That is, once a player figures out how to increase the stat they want through the least amount of effort, they’ll do it.
It can also keep you from changing up the way you play easily. We want to allow some amount of freedom in changing up how you play a single character. If I’ve played my Wizard as a long-range glass cannon the entire game, and then get an amazing end-all item drop that makes me want to switch it up and go as more vitality-heavy battle style Wizard, I’d probably have to reroll. Whereas with our current systems it’s just a matter of building up an item base that supports it. In addition to all that, it isn’t a system which is very user friendly. It’s somewhat difficult to explain to the player exactly how those systems work. Not too many people are going to go through the entire game not caring and just playing how they want to play, they want to know exactly how to raise the stats they want, and it would be difficult to display or show how you’re progressing outside of getting a point added. Then you’re wondering “how exactly did that point get there and what do I need to do to get another one?” Not everyone is into strict min-maxing, but almost everyone wants to know how to make a powerful character. I think keeping some systems nebulous and somewhat unexplained to the player is fine, but something such as stat points, a core progression and “power” system, it should be as straight forward as possible. Especially where fast paced action - not toiling over hidden math and requirements - is the game. With auto-stats you lose a small amount of customization, true, but gain a lot of freedoms in adding more - and more interesting - customization through other means. Worm Cans Initialized. |
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Update: Bashiok replied to several replies further down the thread. To someone who said the different builds possible in D2 provided much of the fun, Bashiok replied:
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| Agreed, and we’ll probably surpass them for viable number of character builds. With runes it’s actually kind of scary. Seeing the game in the wild and what people will come up with… eek. But it’s exciting, making a character that almost feels too powerful is pretty damn fun. | ||
And when someone else argued that stat points had to be allocated exactly to optimize very powerful character builds, Bashiok said:
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| Ah, so then stat points were just a means to an end then, weren’t they? In almost all cases anyway. They were a requirement to the items, clicking a button to raise a number to a required value. The items and abilities chosen are really what created the character, not figuring out item requirements.
You could argue about it forever if you wanted to. The stat points didn’t make the character, but little extra math problems are fun, but little extra math problems don’t really equate to fun or interesting character building, but I think that math problems are fun and interesting, but ... etc. etc. etc. And of course all I can attempt to do is assure you that there’s going to be plenty of build potential, plenty of customization, and plenty of math to dive into, if that’s your thing. |
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