News Blitz: Wednesday, July 9th

Posted 9th Jul 2008 12:55 PM by Flux

  • Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok made a post yesterday on the WoW D3 forum with some info on respecing.
    Blizzard Quote:
    There will almost definitely be some sort of system to respec; however, it isn’t likely to be as liberal as World of Warcraft. We don’t want to lock a player into a system that punishes them for mistakes, experimenting, or lack of knowledge early on in the game. We also don’t think a system that allows immediate, complete, and at-a-whim changes to a character spec matches the feel of Diablo. It’s likely to be somewhere in between. That said we still feel like the desire to play the same class again that you may have played before is still a part of the game, and with some ability to respec could potentially require other incentives.
  • In less happy Battle.net forum news, the tech-troubled D3 forum is being blasted by a spam attack this morning. 2500 pages of junk posts, and counting. Screenshot here.
  • Articles that summarize what’s been going on in the Diablo III community since the game’s launch are popping up on various gaming and tech sites. None of these are likely to have anything you guys don’t know already, but if you want to read more people writing about D3, click away. Jonric gives his D3 thoughts in his weekly RPG Vault column, GamesPlanet NZ summarizes the graphics debate, and Pacific Daily News from Guam runs down the game’s features.
  • Elsewhere, VoodooExtreme had a correspondent file a video report from the WWI with some early reactions to Diablo III. This is a week old, but if you want to see a pretty girl talk about D3 as though she really cares, where else are you going to go?



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Filed under: Blue Posts, Bashiok

Comments

Page 1 of 1 pages
Mackan
Posted 09, Jul 2008 04:28 PM
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I think they need a better spam protection…

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Leord
Posted 09, Jul 2008 06:31 PM
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Indeed they do. I think they are working on massive changes, since they don’t care at ALL about B.net. Same in the RTS community talks.

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AlexanderM
Posted 09, Jul 2008 06:51 PM
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I think a happy medium would allow the play to redistribute -some- skill/attribute points at a time, rather than many or all, and have it be either expensive or a finite thing (one or twice per difficulty?) Maybe require some rare combination or reagents like the cubing in D2?). I think D2 could have used a quest that would have allowed you to shift one or two points out of a skill (assuming they wouldn’t remove a prereq for other skills you already invested in).

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Exile
Posted 09, Jul 2008 07:25 PM
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“We also don’t think a system that allows immediate, complete, and at-a-whim changes to a character spec matches the feel of Diablo.”

I agree, a system like that sounds a bit like guild wars. While it was a fun game, my characers skill sets felt a little loose not being cemented down. However it was still nice to experiment on the fly.

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Leord
Posted 09, Jul 2008 08:40 PM
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I was around for the whole debate on respecs in Hellgate, and in the end it’s this simple:

A modern game such as Diablo III NEEDS respecs, including a FULL one. That does not mean it’s to be simple, but it needs to be possible, and not limited by scarcity, but difficulty obtaining it.

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malakhai
Posted 10, Jul 2008 04:38 PM
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Completely disagree, Leord.

Diablo 2 had a great mechanic underlying the game.  You could be playing a sorceress using fire, and if a godlike ice item dropped you would make a new character or trade it.  If you could just respec to ice, it would destroy some of the economy of the game.  Not to mention many classes could just respec depending on what they wanted to do.

Want to go after Mephisto?  Respec.  Want to go after Baal? Respec.
Want to kill cows? Respec.  Etc.

I would only want the ability to reassign the last point you placed (in case you misclicked).  Other than that, no thanks.  Especially in hardcore.  If they allow respecs in hardcore, they might as well allow respawning.

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MrNajsman
Posted 11, Jul 2008 12:01 PM
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Completely agree, malakhai.

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