Why no story changes?

[ADest]

My only real gripe with D2 when playing through the increased difficulty levels, is that the only thing that changes is the stats on enemies! Every new difficulty always starts with "greetings traveller, I'm not surprised to see your kind here..." and ends with "I'am impressed, mortal..." It would be incredibly easy to just throw in some alt dialogue and even some potentially new alt scenarios on succesive playthroughs. It'd be great if the story changed a bit with each playthrough, rather than everything except stats being a rehash of the EXACT same content and dialogue, over and over again...

Imagine for instance, if in D2 for Nightmare difficulty your character arrives in TIME to fight The Dark Wanderer and Baal briefly, and you then encounter Duriel elsewhere? It'd certainly be a WTF, Awesome! moment, eh? And imagine if you have to fight Diablo, Mephisto, AND Baal briefly in Hell difficulty at the blackened temple in act 3 instead of just Mephisto? I think things like that would greatly add to the content life, and would take minimum work from the developers since the content would essentially already be created for the initial playthrough. The amount of work needed is stuff the likes of which can be done in RPGMaker...

[Matora]

A subtle change in the story would be nice, or a bit more lore thrown in during quest dialouge. And as with the random world quests, some variety there might be nice as the difficulty modes progress.

[humungous]

Think of "nightmare" as having a nightmare about the whole experience. Everything will seem darker and scarier, and you will often be running for your life OF course you have to do everything over again. You're reliving what happened in a nightmare.

I'm sleepy and a bit woozy. I hope some of that made some kind of sense...

[diablosminion]

The whole idea of going through the game on a higher difficulty is just that, to do it over again but with a greater challenge and the chance to find that awesome loot ......but say the story changed like you said....its still would be the same anyway would it not? i dont see any validity in this argument.....

[GhostRidah]

I'll read the story for the first time and then ill just skip the videos and story dialogue after.

So I dont really care to be honest

[jamesisbest]

The overall theme of the story doesn't change as you progress but with randomized encounters you will experience new story elements each time you play through. The randomized quests as you progress are not always available and it should take many runs to experience every quest, a lot of them should have a lot of meaty substance even if they aren't needed. It would be nice if they gave you a special teaser at the end if you beat the game on inferno but I doubt it will be in there. There also may be a possibility for other extras as we progress, perhaps they will add in a few new monsters in the higher difficulties as well. I think Blizzard intends on having the main story elements be all easily discovered on the first run but it will take many subsequent runs to flesh out all the minor story elements. With the likelihood of a couple more Expansions the ending will likely have a cliffhanger that might give you extra things to look out for when you play the game again as well (to find more clues about it and what may happen next).

[Rancors]

what he wants is like other rpgs out there, there are several different endings that base on player's choices which affects the outcome. a subtle change in a story base on player's choice is a popular model to use in rpg.

for example, dark souls have two different endings, and you got an increase in difficult similar to nightmare mode in diablo on your next playthrough. so you can choose to have light ending on normal mode, and then on your next more difficult playthrough to get the dark ending.

[jamesisbest]

what he wants is like other rpgs out there, there are several different endings that base on player's choices which affects the outcome. a subtle change in a story base on player's choice is a popular model to use in rpg.

for example, dark souls have two different endings, and you got an increase in difficult similar to nightmare mode in diablo on your next playthrough. so you can choose to have light ending on normal mode, and then on your next more difficult playthrough to get the dark ending.

I think this would make for a logistical nightmare in multiplayer. When someone joins your game can they play their progress their own story pick?, can they even join the same game as someone who picked a different choice?. There are many tough to answer problems that will likely reduce the cohesive nature of multiplayer which goes against what Blizzard is trying to do. Also, if they keep most of the content for each difficulty it means they can make each run-through long. Splitting up content would either mean they have to have much smaller game or more hasty game design which would likely lower the quality of the game experience. Doing the above can work well for a singleplayer game but doesn't work well for a co-op game.

[ADest]

what he wants is like other rpgs out there, there are several different endings that base on player's choices which affects the outcome. a subtle change in a story base on player's choice is a popular model to use in rpg.

Sort of. I meant for there to be different levels/quests/boss set ups though, in each different difficulty level, rather than different endings. We know Blizzard wants to end the story of D3 Vanilla and go into the expansion a certain way, so I'm not proposing alternate endings that might mess with that.

What I had in mind was something more along the lines of Resident Evil 2. Like how things would change in Claire's playthrough if you went through as Leon first, and vice versa, and things would change on each of their second playthroughs. It's essentially just a shifting around of content, but it breathes a bit of fresh air into the game when you're playing for the third (or fourth for D3) time...

[Dahmerz]

true that would be cool