So basically you're saying you've included a bunch of content you don't expect anyone to ever find. Why bother putting all the work into it if you don't want people to use it.cla$$ics";p="415154" wrote: The secret cube recipes are not essential to beating the game. You do not need to know all the secret cube recipes to beat the game. That is not the goal of the game. The goal is to ultimately destroy Baal on Hell.
Also, the fun of the game is not necessarily just killing Baal on Hell. I mean, if that was all there was to it, the game has about 7-10 plays total, and people stop playing a character once its over. The game is about getting cool gear for your character, which means being able to actually use all the implemented features is part of the fun. Tedious trial and error to discover them is not. (In fact, any aspect where the tedious outweighs added enjoyment decreases the fun factor).
First, take my comments as referring specifically to the early part of the game where you are monster starved. No one complains about lack of immersion in the base game because Flavie is there and there are still a bunch of monsters. And fun trumps 'realism' every time, unless you're trying to make a perfectly realistic medieval swordfighting simulation (which d2 most certainly is not).The player is not starved at all. There's actually more monsters in the later levels than there was before. Take a look at a few of the screenshots I have put up on moddb - particularly, the one with the Canyon of the Magi. This one:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/rebirthe/imag ... 0#imagebox
I did not lure the monsters anywhere. I did not corral them. I ran a little way from the waypoint and encountered that group of monsters. Does the player look xp starved now? In fact, they appear to be overfed. The point I am trying to make is if you make it hard in the beginning, then you set them up for even tougher times in the future. So Diablo II becomes more and more harder, not just a flat rate of gameplay.
Second, you're breaking a fundamental game design aspect of d2. If you are sufficiently over or under leveled relative to the monsters you get almost no xp, and your game design seems specifically tailored to ensuring players are substantially underleveled. The only real solution to this is running earlier areas of the game repeatedly to get an appropriate level - something which will take longer if those areas are low on monsters.
Furthermore, you're only creating artificial difficulty, because it seems to be solved by running earlier areas, since the difficulty stems in part from not having sufficient xp or items or whatever from earlier stages of the game. If reducing running is a game design goal, artificial difficulty enhancement is not a way to accomplish this.
Lets deal with one design goal at a time now.Increasing the treasure drops for all monsters isn't the correct way to go. Because as you have seen on that screenshot, if all of them had a 10% chance to drop a unique item (Just using this as an example), then you'd get a LOT of unique items, and a LOT of rare items (Due to how D2 drops items, if an item doesn't have a unique counterpart, like Katars for instance, then it drops a rare)
Now if you only increased the drops to say, the first two or three levels to each act, then you would throw off the whole cycle I mentioned to you.
Design goal: decrease the player's need or desire to run the game.
Solution: (A) Improve drops and/or (B) provide cube recipes which allow players to create desired items.
Fun effect: D2 is a stamp collecting game in a lot of ways. To qualify as a stamp something must be repeatably identifiable (ie, the player knows if he's already collected one), so rares don't count, even though some rares are also desirable. Thus, the important drops for the stamp collecting aspect are unique items and runes. (And seeing how a given person can't ever expect to see a Zod drop in his lifetime in the base game, the current design is really really bad).
A: pros - better drops means fewer kills per item of quality X found -> less runs through the game needed to get the gear a player wants.
cons - players have more good items? Wait, that's part of the fun value of the game, so no cons.
B: pros - players can actively acquire better stamps
cons - player can acquire specific items on demand, which actually detracts from the stamp collecting aspect. Further, cube recipes need to carefully balance the availability of reagents.
Conclusion: A is a superior solution to B.
Design Goal: Make the game challenging.
Some observations:
(1) artificially increasing the difficulty by restricting xp or items ultimately fails to make the game more difficult. Running specific areas repeatedly can solve both problems - it just makes the game more tedious for the player. All you do is discourage the casual player.
(2) After completing a given difficulty once, it is easily possible for a player to scum for good items and distribute them to other characters of his, putting his character above your expectation, and thwarting the artificial difficulty increase.
How do we solve this?
A. Look at all the unique and set items, and all the level requirements for suffices and prefices. Probably tweak them all upwards - but for now just be aware of them.
B. Tweak the rate at which xp earned decreases as you become over or underleveled. If you think of this as a function of your level relative to the monster level, what you want is for xp to maximize when monster level = your level, drop off precipitously as you leave that optimum point,
and reach zero relatively quickly (like within 5 levels difference). This severely limits the effectiveness of doing runs for xp, and thus prevents substantial overleveling.
C. Go back to those items in A. Figure out how soon you want particular abilities to be available to the player based on where those abilities are appropriate. Its ok for Magic Items to have better abilities than rares for a given level of availability, and rares better than sets or uniques because they are not stamps, and therefore are less likely to be collected.
D. Since you've correlated level so closely with area, now you know what the best possible gear is for any given area of the game. Go and tweak the monster stats to be plausibly difficult with good gear.
Ok, now we need to do error checking. That is, we want to not discourage the casual player, so we want to know what plausible gear is for an untweaked character at a given level. The better drops are, the closer that gear will be to optimal at any given level. You need to find a balance between difficulty and drop quality. If you make drop quality too low, you can't make the game sufficiently difficult for tweaked characters. However, there's obviously a desire not to make drop quality too high. So you need to make drop quality such that a character can expect to see good enough items in a single playthrough to beat the game, while still retaining sufficient difficulty to challenge tweaked characters.
Basically, making a game where characters tend to be overpowered because available items are too good is pretty easy. Which is why that's what d2 is what it is now. If you want to make the game difficult, you need to maintain a strict correlation between gear, area of the game (monster stats), and character level. Which, bizarrely, means high quality drops only makes it easier to make the game hard (because minimum character power is a lot closer to maximum character power for some level N).
Something that would make this easier is to decrease the sharpness of the AC:AR relationship peak. Ie, a given AR being dangerous to a broader range of ACs means you can relax the gear:area:level relationship more because you don't have to tie expected character AC to monster AR and monster AC to expected character AR nearly as tightly.
Something else is to consider a MedianXL like skill system. Not that I absolutely love MedianXL (I don't), but their skill system is set up in such a way that character power doesn't increase exponentially for 20 levels and then plateau every time a power skill becomes available. (Basically, being able to drop 20 points into frozen orb between levels 30 and 50 is not a recipe for a well balanced game, because after level 50 frozen orb stops getting better, and before level 30 you don't have it at all, but from level 30-50 frozen orb power grows aggressively. Since different power skills have different initial levels, its really hard to figure out how much power a level N character gets from his powers).
As a last note, keeping normal as a place where the casual player will not feel to hard pressed is a good design decision, because it lets him become familiar with game mechanics and his power mechanics without getting beat up for doing things poorly. You can start ramping the difficulty up in Acts IV and V, but making it truly brutal should be saved until at least Nightmare.
Will characters be interconvertible? Because that leads to scumming in easy mode and then sharing with normal characters.EDIT: As I may have mentioned before, I am going to include an Easy mode at one point or another. That way, if you don't agree with the difficulty dynamics I have set up, then you could go down the easy road, where drops and monster rates are normal.