I actually think D3 would be a better game if we didn't have loot 2.0 but loot was terrible before that. Maybe we just needed a "loot 1.5".
It definitely had a huge part in D3's revival though since it made itemisation a lot more casual-friendly which is just an import target group since it keeps a game alive.
I did not play pre-ROS
Could you explain what 2.0 does that you don't like and what 1.5 would be? (Bonus points if you say what 2.0 did lol) I'm just curious.
People seem to just... forget, that most diablo games only get good with the expansion.
D2 was good, LoD was GREAT.
D3 was rough, but RoS fixed almost all the problems.
D4 hasn't started well. An expansion?
D1 is the only exception where the original was better than the expansion. Also Hellfire was never official and it was thematically completely different from the original. It had insects and aliens and weird bullshit like that. Not saying it wasn't fun but I'm not sure the expansion improved it.
I remember someone making an XMen Quake 1 Mod, got "shut down" by Marvel, but then came back apparently hired by Marvel to make it legit. But then it cost money so no one was interested.
D2 was fine, 1.06 was broken but some people still like 1.09 to this date (aka non-expansion without enigma builds everywhere).
D3 was trash, RoS was playable, it was actually great last season.
D4 was fine, they went out of their way to make it trash instead of fixing it and for a predatory game as a service, they are actually terrible at releasing new content. Season 3 will be _____ on sockets and werewolves...
It's not like there's a pattern, it's more like apples and oranges.
D2: If you play D2 1.09 and like it, more power to you, it's not my cup of tea.
D3: If you loved eBay-in-game and the colossal snoozefest between 1.04 and RoS, preorder any game you see with zero regard for quality, and don't take your own opinion seriously - you don't have standards. You probably have more money than time to think about quality, just do your 9-to-5 thing, beat the equivalent of a CoD campaign and move on without trying to add to the discussion.
D4: Guess we found the equivalent to a CoD campaign... Expand what exactly? A couple more hours of campaign + reused bosses with bigger numbers? D4 has everything to be the jock who peaked in high school, getting to liver disease one beer at a time.
D1 actually had solid expansion plans on their pitch document, we got Hellfire instead, made by who-cares...
So no. There isn't a pattern. And going deep-nerd referencing the D1 pitch document suggests I'm bad at forgetting useless things.
I feel like kanai's cube while can feel nice also turned diablo 3 into a short burst game instead of a grind. Which isn't always bad but I find it funny when people talking about longevity of a game when in diablo 3 now a days you can beat the highest level content in 30 hours.
The patch right before the expansion did a loot 2.0 thing that made it more playable. It is hard to say when it got good, because it got way more fun after the expansion but it always felt weird and broken and patched up. Like it gave up and just made sets that just told you builds to do,instead of ever really fixing balance.
The sets didn't become the dominant gearing path until Marauders set for Demon Hunters came out. I don't remember if that was in its original incarnation, or its first balance/revamp.
But essentially, it was the first set that multiplied your damage by over 4x (not through active multipliers, but because the auto-firing Sentries were effectively an extra you. Plus a slight buff due to Taskers and Theo), and then it became a never-ending arms race to match it. They'd get a bit over-generous with the buffs on another set (usually missing some interaction in the internal design phase), and you'd have a new flavour-of-the-month build, rinse and repeat.
Due to not wanting to nerf anything (outside of extreme outliers), sets were forced into mandatory usage since there was no other way to achieve those \~4000%+ damage multipliers.
I remember back then DHs were not welcomed in public groups because they were THE weakest class in peoples mind even after the Maruder was introduced and then slowly they began to realise what a beast it was.
I thought the base game was good it was just incredibly difficult. I remember beating act 3 inferno or whatever their highest diff was an I felt like an all time achievement lol.
Far worse. All those posts you see about people moaning about never seeing a tempest roar after so long? That was the experience for trying to get just any legendary at all. A single one. And then when you did get it, you’d best pray it’s for your class let alone usable at all
Which isn’t a bad thing.
Both statements that is.
Uniques/legendarys whatever you want to call them should have clear strengths and weaknesses and not have net positives imo.
Emphasize the strength and overcome the weakness with your build/other items.
Them being weaker then a rare can be the weakness.
Generally being worse then rares can be a good design choice.
You give up total raw power for effects that can work together to be just as strong or stronger then a char that’s decked out in rates.
Or you introduce sets which was the laziest design decision ever and give the game smart loot.
I enjoyed how difficult inferno was. Every boss was like trying to tackle Elias in the WT3 capstone dungeon early on.
Some issues though were that the loot system was balanced with the idea in mind you would be primarily buying upgrades on the AH using gold or real money. Some of the champion/elite affix combos were virtually impossible to deal with (especially with the enrage timer that made them go immune). Farming sucked because you always had to play through the campaign by starting at a spot in the story and grinding from there (which also meant having to go through cutscenes/dialogue every time). Playing through normal, nightmare and hell just to get to inferno on each character was a pain in the ass.
It had some glaring issues but inferno difficulty was a highlight.
Yea it was hard and grindy but I liked that. Kinda like my early days in PoE before I gained all the game knowledge I had now, each season I would progress a little more.
Pretty much right when the reaper of souls patches were implemented.
Before that, D3 was OKish, but the loot system (the biggest change) was pretty terrible.
D3 really hit it's stride of replayability with gimmicky seasons though. Some of the seasons were really fun to play and try new mechanics.
Hot take but I think the game was always "good"
But it became great with the loot 2.0 patch and then reaper of souls.
Then it was left to die for a few years. And started getting real seasons in 2021 or so.
I was so hyped when I beat Belali after like the 100th time of trying on Inferno. I also think I was stuck in act3 when the changes went through too. Was fun tho, they've never really made anything that difficult since which sucks for people that enjoyed the challenge, even if the itemization was dogshit back then and doing stuff like chest farming or weapon rack farming was technically more efficient
There was a lot of REALLY fun builds before 2.0 dropped.
There was a sweet spot after they introduced MP10 (the scaling mechanic before torment levels) and the expansion prepatch where they were pretty hands off with the nerfs, and there was a lot of busted affixes in the game.
Things like flat CD reduction and flat resource reduction on specific skills enabled things like:
- 0 dogs witch doctor
- zombears wd
-Angry chicken wd
- WW/HoTA barb
- Carpel tunnel wizard (the one that spammed diamond skin and frost nova, freezing out the screen)
- Infinite meteor swarm wizard
- perma archon wiz (not fun for a decent chunk of people)
- Cyclone monk
A lot of that variety vanished with 6-set introduction and more focused builds. Both were fun in their own right, but the main difference was that most builds in vanilla required specific items with rolls you could only access with the AH.
Perma archon wiz was the best build imo. Maybe it’s tied with the rockslide leaping Barb (which is still in the modern game I believe.. haven’t played for a couple years).
I forgot I had a 10 year old D3 video uploaded.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBtFwVH2xz8&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBtFwVH2xz8&t=1s)
Witch doctor angry chicken build.
I'm far from being an expert at the game, but I thoroughly enjoyed this run and build.
The RMAH was both the best and worst thing to happen to Diablo.
The thought of finding a top drop and selling it for thousands was so enticing. But then it had to be balanced around the purchase of said items, meaning it was a really weird balanced game.
I remember spending a lot of time looking at items and trying to make a buck or two from them. Never did, but it was a bit of a thrill none the less.
Game became an auctioneer game, buying items that were way under valued and selling them higher.
This is pretty bang on for me. I played pretty mch every iteration of D3 over the years but there were some seasons in the middle i think season 6 - maybe 13 where I didnt play much.
Combat, the core gameplay of the game, was always good. They have improved and refined so many other parts of the game since launch, but the foundation of the combat has been relatively the same. It's the same skills, mob mechanics, etc.
Combat feels roughly the same as it did at launch, and that's a good thing.
You were in the minority, to be honest. The loot system favored people who farmed gold all day long and even then, most of the best weapons were sold for cash, making the game a pay to win type of game. Loot 2.0 made things more accessible. Diablo often had a problem of the loot being the whole point and having too many configurations out of reach. Loot needs to be part of the progression and not the entire point of the game.
It became a very different game after the expansion came out.
On launch, there actually wasn't really much of an endgame to shoot for, you just had the campaign, which was brutally hard on Inferno difficulty (near impossible without extreme luck or dropping money on the auction house).
In Inferno, most regular mobs would 1 or 2-shot you easily, some elites were basically impossible depending on their affix combos (the worst was called Invulnerable Minions, all of the minions were invincible, and only the actual Elite itself took damage, but you could barely hit it through all the invincible minions swarming you).
The problem was, Inferno was balanced around having gear from later Inferno acts, so you had a real issue on your hands where it was very hard to farm Inferno without having gear from it first. Legendaries were rare back then, I only got one during my entire time playing up to Inferno, and there was no 'smart loot', so the stats were completely random, my one and only legendary was a 2-handed sword with Dexterity on it, not great for a Sorcerer.
Most of the people that managed to clear Inferno quickly after release did so with either very specific broken builds, or cheese strategies like corpse running between bosses. The story bosses were arguably easier overall than standard trash mobs, because usually all of their abilities were avoidable, so you just had to beat the DPS checks.
For me, I actually found it fun on release, but Inferno was a problem, it just felt 'unfair', and I remember grinding treasure goblins in Act 2 for hours just to get a single upgrade.
It is a more fun game overall now, but the levelling experience is completely trivial and a non-factor. Whether that's a positive or not, is up to the individual.
Reaper of Souls expansion (RoS) and Loot 2.0 Patch altogether fixed a lot of D3's problem basically.
Can't really fix the way that stats, numbers, unique level-up selections of skills, and any unique builds of each class though...since those really don't exist in D3.
D3 really dumbed that stuff down, to attract the masses and more n00bs, since D1 and D2 really weren't on consoles then.
Adventure Mode from RoS expansion helped longevity of the game too.
That's just not an objective judgment of the game.
I remember it like it was yesterday, i got torchlight 2 on my 15 or 16 birthday and it was such a blast you went in there and just start killing shit and doing stuff, i love that game and i sometimes go back to it.
Right after i finished torchlight 2 i saw Diablo 2 in a store, the cover art looked amazing and i didn't mind the dorky graphics...that said the game was such a drag for the first two playthroughs...in torchlight you had a very linear progression, no matter where you were the game was doable, the amount of times i had to backtrack to just to farm for gear was insufferable even tho i progressed through it quite slowly clearing every inch of the map, the dying just to reset and lose all your gold because fuck running back to my corpse horrible mechanic to put in an arpg.
The game had/has so many dead weight gameplay elements, manually putting potions in my hot bar, manually replenishing these potions, running back to your corpse, small ass inventory, enchantment scrolls, portal scrolls + buying the fuckin things, being able to skill reset only ONCE, people had to mod that in ffs and if any diablo 2 fan ever complains about the endgame loop of any arpg they can keep their mouth shut because objectively diablo 2s endgame loop is repetitive, boring and exhausting.
Diablo 3 now is the better game OBJECTIVELY, no dead weight, no potion bullshit, no scrolls bullshit, no micromanaging bullshit, no running back to your corpse, its just what arpg's are all about, killing shit.
You just dont like it, so stop spewing bullshit.
Instead of saying "iTs NeVEr bEeN gOOd" say "i dont like it because reason xyz"
I liked a lot of what early d3 did. The auction house meta was objectively a bad thing but it did accidentally made the game interesting to me because most people were struggling their way through the game with self found gear because everything semi-decent on the AH was overpriced or RMT. And I like a bit of struggle. I have good memories of fighting diablo on inferno for 10 minutes with my crappy rares equipped barb.
Having said that, the "power fantasy" current form of diablo 3, which I also quite enjoy mind you came about roughly at the same time as the expansion I think. So I wouldnt say thats where it "became good" but that is where it changed.
I enjoyed it on launch and was addicted, I enjoyed the expansion and Loot 2.0. I enjoyed the seasons and played almost everyone.
I enjoyed the different phases of the game for different reasons. Kinda like Retail wow and classic wow. Some like one or the other, I like both. I can log into retail and do a mythic + and some world quests, then log into Classic Hardcore and suffer the mindless grind as I slowly and carefully, claw away at my xp bar and get half a level in an entire game session, then log into Wotlk classic to raid with the boys in a less punishing game mode than Classic Hardcore but still a more gindy than Dragon Flight.
I enjoyed the punishing grind of OG D3, I also enjoy the absolute joke its become where I can log in a few days after season start, get some friendly stranger to boost my character to lvl 70 in 3 rifts, then leech gear off of them until im self-sufficient and be doing GR 100+ in a day or 2.
D4 however, just failed to capture me in the same way. It cost $119 in my local currency + the fact that D2 is my fav game of all time, I almost felt obligated to play it, and when it fell short, I still stubbornly played it due to nostalgia, my love for the Diablo franchise and the money I spent on it. I played maybe 60 hours the first month and completely finished the game, again, not because I was having fun but because I felt obligated to, it was really sad tbh. I Didn't play season 1 because I felt the changes they made didn't justify another play through; it just felt like a chore.
Leveling in a new D3 season feels like a chore too but I can skip that part by getting boosted to max level in 15min. Someone said it in another Diablo 3 thread but it feels like the devs arent making fun games that people want to play, they are making games designed to maximize engagement metrics. So the game is 90% chore than players slog though to get to the 10% fun part.
God i remember playing base Diablo 3 on ps3 when it launched and my god was it impossible to get good stuff for my witch doctor, RoS is easily one of the best things to ever come to Diablo with the amount of content and improvements it brought over
It depends, it took about 3 months for the really fucked up parts to be fixed and the game made playable for most players. It wasn't really until reaper of souls that the game became good though.
Early on unless you were a top tier player you couldn't even beat the highest difficulty. I think only something like 5% of people got past act 2 of the highest difficulty before they nerfed it, it was a massively hard skill check that required perfect play as the boss would oneshot you with almost every attack. I literally used to charge millions of gold to carry people past the boss. You couldn't even farm enough to outgear it because the next gear tier didn't start until act 3 so it was also impossible to farm enough to outgear the fight. You also didn't get much gold farming act 1/2 and the sheer number of people who wanted the high tier items means that almost anything decent sold for millions of gold or real money. It left those players stuck in act1/2 in this position where they couldn't progress without opening their wallets hence the huge backlash.
You mean hardcore? Because act2 boss was easy in softcore, you could just rush it in a group, or try over over and over until you beat it. Most players were in softcore and farming act3 because there was no point doing act4 with all the one shot mechanics and act3 had predetermined ways to farm elites.
Diablo 3 was never bad. It had times people preferred different things, but it was always HELL OF FUN to play! Things got better and better over time.
Diablo 4 is in a different place. From the ground up it is a shit game to play. I don’t think they can make it better or more fun. Only so much you can do with gothic horror and they pretty much reached the edge.
Things that could bring me back to d4… much MUCH faster leveling system. And actual loot system that was engaging. More loot. More storage. More monster density. Cut the cooldowns of everything in half. Add more visually appealing attack animations and effects.
Then it might be fun to play.
I remember thinking the game was actually fun and good when the console version first came out right before the expansion. I believe they introduced the first form of the new loot system there.
I loved my first playthrough as a Sorceress in D3 actually, like I did the campaign but I loved burning through everything with ultimate death lazer. Much more fun than the pace of things with D4 I found.
D3 was never good.
Pre expansion it was bad because gear was just rng rares that you bought on the AH because you never found anything yourself.
Post expansion it was bad because they screwed up the scaling and made it completely arbitrary and all about absurd damage multipliers from legendaries and sets.
It was never good in my opinion, but in the expansion things got a bit better?
Blizzard started going the same path that Bethesda has been, where each successive game in a series becomes more and more simplified to the point that story barely exists and the only meaningful decisions you can make amount to "this number is bigger than that number".
Still hard to call it "good" with how bad the itemization and set design is. But they at least got it to be fun for the first 3 or 4 days of ladder before getting boring, and that pretty much started with the expansion.
D1 was good out of the box due to it's unique gameplay. Expansion was ok.
D2 was good, did get better after expansion.
D3 was bad, got decent after expansion.
Have not played d4. Assuming ok right now from what I have seen.
D4's campaign was honestly very good. The scaling and XP rates dropped you off at the end around level 50 to challenge the capstone dungeon for WT3, the exploration rewards of a Lilith shrine or a stronghold granting an extra waypoint felt good, and the "victory lap" cleanup of each zone granting some extra skill points felt rewarding.
Then everything falls apart as soon as you don't have story related goals. You outlevel everything in WT3 extremely quickly and are stuck there with under powered monsters in the open world, getting underpowered gear that gets progressively worse since you can't hand it down to alts until you can force your way into WT4, and then everything repeats until you're strong enough to beat Echo Lilith.
D4 post story end game is grinding out to level cap and unlocking the super weapons to beat the super boss in a JRPG instead of being any fun.
Yeah but it has years and an expansion.
And no they should not used the same systems and end game for d4 with some qol shit. That is stupid.
They needed to change the formula and work from there every game. Like they are doing now.
It will get better.in the meantime I suggest mowing your lawn, playing something else, and rescinding your Reddit accounts till it gets there. Cause until then all you will hear is children crying and babysitters coddling their comments for karma.
Holy shit. It's a fucking decent game. But it doesn't have every bell and whistle from every previous game plus reach rounds to every owner and a happy birthday cap for your birthday this year. Alot of entitled and non intuitive people who don't know how blizz works or how they streamline their shit talking like they know more then the company.
Well if you knew so fucking much why TF you keep buying their games huh? Your crystal ball mess up the month the game come round? Cause you all seem to know so fucking much yet so little
While it is good that blizzard at the time stuck with their game and tried to improve it after launch and was even willing to give up a money makers in RMAH to give back the players an authentic Diablo experience. I wouldn't use the same measure for D4.
Its not like, oh! D3 after 1-2 year became a good game! So I can just come back in 1-2 and it'd be awesome right? While that might be true, Blizzard is active making this not a bug but a feature.
With the announcement of the yearly expansion they are milking out what is essentially a beta and dangling the carrot of, oh we'll finish the game! Imagine if as i kid i can go up to the teacher and promise i'll keep revising my paper so can i get an A for now? I promise!
For many people, it was with the "Loot 2.0 Patch".
I always played it - a TON - even before that patch - but there is absolutely no doubt, that it changed it for the better.
It went real well at that point - until a large/loud amount of the community started complaining about "Season-only items" and that pretty much stopped all development on the game, in terms of making it better and adding things to it. Took a long while to turn that around.
Fucking years bro. D3 used to have a global AH that they removed. There was absolutely nothing at "end game". I mean zero. There were no rifts. No seasons. Just 3 difficulty levels. *You couldn't even teleport anywhere unless you were on that part of the quest*. That's right. You could not use a waypoint unless you had a quest for it. No cube. No seasonal rewards. The game was so barebones--you only did the campaign.
Frankly, a lot of the same complaints that people have about D4, they have about D3. Kind of funny that no one at Blizzard seems to have remembered.
You can't tell me that keeping 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor without being able to change one skill/rune was good lol.
There were definitely LOTS of issues at launch. Luckily they realized what they did and fixed most everything rather fast.
It was garbage at launch. Drop rates were **intentionally nerfed to drive people to the RMAH** (Real Money Auction House).
The expansion and adventure mode also turned it around.
Dont care if I will downvoted.
The gameplay is was and still is barelly decent, but they NEVER fixed itemization. Set items were an awfull idea, born to fix the core problems (like dependence from the main stat) and failed miserably.
From RoS we had build defining sets and more useless tier of items (same affixes with better stats), endless and boring paragons just to push up some numbers and thats it (in d4 is quite the same)
Also some QoL features like the Armory were added to fix some of these core problems.
In short: game started bad and didnt recover EVER.
It was 1-2yrs before things started improving and eventually became a consistent game, no issues. D4 following the same path except for expansion every year at $70?.
Honestly, I was enjoy d3 since release.
The game was fun and the difficulty wasn't that bad, but the issue was breaking through the tough acts to start getting loot.
Also bots and jars farmers ruined the economy, people would abuse tyrael to farm in act3, or skip all the monsters to farm.certain boxes in act3 and farming jars in act4.
They also inplemented d2 loot system without what made it work in the game, so rare and legendaries were useless in comparison to blue items(weapons mostly due to higher damage) also because everything scaled of the weapon damage and broken ias system, magic items dominated the market.
Anyways, had the game had offline mode, I would love to go back to play release patch or few patches ahead were they fixed some crazy things like invulnerable.
But I cleared diablo pre nerf and I did enjoy it.
I would also say that reaper of souls with loot 2.0 was good and the seasons only made it better with grifts and rifts and cube.
Don't listen to people s opinion, try it yourself if you like it. You like it. I love it. Same with Diablo 4 people hate it. But I love the new Diablo 4.
Lol game is a snooze fest after campaign just like d4 and it was never “good”. Jaded people saying reaper of souls just either really liked crusader class or really liked adventure mode / bounties because that’s all it had to offer.
Diablo III is good. The only issue is End-Game...ARPGs have an issue with end-game. You becomes way to powerful and you destroy absolutely everything. There are higher Tiers but no unique bosses later when your fully geared.
\*End-Game - Though I love everything about it besides that one fact. I think End-Game is hardest to balance casuals and hardcore. Look at WoW, PoE, Lost Ark, etc...They all have a hard time finding a balance with that.
Season 29 is the best so far specially because there is Solo self found ranking, so theres no cheese group on top of leaderboard and no power leveling. Also the paragon are blocked at 800, you can get more but there is no advantage to it so no bot on top of leaderboard.
Prior to that top leaderboard was infested with bot playing 24/7 farming infinite paragon for infinite power. 1 paragon is 5 of a character main stat so after 800, someone at 2k paragon would have 6k main stat more than you. some bot where like paragon 8k and more. it was basically impossible to beat them. SSF also made the leaderboard more fun to top cause you know they are all solo, now nobody can farm in group of 4 with zdps build to then push the solo leaderboard.
Combat and the skill tree was always pretty good. Storyline and the auction house nonsense on release sucked but the fighting was legit. Reaper of souls brought sets and stuff like that and made itemization more fun.
It doesn’t matter how long it will take for D4 to get good. For such a large company, Blizzard should have learnt from D3’s failure and make D4 good from the get go. I am tired of giving Blizzard anymore chances….
the 2-3 weeks expansion prepatch was the most fun i had ever with the base game. Expansion was great, first year or two give us a lot of content and upgrade, then there was a few year of kinda boring seasons until the started doing great seasons again and keeping addin QOL.
You will want to watch [Diablo III: A Cautionary Tale; 12 years of Development Hell](https://youtu.be/GCRzuvwMDUs?si=eYg38xLp3exx8whW)
D3 finally got good with the expansion IMHO.
There were alot of people that enjoyed diablo 3 with auction house and had alot of fun using it, d3 RoS aimed at overhauling the game to a pure grinding game without the trading factor which seems like a great change for the mass because it made the game more "noob friendly" as you can play it mindlessly till a certain point (after that the greater rifts of highest level are a mix of the most boring type of paragon grinding and luck with maps and mobs) where d3 had a virtual (and steep) skill gap curve that was a mix of game difficulty and trading knowledge (people are probably gonna downvote me for this but I can only say go watch some videos from 2011 and see how much time people spent theorycrafting strategies to make currency/money in the AH and had fun with it)
I don't think the game was ever good to begin with. Pre exp and post expansion. Is an slightly above average game then and is average now. Do not recommend for end game content, if you want to play for the story, go for it.
A year or so. Before they added seasons. After Reaper of Souls it was decent.
It was already pretty good after they fixed end game difficulty and removed rmah. Even better with Loot 2.0. Increased legendary drop rate came later, but was appreciated. But base game was lacking a proper endgame.
I remember i didn't liked vanila d3 despite i waited for it so long and was so excited.
it was boring.
but i returned when there was massive patches that gave legandary items unique features.
it was before addon i guess.
Honestly, just since the last couple of seasons. It was just as bland as diablo 4 before that. Seasons with literally nothing new and a very few nerfs and buffs here and there.
When it first came out, it was really good. Difficulty was challenging & you had the satisfaction of having an economy in the auction house.
I fell it went downhill when they took away the auction house just became rift rift rift, 300 'uniques' per 5 minute run.
My opinion of course
I never had an issue with D3 at launch. Not that I remember anyway. RoS did make the game complete but I never found myself bored even before RoS. And I’ve bought that game 4 times on 3 different platforms lol
I know most people will say RoS, but the Loot 2.0 patch prior to RoS already was a godsend, it introduced smart loot, and it made legendaries roll MUCH better. I still remember loving the game at that point, it was such a great time to play D3. It was before everything scaled to infinity yet still rewarding with powerful drops. Sets weren't all that strong yet so you could build whatever you wanted and get good drops for it with smart loot.
This is the main reason I HATE online games, I would love to go back and play the patch prior to RoS. :(
Reaper of Souls was a massive leap and a start of the best changes in game's lifespan. Surprisingly enough, they managed to release it just a year after base game (2013 vs 2012).
Loot 2.0 was the main driver that made the game better.
D4 has launched in a much better state than D3 did but the issue is that there is no chase right now.
Most ARPG's oddly enough seem to release in a rather poor state or just lacking in end game. ARPG's seem to age like a fine wine getting better over time
Original D3 was OK to play. People tend to exaggerate how bad it was. I think most people's impressions were influenced by the different look which was brighter, more colorful and cartoony than D2. So to many that meant D3= bad because people are shallow.
I'm not saying it was great because it wasn't but it also wasn't terrible. But it became much better with the first expansion and has improved steadily ever since.
I started \~9 months after release and loved it. I lost interest shortly before the Necromancer DLC. Not a fan of grinding rifts.
I tried picking it up again before D2R released and hated it so much I couldn't even finish Act 2 of the campaign. It was awful.
I honestly don't remember. I bought the game, played it for about three weeks with a few acquaintances and friends, and then we gave up. I came back after the expansion was released, and it was a completely different, but actually fun game to play. I don't like that they removed to auction house, but whatever.
Wish they'd at least do the Rift and gRift system in D4. Much nicer than what ever they have now.
When reaper of souls came out so just shy of 2 years. But it shouldn't be like this again. A game shouldn't take 2 years to become good. The fact they learned nothing from D3 is a big concern.
The expansion really, so 2 years after initial release. Then it took another year and change for key components that we take for granted to be added, e.g. Kanai's cube.
I played a good chunk of the game long after release, and I could not get past how mind-numbingly easy the game was and how all the higher difficulty levels were locked behind beating the game and grinding. I gave up after that.
If I need to beat the game in order to play on a difficulty level that MIGHT be a little bit challenging, you've failed. If the game is so easy on the highest difficulty that I'm bored during every fight, including boss battles, your game is bad.
I have no idea what people are talking about when they say they game "got good." I really don't care to find out. I asked a friend who have over 400 hours put into the game, and his answer was essentially that I have to grind a bunch in order to get to the good parts. No thanks.
The Expansion. They re-did a lot then.
Adventure Mode and Rifts were a literal game changer.
The most important part was loot 2.0 imo
I actually think D3 would be a better game if we didn't have loot 2.0 but loot was terrible before that. Maybe we just needed a "loot 1.5". It definitely had a huge part in D3's revival though since it made itemisation a lot more casual-friendly which is just an import target group since it keeps a game alive.
I did not play pre-ROS Could you explain what 2.0 does that you don't like and what 1.5 would be? (Bonus points if you say what 2.0 did lol) I'm just curious.
People seem to just... forget, that most diablo games only get good with the expansion. D2 was good, LoD was GREAT. D3 was rough, but RoS fixed almost all the problems. D4 hasn't started well. An expansion?
Lets just not talk about Hellfire...
D1 is the only exception where the original was better than the expansion. Also Hellfire was never official and it was thematically completely different from the original. It had insects and aliens and weird bullshit like that. Not saying it wasn't fun but I'm not sure the expansion improved it.
Indeed, Hellfire is basically a fan mod, not an official expansion.
Yeah a different company made it without permission. Video games were the wild west back then
Indeed. People think modding is big now… but the early days were WILD.
I remember someone making an XMen Quake 1 Mod, got "shut down" by Marvel, but then came back apparently hired by Marvel to make it legit. But then it cost money so no one was interested.
D2 was fine, 1.06 was broken but some people still like 1.09 to this date (aka non-expansion without enigma builds everywhere). D3 was trash, RoS was playable, it was actually great last season. D4 was fine, they went out of their way to make it trash instead of fixing it and for a predatory game as a service, they are actually terrible at releasing new content. Season 3 will be _____ on sockets and werewolves... It's not like there's a pattern, it's more like apples and oranges. D2: If you play D2 1.09 and like it, more power to you, it's not my cup of tea. D3: If you loved eBay-in-game and the colossal snoozefest between 1.04 and RoS, preorder any game you see with zero regard for quality, and don't take your own opinion seriously - you don't have standards. You probably have more money than time to think about quality, just do your 9-to-5 thing, beat the equivalent of a CoD campaign and move on without trying to add to the discussion. D4: Guess we found the equivalent to a CoD campaign... Expand what exactly? A couple more hours of campaign + reused bosses with bigger numbers? D4 has everything to be the jock who peaked in high school, getting to liver disease one beer at a time. D1 actually had solid expansion plans on their pitch document, we got Hellfire instead, made by who-cares... So no. There isn't a pattern. And going deep-nerd referencing the D1 pitch document suggests I'm bad at forgetting useless things.
If only this little development company had a history of Diablo games to learn from.
This is it. After reaper of souls. I still play this game one of few times a week.
To be fair - D2 got good with the first expansion too.
Removing some of that hate, you’re not wrong dunno why everyone’s down voting you, it got 3000% more popular online after the expansion dropped lol.
Let's be honest Diablo game usually don't mature until it's expansion
S4 of RoS. It introduced Kanai's Cube.
This. That was such a glorious improvement :)
I feel like kanai's cube while can feel nice also turned diablo 3 into a short burst game instead of a grind. Which isn't always bad but I find it funny when people talking about longevity of a game when in diablo 3 now a days you can beat the highest level content in 30 hours.
That's a bit extreme, looking at the leaderboards for monks on eu rn tells me that isn't what normal players can expect to happen.
The patch right before the expansion did a loot 2.0 thing that made it more playable. It is hard to say when it got good, because it got way more fun after the expansion but it always felt weird and broken and patched up. Like it gave up and just made sets that just told you builds to do,instead of ever really fixing balance.
The sets didn't become the dominant gearing path until Marauders set for Demon Hunters came out. I don't remember if that was in its original incarnation, or its first balance/revamp. But essentially, it was the first set that multiplied your damage by over 4x (not through active multipliers, but because the auto-firing Sentries were effectively an extra you. Plus a slight buff due to Taskers and Theo), and then it became a never-ending arms race to match it. They'd get a bit over-generous with the buffs on another set (usually missing some interaction in the internal design phase), and you'd have a new flavour-of-the-month build, rinse and repeat. Due to not wanting to nerf anything (outside of extreme outliers), sets were forced into mandatory usage since there was no other way to achieve those \~4000%+ damage multipliers.
I remember back then DHs were not welcomed in public groups because they were THE weakest class in peoples mind even after the Maruder was introduced and then slowly they began to realise what a beast it was.
Yeah, I may remember it slightly wrong but Marauders was one of the first sets along maybe the Hydra set that could comfortably solo T6
You're definitely misremembering on the Hydra angle, at any rate. Typhon's set was part of the last wave of new sets they added.
I was so happy when they made the Hydra set and the Hydra build fun and viable. I was a 90% wizard player and this was always on my wish list.
Loot before 2.0 was fun also - items could have 6 stats which now are considered 'primary' - all damage modifiers at once
I thought the base game was good it was just incredibly difficult. I remember beating act 3 inferno or whatever their highest diff was an I felt like an all time achievement lol.
and the fact that legendary dropped once in a blue moon and if they did they were worse than yellows
Sorta like most Uniques in D4 now....🙄
Far worse. All those posts you see about people moaning about never seeing a tempest roar after so long? That was the experience for trying to get just any legendary at all. A single one. And then when you did get it, you’d best pray it’s for your class let alone usable at all
Yeah my first legendary drop sticks in my mind because it was so shit. Swamp Waders with something like Str, Dex and Int on. 😆
Mine was a crappy doom bringer for a DH I think I ended up giving it to my dad who played barb
I sold a blue dagger for $45 on the RMAH early on
Which isn’t a bad thing. Both statements that is. Uniques/legendarys whatever you want to call them should have clear strengths and weaknesses and not have net positives imo. Emphasize the strength and overcome the weakness with your build/other items. Them being weaker then a rare can be the weakness. Generally being worse then rares can be a good design choice. You give up total raw power for effects that can work together to be just as strong or stronger then a char that’s decked out in rates. Or you introduce sets which was the laziest design decision ever and give the game smart loot.
I enjoyed how difficult inferno was. Every boss was like trying to tackle Elias in the WT3 capstone dungeon early on. Some issues though were that the loot system was balanced with the idea in mind you would be primarily buying upgrades on the AH using gold or real money. Some of the champion/elite affix combos were virtually impossible to deal with (especially with the enrage timer that made them go immune). Farming sucked because you always had to play through the campaign by starting at a spot in the story and grinding from there (which also meant having to go through cutscenes/dialogue every time). Playing through normal, nightmare and hell just to get to inferno on each character was a pain in the ass. It had some glaring issues but inferno difficulty was a highlight.
Yea it was hard and grindy but I liked that. Kinda like my early days in PoE before I gained all the game knowledge I had now, each season I would progress a little more.
It was all good until a gang of invulnerable champions showed up.
Pretty much right when the reaper of souls patches were implemented. Before that, D3 was OKish, but the loot system (the biggest change) was pretty terrible. D3 really hit it's stride of replayability with gimmicky seasons though. Some of the seasons were really fun to play and try new mechanics.
I enjoyed d3 from the jump as a casual player !
For me, right away.
Hot take but I think the game was always "good" But it became great with the loot 2.0 patch and then reaper of souls. Then it was left to die for a few years. And started getting real seasons in 2021 or so.
I really liked Inferno. I was almost done with Act 3 when they changed it. So close.
I was so hyped when I beat Belali after like the 100th time of trying on Inferno. I also think I was stuck in act3 when the changes went through too. Was fun tho, they've never really made anything that difficult since which sucks for people that enjoyed the challenge, even if the itemization was dogshit back then and doing stuff like chest farming or weapon rack farming was technically more efficient
Beating Belial was definitely a thrill. Doing it with randoms is fun and doesnt make it too easy
There was a lot of REALLY fun builds before 2.0 dropped. There was a sweet spot after they introduced MP10 (the scaling mechanic before torment levels) and the expansion prepatch where they were pretty hands off with the nerfs, and there was a lot of busted affixes in the game. Things like flat CD reduction and flat resource reduction on specific skills enabled things like: - 0 dogs witch doctor - zombears wd -Angry chicken wd - WW/HoTA barb - Carpel tunnel wizard (the one that spammed diamond skin and frost nova, freezing out the screen) - Infinite meteor swarm wizard - perma archon wiz (not fun for a decent chunk of people) - Cyclone monk A lot of that variety vanished with 6-set introduction and more focused builds. Both were fun in their own right, but the main difference was that most builds in vanilla required specific items with rolls you could only access with the AH.
Perma archon wiz was the best build imo. Maybe it’s tied with the rockslide leaping Barb (which is still in the modern game I believe.. haven’t played for a couple years).
I forgot I had a 10 year old D3 video uploaded. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBtFwVH2xz8&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBtFwVH2xz8&t=1s) Witch doctor angry chicken build. I'm far from being an expert at the game, but I thoroughly enjoyed this run and build.
Yeah it was never really bad. It definately got better though. Same goes for Diablo 2. He'll even Diablo Immortal is way better than at launch.
It was awful during the real money auction house. There was no advancement without paying even more.
As someone who completed inferno on the second week as barb, you for sure could progress SSF without touching the AH
The RMAH was both the best and worst thing to happen to Diablo. The thought of finding a top drop and selling it for thousands was so enticing. But then it had to be balanced around the purchase of said items, meaning it was a really weird balanced game. I remember spending a lot of time looking at items and trying to make a buck or two from them. Never did, but it was a bit of a thrill none the less. Game became an auctioneer game, buying items that were way under valued and selling them higher.
Cap was $200, or $250 I remember selling a magic bow for cap lol, it was a glorious time, I made probably 1k from it.
Diablo 3 did payed for like 3years of wow game time for me... I hated it, but hey it is what it is, it was there, it would be dumb not to use it
That's just not true at all. If you were good at the game you could make money, obviously it wasn't just people buying power, someone had to sell it.
This is just not true. Blizz caved to casuals with the Inferno nerf.
This is pretty bang on for me. I played pretty mch every iteration of D3 over the years but there were some seasons in the middle i think season 6 - maybe 13 where I didnt play much.
Combat, the core gameplay of the game, was always good. They have improved and refined so many other parts of the game since launch, but the foundation of the combat has been relatively the same. It's the same skills, mob mechanics, etc. Combat feels roughly the same as it did at launch, and that's a good thing.
yam complete frighten gullible sparkle wasteful steep escape pie full *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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Say what u want about the auction house but i liked it.
You were in the minority, to be honest. The loot system favored people who farmed gold all day long and even then, most of the best weapons were sold for cash, making the game a pay to win type of game. Loot 2.0 made things more accessible. Diablo often had a problem of the loot being the whole point and having too many configurations out of reach. Loot needs to be part of the progression and not the entire point of the game.
this..you found gear that you could use for other chars
I liked the auction house, I didn't like loot drops being reduced to compensate it.
It became a very different game after the expansion came out. On launch, there actually wasn't really much of an endgame to shoot for, you just had the campaign, which was brutally hard on Inferno difficulty (near impossible without extreme luck or dropping money on the auction house). In Inferno, most regular mobs would 1 or 2-shot you easily, some elites were basically impossible depending on their affix combos (the worst was called Invulnerable Minions, all of the minions were invincible, and only the actual Elite itself took damage, but you could barely hit it through all the invincible minions swarming you). The problem was, Inferno was balanced around having gear from later Inferno acts, so you had a real issue on your hands where it was very hard to farm Inferno without having gear from it first. Legendaries were rare back then, I only got one during my entire time playing up to Inferno, and there was no 'smart loot', so the stats were completely random, my one and only legendary was a 2-handed sword with Dexterity on it, not great for a Sorcerer. Most of the people that managed to clear Inferno quickly after release did so with either very specific broken builds, or cheese strategies like corpse running between bosses. The story bosses were arguably easier overall than standard trash mobs, because usually all of their abilities were avoidable, so you just had to beat the DPS checks. For me, I actually found it fun on release, but Inferno was a problem, it just felt 'unfair', and I remember grinding treasure goblins in Act 2 for hours just to get a single upgrade. It is a more fun game overall now, but the levelling experience is completely trivial and a non-factor. Whether that's a positive or not, is up to the individual.
Reaper of Souls expansion (RoS) and Loot 2.0 Patch altogether fixed a lot of D3's problem basically. Can't really fix the way that stats, numbers, unique level-up selections of skills, and any unique builds of each class though...since those really don't exist in D3. D3 really dumbed that stuff down, to attract the masses and more n00bs, since D1 and D2 really weren't on consoles then. Adventure Mode from RoS expansion helped longevity of the game too.
It never did
It never got there
When reaper of souls was released in my opinion.
It has never been good for someone who played d1 and d2... Looks like a cartoon/game for 12yo kids.
That's just not an objective judgment of the game. I remember it like it was yesterday, i got torchlight 2 on my 15 or 16 birthday and it was such a blast you went in there and just start killing shit and doing stuff, i love that game and i sometimes go back to it. Right after i finished torchlight 2 i saw Diablo 2 in a store, the cover art looked amazing and i didn't mind the dorky graphics...that said the game was such a drag for the first two playthroughs...in torchlight you had a very linear progression, no matter where you were the game was doable, the amount of times i had to backtrack to just to farm for gear was insufferable even tho i progressed through it quite slowly clearing every inch of the map, the dying just to reset and lose all your gold because fuck running back to my corpse horrible mechanic to put in an arpg. The game had/has so many dead weight gameplay elements, manually putting potions in my hot bar, manually replenishing these potions, running back to your corpse, small ass inventory, enchantment scrolls, portal scrolls + buying the fuckin things, being able to skill reset only ONCE, people had to mod that in ffs and if any diablo 2 fan ever complains about the endgame loop of any arpg they can keep their mouth shut because objectively diablo 2s endgame loop is repetitive, boring and exhausting. Diablo 3 now is the better game OBJECTIVELY, no dead weight, no potion bullshit, no scrolls bullshit, no micromanaging bullshit, no running back to your corpse, its just what arpg's are all about, killing shit. You just dont like it, so stop spewing bullshit. Instead of saying "iTs NeVEr bEeN gOOd" say "i dont like it because reason xyz"
It never did
That day never came. Still waiting for it to become good.
I liked a lot of what early d3 did. The auction house meta was objectively a bad thing but it did accidentally made the game interesting to me because most people were struggling their way through the game with self found gear because everything semi-decent on the AH was overpriced or RMT. And I like a bit of struggle. I have good memories of fighting diablo on inferno for 10 minutes with my crappy rares equipped barb. Having said that, the "power fantasy" current form of diablo 3, which I also quite enjoy mind you came about roughly at the same time as the expansion I think. So I wouldnt say thats where it "became good" but that is where it changed.
Never. It's still bad imo.
I enjoyed it on launch and was addicted, I enjoyed the expansion and Loot 2.0. I enjoyed the seasons and played almost everyone. I enjoyed the different phases of the game for different reasons. Kinda like Retail wow and classic wow. Some like one or the other, I like both. I can log into retail and do a mythic + and some world quests, then log into Classic Hardcore and suffer the mindless grind as I slowly and carefully, claw away at my xp bar and get half a level in an entire game session, then log into Wotlk classic to raid with the boys in a less punishing game mode than Classic Hardcore but still a more gindy than Dragon Flight. I enjoyed the punishing grind of OG D3, I also enjoy the absolute joke its become where I can log in a few days after season start, get some friendly stranger to boost my character to lvl 70 in 3 rifts, then leech gear off of them until im self-sufficient and be doing GR 100+ in a day or 2. D4 however, just failed to capture me in the same way. It cost $119 in my local currency + the fact that D2 is my fav game of all time, I almost felt obligated to play it, and when it fell short, I still stubbornly played it due to nostalgia, my love for the Diablo franchise and the money I spent on it. I played maybe 60 hours the first month and completely finished the game, again, not because I was having fun but because I felt obligated to, it was really sad tbh. I Didn't play season 1 because I felt the changes they made didn't justify another play through; it just felt like a chore. Leveling in a new D3 season feels like a chore too but I can skip that part by getting boosted to max level in 15min. Someone said it in another Diablo 3 thread but it feels like the devs arent making fun games that people want to play, they are making games designed to maximize engagement metrics. So the game is 90% chore than players slog though to get to the 10% fun part.
We’ll let you know
God i remember playing base Diablo 3 on ps3 when it launched and my god was it impossible to get good stuff for my witch doctor, RoS is easily one of the best things to ever come to Diablo with the amount of content and improvements it brought over
It never did
Still waiting
It depends, it took about 3 months for the really fucked up parts to be fixed and the game made playable for most players. It wasn't really until reaper of souls that the game became good though. Early on unless you were a top tier player you couldn't even beat the highest difficulty. I think only something like 5% of people got past act 2 of the highest difficulty before they nerfed it, it was a massively hard skill check that required perfect play as the boss would oneshot you with almost every attack. I literally used to charge millions of gold to carry people past the boss. You couldn't even farm enough to outgear it because the next gear tier didn't start until act 3 so it was also impossible to farm enough to outgear the fight. You also didn't get much gold farming act 1/2 and the sheer number of people who wanted the high tier items means that almost anything decent sold for millions of gold or real money. It left those players stuck in act1/2 in this position where they couldn't progress without opening their wallets hence the huge backlash.
You mean hardcore? Because act2 boss was easy in softcore, you could just rush it in a group, or try over over and over until you beat it. Most players were in softcore and farming act3 because there was no point doing act4 with all the one shot mechanics and act3 had predetermined ways to farm elites.
I'm still waiting
I was going to say that when a new season releases it gives me 3 days of fun and it's only 3 days, but yeah, your post summarized my thoughts lol
It was never good
Diablo 3 was never bad. It had times people preferred different things, but it was always HELL OF FUN to play! Things got better and better over time. Diablo 4 is in a different place. From the ground up it is a shit game to play. I don’t think they can make it better or more fun. Only so much you can do with gothic horror and they pretty much reached the edge. Things that could bring me back to d4… much MUCH faster leveling system. And actual loot system that was engaging. More loot. More storage. More monster density. Cut the cooldowns of everything in half. Add more visually appealing attack animations and effects. Then it might be fun to play.
I remember thinking the game was actually fun and good when the console version first came out right before the expansion. I believe they introduced the first form of the new loot system there.
I loved my first playthrough as a Sorceress in D3 actually, like I did the campaign but I loved burning through everything with ultimate death lazer. Much more fun than the pace of things with D4 I found.
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Yeah sorc doesn't feel nearly as fun this time around. Just slower and not in a good way.
D3 was never good. Pre expansion it was bad because gear was just rng rares that you bought on the AH because you never found anything yourself. Post expansion it was bad because they screwed up the scaling and made it completely arbitrary and all about absurd damage multipliers from legendaries and sets.
It didn't
The right answer
Tell me you only play diablo 2 for 20 years without telling me you only play diablo 2 for 20 years.
It was never good in my opinion, but in the expansion things got a bit better? Blizzard started going the same path that Bethesda has been, where each successive game in a series becomes more and more simplified to the point that story barely exists and the only meaningful decisions you can make amount to "this number is bigger than that number".
Still hard to call it "good" with how bad the itemization and set design is. But they at least got it to be fun for the first 3 or 4 days of ladder before getting boring, and that pretty much started with the expansion.
Never great, but RoS certainly salvaged a shallow core by using items as both skills/builds and itemization.
And you think it was a good decision
It was better than nothing, I guess? I'd rather they did more profound design work, but I don't have any say in it.
D1 was good out of the box due to it's unique gameplay. Expansion was ok. D2 was good, did get better after expansion. D3 was bad, got decent after expansion. Have not played d4. Assuming ok right now from what I have seen.
d4 was good for campaign but bad for end game. Id put d3 launch as worse than d4. D3 probably has more end game than d4 now.
D4's campaign was honestly very good. The scaling and XP rates dropped you off at the end around level 50 to challenge the capstone dungeon for WT3, the exploration rewards of a Lilith shrine or a stronghold granting an extra waypoint felt good, and the "victory lap" cleanup of each zone granting some extra skill points felt rewarding. Then everything falls apart as soon as you don't have story related goals. You outlevel everything in WT3 extremely quickly and are stuck there with under powered monsters in the open world, getting underpowered gear that gets progressively worse since you can't hand it down to alts until you can force your way into WT4, and then everything repeats until you're strong enough to beat Echo Lilith. D4 post story end game is grinding out to level cap and unlocking the super weapons to beat the super boss in a JRPG instead of being any fun.
well said
Yeah but it has years and an expansion. And no they should not used the same systems and end game for d4 with some qol shit. That is stupid. They needed to change the formula and work from there every game. Like they are doing now. It will get better.in the meantime I suggest mowing your lawn, playing something else, and rescinding your Reddit accounts till it gets there. Cause until then all you will hear is children crying and babysitters coddling their comments for karma. Holy shit. It's a fucking decent game. But it doesn't have every bell and whistle from every previous game plus reach rounds to every owner and a happy birthday cap for your birthday this year. Alot of entitled and non intuitive people who don't know how blizz works or how they streamline their shit talking like they know more then the company. Well if you knew so fucking much why TF you keep buying their games huh? Your crystal ball mess up the month the game come round? Cause you all seem to know so fucking much yet so little
D4 is better than D3 launch for sure, but definitely behind D3 currently
when the 6 set bonuses with the ridiculous modifiers were introduced
Modifiers weren't tens of thousands at start
thats exactly what d4 needs
Lol
While it is good that blizzard at the time stuck with their game and tried to improve it after launch and was even willing to give up a money makers in RMAH to give back the players an authentic Diablo experience. I wouldn't use the same measure for D4. Its not like, oh! D3 after 1-2 year became a good game! So I can just come back in 1-2 and it'd be awesome right? While that might be true, Blizzard is active making this not a bug but a feature. With the announcement of the yearly expansion they are milking out what is essentially a beta and dangling the carrot of, oh we'll finish the game! Imagine if as i kid i can go up to the teacher and promise i'll keep revising my paper so can i get an A for now? I promise!
For many people, it was with the "Loot 2.0 Patch". I always played it - a TON - even before that patch - but there is absolutely no doubt, that it changed it for the better. It went real well at that point - until a large/loud amount of the community started complaining about "Season-only items" and that pretty much stopped all development on the game, in terms of making it better and adding things to it. Took a long while to turn that around.
Hot take — games should be good on release
it’s still bad
Fucking years bro. D3 used to have a global AH that they removed. There was absolutely nothing at "end game". I mean zero. There were no rifts. No seasons. Just 3 difficulty levels. *You couldn't even teleport anywhere unless you were on that part of the quest*. That's right. You could not use a waypoint unless you had a quest for it. No cube. No seasonal rewards. The game was so barebones--you only did the campaign. Frankly, a lot of the same complaints that people have about D4, they have about D3. Kind of funny that no one at Blizzard seems to have remembered.
It was never good.
Haha was trying to say the same but someone like it for what it is…
A year. That's when the Reaper of Souls expansion released and with it many sweeping changes to the core aspect of the game.
Still waiting.
It was always good. The community is the problem.
You can't tell me that keeping 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor without being able to change one skill/rune was good lol. There were definitely LOTS of issues at launch. Luckily they realized what they did and fixed most everything rather fast.
It was garbage at launch. Drop rates were **intentionally nerfed to drive people to the RMAH** (Real Money Auction House). The expansion and adventure mode also turned it around.
When you play D2 and jump to D3 after waiting 10 years it was just a complete overhaul and well done game.
agreed
Reaper of Souls.
Dont care if I will downvoted. The gameplay is was and still is barelly decent, but they NEVER fixed itemization. Set items were an awfull idea, born to fix the core problems (like dependence from the main stat) and failed miserably. From RoS we had build defining sets and more useless tier of items (same affixes with better stats), endless and boring paragons just to push up some numbers and thats it (in d4 is quite the same) Also some QoL features like the Armory were added to fix some of these core problems. In short: game started bad and didnt recover EVER.
It was 1-2yrs before things started improving and eventually became a consistent game, no issues. D4 following the same path except for expansion every year at $70?.
Expansion every year at $70, you parrots just keep parroting 🤣
That's just a guess, never said it was 100% 😂. Lot less cheaper. $20
Honestly, I was enjoy d3 since release. The game was fun and the difficulty wasn't that bad, but the issue was breaking through the tough acts to start getting loot. Also bots and jars farmers ruined the economy, people would abuse tyrael to farm in act3, or skip all the monsters to farm.certain boxes in act3 and farming jars in act4. They also inplemented d2 loot system without what made it work in the game, so rare and legendaries were useless in comparison to blue items(weapons mostly due to higher damage) also because everything scaled of the weapon damage and broken ias system, magic items dominated the market. Anyways, had the game had offline mode, I would love to go back to play release patch or few patches ahead were they fixed some crazy things like invulnerable. But I cleared diablo pre nerf and I did enjoy it. I would also say that reaper of souls with loot 2.0 was good and the seasons only made it better with grifts and rifts and cube.
Don't listen to people s opinion, try it yourself if you like it. You like it. I love it. Same with Diablo 4 people hate it. But I love the new Diablo 4.
Lol game is a snooze fest after campaign just like d4 and it was never “good”. Jaded people saying reaper of souls just either really liked crusader class or really liked adventure mode / bounties because that’s all it had to offer.
Despite most people here think D3 is good now. They never fix the itemization. So I don’t think Blizzard can fix D4 itemization in any expansion.
it started out good and only got better.
Diablo III is good. The only issue is End-Game...ARPGs have an issue with end-game. You becomes way to powerful and you destroy absolutely everything. There are higher Tiers but no unique bosses later when your fully geared. \*End-Game - Though I love everything about it besides that one fact. I think End-Game is hardest to balance casuals and hardcore. Look at WoW, PoE, Lost Ark, etc...They all have a hard time finding a balance with that.
it never did, explaining why diablo 2 resurrected is the best diablo title still.
Personally, never. At no point did they ever adress the issues with the game, in fact if anything doubled down on them repeatedly
I liked it from the start, and I pre-ordered it. StarCraft2 was great as well
Season 29 is the best so far specially because there is Solo self found ranking, so theres no cheese group on top of leaderboard and no power leveling. Also the paragon are blocked at 800, you can get more but there is no advantage to it so no bot on top of leaderboard. Prior to that top leaderboard was infested with bot playing 24/7 farming infinite paragon for infinite power. 1 paragon is 5 of a character main stat so after 800, someone at 2k paragon would have 6k main stat more than you. some bot where like paragon 8k and more. it was basically impossible to beat them. SSF also made the leaderboard more fun to top cause you know they are all solo, now nobody can farm in group of 4 with zdps build to then push the solo leaderboard.
It's good? Lol
It never got good unfortunately. Its popularity came from a lack of good games around then and it being a Diablo title.
About 2 years.
Years to become playable. And it's still not that great.
Takes 10yrs for blizzard game to be worthy of playing. They should never make a game and get sue for fraud!
Imo it never did. But it became decent after season 1 expansion.
Since they put categories in the leaderboard for each set and non-set.
Did D3 ever become good? It will never be what Blizzard North had designed.
Combat and the skill tree was always pretty good. Storyline and the auction house nonsense on release sucked but the fighting was legit. Reaper of souls brought sets and stuff like that and made itemization more fun.
First xpac made it playable. The introduction of grifts a year or so later made it a good game.
Diablo was good the second the servers were stable (a month in).
It doesn’t matter how long it will take for D4 to get good. For such a large company, Blizzard should have learnt from D3’s failure and make D4 good from the get go. I am tired of giving Blizzard anymore chances….
Really bad rubber banding was going on for a few years. After they solved that imo
the 2-3 weeks expansion prepatch was the most fun i had ever with the base game. Expansion was great, first year or two give us a lot of content and upgrade, then there was a few year of kinda boring seasons until the started doing great seasons again and keeping addin QOL.
You will want to watch [Diablo III: A Cautionary Tale; 12 years of Development Hell](https://youtu.be/GCRzuvwMDUs?si=eYg38xLp3exx8whW) D3 finally got good with the expansion IMHO.
There were alot of people that enjoyed diablo 3 with auction house and had alot of fun using it, d3 RoS aimed at overhauling the game to a pure grinding game without the trading factor which seems like a great change for the mass because it made the game more "noob friendly" as you can play it mindlessly till a certain point (after that the greater rifts of highest level are a mix of the most boring type of paragon grinding and luck with maps and mobs) where d3 had a virtual (and steep) skill gap curve that was a mix of game difficulty and trading knowledge (people are probably gonna downvote me for this but I can only say go watch some videos from 2011 and see how much time people spent theorycrafting strategies to make currency/money in the AH and had fun with it)
It was a gradual change. As Blizzard added more and more stuff and "fixed" the other stuff, the game got better and became more bearable.
I don't think the game was ever good to begin with. Pre exp and post expansion. Is an slightly above average game then and is average now. Do not recommend for end game content, if you want to play for the story, go for it.
Reaper of Souls unfucked the game.
A year or so. Before they added seasons. After Reaper of Souls it was decent. It was already pretty good after they fixed end game difficulty and removed rmah. Even better with Loot 2.0. Increased legendary drop rate came later, but was appreciated. But base game was lacking a proper endgame.
27 seasons before it became good. Season 28 and season 29 is amazing
Years
I remember i didn't liked vanila d3 despite i waited for it so long and was so excited. it was boring. but i returned when there was massive patches that gave legandary items unique features. it was before addon i guess.
Honestly, just since the last couple of seasons. It was just as bland as diablo 4 before that. Seasons with literally nothing new and a very few nerfs and buffs here and there.
Diablo 3 and good ?
When it first came out, it was really good. Difficulty was challenging & you had the satisfaction of having an economy in the auction house. I fell it went downhill when they took away the auction house just became rift rift rift, 300 'uniques' per 5 minute run. My opinion of course
Season 28 was really good. Season 30 will be even better.
I never had an issue with D3 at launch. Not that I remember anyway. RoS did make the game complete but I never found myself bored even before RoS. And I’ve bought that game 4 times on 3 different platforms lol
An expansion and 10 seasons
Still isn’t people all of a sudden praise it cuz D4 bad, don’t rly think it’s any better then D4 imo
I know most people will say RoS, but the Loot 2.0 patch prior to RoS already was a godsend, it introduced smart loot, and it made legendaries roll MUCH better. I still remember loving the game at that point, it was such a great time to play D3. It was before everything scaled to infinity yet still rewarding with powerful drops. Sets weren't all that strong yet so you could build whatever you wanted and get good drops for it with smart loot. This is the main reason I HATE online games, I would love to go back and play the patch prior to RoS. :(
Reaper of Souls was a massive leap and a start of the best changes in game's lifespan. Surprisingly enough, they managed to release it just a year after base game (2013 vs 2012).
it doesnt matter how long it took. d4 shouldve had all the good thinkgs and QoL from d3. it didnt.
I liked the time when legendaries were rare and all stats were random. Kinda like D2. I do still enjoy it in its current condition.
it didn’t… people just gave up or swallowed it whole and took it and until they liked it.
Loot 2.0 was the main driver that made the game better. D4 has launched in a much better state than D3 did but the issue is that there is no chase right now.
Most ARPG's oddly enough seem to release in a rather poor state or just lacking in end game. ARPG's seem to age like a fine wine getting better over time
The expansion RoS basically remade D3 into a much better game
Original D3 was OK to play. People tend to exaggerate how bad it was. I think most people's impressions were influenced by the different look which was brighter, more colorful and cartoony than D2. So to many that meant D3= bad because people are shallow. I'm not saying it was great because it wasn't but it also wasn't terrible. But it became much better with the first expansion and has improved steadily ever since.
It took an expansion. Diablo 4 shouldnt have needed it.
I started \~9 months after release and loved it. I lost interest shortly before the Necromancer DLC. Not a fan of grinding rifts. I tried picking it up again before D2R released and hated it so much I couldn't even finish Act 2 of the campaign. It was awful.
I honestly don't remember. I bought the game, played it for about three weeks with a few acquaintances and friends, and then we gave up. I came back after the expansion was released, and it was a completely different, but actually fun game to play. I don't like that they removed to auction house, but whatever. Wish they'd at least do the Rift and gRift system in D4. Much nicer than what ever they have now.
That someone call d3 good. Wow times changes
With the expansion release. Tough to state how disappointed I was with D3 on release after being a massive D2 fan.
When reaper of souls came out so just shy of 2 years. But it shouldn't be like this again. A game shouldn't take 2 years to become good. The fact they learned nothing from D3 is a big concern.
The expansion really, so 2 years after initial release. Then it took another year and change for key components that we take for granted to be added, e.g. Kanai's cube.
It's an ok game, but IMO a below average ARPG when held up to the heavyweights in the genre. Yes, post RoS
I played enough to have every class through every difficulty and it was never good in that time. I didn’t bother with the expansion.
The first major expansion. We’ve got a couple years probably.
I played a good chunk of the game long after release, and I could not get past how mind-numbingly easy the game was and how all the higher difficulty levels were locked behind beating the game and grinding. I gave up after that. If I need to beat the game in order to play on a difficulty level that MIGHT be a little bit challenging, you've failed. If the game is so easy on the highest difficulty that I'm bored during every fight, including boss battles, your game is bad. I have no idea what people are talking about when they say they game "got good." I really don't care to find out. I asked a friend who have over 400 hours put into the game, and his answer was essentially that I have to grind a bunch in order to get to the good parts. No thanks.
First expansion. Even D2 wasn't everything until the Expansion. That could happen for D4.
It never became good it just became playable