How is D3 inferior to D2? (considering the new expac and loot 2.0 for d3)
New expansion, the price of a brand new full PC game for an extra class, some meaningless fluff + one more act, just another validation to Blizzards greed. Loot 2.0? a good idea except the whole item system was smashed beforehand. Those aside I will write down some reasons for you why I feel D2 is the superior game, even with all of its own flaws.
The first and most basic of my reasons, Diablo 2 just feels much more like a "Diablo" game, by that I mean the general atmosphere, each Act in Diablo 2 felt unique to me, the locations nicely different but equally as "dark" , the entire game just feels far more grimy and ridden with evil, a horror aspect to the atmosphere, like it should.
On the other hand, even with the superior graphics and fancy physics, Diablo 3 looks like a World of Warcraft cartoon, why they made it this way I don't know, but it took away the horror aspect of the game, which helped make an awesome atmosphere in the previous games. Not many of the locations in the game made me really feel anything, it was just boring, not even places I could say " Damn I hate this place " like I hate the Act 3 Jungle in Diablo 2, just very few locations are worth remembering, the lack of atmosphere is shameful considering how awesome it is in Diablo 2.
Onto the next thing, the entire character building system, the item system, item stats, how they interact with characters and your enemies. They ripped the guts out of the game and IMO, it was for the worst.
All the entire character building ( or should I say lack of character building ) and skill system in Diablo 3 bores me. You might think "Cool, I have a monk, I can change his skills to whatever I like whenever I like, awesome", but I feel this destroys the uniqueness of your characters and the classes become a meaningless blur where you don't even have to think about what you're doing with it. I struggled to make a bad build and even with a terrible combination of skills you can spam your way through everything. That combined with these checkpoints, death being meaningless and having no effect on your progress, all begin to dumb down the game. I much more enjoy the system of Diablo 2, where you actually spend your skill and stat points into the places you want them.
The whole system just feels meaningless and left me with no feeling of attachment to my characters. It is much more enjoyable in Diablo 2 creating a character with a certain build regardless of class, ranging from cheesy builds, all round builds, to specialized. Items, gems in weapons and skills having physical or different elemental damages, with monsters that could literally be immune to the type of damage your character and his/her items mainly deal and you just have to deal with it using your brain, or perhaps putting together a new weapon with a certain Gem that adds a damage type the monster isn't immune to. It also meant that playing with other players was a very good idea, the multiplayer part of the game felt meaningful, having a good party with a variety of strengths and weaknesses that together can overcome the obstacles. Diablo 3 just involves everyone spamming anything they want because pretty much nothing in the game is ever that difficult to overcome for any class.
Item drops, anyone could pick it up in D2, they weren't unique to only your screen, this created far more player interaction and not so easy to get awesome items all of the time, sure it could be annoying at times but that is another thing that IMO adds more competition and less hand holding to the game and again adds more to player interaction. Also with no auction house ever ( Should have never have been in D3 and took way too long for them to remove it ), people actually traded things in game one to one, they made their own game room with a name to state their trade intentions and people joined and bartered.
Sure, there is a large black market now on Diablo 2 where you can buy the items you want for your real cash and someone will deliver it to you ingame, but the games 14 years old and pretty much dead where online community is concerned so Blizzard haven't given a fuck for a long time, that's not my point though, I'm talking about when the game was 'current' and to be judged upon.
Gems and runes, two things that were done much better in Diablo 2 and had far more variety and were actually sought after, in Diablo 3 I had whatever gems I wanted coming out of my ass not far into the game and the stats for them were retarded, why they did away with the damage type and resistances for the gems, along with using that to add difficulty to monsters, I have no idea.
The entire quest system and "room" system, no lobby, I mean what the fuck is this shit in Diablo 3, in Diablo 2 you just created a fucking game however you wanted it, people would see it on the list and join if they wanted to, if you've done the quests they're done, you can still go and kill the bosses again if you want and go wherever you wanted to. It was just a far simpler and straight forward system and I've got no clue why they didn't just try to improve upon that instead of using this lame queue and match making system.
Even with the new loot system in D3, I still far more enjoyed finding decent stuff in Diablo 2 the last time I played it than I did when I played Diablo 3 ( Diablo 2 not so long ago and Diablo 3 very recently ). The skill +'s and certain attributes they could come with meant that when you found an item that was perfect for your class AND build it was far more rewarding than anything I found in Diablo 3, because in D3 it's a simple case of "that weapon is better than that weapon because A is higher than B", where as in Diablo 2 an item could be mediocre for one build of a class but be amazing for another build of the same class.
Well I am just babbling on now between playing with my son and tidying up so it's hard for me to keep track of what I've written, best to end it here as I can probably think of a thousand more paragraphs of things that D3 should have learned from D2 and didn't. I'll happily write more once I've had the chance to read the most likely hard to read paragraphs I've already smashed out onto my keyboard. Or if you have any more specific questions Vibe to as why I feel D3 is a failure of a sequel you can go ahead and ask them lol.
