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S3 Ep255: Diablo: Then and Now
80 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about the food, The Burrito Boy, and finally compare and contrast where the Diablo series has been to where it is going in this week's episode!
Intro:
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Intro:
- Diablo 2 Resurrected: Rogue Encampment
- Diablo 2 Resurrected: Wilderness
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Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Dinner Discussions
00:00:37
Speaker
How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of Supstone. My name is Jake and I'm joined by my co-host as always Dave. How's it going tonight Dave?
00:00:45
Speaker
That's fine. Nothing is too crazy. If you could change one thing about your night to make it better, what would it be? If I had enough time to do groceries because work stuff didn't explode towards the end of the day. That would be that would be my ideal. Mm hmm. So maybe I would have made dinner instead of snacking on Luna bars, almonds and gatehole raid. Yeah, I had a lean quizzing. I had an orange chicken.
00:01:15
Speaker
It was pretty good. They were the, I don't know, they have some sort of sub-products thing. It's the linguizine, but it was pretty decent. I haven't had their stuff in easily a decade. I just remember having like a little linguini dish or something pasta related. We got a couple pastas. I think we got a couple of Fredo's. They're honestly not bad. I'm kind of fat, so it doesn't really feel like it's enough food for me all the time.
00:01:44
Speaker
I think that's also the point.
Frozen Meal Preferences
00:01:50
Speaker
This cuisine doesn't have enough food. I need some sort of fat cuisine, like something for me, a man. Something for men. A man who would be hungry. Cade cuisine. Ravenous boy.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, I will say I don't think I ever actually tried the hungry man dinners Mainly because I was young lad at the time and also it's just like sick Oh, it's a lot of like steak and potatoes type stuff. I'm like, yeah, but I wanted something cool like kid cuisine had like a little bonus Every time should go I have you like at the core and I have the oh, but I have a brownie So like that was like don't you have to look forward to? Mm-hmm. Yeah
00:02:42
Speaker
I do enjoy some of the ones where the ingredients are separate, but in particular, if it's something where you can just like mash it all together and then be like, this is what I would do to a traditional like Mexican plate and just treat it like that.
Homemade Burrito Tips
00:02:54
Speaker
I also like that. So I had like meatloaf, which can be hit or miss, I will say in frozen food and like seasoned mashed potatoes and just like collapse in upon itself, form of the whirlwind and then consume with fork.
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah, those were pretty good. Those were pretty good. I do like
00:03:10
Speaker
Yeah, like it doesn't need to be like fully like I wouldn't blend any of this food together Because they're like you've lost texture. That's too much but mixing it a hundred percent Because like if I have an actual like plate of food at like oh I made dinner or like I'm over to friends or go to a restaurant and it's separated I'm gonna just like grab like a fork and be like one two three like I'm trying to get a bite of everything once anyway You make it so Bob basically with the fork
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, you know.
00:03:42
Speaker
There was something else I had recently. This is food that I prepared. I will now undermine everyone's expectation that has expectations. Hold on. Including Dave, yeah. We had some refried beans. I'm like, okay, tortilla and mango heated up the tortilla for me. So I was like, oh, nice. And I was like put on the refried beans and I like had some cheese and some like sour cream. And then one of them I added ranch. I had two. I added ranch to one of them.
00:04:10
Speaker
And I added hot sauce to the other one. It was, I can't remember the name of the hot sauce now. Nashville Hot to the other one. And I was like, all right, let's freakin' go. Microwave them again so the cheese will melt and stuff like that. You get that good actual burrito thing rather than just a slice of cheese in your burrito. And then I was eating it. I was like, man.
00:04:36
Speaker
Hot sauce is kind of hot. I kind of wish I was like, oh, I got ranch in the other one. So I was cutting them into pieces and then like doing the kebab basic thing, you know, scoop a little bit of refit. Mixing and matching. Yes, it became a fork dish, but it was pretty good. I like how like I had a tortilla. I put three different types of fat in it. I'm like, where's the protein here? Like the cart. Beans of protein. Beans of protein.
00:05:05
Speaker
I mean, if you just threw like a little bit of chicken in there, you're like some diced onion. Peppers. I'm basically saying build a burrito. Yes. That's fair. That's fair. I've seen it done enough times at like Chipotle or some other place that I know what people expect to be in a burrito, but this was not necessarily that.
Diablo Series Evolution
00:05:31
Speaker
I will say as somebody who has made burritos professionally and by that I mean just at home alone. I watch the YouTube video like here's how you make burritos wrong. You should have said for a living because you would have died if you didn't eat food. I need burritos, doctor's orders. But the two key things are to... I've been doing burrito boy is what the doctor says when you come in.
00:05:59
Speaker
best burrito boy L.A. if I'm sorry my head cannons been expanding for medical treatment I should just throw out like enough false information about my diet so there are pieces together like how many pounds is this man
00:06:19
Speaker
But basically you want to actually heat up the tortilla so it's a little more pliable so that when you do like the ingredients and like roll that it doesn't just tear. The other thing is to slather that bitch in butter, not like slather like have it, but like you should at least do a coating, which definitely helps. And then also once you have all your ingredients together, you should wrap it in foil and like let it sit for a bit or honestly like throw it back in the toaster oven so that everything can kind of like meet, meet in the middle, get to know each other.
00:06:49
Speaker
Gotcha. That does sound pretty good. I don't have a toaster oven. I probably would use it. We have an oven and Mango will use that for cooking things, but that's a little bit heavier commitment than I usually want to aim for. It depends on the toaster oven.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think we can conventionally get tortillas above a certain size. You and Mango have like the giant pizza. Uh-huh. What is it? I know what you're thinking of. It's not a spatula. No, imagine like the giant thing that you get to take a pizza out of an oven from like five feet away. The social distancing pizza grabber. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
00:07:38
Speaker
I still want to call it a spatula. It is pretty much what it is. Pizza pan? No. Something else. Anyways, right in with whatever that is. We'll forget to look it up within the next 40 minutes. Oh yeah, for sure. But you know what we won't forget about in the next 40 minutes? Video games. So Diablo is one of them.
00:08:08
Speaker
That's your segue. You know, take it. Oh, I will be doing the rest of the podcast episode. Everybody. Hello, my name is Dave. And so we kind of wanted to, with the resurgence of playing some Diablo two remastered, um, kind of want to go back and look at some of the Diablos and how they have progressed over time, uh, what has changed, what's good, what sucks Diablo three and just see where we're expecting things to go for Diablo four.
00:08:38
Speaker
I have a pun I have to throw in here. We'll see where it Dia goes or see what titles Dia blow.
00:08:50
Speaker
some of the fifth
00:09:10
Speaker
it's obviously like a gothic isometric rpg it was like the big progenitor i would say at least as far as blizzards concerns and it just had so much good theming and i want to say art direction because compared everything else it looks so bad now at the time i accepted it because you liked
00:09:33
Speaker
Was it comparing it to DOS? Like you had very limited options overall. So this was a huge step up at the time But going back yeah talking about the art style it's like oh is this the orange enemy or is this the red enemy? It's not quite that bad, but it literally is like the pics the pixels are like nothing even classic Diablo tuition I will talk about at some point had tiny resolution and Diablo one was a more basic game than that
00:10:02
Speaker
It was like but it laid a lot hard for the series a hard 800 by 600. Mm-hmm. Yeah the thing The thing about like Diablo 1 is it's actually kind of surprising how much of it made it over into Diablo 2 as far as just like gear and Combat and things like that like those the systems got improved but it was literally like
00:10:30
Speaker
the idea of just killing enemies, going down cave after cave after cave, or in this case, dungeon after dungeon after dungeon. That's the entire game, getting loot, making it to the end and then, you know, slamming a crystal into your skull. The ultimate flex, I guess. Yo, check this shit out. Hold my beer. But I didn't play it either.
00:10:56
Speaker
So I won't, I won't say too much for it, but I do know that it informed Diablo 2 a lot and I joke, but they, it was a success, right? This was the creator of the ARPG genre as we consider it now or CRPG.
Diablo II Multiplayer Insights
00:11:11
Speaker
And I think Diablo II is really where it took off because that's when they had the addition of multiplayer for Battle.net. And I felt this personally, but it felt good to be validated by a YouTube video, by a prolific YouTuber who is saying like,
00:11:29
Speaker
playing through single player you're like yeah this I can kind of do things on normal I guess but then like you reach these points where it really feels like you need to play with other people to like get their buffs and other things as you play with more people the game does get more difficult but if you're able to stack
00:11:47
Speaker
certain buffs or have somebody cover a damage that you can't do. Like maybe you're all physical and you find like the one ghost enemy who's like, fuck you. You can have somebody who's using like fire magic to deal with that. So that's really helpful because like the loot table itself
00:12:05
Speaker
Like, part of what I enjoyed about Diablo 2 was it was fresh, it was new, it was exciting, it was dark, it was gothic. And when you were exploring like this desolate wasteland and you found something cool, you're like, oh, holy shit, I got this rare item, it does like five different things, I'm gonna hold on this forever, right? Then you find something better later. But it was so few and far between.
00:12:30
Speaker
So it was very difficult to beat certain things because you were missing stats or your skills sucked or whatever it was. So I'm glad they had multiplayer because I think everybody's experiences, I kind of played through part of the campaign and somebody ran me through 90% of the game. Because there's always a higher level person who's like willing to help out like you want to run something? Yeah, let's go.
00:12:56
Speaker
But that's something I actually really liked about the Diablo community because I went in as a young lad, didn't know what I was doing. I definitely experienced a lot of scams and stuff from like little tips and tricks in the game that I didn't know about yet. Don't turn me your arm or stuff like that. Yeah. Or hey, can I just check your item quicker? Hey, drop it over here. And somebody just telekinesis. There's a whole bunch of things. D&D message with like your account name and password. That was a classic one.
00:13:23
Speaker
I learned a lot at that age but there are so many people who were willing to help you and run you on stuff to help your progression because somebody helped them. So, it really had a good track record of paying it forward, right? And I definitely did some, probably not as much as I could have or should have but...
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, I will say, so jumping out on the community for Diablo 2, I can admit to this, I torrented the game when I first played it, so I was on allowedonbattle.net.
00:13:58
Speaker
I can say this because I've served my time was 40 years in Azkaban, but I made it through and I did have one friend back then so if you weren't on battle.net you could play over direct IP connection on characters that are
00:14:15
Speaker
Just local characters not not validated on battle.net and I think the game still had cheating. I'm pretty sure it did But it was you didn't have to try to cheat on local you could just cheat But I had like the one friend and I kind of felt the absence of that, you know Not really being part of the community that could push you through some of this more difficult content Because they're like straight-up cliffs of difficulty in Diablo 2 where it's like
00:14:45
Speaker
It feels like a pretty reasonable slope and then it's just like it goes vertical The limit does not exist you just slam your face into it, but pretty much And it would have been nice to have that community there I think what you're describing there is kind of banding together to get over it kind of uplift the newer characters Get them into the ecosystem. It's something that's almost
00:15:10
Speaker
I think of it more in MMOs than I do more small co-op or single player experiences, but it was definitely there. It was definitely present in Diablo 2, which pretty much was, maybe that's because people treated that game kind of like an MMO.
00:15:30
Speaker
yeah honestly like I've played other airpgs where that's just not really a thing yeah I think a lot of it is but you can progress with people if you party with them but typically you're not partying just because I think it's shared loots
00:15:47
Speaker
I feel like everything should be incensed, personally. Because in Diablo 2, it fucking wasn't. Because you do those cow runs and you have one person who's running the whole group and you have what are called vultures, me being one of them as a low-level character, who's running around just scraping for like, that looks shiny, let me grab that.
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of the Wild West. They hadn't solidified how they want these structures to work. I mean, that was the last Diablo that had shared loot in the same instance.
00:16:29
Speaker
there might have been a time where that was true in three I don't think so though I think it was always instant salute but could be wrong it's been a long time though even even three is becoming old at this point that's all how long Diablo has been around but I definitely do have some things I want to say about three but that's fair I'm gonna I'm gonna be the balancing I'll be the devil's advocate for this or Diablo's advocate I can't believe I missed that oh my god that was so good yeah right
00:17:00
Speaker
Because I don't hate the modern ones as much, and I definitely think there's some things that improved. And I also saw some of the flaws in two, which I know we'll kind of get into as we go through it. But I know, I know. Hard to believe that they didn't just absolutely nail it the first
Diablo II vs III: Skill Systems
00:17:15
Speaker
time. So I'll be the first to kick Diablo II in the shins. Sure. Graphically, not great to go back to. Fucking sucks. Resurrected's pretty good, though.
00:17:28
Speaker
Getting there. Hold on. I thought that's what we were talking about. My apologies. So just at least with the Apple II, and this is still true of resurrected, the combat, like a lot of your build options for different classes felt very similar for a lot of the options because a lot of them it's like, hey, I'm going to hit somebody a bunch physically with a melee attack.
00:17:49
Speaker
Okay, that covers like at least one of each of the classes and like there were some other branching things out but I felt like there were only maybe two or three tops that were like, oh, you can do this, this or this. And a lot of your damage was just from like skills and you really could only level up so many of a given thing and it didn't make sense to like use something else. So when you were in combat, you essentially had like two buttons bound.
00:18:16
Speaker
I'm going to use this spell or I'm going to use this other spell. So it felt very limiting as far as your options. Not at the time because that's all you knew. But compared to something newer like Diablo 3 or Diablo 4 where you have multiple, you're like
00:18:31
Speaker
I feel like that's an improvement at least. Yeah. I mean, it's worth noting that for Diablo II and resurrected, like you still could bind skills to the function keys. So you could be casting things quickly. You're just like, oh, hit F3 to go to teleport and then right click to jump and hit F1 to go back to your attack or whatever. But I mean, that's not really a convenient input scheme. And they did rectify that eventually.
00:18:58
Speaker
The skill system was very interesting in 2 for me because I actually like so much about Diablo 2 was like wild west of let's just try something and maybe it's inspired and maybe it's terrible. But we don't know how people are going to address this, right?
00:19:17
Speaker
They seemed like they had a lot of great ideas on paper, but they didn't know how people might interact with it, right? This hasn't gone through thousands of QA testers to see how it all played out, play testers to see how it played out. And the skills were the thing that got me. Even when I came back to the game, I was like,
00:19:35
Speaker
This skill sounds kind of cool, I'm gonna put a point in it. Build ruined. Like, freakin' immediately. And not technically. You can kind of make that up or you can get carried through some of the harder fights until you can, like, get another respec, but you only get one respec per difficulty unless you... It's like, kill every boss in the endgame and it's a rare drop of the things that can actually provide it. It's insane. Maybe?
00:20:00
Speaker
I feel like the whole respecting thing got added way after I initially played because it's usually very much like 0.2. I don't know how long that was. Like even now for like the character I have in Diablo 2 resurrected, I'm holding so many fucking stat points because I'm like, I don't know what I need yet. Like I don't know what the final build is and I want to lock myself out or have to use one of my respects when it's so limited.
00:20:27
Speaker
Right. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about the system and ARPGs in general, right? Because this is really, this is a grandparent to where skill trees have gone in subsequent games. How do you feel about kind of locking people into their choices as they make them? And how much information should people have before they even click those choices?
00:20:55
Speaker
Uh, I, I don't dislike locking people in. Um, so you do, you do like to turn the double negative. Yeah, a little bit, uh, partially because it's what I grew up with when I'm used to, because if I like really hated something after like 20 minutes playing character, um, I would probably switch out. Now, unfortunately, Diablo two has some like major skills every six levels.
00:21:23
Speaker
So, it takes a little bit to get to level 30 unless somebody's running you. So, if you're like, oh, I'm really curious to like try this at level 30 spell and then you get there, you're like, I don't like it. And essentially, all the points you put towards that are now kind of null and void. So, that part sucks. But I've also made so many burner characters. So, like for me, it's not a huge factor.
00:21:47
Speaker
I think respecting should be an option to some degree. So you should be fully locked out. But I think people should be forced to commit a little bit for what they're doing. Right. There should be some sort of price to pay, probably, to lend some credence to it. I kind of am split on this. I'm almost in the exact opposite camp, I guess, if I think about it.
00:22:17
Speaker
Starting with three, they basically remove the need to respect it all because all of the skills are just available to you as you level up for your class. And then the choice became which active skills do you want to equip.
00:22:33
Speaker
Like one through four I think and then left click right click and Also like what passives do you want to equip to those skills? So that's where the customization came in and it could vary up your playstyle dramatically. Maybe you have more spenders generators, whatever the crap But you couldn't make a mistake if you kind of if you try to skill and you're like this sucks You could just take it off your bar
00:23:01
Speaker
And I recognize that there's a price to pay for that, right? Like there's no incentive to roll a second barbarian, for instance, in Diablo because yes, there's no difference between a level 60 barbarian and a level 60 barbarian besides gear. And then whatever they picked for their flavor of the month skillset. Um, but is that a loss? You know, do you want to make multiple?
00:23:27
Speaker
I wanna make a comment, I feel like I have to make a very brief detraction to just say one thing about remastered. It's gorgeous. If you don't realize the disparity between how the original looks and how remastered looks, but like even the cutscenes, like just going back and watching some of that, wildly different, huge. So I actually played Diablo 3 for like an hour last night. Okay. More research than I did for this.
00:23:54
Speaker
I just let Dice, Dice I love you, I know you're listening, talk to me for like an hour about all these mechanics and stuff because honestly I wouldn't have known quickly so I got a good amount of data all at once. But so much of that game for me feels too polished, too smooth, like you could just
00:24:16
Speaker
Part of it is the art style. It seemed to have lost some of the appeal for me with the aesthetic. It feels more like Torchlight or World of Warcraft. It's more fantasy and dark graphics. The items themselves. Yeah. But also even the items don't take up as much space. You don't have an eight section thing to put in your inventory. Now, for convenience in modern gameplay, it's so much nicer to be able to pick up a whole inventory of 30 items. Huge.
00:24:45
Speaker
But it feels like they're just like the number scaling of everything, the scaling of everything, not just damage is so wildly different in 3 because they're like, hey, you've done a story, like you want to do endgame content. So like they're throwing magic stuff at you, you have different ways to make progression, you can change your build around.
00:25:06
Speaker
But for me, it's like there's no stakes in it almost And I like a little bit of stakes whether it's in plot like a TV show Whether it's like death in a game like Elden Ring Like I want my actions whether successful or unsuccessful to be a little bit impactful And for three, I think a lot of that is lost for me because it's just like streamline. We got you. I
00:25:34
Speaker
It's like you can't make mistakes in three, like you said. It's very just...
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think part of that is because of the Blizzard-ification, basically, of Diablo, starting with three. And for people who play Blizzard games, you know that generally they might not massively innovate in a game, but they're going to pull so many things together and then just polish the heck out of it to the point where it is the most approachable version of that product. Yes. That it's pretty good. And I don't think it's a bad thing at all.
00:26:07
Speaker
Yeah, that needs to exist. Someone needs to be the best at that, I think. It's what they did with WoW. It's what they did with Overwatch. It's just, that's their thing. And they were trying to do, I think, more with Diablo 3, but clearly, like, I think it's not just you who thought that they missed the mark on that.
00:26:29
Speaker
The real money shop existing literally impacted a lot. That's the classic. It's not even that it was bad on its own. I do remember seeing someone who I think it was the first week had a rare quality, so this is yellow quality ring on the shop for $200 and somebody else bought it and I was like I'm out.
00:26:54
Speaker
But yeah, I know some people probably those in countries where the US dollar is maybe a little bit stronger, they did all right than those opening weeks of Diablo 3. But they had to change the drop rates and everything like that to make sure that they didn't flood the market. And it was just terrible for a single player experience, but I digress. I don't hate that part of it being casual.
00:27:16
Speaker
But the difficulty is the other part for me. I want to be able to change my skills around in response to a threat to have a more efficient build. That's kind of what I want. I want that sort of versatility. I want to be able to not have to look at a guide to know what I should bring in, but also not have to play with other people.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah. But I would say, I'm sure we'll talk about the difficulty in two. I'll let you have that one. But the difficulty in three is pretty much a cakewalk through normal difficulty. And that game was designed especially at launch. You got to remember that like this end game content like rifts and bounties and stuff like that. That didn't exist when the game launched.
00:28:04
Speaker
The game content for three was just continue to beat the game campaign over and over and over on harder difficulties. Into torment, higher levels of torment and it was just everything scales higher. More magic find, more gold, more incoming damage, more enemy health. That was the game.
Diablo III Gameplay and Community
00:28:28
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely feels like they're just like, hey, we're going to give you this end game slider. Do with it what you will. And it was just for everything. And again, that's fine if you're like, I enjoy this type of thing. But when I was talking with Dice last night, I was like, oh, I remember playing on my whirlwind barbarian and doing riffs. And basically, I just held right click and would just drag my mouse around the map.
00:28:52
Speaker
And I was like, oh, now that I look back at it, I was basically playing Vampire Survivors in a different fashion. And I'm like, that's not what I wanted from an RPG of gameplay. But at the same time, if I look at something like Path of Exile, which I will not go into because it's his own own beast. That's next week's episode.
00:29:13
Speaker
all batches but it a lot of their pages will have that similar type of thing were like basically you are trying to go for all I will be able to clear harder maps I need more damage but like my bills saying roughly the same on
00:29:32
Speaker
Each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. I feel like it's really just what is good for you personally. But I think for me, I wanted more of the aesthetic and pacing of two. Even though the difficulty spikes, you're kind of like bullshit. And like, would you agree that difficulty is what forces creativity, innovation, and kind of even the need to farm in these types of games?
00:30:01
Speaker
I thought Eldering was easy. I went bonk build. But no, it definitely does. For any game, I always enjoy the creativity aspect of theory crafting a build to figure out like, oh, what if I put these two things together? And it feels good when your creativity gets rewarded or you find a solution to provide a challenge.
00:30:27
Speaker
I would argue, I know you're the same way where you like finding stuff or finding the most optimal thing for your given build. But I think a lot of people are the same way where it feels rewarding to solve it in that way versus just like the, here you go.
00:30:45
Speaker
Yeah. And it's kind of meaningless to solve it or make a super optimized build, if anything works. And that's the way that early Diablo was for three. You got to, you got to remember, like a lot of people only play through the game once. Right. That's true. Stories done. I saw the credits. Why would I keep playing? I don't understand. Why are you talking to me? Who are you? Get up my house. At least when I interview people for these episodes. How does that contrast with the difficulty of two though?
00:31:15
Speaker
I mean two just sucks difficulty wise because even on what I mentioned like for the single player like there would be some spikes of certain bosses like you really had to have your build together and you're like I didn't realize I was making a build without just you know surviving stuff.
00:31:33
Speaker
But as you go to the higher difficulties, I mean obviously things are scaled higher for like health and damage, but it also just nukes your resistances. And you're like, what's a resistance? Like how much damage you can take from other shit? And it's a lot. So if you don't have full resistances or as high as you can get them, which is usually 80, 85% for a lot of things, you fucking feel it.
00:31:56
Speaker
Like one enemy type, well, my go-to example is like the beetle in act two, where every time you hit it, charge bolts come out. And it would just take out chunks of your health. But that's just an example. It was just welcome to the desert. And as soon as you leave the town, a beetle attacks you. You're like, oh, that kind of hurts. Tell you attacking the beetle. And you're like, that hurts a lot. Maybe I'll just let the beetle hit me. The beetle's not that much of a problem.
00:32:26
Speaker
Legitimately running by them is probably distracting. I'm only here to kill maggots and that's it. Maggots and cats. But one of the stats that was pretty prominent in Diablo 2 was FHR, faster hit recovery. So that means when you get hit, you always have like a stun, like you're kind of like knocked back a little bit. We call this jab locking and smash.
00:32:55
Speaker
There's a time where you can't interact or do something. So if you have like four enemies taking turns hitting you, you're basically just hits done, you're fucked. So the more FHR you had, the faster you could recover and interact or do something to get out of that situation where they're bonking you.
00:33:10
Speaker
I don't know if other games have that as prominently, but it was a stat you actually need to put in to adaptability in Dark Souls 2. They're like, hey, this is a thing. What an interesting comparison. How did you feel about faster hit recovery if you're comparing it to adaptability in Dark Souls 2? I didn't like it.
00:33:33
Speaker
A lot of times it was just more so like it would be on an item. You're like, oh, I need some of this, but you didn't care about it too, too much because usually you'd have a way to teleport around certain things. I don't know. That's fair. There were some other ones. So some of those continued to make
00:33:56
Speaker
I guess maybe defensive stats on that don't necessarily feel good to need if you feel like it's mandatory. Adaptability is really the worst. I'm a Dark Souls 2 apologist and I even think faster hit recovery is still better than adaptability. Nobody wants adaptability. Which, for the listeners who aren't familiar, is basically you get just a microscopic couple extra iframes when you do dodges in Dark Souls.
00:34:25
Speaker
So that's the comparison here, but like it's not fun because it doesn't this it's not making your build better to get that stat It's not making you do more damage. And if you were contrast this with I think FCR faster cast rate I think was also in Diablo 2 like that one actually feels good. You could have a choice.
00:34:45
Speaker
to cast slower, but obviously if you're using a caster, you're going to be doing less DPS. It's probably one of your most important stats. So that one, it feels like you're being amply rewarded anytime that you forgo something else in order to put this on your build.
00:35:01
Speaker
Whereas, the best you can do with like a purely defensive thing, I'm actually gonna put all resist under this as well. All resist is more helpful perhaps than, you know, faster hit recovery. But it's a don't suck stat. It feels like a tithe that you have to pay. You're being bled by white mana, essentially. Yeah, a little bit.
00:35:24
Speaker
Where it's like, well, your stats just aren't good enough for this difficulty yet. Oh, is it because I don't have enough damage or something? It's like, no. You need to take that cool stuff off of your character and replace it with all resist. And I know that's a slippery slope. You can't say like, don't have defensive affixes in your ARPG, right? But I mean, all games will
00:35:48
Speaker
have that as an option. Like my go-to example, always be altering for any type of game comparison. Even Tetris, weirdly. But you don't have to put health into stuff. You can just never be hit. That is an option, right? But it makes certain things harder for you. Or if you get hit once, OK, that's it. You don't get to take multiple hits. Whereas other things, you're like, oh, I want to be beefy enough to where I have the reaction time to hit a potion.
00:36:15
Speaker
to use some of that health pool, but I want to still primarily focus on damage. And other things will actually reward you for putting points into defense and using it as damage. There are ways to do it, but if you're ever just funnel tricking like, hey, you have to put points into this, it feels like a waste of a level up almost, where you're like, okay, you have to eat your vegetables with dinner. All right, you gonna eat the green beans first.
00:36:43
Speaker
It's like a good example of an affix. This is the affix podcast now that I think has more weight to it, more value to it, is something like thorns. Which, you know, maybe it's not so good if you got just a little bit of it in a game and it is primarily defensive, but it's defensive with a little bit of offense, right? It's making up some of the offensive capability of your kit, which allows you to not feel bad if you focus more on defensive stuff.
00:37:07
Speaker
It's a choice rather than something that you have to do. And I think that is something that I appreciate more. All resists and elemental resists on their own actually made it all the way through in Diablo 3 as well. And I don't know if I ever appreciated needing to get more of this stat. Like I understood my character was stronger if they had these higher defensive values, but
00:37:35
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't feel nearly as exciting as like every time you cast Fireball, another one appears out of your butt or something like that, right? Like that's much cooler as an effect. Yeah. And credit to Diablo 3, because they built so much on Diablo 2. Because like I said, Diablo 2 for me, I'm gonna say Diablo 2 remastered because it's the one that doesn't look like absolute trash. It's the standard now. It's pretty much the same game, but just playable.
00:38:02
Speaker
Because when I went to play Diablo 3 last night, it does not look as good as Diablo 2 remaster. I mean, to be fair, that was updated more recently. But so many things in Diablo 3, they give you options for build diversity, where you could have special uniques or affixes to change your play style around. And it felt cool to play around with those and try something out and then find something that was cohesive.
00:38:28
Speaker
versus which one of three things you want for Diablo 2. Like it was so linear in comparison.
00:38:36
Speaker
Yeah, I would temper that critique with, I think part of it was Diablo 3 was like a live service game. And Diablo 2 was how much content should we make for a game that we release? And if you're thinking about it that way, yeah, that's like your sorceress is going to have a best in slot monarch shield. If you're fire, you're going to start with a leaf rune, something like that. And there's a prescribed path towards greatness, kind of in Diablo 2. You can go in different directions for a class, but
00:39:05
Speaker
A couple of them are good, right? So those are maybe where you invest. And to take a half a point away from Diablo 3, they almost fell into the opposite problem where like – and the higher difficulties, they really started rewarding you specifically. Here's the seasonal set and this is just going to be the new hotness.
00:39:27
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't like how they're like, this is the meta, and I'm like, okay. You're poor, you don't have the meta.
00:39:37
Speaker
Again, touching on Path of Exile ever so briefly, as for each season, they essentially reset the skill tree. They clear the whole board, they rearrange some stuff, they rescale some things, and you have to redo
Diablo II vs III: Aesthetics and Storyline
00:39:51
Speaker
it. Now, there's always going to be a top number of builds. They're like, this is the best for clearing stuff.
00:39:57
Speaker
But it still feels so fun to just experiment and make your own thing. Yes. Another credit to Diablo 3 Transmog. Every game should fucking have this. It feels really cool to like, hey, if you're doing a number chase where it's like, I need the best in here so I can get higher numbers like with Destiny, it feels good to be like, I don't like how this looks, but I can make it look like one of the cool pieces I have, but keep the good stats. Yeah, exactly.
00:40:30
Speaker
Um It's it's just an obvious. I don't have anything to add to that. It's just all games. I agree Yeah, like I don't know who thought of that first but When destiny first added um I think like some of the first iterations of the system where literally you have you have like two sets of gear and one of the sets is what it visually looks like any other set is like where the stats come from and eventually I think like by
00:40:56
Speaker
Diablo, I don't think Blizzard usually does things first anymore, but at least by the time they got to Diablo 3, it's like, oh no, you're just kind of unlocking transmogs and you can just apply it to make something look like something else without all that other stuff in the middle. Which is the way Destiny does it as well. Anytime a game introduces a transmog system or glamour or whatever it's called,
00:41:18
Speaker
I kind of just assume that it's always been there because it always feels like it belongs. Yeah, it's just really nice. It's in the same way you have like if you go and press escape and you're like, oh, game settings, you expect certain things to be there as far as changing how some things are displayed, being able to rebind controls. Like it's just an accessibility thing that's just nice.
00:41:40
Speaker
and transmog is strictly just to be visually appealing but it sucks to be like this is my highest level gear and you look like a dork like it doesn't feel good you're like I wanna style as my character so it just needs to be in all games absolutely
00:41:59
Speaker
Do you think fall guys would be fun if you couldn't do transmog? Really? Yeah, right. You transmog yourself into a jacket from Hotline Miami. This is an incredibly painful process to compress and reform a guy. Do you like to shove people? Oh my gosh, that's really good, actually. Man, I hope they have that for the intro.
00:42:27
Speaker
when they drop the content. I mean, wait. It will eventually happen. I'm waiting for the Elden Ring one, personally. Right. The Ronnie Fall guy. Ronnie had the idea. I'm so down. That's really good.
00:42:42
Speaker
of because we played a lot of D3 right back in the day. We did some Diablo 2 remastered together. Sure. What were your go to for recommending to somebody who just wants like, hey, I've heard about Diablo as an ARPG. Where do you think I should start to check it out?
00:43:00
Speaker
This is the problem right like unless I know that they're they really love hardcore older games That's what Diablo 2 is even the resurrected version is still pretty much That right. They're not really going outside of that mold and I don't think anyone wanted them to So I I feel like if I had to pick it right now so I wouldn't even recommend three I think I would say like wait for four see how it is and then maybe pick up three because it might just be on sale when four comes out yeah, but
00:43:30
Speaker
If I had to pick just between the two and four doesn't come out for another month and change, I mean, I would recommend three. It's just the more playable game. But I would recommend people to also like check out the cut scenes in the story because despite the fact that like the lore kind of doesn't matter, people generally weren't playing these games for lore. The story of two was just like choice, pretty much. And the story of three disappointed a lot of people.
00:44:01
Speaker
What's funny is I know we've talked about this a number of times, and then I was talking about this with Dice last night. I'm like, hey, do you remember anything that happened in 3? And he's like, I think there's a guy called Mafael. And I was like, yeah, yeah, he was the guy with the sigh and the orange bandana. And he just kept going on. I was like, ninja turtles. But yeah, we couldn't remember really any of the details. We're like, we know Reaper of Souls is Mafael. That's it.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I remember some of the key points, but this story spent a lot more time with some of the non-prime evils. I don't know what they're called, but there's a word for them. They have a proper noun title for like... I wish I had a math joke lined up for this. God damn it. Yeah, right. But they're not as interesting as Bale and Mephisto and Diablo.
00:44:54
Speaker
And the game kind of knows it, too. You know, as they approach the end, it's like, all right, we need to bring in the A-Team, right? We're losing them. But, yeah, it's not great. And some of the character interactions are really...
00:45:08
Speaker
Pretty much all of the chapter-character interactions are pretty boring and I find 2s a lot more memorable for some of the initial opening scenes. You know, first time going to the harem under the palace or the arcane sanctuary and it's like, yeah, this is different, right?
00:45:28
Speaker
And outside of the time that Diablo 3 was literally like making fun of themselves with the pony level, Ponyland, like there's not that much that happens geographically that's memorable. It's fine. It's just not. It's serviceable. Yeah.
00:45:49
Speaker
like I liked heaven, I liked hell, but I mean it looks like heaven and hell would expect them to look. So it's like, here's the golden area and here's the red area, you know? Yeah, it's... Oh no, it's...
00:46:06
Speaker
It's one of those things that's hard to describe, but it's easier to feel. You know when there's a really good level design in something because you feel very immersed. You don't know exactly which components of it contribute to that. You're like, this feels right for what I would expect. Or it just exceeded my expectations because I'm like, I don't know, this is going to be, oh, goddamn, this looks awesome.
00:46:30
Speaker
Like, to Destiny 2's credit, whenever they do raids or content like that, it looks really cool. And they have like a whole theme going and like I like the level design, but like some of their just generic areas, especially some of the early ones like EDZ, you can throw under the bus easily because I was probably from Destiny 1, which is like, do you like Earth?
00:46:55
Speaker
But there's like not much stuff in it and you're like, no. Versus if you go to anything like the Dreaming City, you're like, oh, god damn. Yeah. But the other D2, that's not gonna make things confusing. Yeah, the other D2 notes. But I think theming really goes a long way and I think of the two, two had a stronger theme.
Anticipating Diablo IV
00:47:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:23
Speaker
This is actually, this is pretty much proven by what people said back then when three launched, all the way up to four where they literally, some of the first looks at it were like, we're making it bloody and violent and like much more visceral and all of this stuff. They literally were just playing into like, we realized that you hated this about our previewing.
00:47:47
Speaker
So I don't know if there could be much more of an admission of the fault then we changed it for the next game, right? Yeah, it's like
00:47:58
Speaker
If you're going to be fighting demons and you want it to be like somewhat taken seriously or like it's going to be more of like an edgy experience, I don't think that's something like dungeon defenders, you know? Right. Dungeon defenders is fun. I'd love to play with friends, but it's not gritty. Like it doesn't have that same personality. So it depends where you're going for it. But like Diablo I think has been stronger with a grittier approach. Yeah.
00:48:24
Speaker
It's what the player base, the world that they spent so much time in, it's not fair to like take them back years later and say like, this is the world now. It's much brighter. It's cleaner. And all of this stuff is fine. This is a nonviolent game. They didn't do it go that far, but like, yeah, it felt like a misrepresentation of the lore and platform that was already established for them. They spent a lot of time with them. That's, I mean, that's fair.
00:48:57
Speaker
I was going to ask, because you've done more of the demo of four than I have, what stuff are you looking for in four specifically? Whether it's something that you already came across in four, you're like, oh, I like this. Or something that you would like to see happen that just maybe didn't come up yet in that content.
00:49:21
Speaker
So part of the problem with Diablo 2 I felt was like a lot of the gear was gated until you kind of got really far in and then it was kind of like level gated in a way. So you almost just kind of have to like farm and grind for it and it felt like some of the stuff you could use on the way there just wasn't so great. Diablo 3 kind of had the same problem where it's like it would literally throw legendaries at you which are supposed to be really good gear and it's like this is
00:49:50
Speaker
There was literally a time for the marketplace, a good chunk of time when it was still up, that legendaries were not worth any money. People would spend more money on rares because they just rolled higher. And that felt terrible, right?
00:50:05
Speaker
One of the things they fix I feel like with 4 is a legendary or like a brown rarity golden, not golden, orange, orange rarity, is it'll have like a special affect, some special effect.
00:50:21
Speaker
That is not normally how stats work. It does the thing similar to every time you shoot a fireball, one comes out the other end, right? And you can just break your item. You can just smash it open and grab that piece out and then go slap it onto some other piece of gear that might have rolled really well.
00:50:40
Speaker
And so if you find a legendary that's like, well, I already have good gear, but I want that specifically. I want that one line. You can just take it and put it on your gear. And that's amazing. I love that. Because I know that the decisions I'm making with my build right now, they'll be outleveled eventually. But I get to be really powerful when I find cool things in the moment.
00:51:03
Speaker
And I like things like that Diablo 2 laid the groundwork for that with like the room system and the gym system But it's good to see that they're still expanding it
00:51:17
Speaker
You know, if they had a room where it's back, I'd be so happy. I don't think that they were thinking three, right? No. No, I don't believe so. If there were rooms, they kind of come with gems. What's crazy to me? They had sets, which are typically like, if you get enough of these pieces, you have whatever set bonus. But the set pieces were always non-socketed, from what I remember in two. And in three, you're like, oh, yeah, you can have a socket and set piece. Do you want to slap a gem in there that gives you like 270 strength?
00:51:46
Speaker
Okay, it just yeah, it felt like it felt so weird to me but like I really enjoyed rune words because like that was my first experience with Hey, here's like how you magically enchant something and make it like Insanely badass. Yeah, you should describe how do rune words work in Diablo 2?
00:52:10
Speaker
Well, listeners. So, you have an item that has sockets. Sockets are like little holes in items and stuff, right? So, each rune word would be dependent on an item type and a number of sockets. But if you put the correct runes in in the right order, you could get a rune word which would essentially change that.
00:52:31
Speaker
I'm trying to think if one of those is actually a rune. Well, maybe. But it just felt really cool because it would give you so many special magical properties on what was gonna be just like this empty item. And some of them were really fucking cool. Like Enigma is a three socket armor piece. And I'll always remember the runes jaw, if, burr.
00:52:56
Speaker
And it was always very common and very rare. I'm sorry, I should say like highly valued in a lot of bills because it gave a standard armor the ability to teleport, which is typically only a sorceress ability. So you can have other classes that cast are like, surprise, motherfucker. And they just like hammered in, always blinked around and with like chuck hammers. So they have like this massive AoE of damage.
00:53:22
Speaker
But that was like super cool. And then I'll gush briefly about EOBTDCB. Ethereal Breath of the Dying Colossus Blade. It was the big ass sword. But it's a six socket rune word. Breath of the Dying. The reason I mentioned Ethereal at the beginning is one of the runes is Zod, which makes an item indestructible.
00:53:50
Speaker
So even though it's ethereal and it can't be repaired, it doesn't have to be. But Breath of the Dying had some other stuff. But the key part was any time you killed an enemy, a 50% chance to do a level 20 poison Nova. So as you killed like, let's say two enemies, let's say with a lot of averages, you're going to hit it. You would just explode entire stacks of enemies because it would just chain react through.
00:54:18
Speaker
And it's not like you needed a poison build, it was just strong. And it felt really cool to do stuff like that.
00:54:25
Speaker
I mean, that's fair. I mean, I can – you can tell Dave's a little bit excited about this. I appreciated Runewords too. I'm smiling and I don't normally do that. I mean, I liked – they serve a very interesting – breaking this down mechanically, they serve an interesting purpose, right? Because in a way, it's kind of like the old like McDonald's Monopoly game where you're like collecting the letters and you're like, oh, I've got this. I can redeem this in for something.
00:54:55
Speaker
That's pretty much kind of how rune works. But individual runes, I don't think were too rare. At least the ones I saw, maybe some of them were on the high end. So the ones that can drop are not super rare. But just like the gems, you can do three of the same type.
00:55:16
Speaker
As you got the higher tiers, you might need to add some gems into the mix in the Roger Cube. But you could essentially fuse three of the same into the next higher tier. Exactly. So once you got the higher tier stuff, they did some crazy stuff. Even standalone. One of them, Ist, is 25% Magic Find. And that is a super high value one that everybody wants to trade for. There's one that ignores damage. That's some silly shit.
00:55:48
Speaker
It's a cool design though because it lets you do this little mini adventure basically. You have your shopping list, you have your quest. I'm going to go collect these parts and you're probably going to find some of them along the way. The point I was trying to make, and this may or may not be correct, is if you had one of them, specifically the goal to accomplish getting one of these,
00:56:11
Speaker
You really had a an achievable path of farming to get there You knew what enemies would drop the pieces to get there. You knew what gyms you needed you had your shopping list Which feels better than relying on pure RNG? Right like because what you're describing when you're talking about some of the effects on some of these rune words Like that could be a legendary item, right? It could be the same thing as a legendary effect It's something different that your character can do in the game now but
00:56:41
Speaker
You get more of a sense of ownership when you're building this up over time when you're collecting your list and The funny thing is like the last piece was oftentimes like one of the easiest things to do you had to use a normal Piece of gear that had this many sockets and you could just reroll town inventories till you got one that you wanted didn't require fighting any bosses or doing anything like that and Then you just slapped it all in and it became your magic item
00:57:09
Speaker
That was really cool.
00:57:12
Speaker
I'm surprised that they actually dropped that. That was one of the things that hurt 3, was that they didn't really have a system to compensate for the loss of that. Because rune words, they kind of fit into what they're starting to do more with 4, which is like, you can break down your gear, take the stuff you like, and build it into something better. Not to the same level of complexity that I saw yet. I don't think that they really are bringing it back. I don't want to give anyone that impression.
00:57:41
Speaker
It's an enjoyable gameplay system and that's the type of thing that you want people to have if they're going to play the game for a long time. Yeah. I honestly wish they'd also add a little bit of...
00:57:53
Speaker
I don't know if they had any of this in 3 because it's been a while since I've really deep dove into it, but having items that gave other class abilities, like I forget what it was, but there was like a unique item in Diablo 2 where it's like, oh, it's a sword. Oh, it allows you to breathe fire. So you'd be a barbarian just like holding out your hands is like fire shot out of your body as it renders like 17 different PNGs and it was so dumb, but it was fun.
00:58:19
Speaker
Yeah, cuz you're like it's more Barry's gonna hit me. Oh no, he's breathing fire Like just having that little mix-up of or silliness was always cool Yeah
00:58:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I know we're approaching the end of our analysis here, but there are things I liked about the skill set as the game went on. I obviously kind of, I really liked the actives in three. I like, that's where they introduce spenders and builders and for the most part to use mana, which is fine. It's good base level and a lot of the classes still use mana, but they kind of started varying it up a little bit as the game went on, but then they kind of took it too far with four, in my opinion.
00:59:03
Speaker
But yeah, by the time they got to four for the beta maybe some of those changes. It's very streamlined It's very much like you equip one Spender or one one generator one spender and then you'll put your cooldowns on your bar and before you could really just screw up your bills and Diablo 3 there was literally a tick box in Diablo 3 that was just like
00:59:26
Speaker
by default that's the way it worked but there's just like freeform mode or elective mode that's what it was called and you could be like do you want to take all of your primary punch abilities as a monk that have no cooldowns and they all generate abilities and put them all over your bar so you can just hold one and then two and punch people in different ways you can do it it's not good we'll save it it's not good but
00:59:52
Speaker
It had more freedom. And from what I've seen from four, it feels like in some ways it has like the least built diversity of the two, of the three, I should say. And four is, or three, a fifth numbers at this point. Diablo two might've been the peak for being able to screw around with stuff as much as you wanted. But we'll see, I guess.
01:00:20
Speaker
Yeah, for my little bit of time in 4, oh god, I have 10 seconds. I really thought that in some of the, like, it didn't feel as impactful to level some of the, like, I played the Necromancer, it was like, oh, bone things, bone splinters, because it wasn't teeth.
01:00:38
Speaker
Because one of the things I liked about just smacking so many levels into like teeth, which is like a very early level, a very early spell, is you would actually just see more teeth go out. Like it would just make the spell wider and you're like, oh, cool. And then depending on where you cast it, it would do more of like a shotgun or a very narrow blast. So I hope it still feels like it's impactful and scales.
01:01:05
Speaker
Because it felt a little lacking. But again, I had a very limited time in the beta, so. Yeah. Could not be the case. I will say, I'll still say corpse explosion is the most ridiculous nonsense. It has been since. It's insanely strong in four until they like nerf it. I don't even know. I think it's based off percentage of health, so.
01:01:32
Speaker
I'll see, I guess we'll see how they nerf it, but it was really good. Um, but yeah, I mean that is, that's Diablo. I had a full list of questions. I don't think we touched on the list at all.
01:01:47
Speaker
No, I actually went through my notes. All right, for the second hour of the podcast. No, not necessary. It's a it's it's a really cool franchise. I want to see where they go with it. I do want to see Diablo four succeed, but I'm not going to lie to myself and say that it's guaranteed to. So I'm waiting for reviews. It's coming out sometime in June, I think.
01:02:14
Speaker
And unless they are, they do have like a couple open events before then, unless something is just like, this is the hook. This is how we, you know, it's going to be something you want to play at launch. Then I'll probably wait a little bit, but it's good.
01:02:31
Speaker
and I hope that they continue to take lessons from their previous games, and they treat their employees well and We can go from there Me over here with just the widest eyes. We'll see I mean obviously I hope for all of those same things as well, but as Always time will tell we can hope for the best, but I'm gonna see how it shakes out It's true and if you want to shake out you can
01:03:00
Speaker
Send that in, soapstonepodcastatgmail.com, or you can check that thing on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.
01:04:02
Speaker
Yeah.