The fervor has begun to die down following Diablo III's Parisian unveiling, giving former Blizzard North employee and Diablo II dev Michael Huang time enough to brave the cooling hellfire and speak out. On his mind are some Diablo III design choices that Huang says are "counter to the decisions the original Diablo team members would have made."
One thing sticking in the self-professed foodie's craw are "floating numbers" that drift above an opponent's head in the upcoming sequel to give an arithmetic angle to the carnage, a feature that was pitched by the game's current devs during the making of Diablo II but "refused" by Blizzard North. Another is the re-use of existing classes, including the Barbarian, a character Huang describes as the "most broken" class in Diablo II due to his unfair ability to leap. It's interesting to see how much negativity has been poured on the upcoming sequel given what little we've seen, though as Huang writes that he's already all but written off PC gaming as a whole anyway, we suggest he simply sit back and wait for the day that he'll be able to play the game with his thumbs.
[Via N4G]













(Page 1) Reader Comments
The now broken up Flagship studios?
Don't get me wrong I have a lot of respect for the guy and everything he has done. Diablo and Diablo 2 are some of my favourite games of all time, but it sounds to me like he's just sour that he's not working on it.
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Maybe if Blizzard North would have survived maybe we'd already be playing Diablo 3
Blizzard may have a solid lineup of games they've developed but that hardly makes them infallible. Over the past years, in fact, my confidence in them has plummeted. For example, despite Warcraft III's excellent interface and character and story integration, many of their design choices regarding gameplay mechanics were a result of laziness. The brilliant balancing that bled through Starcraft's playable races definitely did not translate to WCIII.
World of Warcraft is also a good example of a Blizzard refocused on accessibility rather than playability and fun. That game used to be difficult, enduring and rewarding. Now there's no point to working towards anything because eventually they'll simply hand it to you on a silver platter.
Diablo III does worry me. I don't know enough about the game to place my faith either way but Blizzard's recent track record (incidentally around the time Vivendi entered the picture) is very unsettling. I'm terrified that one of the last untainted large developers has already begun to succumb to "please everybody syndrome". Time will tell.
The fact that we've only seen minutes, let me repeat, MINUTES, of gameplay, and to have such a firestorm of BS makes me want to knock the teeth out of some people, you would think people are stabbing babies. The one thing we do know is, Blizzard's track record is almost perfect, that's a fact, and it's a damn good indicator that they can put out a game worthy of our cash, wtf else do we want?
I say, F 'em.
Seriously, the guy wrote Diablo 2, one of the best roguelikes to grace our PCs. I mean, it will be very unlikely that Diablo 3 will top Diablo 2. Sure, it'll be a great game, but for it to actually top the game and be played for 8 years after its been released is going to be next to impossible.
I think the guy has more leverage than anyone that has spoken about the Diablo 3 design choices than anyone else out here. Calling him a "hack" was just poor.
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If you can get the site to work it turns out to be a mildly interesting but totally non-inflamatory comment about the mildly different approaches of the different Blizzard studios.
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We shall see, if the site ever goes back up.
I'm glad this guy isn't working on the game, or atleast, noone with his train of thought. What the Barbarian lacked in ranged attacks, he made up for in the ability to quickly overcome a large distance with leap. It didn't give the Barbarian any sort of advantage over the other classes (Sorcs had a teleport skill if I'm recalling properly). Taking Barbs out wouldn't have made much sense either, since only a few decades have passed since the last fight with Diablo, and the Barbs would still theoretically be around. Then again, if you have Barbs, why not Necros, Zons, Paladins (well..ok...maybe not paladins), and Sorcs? If you are going to include one, it doesn't make much sense not to include them all.
Whatever, I'm just hoping that the visual style gets a little bit more dark before the game is released. I don't want to play Diablo: WOW edition any more than I want to play WOW.
Yeah, never...
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Most importantly, I hope the 3D perspective means I don't have to constantly play with the map overlay. That killed the visuals of D2.
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Thanks for playing.
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Sounds like this guy is a bit whiny.
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That dude is just grasping for straws and he is just jealous for the attention. Don't give guys like him an article, Joystiq.
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gimme anything blizz
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Coming from someone that plays both, I don't believe that is true at all. PC-only gamers are constantly whining about, and displaying an elitist atittude toward, consoles all the time. Go to any PC gaming forum and it's easy to see. Hell, it happens here all the time too. Look at your own comments compared to what he posted. All he did was make it known that he wished Blizzard would produce some console games, yet you accuse him of bitching and whining. What he said doesn't come across like that at all, but your response does.
I swore off all PC games after Morrowind stopped working on my PC because the DRM didn't like my new dvd burner.
These are not problems you have with console games.
One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago.
One of the reasons why the Barbarian return shocks me so much is that I always felt that the Barbarian character class was the most broken of the classes in Diablo II. The Barbarian's ability to Leap, for instance gave him advantage over other classes which had to walk around the barrier -- it is the showcasing of this skill in the video (during which a bridge crumbles away, leaving no way to cross the gap) which makes me wonder if they have an alternate way for other characters to cross the gap or if all the characters have Leap now.
Of course, going 3D means that a lot of the things that were hard to do with sprites (such as actual armor looks being reflected on the character) is much easier using polygons and textures, as well as real 3d lighting. The use of a physics engine (Havoc, according to the game specs) is also a nice touch.
While I have more or less given up on the PC as a gaming platform, I'm glad to see that Blizzard is still committed to releasing titles that aren't first-person shooters; such a shame that we won't be seeing this title on the shelves for another year or two at the earliest."
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If you want to go and look at a broken character go and check out a Blessed Hammer spamming Paladin with that exact runeword I mentioned above. Nothing like being teleported on and hammered to death.
P.S. A Barb's best way of large scale movement wasn't leap. It was leap attack as it had no range on it.
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And Barbarian was, is and will always be broken in the bashing games: it doesn't have any intellect and *surprise* it was never needed to play Diablo to begin with. So it is most fitting class for the game.
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To be fair, Huang does't really hate on the game like many ill-informed fans. Yet just because he is a former Diablo dev doesn't mean his opinion is somehow more "correct" than anyone else's. Just because he worked on a blockbuster game in the past doesn't mean he's some super-dev that can turn sh*t into gold. Example: Flagship Studios and Hellgate. (Yes, I realize Huang has nothing to do with Hellgate, but the team was made up of a lot of former Diablo devs.)
And for the record, Vivendi has little say with what Blizzard does. They bought them and then pretty much said "Keep doing what you're doing." From what I understand, the top guy in Blizzard communicates with the top guy from Vivendi and that's it. Vivendi doesn't even do QA for Blizzard.
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I don't really remember barbs being very much of a factor in PVP, although I wasn't a huge participant. That seemed to be mostly overrun with Sorcs and Amazons, although it changed with each patch.
But really, the biggest broken bit in Diablo II's classes was the tendency to encourage builds that just spammed out one ability, like whirl barbs and nova sorcs. It would be nice if the new game made people focus a little more on flexibility.
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Aw, fuck! I cant believe youve done this.
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