It has been said multiple times over and over that these weren't actually 'fun' in Diablo 2 anyway.
It can be said any number of times, it won't make it true. The customization and uniqueness of characters is what made the game fun for me. You had to give careful consideration to what you wanted to invest your points into. When I went into a game online with my trap-focused Assassin, I would play with other Assassins that had totally different skill sets and playstyles, and people who hadn't played with an Assassin that only used traps. You could mix and match different skill trees if you wanted to, or focus entirely on getting the best skills from one, and the choices you made ultimately felt meaningful, because they actually were.
If you accidentally mis-allocated a skill or stat point, you had no choice but to start a new character over from scratch.
Bad decisions having consequences isn't a bad thing, and I'm pretty sure that's not an accident you'd make too many times, or at any point where you were experienced enough that it would matter. I certainly never had this happen, and I'm not even sure how someone would manage it. May as well discuss the possibility of accidentally deleting your character, or accidentally formatting your hard drive, or accidentally falling asleep while smoking and burning your house down. They all result in losing your offline characters, and they would all be your own fault.
In D3 that time component has been cut, but the fact is there was nothing preventing you from making additional characters in D2 in the first place. Any idea of unique identity was purely in the player's head.
False. The time component is
exactly what prevented people from making every sort of character with every combination of skills and stats. Your statement is that uniqueness isn't reduced by a reduction of the time required to achieve all unique combinations, and that's blatantly false. If they make it so your singular character can switch between all classes and levels them all up in parallel, that results in everyone having access to all skills in all classes regardless of what they start with or do over the course of the game, and obviously reduces uniqueness.
Anyways, anyone can scream its praises and defend the game for the next decade until D4 is announced, but I'm not purchasing it, because it simply isn't worth my time, and it certainly isn't a worthy successor to the previous installment. I would rather play through D2 yet again and make yet another unique character than to waste my time bothering with such a trite gaming experience. This is a good example of a developer making design decisions just to cater to a new audience, hoping to make it more accessible and casual-friendly, and still assuming they will profit off the people who loved the franchise already while completely disregarding them all the same.
It's not that I don't like Diablo enough, it's that I like Diablo too much to pay someone to dumb it down and make it worse in general.
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 16 2012, 4:12 am by Azrael.