Shadout

It's a creative process, you build, choose carefully, and get rewarded Sure. Problem is planning only goes so far. Sometimes skills do something else than what they seem to do from the description. Sometimes the game changes over time to make the perfectly planned build less valid (like if at level 200 out of nowhere all enemies suddenly becomes immune to cold dmg). Sometimes a patch throws all previous choices out of the window. The thrill of planning goes away if the game makes planning impossible. Which is okay for those of us who might want to test the different skills over multiple characters, slowly figuring out what works and what does not. But for most people it is not. It ought to be possible to plan out a build without having to read a wiki to see how skills really works (and not what the tooltip says), and without fear of the choice being invalidated by a later patch. Respeccing should be rare enough that planning is required. But it should be possible to come up with something more reasonable than "make a new character", for those cases where the plan is destroyed by outside influence (whether that is patches, bad tooltips, unpredictable end-game changes or whatever).

Yeah, that is the respec I would like as well. Possible to respec, but at a very high cost. High enough that you might consider if rerolling a new character is acctually better. I dont like totally free respeccing (like in diablo 3 for example), but likewise, no ability to respec at all is also bad. As an absolute minimum, respecs should be given with balance patches.

A case of "loot is too complicated for players to handle!". Imagine the horror for the co-op experience if players had to stand around for 3 seconds looking at gear! Totally breaks the flow! Well, except that breaking the flow is generally a good thing, since it makes the normal gameplay (killing monsters) less repetitive. It is the reason most games try to make you 'waste' time juggling the inventory, go back to cities to sell, repair or whatever. Might also be because a good loot system is fairly difficult to make. Much cheaper just to throw it out the window... Just look at the mess Diablo 3s loot was at release. They also had this idea that itemization had to be really simple and easy to understand. Noble goals I guess, but not if it comes at the cost of being able to customize your character through your decisions - which kinda ought to be the most central element of an A-RPG. But then, Sacred 3 is not an A-RPG at all. It reminds me more of Bastion, Transistor, or Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. With the difference that those are of a better quality of course. Some unkind reviews coming in: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-08-01-sacred-3-review http://www.gamesradar.com/sacred-3-review/

It would be difficult to talk about 'gamers' as some coherent group. The differences between something like some imaginary person playing an singleplayer RPG, a person playing FIFA or a person playing Angry Birds are huge (even if one person plays all 3 of the above, the experience the person is looking for in each game, would be wildly different. Point being; those games are not substitutes for each other - they arent for the same market). I dont think the 'core' gamer archetype, those who would play a typical $60 game on console or PC, has changed that much in the last decades. Sure, genres has changed a bit, and gamer preferences are following suit, but none of that is really significant changes. The biggest change is just new distinct groups or maket segments showing up, that can also be considered gamers. I think it's more a matter of game developers designing what they believe the masses want. Rather than what the masses actually want. Problem being, the group of people they are targeting are probably not going to buy their game no matter what they do, and the smart thing would be to target the group of players that have a remote chance to care bout their games in the first place. You are a hell of alot more likely to get success if you make a niche game that the people in that specific group really want. Than making a game that tries to cater to 'everyone'. It ought to be common sense tbh; should be much easier to make a game that 1 million people really want, than to make a game 10 million people really want. In the latter, you mostly end up making a game so bland, that nobody wants it. It is a disconnect in logic, where developers/publishers seeing the succes of "simple Ipad games" for example, leads to the conclusion that if only games on PC or console were similar, then surely those same people who buy (well, download for free) games on their phone or tablet, will surely buy a console or PC game too! Which is not going to happen. They apparently can't fathom that 1) People might not jump from casual phone/tablet gaming over to a console, no matter what happens and 2) Even if people do make the jump (clearly, a ton of people do play both phone/tablet games and console/pc games) most people probably don't want the same experiences on a tablet as they do on a console or PC. Whatever they were thinking when decicing to make this game, it does sound like it is simply a bad game, maybe it will end up medicore at best, which won't help them much. Regardless of it being named Sacred or not. We, as Sacred fans, are bound to be disappointed merely because they make such a drastic change from what we epxect (a relatively deep A-RPG). But at least if they made a good game in another genre, it might be kinda okay to be honest. Taking chances, innovating, and experimenting is generally a good thing. If there is quality in what is made anyway... I'm not convince there is a niche of gamers out there, who just cant wait to play what Sacred 3 has to offer though. Oh well, enough mindless ranting. Looking forward to the (rumored?) Kickstarter - Unbended -from those former Ascaron guys Kickstarter and similar is such a great trend for doing what I said above; focusing a game on a smaller niche market of gamers, since the developers can see how interested people are - before actually making the game. You dont have to target your game for some unknown - and probably imagined - mass market, when your "customers"/supporters have already told you what they want.

It's not that bad (if 'not bad' = getting gear cheap...). For a few million gold you can get good enough gear for clearing inferno. At least that was my experience when going back to SC recently, gearing up a new monk from scratch. The gear still wont be good enough for clearing it effectively/rarely dying however - Probably closer to 10-20m+ gear then. Might be a matter of what one considers decent as Spunky says. Getting good enough gear for NEVER dying in act3-4 Inferno would be insanely expensive. Getting gear for clearing it; not so much. Inferno should get considerably easier in 1.0.5 though, which will both make it possible to play with cheaper gear, as well as further lower the prices due to more people being able to find the gear.

Link to new patch info http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7155884/Dev_Journal_Defensive_Bonuses_and_Monster_Damage-9_14_2012 Maybe it will turn out being a "not so bad" thing that Diablo 3 was so flawed at launch. Blizzard seems to have been speeding up their patching a lot, in a panic mode over player reactions, compared to pre-release, when the PvP patch 1.1 was supposed to be the first patch there would even be. This patch sounds a lot more interesting than previous patches, targeting the rather huge imbalance between defensive skills (whereas the 1.0.4 patch only targeted offensive skills), thus allowing more different skills to be used, and also adding more end-game (to counter the ever increasing Inferno nerfs...). If I know Blizzard right, they will try to release the patch right on top of Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2

I'm separating between playing a 10 year old game and playing a game for 10 years (continuously) I played D2 right before D3 release myself, and it was still fun - though graphics were hard on the eyes and controls can be annoying. Hell, I replayed Diablo 1 as well (to get in the mood ^^), and it was pretty fun too. Cant imagine playing the same game (MMOs excluded, as they change so drastically over time) every year for 10 years, which I know many people did. Picking up the game again after some years, and the game still being fun however, is another thing - in my head. Different kinds of longevity. Diablo 3s problem probably isnt that it wont be a fun game to play again some years from now, as the game is mostly fun to play right out of the gate - its problem is rather that it is not very fun to keep playing continuously - which obviously sucks a bit for a game type that is known for its "continuous playing" longevity.

True, but on the other hand, was Diablo 2 patch 1.0 (or some of the first patches after that) something you wanted to play for 10 years either? Probably not. It is difficult to say if patches will bring D3 to the point where D2 was as the time where most people seem to remember it today - which seems to be patch 1.0.8+. Not that I could ever imagine playing Diablo 2 for 10 years either For years though; no problem.

As sad as it is, it probably is real

Not playing much, though it is more a question of limited time, and other interesting games out and/or coming out. (re-)Playing Dark Souls on PC right now - being game of the decade pretty much, means that Diablo 3 cant exactly compete, no matter what one thinks about it Tbh, the grind is what one makes of it. Don't treat it like a grind and it wont be one. Will probably check back in with Diablo 3 when they get some more patches out. With all the inferno nerfs, the game is in more need of end-game than ever. Not to turn this into a Sacred 2 topic, but it is funny about perception. The feeling that I could never find really good drops is exactly the one I had in Sacred 2. There I could find good items much easier by running between vendor screens - which was not very fun. This does not excuse Diablo 3's AH for repeating the same mistake of course.

Interesting I wasn't the only one who thought Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Though I have a hard time imagining this will be as good. Since it might try to be half A-RPG (Sacred-like) and half Puzzle-game (Lara Croft-like), instead of just actually being good at one of the two. They aren't even wrong that a large part of Sacred 2s game time was spent traveling to a quest, if you were doing quests. And for that reason alone I usually skipped quests as soon as I got bored of exactly that - which was within 5 minutes typically. It was simply more fun to run around exploring, instead of running from A to B in a quest which mostly had uninteresting story and content anyway. The obvious solution to this problem, which was indeed a problem imo, was to make better quests. Quests that didnt ask you to run from A to B to do X etc. And just "slightly" less than 500+ quests, since quality would be preferable over quantity. Instead they managed to conclude that the problem was having an open world you could explore. Which is of course a silly conclusion. Edit: Funny thing about trying to be Guild Wars. Isn't Guild Wars 2 open world-ish? There certainly does seem to be a lot of similarities with GW1 however.

I greatly prefer something in between. There should always be an option to respec to be honest, so you can try different skills while levelling, correct either missclicks or flat out get a second chance if a patch screws up your current build. But on the other hand there really should be more permanency than seen in for example D3, as it really removes the feeling of trying to figure out an all-round build that can tackle different types of enemies and challenges, and then, when you choose, being forced to get the best out of your choices in all those different situations - choices that matter. When you can respec freely, it just feels like you can optimize for everything if you want to. Which is a lot less fun imo. Hard balance to get right fore sure. In Sacred 2 it would have been just fine imo, if a respec had reset your Survival Bonus for instance. Making you able to respec essentially for free if you died and got the survival bonus reset anyway, but the cost could be substantial if you wanted to respec otherwise. I cant imagine Keen Games adding something like Survival Bonus to Sacred 3 however, and they seem hell-bend on making it a Diablo 3 style respec anyway.

Probably to some degree. No matter the amount of community feedback, they probably can't suddenly change the game to open world. That would be a rather big undertaking for something that wasn't planned from the start. Other stuff like number of active skills, potential (lack of) focus on item stats and whatever else people might be interested in could potentially be changed very close to release (Look at Diablo 3 which for better or worse... had some really drastic changes up until a few months before release). Which is why I have always thought that people should express their opinions when they don't like something. Many will say that there is no reason to complain, since the game is still far from release, and it is better to wait and see. But it is exactly because it is far away from release that it is the right time to complain. As it will be the only time where there is the slightest chance of affecting the developers (or more correctly, the publishers (=Deep Silver), if they can be made to believe there are more money to be made with design changes ). Especially for Sacred 3 of all games, as the chances of post-release support in form of substantial patches are approximately 0% for a game released by Deep Silver. Of course complaining =! whining, which people sometimes have issues differentiating between It has to be somewhat reasonable and well-articulated, otherwise it just ends up doing more harm than good, convincing the developers that their customers are whiny morons (which to be fair, a lot of game customers probably are...) who they should ignore. But really, if people are unhappy about news, no matter how vague those news are, about Sacred 3, then go tell Deep Silver on their forums. It is unlikely to have much effect. However, not complaining is sure to have no effect.

Oh yes!

Diablo down in Inferno. Pants were mostly kept dry. Borderlands 2 soon!

I wonder, how will you know what to expect from a mission before starting it. If you don't know what the next mission might bring of challenges, thinking ahead won't be possible. If you get no inforation pre-mission, "Guessing wrong" could be highly annoying in Hardcore mode (if such even exists) if the balance is purely rock-paper-scissors based. I remember that Spore A-RPG some time ago, while it failed pretty hard, it tried those closed mission-based challenges. And each time before you started, it gave you an overview of the types of challenges to expect - giving you some of the information needed for picking your skills. On the other hand that simply results in "picking the correct skills for the current task", which is hardly tactical nor very interesting. I'm all for not being able to switch skills in the middle of combat, or even quickly outside of combat. However I don't see how they couldn't achieve a goal of tactical and balanced combat with 4+ combat arts at a time. Being stuck with 4 or 5 (like Sacred 2) for a mission would be very much in the spirit of Sacred 2 - even with the reduced permanency of the choices. And more importantly, offer a bit more variation than I can imagine 2 Combat Arts will be able to. Now of course if it turns out we can directly or even indirectly control the 3 AI characters, essentially giving us 8 Combat Arts at a time, then it is a whole other matter. Though it would still be bad for co-op. Which would of course be very much against their stated goal with co-op being the primary focus.. On the other hand it sounds really positive about more tactical gameplay - something I was really looking forward to in Diablo 3 as well - and something that game even partially delivered on. 2 CAs sounds way too limited for ever achieving tactical combat however.

Yeah, very nice writeup. "The reason for this strongly limited customization is, according to the producers, to keep the player from feeling overpowered." <-- Me left speechless. In what world does that logic make sense. Games like these (if not most games in general) should exactly be about feeling overpowered - without actually being so. Edit: "The reasons for this decision are mainly the difficulty of programming for the Cell processor, and the (nowadays) lackluster hardware. This way, by having the hardest plattform to develop for as lead, a better quality can be assured for other platforms." It does seem to be true that PS3 is by far the hardest platform to develop for. But I cant get my head around how developing primarily for the hardest platform would increase the quality for other platforms. Wouldn't it rather keep the quality back for those platforms, due to potential programming limitations when their team struggles with the PS3. I am not sure there has ever been made a port from console games, which did not suffer from it, in any case. Of course one could argue the same is true from PC to console, so it is probably just a matter of something which benefit some people and hurt others, depending on their platform.

Damn some of those sites are bad. Couldnt they have found some who could write, and maybe even think for themselves while doing so. Preferably someone who knew Sacred 2 as well. Just take this: "I was told that gameplay will clock in at around the 100 hour mark, which is before you factor in engame and multiplayer content. This is due to each level being able to be played multiple times so each time it “tells a different story,” whatever that means." Well, if you don't know what it means, it might have been an idea to ask them? Otherwise it might sound like you are just rewriting a PR speech. Anyway, reading about the game I actually think of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light - which is a lovely little game - where the design focus was heavily on 2-player co-op, although allowing singleplayer. Focus on smaller more puzzle-based areas/levels, a few usable skills, loot etc. It surely had next to nothing in common with A-RPG's though.

Hm, maybe it ends up being a good thing that the game has been so flawed at release. Sounds like Blizzard has gotten scared into increasing their ambitions for patches a great deal (compared to pre-release comments about not wanting to make any content patches between expansions...). A new post about future plans here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6398870250#1 (ignoring the first half which is basically Jay Wilson excusing for being yet another Facebook teenager not understanding the concept of public spheres)

Should be possible to accommodate both groups of players imo, by having content that fits everyone. The issue with inferno was that it was both difficult and at the same time the place to get gear. Essentially to beat inferno act 1 you had to get gear from inferno act 3. Which was a problem obviously - as in pretty much impossible for anyone not exploiting - until Blizzard came to their senses and allowed the high end gear to drop in late Hell and early inferno as well. Even then it was a very slow progress with people getting stuck in act 1. I get why people don't like that. The goal should always be to have the difficult content be beyond the gearing content. Having difficult content mostly for the sake of challenge, and not for better gear - since if there are better gear rewards to be had, then everyone will have an expectation of being able to get there.

I'm kinda sad the game is made easier all the time. Most of the changes are good for sure, like somewhat better skill balance (still a looong way to go there), much more interesting legendaries, balancing some of the more insane elite affixes etc. With all the increases in player dmg inferno just out to not be nerfed at the same time as I see it. Hopefully more actual and optional end-game will be added in later patches to make the difficulty of inferno a moot point, but right now it is a shame to read the endless amounts of nerfs Edit: Blue text on gems and tomes are not a small thing! I have missed a ton of them so far.

Just so you are aware of it http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/securityupdate.html Probably wont affect anyone in any direct way, but changing password, and getting new mobile authenticator (if you have one) + changing security question when both of those gets updated is likely a decent idea for US players especially. A sad and rapidly increasing trend of our time it seems. Been through PS3, Bioware/EA, Turbine, Valve, Blizzard hacks and probably others in just 18 months or so. Sigh.

They are supposed to be the slowest at least! But yeah, they used to be smart in the way that they realized happy customers were returning customers, even if it meant releasing patches 10 years after release. Which sadly seems to be a rare thing in the industry, with EA and similar stopping to support their games after a few months. On the other hand, maybe Blizzard dont actually support their games longer than others, 1 normal year of support just ends up being 10 years due to the glacial speed of development

I was really hoping for a side-scrolling brawler MMO :/

With 10 million copies sold, I'm not sure they are in a particular need for other revenue sources. Could be interesting to hear how RMAH is going for them. I generally believe that if some product is successful, companies will make sure to tell everyone repeatedly. Since they wont tell... Might just be wishful thinking.