I don't play Diablo, but this is fairly clever

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Too bad it took them so fucking long to figure it out.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/5/3/diablo-3s-ability-system.html

Allocating stat points as you level up: gone. Great, this was busywork that contributed basically nothing, so the subtractive design makes the game more elegant overall.

Talent trees: gone. You have exactly 6 slots for abilities, and you can put whatever you want in those slots. There are approximately 24 abilities per class, so your build involves making meaningful choices about what to keep and what to leave out.

Runes: interesting new feature. I read that this system took far longer to design than any other system in Diablo 3, and I totally believe it. When I first saw the interface in the recent open beta test, I couldn't believe what I saw. I was so blown away, that I had to go read about it before clicking on anything because it appeared too good to be true. I think this actually happens a lot in design, where when you finally create / see / experience the "right answer," it seems so obvious, like it couldn't have been any other way, but it might have taken years for the designers to figure out that answer. Elegance is hard.

Here's how runes work. A rune is a modifier to an ability. Every ability (each of your class's 24 abilities) has 5 runes associated with it. And I don't mean the same 5 choices, these are custom for every single ability. You can only have rune selected for any given ability. So that means you have to choose if you want your Magic Missile to have 1) increased damage, 2) split into three shots instead of just one, 3) pierce through enemies and keep going, 4) generate mana ("arcane power"), or 5) track the nearest enemy and do slightly more damage. Here are the abilities for the Wizard, along with all their possible runes.

So the combination of possible builds here is ridiculously large, given that you fill each of 6 slots with one of 24 abilities AND for each of those 6 abilities you chose, you also choose one of 5 runes. Oh and you also choose any 3 out of 15 possible passive abilities for you class, so even more combinations.

Infinite Instant Free Respecs

Now here's the part that was too good to be true to me. You don't spend points on these runes. You don't muck around with them in your inventory. You don't commit to them and have to pay some annoying respec fee or something. At *any time* you bring up the ability menu, set which abilities you want, and for each one click on the rune you want. It's all in a nice menu with no hassles. Again: any time. With no cost. As much as you want. The only drawback is a three second cooldown so you don't do this in the middle of a fight. Wow!

As you level up, you automatically gain new abilities and runes. Gaining them requires no action on your part. And at any time, you can switch amongst any abilities and runes you have so far, eventually all of them. You can fully explore the system all you want. You can see what every ability does. You can try out any combination of abilities. The freedom is amazing and it shows newfound confidence from Blizzard. There is no need to slow the progress of people figuring out good builds: Blizzard is telling us that exploring builds basically *is* the game, so go for it.

Elective Mode

I do have one minor complaint here. Internally, Blizzard said they divided the abilities into different categories that helped them think about what's what, then they realized that players should be able to see these categories too. So they exposed them, and tied them to the 6 different slots you have. I think this worked really, really well. It makes the whole system easy to understand, elegant, and imposes an interesting restriction: that you can only have one ability from category one, one from category two, and so on. It would be absurd to think you don't have enough choices, because you actually have over 29 BILLION possible builds per class with that system.

But really, I think Blizzard had already done a lot of development that assumed you could choose multiple abilities from a category if you wanted. They were maybe already too far down that road. So while their new system is easy to understand, elegant, and has an interesting limitation, you can turn on "elective mode" in the menus to get a less elegant UI that lets you put any ability in any slot. And of course you have to because it's strictly better for you to remove that limitation. So yeah, too bad they couldn't have made the simpler concept with better UI and the category limitation work. But whatever, it's fine.

Nephalem Valor

There is one more surprisingly great thing about the Diablo 3 ability system. That you can respec at any moment as much as you want does create one problem. If you are super hardcore, you will have a different spec for like every encounter in the game once you have memorized it all and are farming for items. That means the best way to play is tedious once you reach that level of mastery. It would really suck to "fix" that by limiting the respec in any way though. Normal humans want to explore the system freely and I'm so blown away by this infinite, instant, free respec thing that we should NOT ruin that to address this hardcore problem.

Of the top of my head I thought, "Hmm, maybe have a separate mode where respecing sucks or something, let hardcore people play that." But Blizzard's answer is much better. The Nephalem Valor system kicks in at the max level (60). So before that, meaning your first run through the game, you really can respec all you want for free with no drawback at all. Go for it! Once you reach 60, you can get a buff called Nephalem Valor that can stack a few times, maybe up to 5. Each buff increases your gold find / magic find stats. Also, if you kill a boss with that buff on, the boss will drop extra loot. You get the buff by killing rare or champion monsters.

The genius part is actually how you lose the buff though. I think it lasts about 15 minutes, so you have to keep progressing to stay buffed. But you also lose it if you *leave the game* or if you *change your abilities or runes at all*. Ok think about that. If you plan to farm the same 3 minute segment of the game over and over and over, you can do that. But you'll be doing it without the buff so it won't be optimal to get rare items that way. Also, if you want to respec before every single encounter, you can. It's just that you won't have the buff so it won't be the optimal way to get items either. The optimal way to get items happens to line up with the fun way to play: to go an entire big run where you stick to one spec. This is a very clever way to solve the problem for the new player and the expert without really sacrificing anything.

Conclusion

Thanks to Jay Wilson and the rest of Blizzard. I think this ability system with 6 slots, the lack of tech trees, the 5 runes per ability, the infinite instant free respecs, and the valor buff system overall is a very solid design. I'd go so far to say that it advances the craft of game design, even. Blizzard has come a long way in designing these kind of systems, and I think they've finally nailed it.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/class/wizard/active/
^Or just check out this link.

There are definitely some good ideas worth using in here.

[Glain]

Well... at least somebody has a good thing to say about it.

I'll play it because it's d3, but I have misgivings about the whole thing. Destroying the entire idea of the player having any direction to their build is... interesting, to say the least. It's almost like you could just turn the player into an amorphous blob that could just change character classes whenever it wanted... I mean, why not, right?

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

It's better than having to replay because you didn't spend your points correctly last time.  Or having to spend dozens of hours researching builds because you don't want to spend thousands of hours testing them yourself.

I do like removing all static boosts (+5 Damage) from classes.  It seems like removing stuff like Abandon and Defense Up from FFT.

[Kaijyuu]

Seems a solid design to me, but we'll see how it plays out.


Only drawback I immediately see is you're never building toward something. In the old system you could see a tasty talent at the bottom of the tree to salivate over as you got closer and closer. Here you just get abilities/runes/whatever at arbitrary points. There's no conscious decision making as you level up. No lofty goal to shoot for that you won't obtain anyway.

I'm fine with free respecs and all that, but I believe in solid choices to be made when leveling up. Sort of like FFT's job system, where you choose what to build up, but never lose out on opportunity to build something else. D2's problem was choices meant exclusion, the loss of options, and that can be fixed without removing skill trees and the like.

[Eternal]

Quite honestly, I'm tired of hearing about Diablo 3 already.

[3lric]

I just want to play the game, don't care about the TL;DR of it, I like Diablo, Diablo 2 and i will likely like Diablo 3 as well, if for nothing else then that fact that it's diablo

[Choto]

Et, you gotta realize that diablo fans have been waiting for over a decade for an eventual sequel... and furthermore have been waiting like 3 years after they announced it was in production for it to come out. And now its coming out next tuesday. So yeah the hype will certainly be pronounced.

I just hope it the itemization isn't to WoW-esque... I already heard about tiered armor sets and almost vomited. And I totally agree with you Glain. Although they do have something of a talent tree... so there will be a decent amount of customization.

If you guys play let me know. I already got a few buddies that are gonna play it.

[Kaijyuu]

I just want to play the game, don't care about the TL;DR of it, I like Diablo, Diablo 2 and i will likely like Diablo 3 as well, if for nothing else then that fact that it's diablo

Attitudes like this is why mainstream gaming (and mainstream anything, for that matter) sucks. Name recognition is apparently more important than the game itself.


Curious: did you buy and play Torchlight?

[Ryqoshay]

Curious: did you buy and play Torchlight?

Torchlight? No. However, I did look it up, and it has thus been added to games I need to play some day. I've often enjoyed non-mainstream games, like the first Borderlands, or Portal, before either ended up doing well enough to warrant a sequel. Your comment also reminds me that I need to find my copies of Painkiller and M.A.X. so I can reinstall them.

I wonder if M.A.X. will even work on a Windows 7 machine... In XP, it went into hyper-mode and became unplayable with continuous turns on.

Addendum: Of course, this will all be after I have exhausted my obsession with Diablo III.

[Kaijyuu]

I mentioned Torchlight since it was made by the exact same people who made D2. It is Diablo in every sense but name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torchlight

Development of the game was led by Travis Baldree, designer of Fate, joined by Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer (co-designers of Diablo and Diablo II)

Many reviewers compared the game to the Diablo series, some describing it as the best Diablo-like game since Diablo II[43] and "the best Diablo clone in years."[44] Adam Biessener of Game Informer stated that "the soul of Diablo hasn't been so ably captured in years,"[44] and The Escapist's John Funk wrote "Torchlight absolutely nails the formula that made Diablo so addictive."[53] RPGamer stated that Torchlight "manages to overcome the Diablo expectations by being a game that can stand on its own merits."[48] Satchmo on the blog PX2C gave an overall score of 9/10 saying that "It is a fine entry into a genre that doesn't have much representation on the Xbox".[55]

Yet you've never heard of it until I mentioned it. This is why I hate name recognition.

[Celdia]

I played Torchlight right up until about 2 days after I realized I could totally exploit the weapon enchantment by bypassing the auto-save feature through End Process'ing the game after getting an undesirable enchantment. I proceeded to god-mode through about 10 floors and 2 bosses [though the bosses were an amazing disappointment despite that] with a customized uber-weapon and found the story wasn't interesting enough to keep me playing it as it was just Diablo 2 with different graphics and a slightly modified combat system. I played enough of D2 that I wasn't interested in playing a new D2. Now if it had supported ANY kind of multiplayer I might've had some more fun with it. Torchlight was a solid game, no question about that, but my tastes have changed over the years and Single Player Diablo doesn't interest me anymore. I likely won't bother getting D3 for the same reason, assuming my computer could even run it it will still be more of the same of what I've already played and I'm tired of that.