So i've been playing the Darkening of Tristram event in Diablo 3. If you don't know...

So i've been playing the Darkening of Tristram event in Diablo 3. If you don't know, it is part of a celebration of the 20'th anniversary of the Diablo 1 game. Blizzard did a little something in all of their games for it.
In Diablo 3, they recreated old tristram. Everything is of course fucked up and destroyed but they also added this weird pixelation/resolution filter I guess to give you the feel like you were playing the old game.
But you're still using your modern Diablo 3 heroes and systems.

Now, one thing this brought to mind is if we are going to enter an age of nostalgia exploitation in video games much like movies have been doing?
With video games people could always just hop back to the older games and they were rather distinct and there really wasn't a call for it. Video game audiences generally want to see new stuff.
However, this could open an odd door of reboots and soft reboots and just outright remakes.
Now, we know that some games are always remakes (Mario, Zelda, etc) and we have seen the results of hard reboots/remakes like with Tomb Raider and DmC.
But what about soft-reboots?
Complete rebuilds (REMake comes to mind)?

Or something like this…which is nostalgia pandering to the point that they even make it look like you've tried to play a game with max resolution of 800x600 on a fucking modern monitor?

One final question to discuss…could this ultimately be a good thing? Modern day developers in a bid to cash in on a nostalgia wave are inadvertently made to look back on the older games and discover (or rediscover) just what made them fun and why people like them more than their newer stuff?

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over 10 years ago every fucking company, except Sony and MS, were pretending to "get back to their roots" and it amounted to jack shit. the most that will come out of this is old games getting taken off the online stores and replaces with shitty HD remakes at a 500% markup.

It's almost as if the only people still playing Blizzard games are faggots who buy into things like 'brand loyalty'.

This is the most artificial kind of nostalgia, using their previous achievements and well-remembered products as marketing gimmicks. I expect to see even more of it a shit like Halo:CE becomes 'old school'.

it's extra pathetic because they didn't even make it.

You actually bought Diablo 3? Whatever shit happens, its because of people like you that fund it.

Diablo 3 on console is really good.

It's not even good nostalgia. Nu-Blizzard just took the cow level, and made it a shitty meme in Wow. This remade dungeon is a soulless, half-assed attempt at bringing back Diablo 1 because the followers don't even fit in the event.


Said the Blizzard-fanboy-sjw-shill. Go back to reddit/the Blizzard forums with that shit.

I can assure you, the people who still play D3 have not touched Diablo 1 once. They were probably not even born when D1 came out. So it's really not even nostalgia pandering, it's fake nostalgia pandering.

More or less yea, but even people who didn't play Diablo 1 would eventually realize Diablo 3 sucks.

A couple years ago a local gamestop had the special edition sitting on their shelf. They sold it to me for a fraction of the price because it was just collecting dust.

When you put the game into the higher difficulties (which you can only unlock after beating it first) it ratchets up the challenge and it actually feels like a fucking diablo game.
And in that case, what they did with the potion, where it is time/cooldown based instead of stock based it makes the game even harder because now you can't just spam potion drinks to get yourself out of a situation.

As for the mechanics of it all, I can see what they were really going for and in some ways it is pretty good. Other than your paragon stats (which are your levels after you max out your normal levels) you can freely change your build and loadout by essentially changing gear.
As someone who likes to experiment with different abilities and such all the time this saves me tons of time in having to build up from scratch.
However, their lack of being able to focus stats means I can't make classes against their type (like a tanking/melee necro as I could in Diablo 2) so that's a downside.

Playing through this now, I wonder if Blizzard just isn't realizing how they may have shot themselves in the foot.
Remember the early talks about how Diablo 3 just wasn't dark and gritty enough?
Well…in Diablo 3 there is no need for a "light radius" at all.
Now that i'm playing through the old dungeon, which is pretty faithful to the original game, it is dark, dank, things come at you from the darkness and it feels a whole lot more creepy than ANY dungeon in Diablo 3.
While Diablo 3 may be pretty…just this little remake here of Diablo 1 shows that Diablo 1 had more of a horror atmosphere.

I wonder how much of that is helped by the pixel filter they've slapped on it though? The fuzzy graphics kind of give it a dream-like or memory-like quality to me. The same sort of feeling I get when I play something like Resident Evil 2. Where the low resolution graphics actually add to the creepiness.
Anyone else know what i'm talking about or am I just falling for nostalgia bait?


I've played them all at this point. 3 is definitely the weakest on all fronts. 1 has the best atmosphere for the subject matter (I can go into at length how having the issue localized to a single town rather than the world helps ratchet up that factor). 2 is the best in terms of gameplay mechanics (how you level, how you customize a character/class).

Your reason why or how you bought the game don't matter.


Unlikely, considering you still bought Diablo 3 and gave them money.

What you're missing, though, is that they are showing, likely without being aware of it, that the old games were indeed darker and grittier, especially to those that may have never played them (most of the diablo 3 playerbase really).

Hopefully it makes people want more of that and then the next diablo game can be put back on the right track.
And I say next diablo game because the ending of this one has Diablo, once again, released.

Maybe now that Metzen is gone we can get story beats other than "Character becomes CORRUPTED, releases ANCIENT EVIL".

Probably not though.

The problem is that too many people misunderstand what was great about a lot of the classics from yestermillennia. It's way too common to try and chop up a game into individual parts and go "Oh this was good" or "That was bad". It doesn't work like that.

D1 wasn't amazing because of any individual part. It was the game as a whole. You didn't have this huge backstory or lore of the world. As far as you knew, it was basically some random European village somewhere. It was low fantasy. The presentation was top notch as you went deeper and deeper, the environments became increasingly strange and hellish. The gameplay was not particularly complex. But that wasn't what the game was riding on.

This is why so many remakes or reboots just aren't very interesting. You can't just take a game and change bring over superficial changes and expect the same thing. This is why I have some hope for the FF7 remake since it looks like they just scrapped the old combat system. It wouldn't have worked to just "FF7 but new graphics". Games don't work like that.

CORRUPTED

I wanna see an ARPG where you start off as a lowly demon and work your way up Hell's hierarchy by killing other demons and good guys.

it's going to be pure SJW trash from here on out. expect Bioware-tier writing for the next WoW expansion, or whatever game comes out before that.

...

They though Tracer's orientation had way more priority than fixing all of Legion's legendary and class problems let alone give Diablo decent 20th anniversary stuff. This is the same company that thought it would be cute to encourage sexual abuse/misandry towards men through an ex-boyfriend dummy for social justice. This is the same company that hired a furry who told the playerbase using a mouse to play Wow was stupid, as he uses a tablet to design and balance classes when he isn't busy being an attention whore.

Let these sink in for a minute.


Again, Blizzard thought spamming cow level memes and the Tristram song were what made Diablo big, not the other things that made Diablo loved by millions until Diablo 3 ruined it.

You know, from what I heard in the past the biggest issue at Blizzard was the crusty hierarchy that never changes, i.e. people who are completely out of touch having the last say in everything.

This is the exact opposite of what they needed though. Fuck.

That happens more often than you would like to think in companies.
People get entrenched and if they were there since the beginning/small days they are never made to leave nor would they want to leave voluntarily because that company is their life.

Of course, that many years goes by and you also end up in the position where grudges are made and departments stop talking to eachother at the top levels and things get really shitty really quickly.
I'm watching this happen in the company i'm working for now and it is a well documented phenomenon for all others.

Research In Motion, the makers of the Blackberry phone is the prime example and THE study case for this happening.
Look into the rise and fall of RIM if you want to know what the fuck is going on in game companies today.
I imagine the problem is even worse in Japan where the business men at the upper levels fancy themselves as samurai and like to LARP that samurai code bullshit.

It has all to do with money. Companies, especially Blizzard, are desperate for money in the current climate. Unfortunately, with Trump in office and many more newcomers to the global stage, things might change soon and people will buy reboots simply because they have money. This of course will justify (to the devs anyway) that retro reboots are cool and rehashing old content is profitable. And then comes the year of reboots. Much like movies before it.

why

What's that gun?

???

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People on the forums rightfully called out Blizzard saying if it was called the ex-girlfriend dummy, all Hell would break loose. This is one of many sjw-enforced shit they added into Wow with Sylvanas being a dindunuffin, redeemable-feminist heroine and Fembuster Gnomes in new Karazhan.

It's a matter of time when Diablo will be full of socjus shit like this.

it really says a lot when I think the MMO with the most well-adjusted female playerbase was FFXI.

There's EQ2…but no plays EQ2.

At least they backed off of the dummy and renamed it, but you're right that it was stupid they even thought it would be a good idea in the first place.

Also, when the overwhelming majority of the playerbase is male and only a small fraction would be gay, throwing an "ex-boyfriend" dummy in would be really stupid and off-putting to a lot of people on that basis alone, never mind the misandry aspect.

And for a big anniversary like this, the fact that there's really not a lot of anything in terms of celebrations is pretty terrible. Maybe they still have it out for Blizzard North, I dunno.

Last year was the biggest slap in the face for Diablo because Chen did nothing, but inflate his ego, as he ruined any diverse gameplay with his mandated bullshit. They did nothing for the series until Blizzcon was around the corner, and they really thought announcing a paid-dlc class and a shitty dungeon everyone knew was half-assed would make Diablo popular again. Chen really thought people wanted to hear him talk about shitty, 3-4 year-old game designs nobody liked instead of another Diablo game or expansion. Wow's Diablo stuff was an even bigger joke with some half-assed hub based on the cow level meme with the only best reward being a fucking bag (and it's not even a guaranteed drop).

How out of fucking touch do you have to be with your playerbase to do blunders like these?! I also don't get how they try to make memes out of shit nobody cared about like Cow Level or "Barbie." Nowadays It really is pick "Demon Hunter (Chen's favorite class) & class of the season or fuck off" now that Chen killed Barbarians when Barb players proved the D3 engine is outdated shit with a build he ruined. Newer seasons are worse than the last one, but all of them tend to last for 1-2 weeks when autists are sick of playing the same broken shit.

pretty sure it's a FAMAS

The Darkening of Tristrtam was a'ight. Nothing to cream your jeans over. It's a theme park version of Diablo 1. Nothing more, nothing less.

The coolest part was saying various Diablo 1 enemies recreated in high quality 3D. The final confrontation with Diablo where he actually looks like fucking Diablo is supposed to look was very rewarding.

Unfortunately, at a certain point they gave up on making new models for the enemies and just decided to reuse preexisting models to represent them. I didn't expect too much from a free event that only lasts a month, but it was still disappointing to see enemies like the Overlord totally skipped over, despite the fact that the Butcher himself is an overlord and all you'd need to do is work backwards from there.

Overall, you're still better off installing Diablo 1 and playing with an HD/Expansion mod. If you don't like Diablo 3, this won't change your mind.

6/10

Or AR-15

...

They wouldn't have even changed the HP/Mana bars if one of their artists didn't do it in their own time.

...

Sounds like par for the course for Blizzard. Look how long they have been fucking up WoW.

what? i never played WOW but did play War3, so explain what happened.

I hate blizzshil thread so fucking much.

unless I missed something I wouldn't say she's redeemed.
But making her Warchief and letting Vol'jin say that he saw her saving everyone I guess she's destined to become Kerrigan 2.0 later on.

if there was any point in Warcraft's history were it would've actually made some kind of sense to appoint her as warchief it would've been during Wrath. this just sounds like pointless development to keep her from becoming completely irrelevant.