Diablo RPG Kickstarter signup is live

[innerdude]

The rules are powered by a custom d6 dice pool system from a dream team led by Joe LeFavi (Blade Runner) and GCU’s Przemysław Zub (Dying Light) working alongside Cam Banks (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying), John Harper (Blades in the Dark), Mike Olson (Fate), and Shawn Tomkin (Ironsworn) on the core rules.

(bold emphasis mine)

I may literally be one of the only human beings on planet earth in my current age bracket (mid-40s) and hobby spectrum (PC gamer, D&D gamer) who has literally never played a single minute of any Diablo video game. (Though I daresay Torchlight probably comes close enough to the formula to be a reasonable facsimile.)

I'm furthermore not a Blizzard fanboy. Never played a single second of WoW. Played maybe a handful of games of DOTA in my lifetime. Played Warcraft II and III single player campaigns, but never finished either. Played maybe 3 total games of StarCraft ever at late '90s LAN parties.

So when I say I couldn't care less about Diablo as a franchise, believe me I had absolutely zero interest in this TTRPG and Kickstarter before just now.

But I literally just sat straight up in my chair when I saw those three names mentioned in the design credits.

sigh I guess my gaming wallet isn't out of the woods yet this year.

 

[JConstantine]

This was actually overstated.. Outside of passing people in town and when you approach clearly marked areas for multiplayer opponents, the game actually makes most other players invisible to you and you never have to interact with them.

Other than when you're fighting an (optional) outdoor boss, the "forced multiplayer" folks were worried about is mostly watching somebody ride past you on a horse.

This was based on my actual play experience during the beta weekend. It was not just world bosses, or even Helltide events; I would have random players contribute to pack clearing in the open world like it was Guild Wars 2. That's not really the experience I'm looking for in an aRPG, I play GW2 for that. If your experience in the live game differed, that's cool, but I found it obnoxious enough that, combined with the level scaling, I was put off the game. And that was probably for the best given what they did (or rather failed to do) with Lilith.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This was based on my actual play experience during the beta weekend. It was not just world bosses, or even Helltide events; I would have random players contribute to pack clearing in the open world like it was Guild Wars 2. That's not really the experience I'm looking for in an aRPG,

I'm not sure how you would have seen packs of players clustered around content that wasn't at the borders of a town or a marked multiplayer event. Maybe there's a dial they adjusted on how much one encountered other players.

When I've played (I completed the original campaign and played through two seasons since then) and Sanctuary feels about as lonely as it did in prior games, except for people riding by on horses or silently milling around in towns.

 

[Weiley31]

It is explained in D3, yeah.

In D2, the soulstones are destroyed, but that's not equivalent to destroying their souls, rather the idea was that it sent them back to the Black Abyss (I believe this is actually stated in D2, even), where demons originally came from (but you will note that they managed to get out of that before). This essentially equivalent to Batman dusting his hands off after slamming the Joker in a cell in Arkham Asylum and saying "Well I never have to worry about that guy again!", when he full-well knows the Joker has escaped Arkham before!

But specifically in D3, the Evils left "traces" - i.e. corruption - on Sanctuary, and Adria used this to essentially pull them into the Black Soulstone (which was a major thing in D3). The soulstone when was used to create like, powered-up super-Diablo out of Leah (nobody liked this plot development at all, I note). This Diablo was defeated and shoved back into the (overloaded, somewhat unstable) Black Soulstone which was then put in a "safe place" (lol as if) by the Horadrim.

Malthael (the Angel of Death) then immediately stole (killing most of the people protecting it, in an admittedly cool cutscene) the Black Soulstone to try and drain the souls (or part of the souls - enough to kill them) out of all humans in Sanctuary (basically just taking the "Judge Death" approach, I feel like that's probably where they got this from), and stopping him doing this is the plot of the D3 expansion. He then got mad when this failed and shattered it, and long story short this broke all the Evils out again, though as of D4, certainly Ba'al and Diablo are still MIA.


On the direct contrary he is the main (indeed kinda only) good guy in D3. Other angels are terribly naughty though.

Man Diablo 3 was fun. I ENJOYED my first ever playthrough of it as the Necromancer.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Man Diablo 3 was fun. I ENJOYED my first ever playthrough of it as the Necromancer.

It was. At least for me on Adventure Mode - I didn't really enjoy playing through the story either time I did it (PS3 and PC). Necromancer was a particularly well-designed class.

 

[Jaeger]

I may literally be one of the only human beings on planet earth in my current age bracket (mid-40s) and hobby spectrum (PC gamer, D&D gamer) who has literally never played a single minute of any Diablo video game.

Now there are two.

Let it be heard that any man that knows not of Diablo game play; Them I shall call my brother.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This was based on my actual play experience during the beta weekend. It was not just world bosses, or even Helltide events; I would have random players contribute to pack clearing in the open world like it was Guild Wars 2. That's not really the experience I'm looking for in an aRPG, I play GW2 for that. If your experience in the live game differed, that's cool, but I found it obnoxious enough that, combined with the level scaling, I was put off the game. And that was probably for the best given what they did (or rather failed to do) with Lilith.

I think that was largely an artifact of the beta weekend. Either that or they turned a dial like @Whizbang Dustyboots suggests.

Unless it's a Helltide (or similar) or a World Boss, I pretty much never see another player. In fact, I would say I often literally go for several hours in the open world and never see other players outside of towns, Helltides (and similar - there are often season events like that).

That's not to say it was a good decision. I don't think it was. I think the open world has two huge problems:

1) It's incredibly bland and visually boring and undifferentiated. Like, sure, there are five or six biomes, maybe slightly more if you're generous. But every single location is rendered in such a way as to be completely forgettable. I've got hundreds of hours logged on D4 and if you showed me a random screenshot (with no map/minimap) of an area, I could probably tell the zone, but very little more.

Whereas with say, WoW, even early on, unless it was somewhere I'd never been, I could have reliably "geoguessed" pretty much every location fairly precisely. And WoW's map is much larger.

Also the combination of bland and "always the same" means you never have a reason to actually look at the world outside of Helltides (and similar). You just blast past it on horseback looking at your minimap and trying to keep your speed as high as possible.

Absolute and total fail/miss on Blizzard's part.

2) It adds nothing to the game, gameplay-wise apart from tedious collectathons.

Again, big miss. D4 wants to you spend either countless hours trying to collect boring statues and waypoints "legitimately" or to go online and follow some maps. And you need to do all the waypoints and fortresses every. Single. Season. Which is just boring. Really boring. They made it so the fortresses give big XP to try and compensate but it's so fundamentally dull. It's not as time-consuming as say, going through PoE1/2's story, but it's somehow vastly less engaging.

And nothing else in the world is worth doing, really. Especially the countless quests - some of them are quite well-written, but they're all boring and featureless gameplay-wise and totally unrewarding in a game that is very much about efficiency and doing the right thing.

Most of this is because they made it a FIXED open world.

They did that because they made it a SHARED open world.

To share it as much as they wanted, it has to be fixed.

And the precision difficulty control, which is kind of necessary for the setup they've created means there's no texture to the world either. There are no hard or easy or farming areas, really.

So I think that + fixed dungeons was a VERY bad idea, and I don't think D4 will ever quite redeem itself unless they change that. But it's made a lot of money, a crazy amount of money, in largely part by selling microtransactions, so I don't know if Blizzard care.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah, after the first two seasons -- which included the busy work of unlocking the same content again on a new character of a class I liked less than the ones I played before -- I wondered why I was bothering with this.

At some point, if WoW slows down -- the eight week content cadence is so fast I'm more in danger of burning out than running out of stuff to do -- I might pick up the expansion and play through it, but that's a less compelling choice than finishing Baldur's Gate 3.

 

[schneeland]

Unless it's a Helltide (or similar) or a World Boss, I pretty much never see another player. In fact, I would say I often literally go for several hours in the open world and never see other players outside of towns, Helltides (and similar - there are often season events like that).

I guess that really depends on when you play(ed). I bought the game when it was out and played the campaign in the following weeks, and I quite frequently had other players show up for overworld events. Now it was never hordes of players - I don't remember there ever being more than three random players, but it still the atmosphere was distinctly different from that of earlier games where you play alone or other players that explicitly joined your game.
That being said, I feel the game had much bigger issues than the multiplayer aspect. But that's maybe a discussion for the video game thread.
The only thing I will say is that I hope they do no replicate the loot experience from the video game in the TTRPG - because I felt like a garbage collector with all these useless magic items.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The only thing I will say is that I hope they do no replicate the loot experience from the video game in the TTRPG - because I felt like a garbage collector with all these useless magic items.

What they need to do is basically make it so you get like, mostly really cool loot. Like, if, in Diablo 2 terms, most items were a Rare (Yellow) or occasionally Unique (Pale gold).

D4's loot experience is dire and D3's wasn't much better. You just throw 98% of the loot straight into the trash compactor, as it were.

But D1 and D2 weren't like that, and whilst you got too much loot for a pen and paper game, the general vibe I think could be replicated well.

(I actually think you could make a kind of excellent random armour/weapon loot generator for Daggerheart of all things, if you willing to accept some minor balance issues. I might consider doing that if very bored. Everyone in my group is away for August so no DH for a while so maybe I will hmmm.)