Blizzard to Release Diablo III Patch to Fix Design Issues
Blizzard's announced that more patches are incoming, this time to balance game design.
Now that Blizzard’s managed to patch up most of the problems that came with Diablo III’s launch, it’s announced that in the coming weeks it will be introducing some design patches to tweak the balance of the game.
Those who played as monk and demon hunter who were angry about having abilities nerfed, don’t get your hopes up just yet. Blizzard’s not reneging on the abilities patched in 1.0.1, although it’s offered some explanation as to why these abilities were tweaked. The developers felt that Lingering Fog, Boon of Protection, and Force Armor were all abilities that were so powerful that they were being abused, thus they felt it necessary to nerf these abilities. They also reassured fans that they won’t be nerfing every ability they feel is “good”, just any that may be abused in a way that breaks the game.
They acknowledged that Inferno’s difficulty setting also needs adjusting. Hardcore fans need not worry, they’re not going to make Inferno easier. There’s just a few difficulty “spikes” that the developers saw in the game that they felt needed smoothing out, which they say they’ll do so by better mixing champion, rare, and boss packs.
Fans have also complained that Diablo III significantly altered rare and legendary loot to the point that they no longer were quite as hard to encounter and special as they were in Diablo II. The announcement acknowledged the complaints and offered the explanation that legendary weapons aren’t meant to be the best in game, but simply be another tier of items that players could collect. The developers felt that legendary items were good in comparison to the lower level tiers when comparing levels and explained that legendary items from a lower level are obviously not going to be comparable to a higher level special or rare item. However, they've decided that in the future update, they WILL be buffing up items quite a bit.
Finally, Blizzard is changing up how the artisans will work. The developers want to alter how the blacksmith levels up by lowering the gold requirements for each level, in the hopes of allowing players to craft items good enough to fill in gaps in armor or weapon sets when looting doesn’t prove useful. They’re also lowering the amount of gems required to combine gems to a higher tier so that gem crafting will be more useful to players.
These design updates are all slated for update 1.0.3, which will be coming in the next few weeks. Next week, players will have access to the 1.0.2 update, which continues the now two week old tradition of hotfixing in game issues.
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kareed44 Blizzard does a really good job at addressing issues like this (bugs, balance issues, etc...). They seems to listen to their user's feedback (positive and negative) and make educated decisions on what to change, if anything needs changing at all. They may not be perfect, but I challenge anyone to name a game developer who does it better. They get hammered and flamed by people constantly but when your the best at what you do there are always going to be haters.Reply -
guruofchem Agree with kareed44 - they do seem to work pretty hard to make adjustments, without simply slapping crap on and hoping it works. They may not be ideal, since ideal would be a flawless game at release and there will never be such an animal, but they are better than anyone else I have seen in a lot of years of gaming.Reply -
cknobman The developers felt that legendary items were good in comparison to the lower level tiers when comparing levels and explained that legendary items from a lower level are obviously not going to be comparable to a higher level special or rare item. Thus, they’re not tweaking any settings with the legendary items.
This is just flat out 100% incorrect, wrong, and not true.
Blizzard posted this on their game design update (in fact it was one of the main points they posted):
we’re planning to just straight-out buff Legendary items in a future patch
Please do better when posting articles like this so you don't accidentally misinform someone. -
aoneone aha im glad i didnt waste 60 bucks on diablo 3. I'm waiting on skidrows diablo 3 ^_^ thumbs up if u agree! ^_^Reply -
KNO3 9371177 said:we’re planning to just straight-out buff Legendary items in a future patch
Please do better when posting articles like this so you don't accidentally misinform someone.
I agree. Actual release is here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6018173/Game_Design_Update-5_28_2012#blog -
djscribbles Their "DRM" is just the side effect of them not releasing their server code. I don't neccessarily agree with the decision, but a 'primarily' online game where most of the long term community is composed of online multiplayer gamers, they are playing the long game here by removing some of the risk of item duping schemes.Reply
If you can access the server code to play single player/lan from your PC, it's only a matter of time before someone reverse engineers it to find an exploit, once the duping-genie is out of the bottle, it's pretty difficult to put back. My assumption is that this is exactly how duping occurred in Diablo2, and they made the change to prevent it from occuring in diablo3.
Complain about DRM all you want, it likely had little to do with piracy prevention, SP/LAN is just an innocent bystander in a quest against hacks. -
bigdragon Wow, what were they doing back in beta? So many changes so quickly after launch. I would have expected them to catch all this stuff back in beta -- that's what they're fore! I know they're trying hard to say that good abilities aren't being nerfed just because they're good, but that's the same line the Battlefail 3 developers told us over and over when they ruined perfectly good weapons to make others shine. It's a never-ending shell game. You just need to figure out what has the best stats after a patch, everyone winds up using it, and then that gets nerfed too. I don't like this type of patching. Glad I avoided Diablo 3.Reply -
kareed44 DroKing - I'm not saying I like the DRM, but I do understand the need for it. They are protecting themselves from thieves. Regardless of what you think of the company or the game itself, they put in a lot of work to put out Diablo 3 and intend to receive compensation for it, just like every other person who has a job. Blizzard doesn't owe anyone anything (even though it seems clear that they work hard to appease their customers). They have a product that cost X amount. Take it or leave it.Reply -
vrumor Hope you enjoy your wait there aoneone. Guess itll go along with you sitting alone in your room playing a game thats meant to be played online with people *gasp*Reply