I know what you mean.
I'd give like... 40 SoJs for an HD version of D2.
Maybe I'll try D3 again. People keep talking about "Loot 2.0" like it's the best patch ever.
I have not gone back to the game on PC after the first month, but I did end up buying the PS3 version (I mainly bought it for a friend, who couldn't care less about it) and thought that the "loot 1.5" (the mini version of the 2.0 patch and without the class changes) was pretty fucking fun.
For two weeks anyway, and I got extremely frustrated with the save feature eating away about nine hours of ridiculously awesome drops for my Hardcore Inferno WD. It's not something I could endlessly play like Diablo 2; a game that I played every day for the first six months of it's release, and then similarly with the release of LoD. The only reason I'm even considering playing it again on the PC is for RoS and seeing how far I can get on the ladder with the Crusader. The endless clicking using the same exact skills is only so much "fun" after a while, and just getting better loot for the sake of better loot is not in any way fun to me. The gear is a means to an end to me. Hardcore on the other hand is an entirely different beast, and I would probably stick around longer for that; except, you know...Battle.net, so no.
Diablo 2 -> Diablo 3 is the poster child for modern over-engineering.
Diablo 2 was and still is a massively broken game. It didn't ever get close. Skills were broken and unusable (or too usable), items didn't scale, gems were useless, gambling was useless, hirelings were useless, uniques were mostly useless, you could get mobs that were unbeatable, the economy was fucked with dupes, enemies and bosses were too farmable. They fixed a lot of it and yet even now it's still pretty broken, only a few builds with heavy gear are viable at the top end. I think it was those rough edges that gave rise to organic player strategy and that made it fun. It was always fun to create a new character an see how far you could go before you hit the wall. Much more boring to respec. Diablo 3 tries so hard to avoid pitfalls it simply feels forced, there's a particular path they want players on, a certain way to play. Maybe it's less repetitive but it saps a lot of strategy and makes it less fun. Truly great games often are broken experiences, but that's okay. Throwing 200 people on a game and playtesting the shit out of it makes it more generic, maybe the lows get brought up but the highs come down too.
This is somewhat correct, but it's also a very narrow view. Did you play the CD2 upon release before all of the rampant dupes, hacks and bots? Even if many of the early skills were complete shit until synergies (which just added more of the same issue), being completely ignorant and the discovery factor was really damn fun. The game was so fun to play that hitting that "brick wall" wasn't really that much of a problem, because your next character would level up faster with the gear that your previous character found. After one or two "flop" characters, it was extremely easy to tell what skills would be viable late game, and which were simply filler to the "real" skills--which ultimately is all that mattered since you weren't going to cycle through multiple skills every few seconds.
Maybe I was just lucky, because my first character was a max CE Necro that hit 97 on ladder before the 1.3 patch, and after that I was one of the first few to play as a Hammerdin, before everyone and their mothers were playing them much later in LoD with Enigmas, but I never felt like I ended up hitting a wall and had to start over. The starting over for me was just because I wanted to experiment with all of the different builds (many of which were entirely viable, even if they were not as overpowered).
And like I said earlier, Blizzard may have made it so that more skills are viable at the higher levels in D3, but almost none of them are interesting at all. Give me a broken game that's a lot more fun to play than one that's overpolished and streamlined almost to the point of being completely sterile. The only thing I truly like in D3 over D2 would be the graphics and aesthetics, but we're talking about hardware being the limiting factor.
