PDA

View Full Version : Keep item qualitites markantly different!


jakotaco
07-07-2008, 21:51
I've seen this to eb a trend nowadays, dividing "rares" into tiers of different colors so that a blue rare is just the same as a purple rare but with less powerful mods.

And in my opinion that is a rather boring wasy to do it, Mythos is a fine example of a game that did this mistake when greens, blues, purples and oranges can spawn with pretty much the same amount and type of mods but simply differetn quantities. Kind f takes away the feeling of difference when people barely can agree on what's the difference between the differently colored items.

In Diablo2 it was kept simple, a blue had a maximum of two affixes and had a few affixes that couldn't show up on a yellow. Making some of the blues interesting as they were'nt guaranteed to be inferior to a rare. A yellow had a higher amount of possible affixes but a slightly shorter list of possible affixes. Where the Uniques (gold) are nice themed items with sometimes more exotic properties not available on magics and rares. And the greens were different from the uniques in that they had usually fewer stats but instead had set bonuses.

This distinct difference was something I didn't quite learn to value until I had played games that didn't have this difference. When you can barely see any connection between affixes, rarities, colors and stats.

Whatever you do, don't water the rarities down to shades of gray!

If you absolutely wants to have many different qualities of items make sure they have something that makes them different other than the maximum damage enhancement on them. Maybe let them have completely different affix pools (maybe a Kurast item has a big pool of poison affixes whereas a heaven item has no poison affixes but instead magical or lightning damage or something...)

If nothing else we will not have to worry about repeating the (possibly debated) list of item qualities in order form worst to best 10 times per day... :crazyeyes:

lionheart
07-07-2008, 22:55
I agree with you, there should definetely be distinguishing differences between the various items. The rarity should mean something in my opinion

Dimmu
08-07-2008, 02:36
I don't think they would do what you're talking about because d2's popularity pretty much revolves around the item fetish thing, so clearly their system had to be awsome for an 8 year old game to still have a fairly huge amount of players.
But I'm curious to see if they will add more types of droppable items, considering they added sets and rares since d1 it wouldn't suprise me to see an entirely new type of item which monsters can drop.

jakotaco
10-07-2008, 18:52
I don't think they would do what you're talking about because d2's popularity pretty much revolves around the item fetish thing, so clearly their system had to be awsome for an 8 year old game to still have a fairly huge amount of players.

True, one can always hope they don't mess it up. Just seeing that FSS with their Diablo background still chose to have many different item colors with little to no difference one can never be sure. WoW had taken one step in the direction of more different qualitites of items, but in that case the stats were non-random so it actually was balanced so that an epic always was better than a rare of the same level and so on.

Anyway I thought it was best to post a "little reminder" to let the guys know that simplicity and distinct differences is more important than quantity. :girly: