being blizzard, i'm hoping that they did balance it out anyway, and make it a better game for it. people raged about SCII and how they cut important things, but its turned out great.
i'm just nervous now.
Yeah I been nervous as well since Craptivision merged with Blizzard. Pretty sure Koticks going to run Blizzard down the shitter as well.
No, but you at least need to be able to play your character how you want to. You need to be able to make choices that may have consequences. If they game removes all those for the sake of making the game "more accesible" it always has a negative effect.
It all depends on the story and the setting. Choices are great, but I still feel D1 is better than almost any RPG out there, and there are very little choices, or consequences. But the setting, the music, the characters (Faran the drunk). I mean they got people who are there just to envelope you more into the story. I remember my first time meeting The Butcher to this day, or even Leoric, or Arch Bishop Lazaurus. These are some of the greatest memories I have of gaming. Even the mini-bosses we so epic, like Sledge (he was random, so you had to live in fear, and hope he wasn't going to be spawned this time through), he was a big orge type guy that traveled with about 5 or 6 others, and unlike every other one that you run into that looks like him, him and his band stealth. The onlytime you would know you found him is, you would be walking then all of a sudden you couldn't move, they would unstealth and have you surrounded, and when you get hit you can't swing and you can't block people behind you, he was tough as hell.
The perfect example would be comparing Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. DA:O was a great RPG, that reminded me a lot of a more High Fantasy version of Diablo. DA2, was a piece of shit hack and slash with minimal customization. BioWare claims all changes were made to make the game more exciting, but all it did was strip all the unique aspects of the game away and turn it into a generic Action "RPG" that was just a giant hack-and-slash with a mediocre storyline.
DA1 on PC wasn't anything like Diablo, it's like an RPG/RTS. DA2 is just like DA1 was on consoles. I don't see what was stripped away, Bioware has been doing that RPG/RTS crap since Baldurs Gate in the 90's. I personally liked both games, but here you are citing gameplay as making it a crap game, not storyline or customization, so it seems to be completely off topic and more a rant towards Bioware.
People want a newer fancier version of Diablo 2, they don't want a completely different game. They also want to be able to play their Single Player games, whenever, wherever. Not allowing people to play the game at all when they aren't connected to Battle.net is absurd. It's easily remedied by not allowing characters to be ported from SP to MP. Problem. Fucking. Solved. Store all MP characters on Battle.net servers, and then people are forced to use legit non-hacked characters unlike in Diablo 2.
I sure as hell don't want a fancier D2. D2 never had me crapping my pants over bosses like I did in D1. D1's music never pulled me in, neither did it's storyline or NPC's for quests. Nor did it's locations, you want fear, you need a bit more enclosure, and less colorful/bright areas and less bright spell effects. I want to be crapping my pants, staring at a door and seeing blood and people on spikes on the other side and thinking, "maybe I should just ignore this door and mosey on killing skeletons", D2 never gave me those moments. As far as being online, thats a bit of a pain, but it's not for SP/MP characters, it's for hacking, and it's going to fail, but meh.
When you need to come out and say that people should play other games instead of yours in certain situations, there is a problem with your sales strategy...
Theres a lot of Problems since the Activision Blizzard merger, and there will be more down the line, and it makes me sad. I don't know if this game will be good, I hope it is, if it isn't I will continue playing D1. But the lack of skill trees I see people complaining about doesn't bother me one bit, not if they do the game right. Remember you get to fill so many slots with so many abilities, picture those are "skills" you want Whirlwind, toss it in a slot, you want Frenzy, toss it in a slot. Those slots are going to act much like Skill Trees, so I don't see the huge issue. And I also comment because I'm sick of hearing about comparisons to colorful D2 crap, seems people are too young (and I'm only 25 lol) to remember how amazing D1 was (and still is), just to give you an idea, Diablo 1 is tied for 3rd on Metacritic with a rating of 94(and it came out 16 years ago!), and Diablo 2 is tied for 9th with a rating of 88.