The good, the bad, and the Lord of Terror.
I have played Diablo 1 through 3 and I am a huge fan of the Diablo series. Since the release of Diablo 3 I have read a lot of posts complaining about the game being bad. Usually the discussions don't have any substance to them in ways of game design.
I would like to discuss the reasons why you think that Diablo 3 is a good or bad game. Hopefully we can learn some things about design(or other things) that we all can apply in future game projects.
The good
- Very Juicy
- Gameplay is intuitive
- Good co-op
The Bad
- Little to no felling of ownership of your character
- Player skill gain lacking
- Stats feel vestigial
- Always online single player
I would like to discuss the reasons why you think that Diablo 3 is a good or bad game. Hopefully we can learn some things about design(or other things) that we all can apply in future game projects.
The good
- Very Juicy
- Gameplay is intuitive
- Good co-op
The Bad
- Little to no felling of ownership of your character
- Player skill gain lacking
- Stats feel vestigial
- Always online single player
Comments
So it's a game that has far more with how lucky you get than how good you are as a player. (Feel free to think about my mastery talk at the last meet up ;) )
After that, it just felt like a waste of time to me. I'd just started Hell with my DH, and had played around 2 acts each with all of the other classes. I knew how each class played, knew how pretty the art looked, and there was no longer anything new to learn and discover. I went from playing quite a lot, to playing only if friends were playing, to not even wanting to play.
The game design felt pretty evil: when I played, I got the same feeling that I get from people sitting in a casino. Where they gambled money away, I was gambling time. I wasn't earning knowledge or skill, I wasn't getting treated to more and more beautiful art, and while I did experience satisfaction when I got some new, awesome item, it happened so seldom. It just felt a lot like WoW or something. It felt as if they actually wanted an addictive game. They wanted cocaine. And as someone who barely has enough time for the other stuff he wants to do, the evil slot machine stuff was just too much for me.
I compare this with SC2, where every game I play (win or lose) I feel as if I've learnt something, whether it's how not to play, something to look out for when scouting, or whatever. I still suck at the game (mainly because I've only played around 300 games or so since I bought the game around 2 years ago), but every game has value, and every game feels as if it brings growth. :)
I wish I'd played Diablo 2 more, earlier, so that I had something to compare it to. By the time I got D2, it was already after other similar games like Sacred and Titan Quest, and my maximum resolution was 800x600. I just wasn't interested then.
To be honest, if you journeyed back 12 years and spoke to past @BlackShipsFilltheSky and asked him what he thought of D2 he would have said approximately what @Elyradine just said about D3. But looking back the thing that made D2 a better experience for me was that it was actually a little challenging. D3 is not nearly challenging or complicated enough for my tastes, and it's kind of slow, and I don't have the time to work at it for 30 hours+ (per character) just to get to the point where I can enjoy the game (in inferno). I am seriously considering hiring someone to level up my characters to inferno for me (because, why not? There are no irrevocable character decisions in D3. I have no sense of ownership of my current characters anyway).
I'm quite involved with diablo-likes... I released one last year in fact. I think it's fair to say that because I've dedicated so much of my time to the genre I've got very high expectations of these sorts of games (because I'm always comparing them to my dream diablo-like). Nevertheless I do think I understand why a lot of people enjoy D3. It's beautiful, it feels majestic in its dark sweeping story (if you don't think too hard about it), it's got some fairly visceral action, it plays intuitively, it's got solid coop, and there's always some loot around the corner.
And did I mention the art!
There are plenty of good options for disappointed Diablo 3 fans on the horizon. Torchlight 2 etc... and this game looks pretty interesting:
I'm very curious about how D3 is going to look in a couple years time after we've played the competition.
@Elyradine If you feel like honing your SC2 talents, I'm pretty useless and happy to play :)
When I saw the Lineage trailer last year, my head exploded. The gesture stuff that actually seems to serve a purpose as opposed to being gimmicky; how you can pin enemies to walls with a crossbow; and how freaking awesome them Korean artists are.
Also, I know my nick's hard to spell, but at least you were consistent! :D
SC2 is the only game I've played consistently over the last 2 years pretty much for the reasons @Elyaradine stated.
I have a question about Diablo tho, it strikes me that the game tries to cater for the masses? Yes, no? It's almost as if they've neglected the hard core players of the original games.
Gameplay design
The skill progression in D3 is quite nice if you're pressed for time. The way all of a classes skills are available to you, depending only on your level, means that you can switch up skills and feel like you're playing a new build on the fly. That's nice, but it severely limits the feeling of ownership you have in a character: All monks are essentially the same, barring the items you've been lucky enough to find. But this also creates another problem in terms of combat design, the game is free to require certain skills for survivability later on. But I'll get to that...
Combat is very strange. The graphics and juiciness of combat is amazing. They learned from what TQ did with the Defender and just did that on steroids for every melee class. Particle design from fighting games helps make every hit and spell feel badass, it's gloriously done... But it's not hard. The game isn't a challenge at all until you start hitting hell difficulty, where it basically ramps up to unforgiving very quickly due to the scale that they've chosen for items.
Because items are inherently uninteresting in D3. Because your character has little to no binding choices, items should be the thing that adds flavor and style to a character, but instead they're just things that have stat numbers on them. Items rarely affect actual gameplay, not like say Frostmail or The Lightsabre or Windforce did in D2, instead they change your stats. Which you can't change in any other way... Stats feel vestigial and strange, especially given the sheer size of the numbers you're adding with items eventually: by the time you hit lvl 60 you'll be adding more to your primary stat and vitality through items than via your character level. Finding an item that adds 250 vitality is crap, you want 300+. And the primacy of your damage stat (different per class) means that you never want to not add to it if you can because it makes all your skills better. That's right, somehow your zombie dogs attack with a fraction of your weapon's damage, at it's attack speed too. I get why that was done, it's the only way to increase skills during play without skill points, but it's pretty damaging to the idea of stats if you only ever have 1 stat that affects all your skills. Why doesn't dex change your dogs' defense? Why doesn't strength do something different?
So the stats, items and combat form this cycle of power creep that generally turns the game into a very pretty multiplayer chat room. Skills should help that, right? Except they don't. The way you gain skill glyphs as you level up means that you aren't actually making any meaningful changes to the skills you'll consistently use as you level up and there are definitely certain glyphs for skills that a better than others. Glyphs aren't even a tradeoff - once you get one glyph, you'll never use the basic non-glyph version of a skill ever again. The power creep as you get higher level also means that you need certain defensive skills just to survive...
Which is odd, because the frequency of death is definitely something that they tried to design in. You don't really have penalties for dying, other than equipment repair costs and later on the damage you managed to do gets regenerated away by enemies before you can get back to them. Repairing eventually gets really expensive, forcing you to grind for gold if you're in a shit spot, but that's only on inferno difficulty. But holy shit can you die fast. And unfairly. Monsters stun lock you, taking away your agency, with alarming regularity. There are skills that can get you out of being jailed, frozen, stunned, etc. But they have recharge times and so do potions and wow you're screwed again because you ran out of get out of jail free cards to play against the patently shit situation that you lucked into... Basically, the combat is bad, masked by gorgeously juicy graphics right up until you hit the point that you have to run specific skills to get further to get more items drops that are maybe good enough to wear for a while. It feels remarkably more hollow than even Diablo 1.
Information design
Yes, D3 is trying to bring people in that have never played this kind of game before, but sometimes it just feels like it can't decide what to show the player and what not. There are a whole bunch of things that are options that make the game feel better to play, but why are they even there in the first place? Why force players to select only 1 skill from a particular "type" of skill (because they're not very well defined types, they're essentially tabs in some sort of list, but don't seem too related to each other) when early on they'll want to use more than one skill and eventually they'll turn that option off just to be able to survive in the late game? Why have all those stats if you can't actually do anything to them as a player? Why are items decomposed into the good green numbers and the bad red numbers and then still have other stats? Why is DPS a thing and then attack speed is somehow relevant? Why for the love of loot do you have to check a tick box to get meaningful numbers out of your skills?
The game feels like it's trying to hide poor combat design under an obfuscation layer sometimes. Sure, you end up trying skills as you get them to see what they do, but in the early game rush of everything dying in a haze of particles, you can't tell what's good and what isn't easily. And why on earth does the game punish you for switching skills on the fly? The whole recharge time thing when you select a new skill makes no sense.
Don't get me started on the design of the auction house interface... Which brings me to...
System design
Specifically online implementation. This is one of the things that became a huge issue at launch and then died down for a lot of players, only rearing it's head when you couldn't play single player because your parents were torrenting porn or whatever.
The only reason the game is all about online only play is the item auction house. You can't have an auction house without controlled item drops. You also can't have offline play modes because then hackers gain access to all the gameplay code and could do everything from spoof item creation commands to write their own b.net emulation servers. All of that has been done before and if you're someone the size of blizzard, you know that they'll do it to your game almost instantly.
The auction house also means that you can't have cool items dropping for everyone, so now in my single player game, my discovery rate of uniques and other neat shit is somehow messed with by people playing all the time and selling those same cool items in the AH. Rad. So the joy of finding something cool is taken away and yet I still need the best items to survive so I have to buy those via the AH unless I'm really stubborn in order to keep playing and stand a chance of finding items that might be better than the ones I just bought... Somehow that doesn't seem like a solid player feedback loop. I have 4 characters, 1 is at lvl 60 in inferno, and I've found 3 legendary items so far. They sucked.
In fact, the AH determines so many things about the design of the rest of the game that it feels like it's this enormous squatting weight on the play space. It controls item drop rates and item coolness in general. It controls stats and leveling up because we need to make the items the most important thing in the game because we have this AH to drive. It messes with skills because you can't sell those off, so you have to make skills depend on items in order to include them in the AH somehow, otherwise the AH just feels tacked on and useless. It messes with the vendor system because you can't have items that are cooler than AH stuff being crafted in the game at the drop of a hat and some wood-chippered chunks of other crap items.
Actually, I haven't talked about the vendors at all so far. They feel really bad... Sure, at first they dispense items that are better than what you can pick up most of the time, so they're ok. But eventually you're crafting like 20 boots at a time, hoping for one that has more dex or str or vit than your current set AND happens to have a good movement speed multiplier too. It suffers from the shower curtain problem (thanks @Aequitas) that mars item pickups too: why the crap do I stand a chance of getting an item that has no value for my class whatsoever? I don't want str, I'm a witch doctor, stop giving me str items! Why are the gems so underwhelming too? Why do they just add to the stat numbers instead of doing slightly more interesting things? Why can't I put a gem into a crafting recipe to give me a higher chance of a specific stat appearing on an item? Why are all my craftings gated by stupid in game pickups that artificially limit what I can craft?
The game itself feels incomplete too... There's obviously a missing vendor. The final act feels shorter than the others (although that tends to happen with diablo games) and there's all this scope for more stuff and more complex systems that either feel like it hasn't been properly implemented, or was taken out of the game at some point and poorly plastered over.
So yeah, next post will be what I feel I can learn from D3 as a designer in my own games. This has taken far too long to write up and I feel like I'm getting bitchy instead of exploring the choices the game seems to have made.
@Karuji, I agree on the skill part. But I honestly don't understand the comment about eternally grinding for loot. That was a big part of gameplay since D2. At some point it wont matter how skilled you are as a player you simple need better items. When you first start the game you "see-saw" between gaining skill and getting better items. But once you have unlocked all your skills and have reached your skill cap, there really is only items left. Other than item hunting(and generally just enjoying the gameplay) there really aren't other reasons to play.
I understand what @Elyaradine is saying about the skill increase. I feel that most games that don't have serious consequences for dying will suffer from this. Determining what "serious consequences" are depends on the type of game, and who is playing it though. I knew I would feel this at some point because that was how I felt with a high level char in D2, this is the reason why I have thus far only played D3 on hardcore mode. It seemed to mitigate this problem. But, is hardcore mode(permanent death) a solution to this?
@BlackShipsFilltheSky, ownership of your character is something I had issues with as well. Not when I started playing but later on when I had to recreate chars(hardore mode :)). It felt like I played the same char over and over, instead of the feeling I wanted of new potential for the new hero that rises.
@dislekcia, thanks for the insightful post. Kinda what I was hoping for with this thread. :) I will have to read through your thread a few times still, but I'm sure we will find some very valid points. Also, you don't need to limit yourself to design, I want to learn anything I can at this stage. So anyone with any input...please post it here.
I have some serious issues regarding immersion in D3, but I'll discuss them later.
Now some more questions :) Taking Elyar's numbers as averages people play roughly 50 hours before thet get bored(bad sampling space, I know). I played a lot more...and I know people who played even more than me. In terms of cost for entertainment I reason it out in terms of movie tickets. If I pay around R75 for 1.5 hours of movie experience thats about R50 an hour, and if you pay R430(kalahari) for a copy of D3 that means about R10 an hour for the entertainment. So my question is this, how many hours did you expect to get out of the game? And do you think that you got value for money?
Don't fuck with your skinnerian reward loop
D3 really messes with the perceived rewards of finding items, which is one of the major forces at work in getting players to keep playing your ARPG. Unique items that have interesting effects and combos can be the antidote to shower curtain syndrome: I remember finding a neat unique bow or armor in D2 and wanting to start a new character just to try that out (after 3-4 hours of play just to get to the point of being able to use it), D3 doesn't have anything like that. In fact the blacksmith totally destroys that 'keep it for another char' feeling, because new characters can just get whatever crafted items they can wear and be ahead of their drop curve. So yeah, if item drops are a part of your design, don't do things that make your items drops less useful or even annoying. Sure, still having crap items is needed if you're aiming for skinnerian reward cycles, but there's a method to that madness.
Skills are incredibly important
Skill design is really hard. Class based skill systems will always have issues of optimal builds, balancing around specific item combos etc will deal with that to a degree, but you'll still have a really hard time dealing with the min-max player issues... This isn't a problem in a single player game though, min-maxing can be fun!
With SpaceHack I went with a modular skill system that rolled skills and items into one thing that would get dropped when you killed enemies. So you're always responding to what the random gives you, not planning out an optimal build from the start. To me that feels a lot cleaner and more open to interesting dynamics.
Bottom line here is that different skill loadouts should be rewarding to players in both the using and the thinking up. They can be a really huge point of ownership and debate, we've seen skill reclaim systems work fine in the past, so I think those are pretty good in this kind of game... If you do go with an always available skill system, make sure there are tradeoffs in choosing specific skill variants. I believe that specific runes were supposed to interact across skills in D3 originally, but that was cut, probably due to complexity.
Health potions are annoying and crap
Either you can quaff them ad infinitum and they become about turning gold into health s your actual health doesn't matter, or they're annoyingly limited and you feel that you'd have survived that encounter if only you'd had one more health potion useable... Both are bad for players, which is why I like the health globe on floor power up/pickup system. I actually did that before D3 did in SpaceHack ;) but the inclusion of both types of health potion in D3 just drove the point home for me.
Figure out how you're going to get paid for the game
and then stick with one method. D3 feels greedy as all get out, paying once for the game, then trying to get you to pay for items all the time, really not cool. Players can tell when you only care about the amounts of money they can give you. There are freemium mechanics available to ARPGs, but you can't be a paid game and think like you're freemium too.
Don't mess with the info you give to players
That means not hiding stats, not giving weapons and items useless extra stats (Titan Quest suffered from this really badly) and not reducing comparisons to meaninglessness for players through doing comparisons for them. If you're going to have stats, let players interact with them meaningfully and make them a proper economy in your game, don't go halfway. Bastion has no stats and I haven't heard anyone complaining about that lack because it's consistent with their design.
Previews are super important
This was more a response to Titan Quest's and Hellgate London's skill text ambiguity, but give players an idea if what their skills are going to do once they're upgraded. D3 sidesteps this problem with the always accessible skill changes, but it's still not great because you have to play with something to actually be able to tell if you'll enjoy something (and even then you can't tell until late in the game progression and difficulty actually exists). Again, we did this with SpaceHack in your upgrade choices... Still feels like a good change.
Juiciness wins
I bought D3. I enjoyed it for a while, I'd still enjoy it with friends up to a point. Style and flair can go a long way towards making a game do very well. I'd rather have a stylish game on top of a deep system, but there comes a point at which working on system depth has diminishing returns for most players. Juiciness doesn't.
One other thing that bothers me about D3, and I'm probably fairly alone in this, is that the always online with computations on the server has a side effect of all the commands a player might make having a built in delay. There's about half a second or more between choosing any attack and it actually happening. If you look at Eternal Lineage (an MMORPG) the delay is slightly longer even :(
Blizzard do obfuscate this delay with some okay animations (btw the animations in D3 seem very substandard to me) and some great effects, but the delay is still there, slowing down responsiveness in combat. For some actions a brief delay makes sense... but the Demon Hunter in particular felt very awkward to me, so much so I started a new character, the Demon Hunter was a lot slower than what I've come to expect from shooters.
Torchlight 2, being client side, has the option to have more responsive combat. I hope they take that opportunity.
Also. Like @Dislekcia said, Diablo 3 had the distinct feeling of having once had a lot more mechanics and having had them stripped away pretty haphazardly. I believe the glyphs were originally loot? Some of the first videos showed climbing terrain and jumping and dialog options. I'm all for refining designs... and I've messed up with exactly this kind of thing in the past myself... but a lot of what was left over feel kind of vestidual, and I did expect better from Blizzard.
I think it's fair to note that D3 has been pretty divisive. From what I've seen. I personally felt my time was badly invested in it, that it was way too long for the amount of gameplay content, and the amount of time spent walking around was painful, and that it was one casual difficulty mode. Of course I don't judge my entertainment by quantity but by quality, and a lot of players, if not the majority, have different expectations. (I'm definitely not a typical Diablo consumer).
But I've also chatted to people who got totally invested in it. I think for them the tone and the visuals and the atmosphere engaged them in a way that Torchlight 2 just cannot. And in that state of engagement the grind doesn't stick out the way it does for me, at least at first.
But I have this feeling that ultimately... for most people... Diablo3 disappoints. Just that sometimes it takes 200hrs to disappoint. If that makes sense, I mean to say the reasons for stopping playing aren't "I've done everything and I'm happy to stop now", but rather "This game no longer captures my curiosity and it has become like work".
Although maybe there is no way to avoid this (in a Diablo-like) and be as successful :( ...or rather that the alternatives to creating a grind engine (like a dramatic story and spectacular -as apposed to reusable- events) are riskier, have more focused market appeal, don't benefit as well from inter-player marketing (because they have briefer play times), and are harder to craft.
Sometimes game design makes me sad. I hate incentives to keep players grinding and to make stories never finish or be inconsequential or drawn out.
(Says the guy currently running an online-only beta - except the game actually RUNS on your machine, not our servers, so we don't create any lag that way)
I was really annoyed with the lag in single player part of D3. The character I took to lvl 60 was a Demon Hunter, picked that class instead of going much past 50 with my Barbarian because DHs can move around between fights much, much faster. The ranged combat felt pretty good, but the low health of the DH and the reliance on dodge skills to get you out of combos basically meant that you'd sometimes just straight up die to lag. Especially vs fast monsters. Argh.
Sometimes I feel that ARPGs have a lot to learn from beat-em-ups and brawlers. The way enemies engage the player character in a God of War or Ninja Gaiden is so meticulously designed. So much better than the mindless wave assault that's all D3 enemies do.
I think a lot of the current wave of ARPG's are aiming at players relatively new to the genre, or otherwise just not inclined to do serious calculations. I suspect that there is room for more complicated ARPG's in the marketplace, and a substantial group who would become dedicated fans of such a game.
Has anyone here played "Cladum: This is an RPG". That really impressed me with it's complicated system that became more complicated over the course of the game. Not that Cladum solves all of Diablo's problems or anything, and it had many of its own problems perhaps, just that Cladum presents a simple system at first and gradually unlocks more complexity, well beyond the complexity and meaningfulness of Diablo. Come to think of it Bastion does this very well as well.
Also I totally agree that ARPG combat is lagging behind brawlers, and Diablo-likes are perhaps the worst offenders. The only one that really stands out for me in terms of combat is Dragon's Nest.
*** Post contains spoilers(just in case)
So I want to get into my biggest problem with D3, and it's one of immersion. There are a few things that break the immersion for me in D3 that weren't present in the previous 2 games. I'll start with examples from D3 but will try to generalize my thougths to the RPG genre.
Achievements
As soon as you start D3 you can open up the achievements menu and have the whole story laid out for you in a goal oriented list. I tried very hard to resist opening the achievement menu on my first play through because I wanted to preserve the story for myself. But even those efforts were somewhat thwarted by friends completing achievements and giving me a nice pop-up message to let me know what to expect.
To me achievements can be a great tool to guide players to more obscure content that they might miss during their exploration. Or it may be used to provide some interesting challenges to promote emergent gameplay. But a game that comes with it's own spoilers built in...seriously?
In my opinion there are two major parts to RPG's: Story and Character progression. The first play through of the game story will most likely take presedence over character development as the player has a whole new world to explore and discover and lot's of people to interact with. Hearing fantastic tales and following the bread crumbs until the plot unfolds is such a major motivator to play that it almost seems senseless to continue once you know the ending. By giving the players the ability to gain knowledge about the story without interacting with the game world, the immersion is seriously damaged.
External References
Here I'm talking about in game references to things outside the game world. There is a achievement called Bashanishu which refers to a moderator called Bashinok, and at some point when playing with the enchatress in the desert she offers to conjure you some water. Which I can only assume is a reference to WoW and mage water. These are only two examples.
External references in a core social game like WoW are fine, even required some times. There is a community in social games that need to be nurtured. The players will very likely spend a lot of time together online and will talk more about real life experiences than in game experiences. The real world references serves as connections between the players that they might have experienced together. But trying to get immersed in a fantasy world were you are constantly reminded of reality is terribly difficult. At it's core the Diablo series is(supposed to be) an immersive single player experience and should be treated as such. External references don't belong in immersive RPG's.
The Auction House
In general I don't have that big of a problem with the AH as the rest of the D3 community(not talking abouty the real money AH). I will however say this about it. Where in Sanctury can I speak to the auctioneer? He's got some explaining to do about the demon blood inside my boots!
Having to quit to menu to be able to run auctions immediately breaks the connection between player and character. My internal monologues usually go something like this: "Raaargh! I keep dying to that Lag Monster pack, I need some better gear." Once at the AH: "Right....so my monk needs some cool treads...these boots are on special...and they have recently been dry cleaned. Nice!" The difference being that I switched from talking about "I" to "my monk" By placing the AH inside the game world the immersion would have stayed intact. Adding an Auctioneer to your entoruage along with the Blacksmith and Jewelcrafter would be one way to do it. You would still need to explain why an auctioneer is following you around, but there wouldn't be a player/character breakdown.
Game worlds are fragile places, they exist more in the mind of the player than in the game iteself. The designers can create fantastical worlds and visuals, but it comes down to the player to suspend their disbelief and make the world a "reality". Creating situations where they are not actively looking at the digital world you created, creates a barrier that prevents them from suspending their disbelief when they enter the world. This barrier gets more and more enforced the longer they stay "in game" but are not "in world".
Item identification
A smaller issue than the prior ones, but there is no in game explanation offered as to why you are able to identify strange/rare items. Just a simple, "Discovering the unique properties of this well crafted item will take some time and concentration." would have made all the difference to me. The way it's implemented makes me feel like I need to ask my inventory permission to use the new shiny I found. But hold on, it needs some time to process my application and will get back to me later.
In conclusion
Diablo 1 was one of the most immersive experiences I had with video games. I remember my heart actually pounding as I approached the chamber that contained the butcher. It felt like I was literally fighting for my own survival and had a real adrenalin rush when the fight was over. Diablo 3 has lost this immersion almost entirely and this was my biggest disappointment in the game.
In terms of immersion I think Bastion does a few quite innovative things. If you're interested in immersion how have to play it period.
The narration obviously, which is just plain wonderful. But more than that: Almost everything in Bastion has a rich flavour in the game world. It barely ever tells you about game logic things like stats and dps and cooldowns. Even the music has a physical representation in the world (it's being played by a NPC).
In Bastion doing more damage might involve drinking a spirit like "Graver's Gimlet" from the distillery which "tastes different the longer you swish it around. Miraculous stuff." (which grants occasional double damage) or adding "something heavy" to your hammer in the forge to add a choice of useful effect, like greater knockback, to knock enemies off solid ground to fall to their deaths.
In contrast, in D3 adding more damage may mean equipping metal boots that make you smarter and so cause your zombie dogs to bite harder.
I'm not saying ARPG's should follow Bastion. But for me Bastion feels like a really complete and immersive world while D3 sometimes feels a lot like dealing numbers at enemies due to my magic pants (although I think it's pretty awesome that "magic pants" play such an important role in the game).
At the same time Bastion doesn't have very accessible information about things, which goes against what @Dislekcia said about skill text previews. Bastion doesn't have much in the way of branching player choices that give ownership of the character build (though it does give the player a lot of control and choices, the choices are easily switched up with no little drawbacks, so there is low investment, but to be fair the choices do mostly provide deeper strategic implications than the type of add-more-dps choices Diablo3 provides). Also Bastion doesn't have the variable loot loop that Diablo-likes really benefit from. But, personally, those amount to insignificant gripes. I found it a wonderful and unique experience and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.
You can't just login to the first town, and way point to the stuff you want to kill.
Due to these linear required quest lines to play the game, almost all of the brilliant diablo randomness has disappeared.
The game lacks any sort of end game activity. Grinding for gear with slightly higher stats than what you have, or for millions of gold to buy said items isn't fun. Picking up an item with a name like Windforce knowing it is an awesome item, because it is legendary and has the fixed stats to go with it was fun. Now you pickup an entire inventory of yellow items, and all you do is check if the weapons are above 1000dps before vendoring everything and if the armor has some stat on it that would make it sell like GF./MF and all resist.
So my point is this. They took away very fundamental characteristics to the original two titles, namely character customization, epic loot, and randomness creating an endless gameplay experience. This is making the game fail very hard atm. (Yes 10million copies sold ect. doesn't make a game any good. Just means the hype machine worked.)
It's already been said that Diablo 3 is nice and juicy. Looking at the design and the way the game plays, I don't think this was by accident. Sure you want your games juicy, but I think the D3 designers capatalised on this in a much better way than we might realize at first glance. There are 4 things I want to mention on how I think they achieved this.
Champion Packs
The champion packs in D3 drop better loot than the bosses do(or at least just as good). This means that you won't be wasting your time when roaming about acts and slaying everything in sight. The boss fights are not the only place you are able to farm end game loot, so there is no need to spend hours on end doing the same boss fight. Spending more time walking about the world means you spend more time looking at the world.
Skill switching
Putting aside all the negatives of this for the moment. There is something cool about being able to switch skills whenever you want just to look at the pretties. Trying to freeze an enemy you haven't freezed before just to see what it looks like is painless with the skill switching employed in D3. Making it this easy to switch skills encourages players to switch more often and spend more time looking all the spectacular special effects on the different skills.
Random Dungeons
Random dungeons/events don't completely fall into the juicy category, but they are still useful for encouraging players to spend time playing in certain areas. Because there are a number of different events scattered across the acts and that they are not always spawned at the same place, the players can spend time exploring the scenes and get to see more of the world. It also creates a sense of anticipation hoping to find your favourite event in the area you are in.
Achievements
As I mentioned earlier, there are some instances where I think achievements can be useful. The achievements system can help guide players to areas and events that they previously have not fully explored. Sharing more of the world with them.
The combination of these elements give the players excellent incentive to run about and see all the great assets that the artists created for the game. Making your games juicy is always a priority. In my opinion, having a world this beautiful obligates the designers to find ways to share it with the players. They created a great looking game, and then gave the players many reasons to look at it.
Granted, this does not necessarily make a good game. But I think that if the designers made these decisions consciously, they did a pretty good job(on this at least).