1. I don't mean to suggest that Larian should or would ever do Diablo; I rather doubt it in fact. I simply thought it would be interesting to speculate and conjure up creative imagination.
I know. That's just my speculation. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
2. There is an active SP community at diabloii.net. I played D2 for 2 years single player only--I used to have a slow dial up and a slow computer which made MP unenjoyable. Nonetheless Larian should be quite capable of doing a multiplayer game, and in fact will be as I understand it.
I prefer single player too. I'll be interested to see the Larian multiplayer...
3. Most definitely D2 is a combat game. NWN had too much dialogue for me, and I didn't care for Verdistis at 1st. It does have RPG elements. Blending them appears to be a strength of Larian.
Agreed on all of that. What I fear is that I've read what all the
Diablo fans have written about
Divine Divinity. They don't like it because it's different to
Diablo. It would happen again. I'm not saying it will be a bad game, but it will fail because RPG fans who hate
Diablo won't buy it on principal, and those who do like
Diablo will rubish it and not buy it either.
4. One strength of D2 imo lies in its character and skill system--there are still builds in D2 I haven't made yet that I may yet return and tinker with. A merging of Divinity with a D2 skill type of system would be awesome.
definately has a supurb skill system. As far as I've seen, I think it's unbeaten.
5. Another strength of D2 is the way that even after beating the game with a character you can go back and keep playing him in a quest to get your guy to lvl 99, or get all the hot elite items, or complete certain or all sets. These features could be implemented in a Divinity type of D3. If Divinity had for instance another map, accesible after beating the game, with random placement of items and perhaps random monsters or even random subquests which could be infinitely replayed that would be cool.
Like my idea of having a re-randomisable battlefield at the end of
Beyond Divinity. Quoting my cousin who finished
Dungeon Seige recently: "So I've built up this team that can defeat dragons... and that's it. There's nothing else." We've just spent 60 hours creating this personalised hero. Let us play with it some more!
I think what's needed is for both
Divinity and
Diablo to take a little bit of advice from each other. Improve
Divinity's combat and character development, and improve
Diablo's story and variety.
