DIII gameplay idea
this may turn into a small novel, sorry...
ok, so i haven't been able to read all the old posts, but i read through the ones in the new thread... and it appears as though the seggestions would essentially make a bigger Diablo II. same crap, every day. Blizzard North has a long history of revolutionary games, games that changed the way the genre was played, made, and viewed. Star Craft was far ahead of its time when it hit the market, and Diablo itself made a whole new genre of 3rd person roleplaying/action. so, if Blizzard were to consider Diablo III, it'd need to be a whole new concept, something outside the box, and out of the ordinary.
In my humble opinion, i'd like to see DIII be a dynamic game environment, preferrably a pay-to-play MMORG (pay-to-play keeps all the stupid little 10 year olds, that hack the crap out of the game and screw over legit players, out). anyway, i would think the best way to design the game would be around the Sin War (those who don't know, go read about it). this would mean only human player characters (PC). and now the kicker: no character classes (to speak of). this will probably piss people off... but keep reading.
when you start a new character, you choose male or female, then what they look like. if i had a say, i'd want a face/body editor similiar to that of The Sims 2. then, you play... and everything you do, the people you ally with, the weapons you use, the things (or people) you kill, will decide what course your skills will take, and your appearance, go. this is ofcourse, somewhat similiar to Fable... except if you say, used swords exclusivley, you're skills in "swordcraft" would become dominant, but you could pick up a staff and start slinging spells at any time. perhaps blizzard would design it so you could "forget" skills, and learn new ones instead. that way eliminating "character regret", and still maintain a level of balance.
all this in mind, if you ran around killing innocent NPC's, or other "good" characters... you'd start to look more and more evil, and vice versa. the complexities of such a character system are mind boggling, but it would revolutionize MMORGs (i think). the old fashion good vs. evil, with the classic DII towns and villages (and new ones, mentioned in the books). with angels as allies for the "good guys", and demons allies for the "bad guys". that'd be pretty sweet to fight along side Tyreal (he'd be NPC of course). perhaps they could work in a way to allow characters to defeat the prime evils at certain intervals (and make sense for them to come back). or just have really, really big demons to kill.
anyways, i'm sure the writers can come up with the specifics. but i think the dynamic character and skill system would be much better than trying to think up new (and therefore different and unboring) character classes. and the changing skill trees would be nice... then you could try different skill sets without losing progress on a character.
to sum it up... take Fable, give it about a bazillion times the items and item types, take away the effect of maxing the skill tree and becoming indistructable, add a face/body editor, female character type, keep the no holds barred sword swingin' butt kickin freestyle combat system that makes Fable fun (and especially the swing your sword once, cleave a dozen guys effect). add in the MMORG side, keep the townspeople stuff/villages (hey, the bad players will need fodder to build up thier evilness, and good characters will need to try to stop them)... and throw in way more bad guys, and way tougher bad guys (so that there's always somewhere you can go to live on the edge of death).
i think if Blizzard could take what they've learned from WoW, the dynamic character appearance of Fable (and run with the idea to expand into skills and stuff), and the people editor of the Sims 2... you'd have a hellofa game.
one last thing i was thinking of, was expansion of item types. it'd be cool to have a left glove and a right glove (because when finding ancient artifacts, the chances of finding both gloves are slim, and perhaps you want the bonuses from two different gloves)... in otherwords, a flexible game, where you can change anything, and do anything. and kill alot of stuff... then kill some more stuff, and then when everything's dead, kill it again! then, if it's still alive, rip out it's skull and beat it to death with it. (you're thinking, that's not physically possible... but that's what it'll be screaming [in some wierd demonic language])
anyway, if you read this far, congratulations. please feel free to comment and expand on my ideas. don't bother flaming them, cuz i couldn't care less.
MUD rules.
