My second point plays off of what Spinks said with respect to the “Hardcore scene”, which I am guessing she means the “online” scene. Being an online game, especially in 2012, means you need to establish connections between players…aka communities. This is something that I feel D3 is failing at and Blizzard is really underestimating the importance of. Perhaps it is because they wanted to preserve the “pickup” nature of the game, but we all know that games with staying power have communities. We don’t ONLY play games for the gameplay. The same way I don’t play beach volleyball during the summer only because I like the game, I play it because I like meeting new people and establishing connections with them.

The rest of the forum thought he was overly confident and underestimating the community, but it’s a good sign if you’re worried about difficulty.

What I think in the end is that D3 is going to end up the more polished game of the two, but TL2 is going to have lots more customization and longevity overall.

There is a lot of simplification in the D3 systems, some of which may be good though I’d still prefer having to find rune drops and build the runes rather than the current system. On the skill display, you can go into the options and select ‘elective mode’. It’s not the most elegent system but it does let you assign skills as you wish. This is really and entry-level mode for the game. I’m not a fan of hand-holding in general but it seems to be necessary in the modern market.

D3 is still and action RPG and that’s all it’s trying to be, which is a victory of sorts. There was a great deal of concern that Blizz was going to go ‘WoW light’ and it looks like they avoided the problem. The actual test of the game will be Hell and Inferno levels, which we aren’t going to see until a few weeks after release.

But there has undoubtedly been a lot of effort spent in marketing innovations also, especially for older games with a solid core player base.

I have a soft spot for Diablo and will definitely be playing it, I’m happy with my preorder and I know I’ll have people to play with. But for all that, this is going to be one of those huge selling games that doesn’t come anywhere NEAR being anyone’s game of the year. And that’s a shame because Blizzard could have done better.

I also think there was a third gameplay to add to the two you have listed, which is people like me who didn’t play on battle.net at all. I played a lot of Diablo 2 and it was all either single player or LAN play with friends. The whole hardcore scene is very alien to me, I knew people did it, but I couldn’t really figure out why. With Diablo 3, the question in my mind is whether this is really a game that large numbers of people will want to grind into the ground or not. My gut says not. Maybe if Blizzard bring the PvP stuff out promptly and support the game assertively via ladders and contests to encourage people to compare their gear a lot.

It has about 4 difficulty settings, I think, so I assume the difficulty ramps up steeply by the time you get to the last one.

On the subject of race, I also find it weird that the Bro-iest game genres are also the only ones that actually seem to have non-white characters who aren’t immediately defined by their otherness. Some of them may even have more than one black person in the cast.