A poster predicted doom for Diablo III with a variety of arguments: it’ll be too easy, items will be too findable, gem hunters will flood the market via the Auction House, and the game is overdesigned to control player options more than Diablo III did. Naturally, Bashiok does not agree.
[blue]That’s a lot of assumptions, and as you said I’m not going to be able to convince you otherwise, so I’m not going to spend precious finger-fuel and try.
But I do think there’s something to be said for over-designing games and systems, and that to no small degree what can make a game fun is how loose the mechanics are. I believe we’re completely guilty of trying to make systems too tight sometimes, but I just personally do not get that feeling when playing Diablo III.
For one, the amount of randomization we’re not only allowing but actively inserting into pretty much all of our systems is pretty insane, and randomization just purely does not allow for tight mechanic control by its nature. And then there’s the runestone system, which no sane designer would ever attempt if they had notions of tight balance on their list of goals. Diablo III is well designed in many ways, but it is set on a very solid foundation of randomization and uncertainty. I think that’s what will make discovering everything the game has to offer extremely compelling, and very likely for years to come. [/blue]
I think some of the restrictions on [wiki]Class-Specific Weapons[/wiki], along with auto-[wiki]Attributes[/wiki] and the removal of the [wiki]talisman[/wiki]/[wiki]charms[/wiki] could be argued as restricting play choice and options. But as Bashiok points out, the [wiki]runestones[/wiki] system, plus the fact that every class in D3 has like 4x the viable [wiki]active skills[/wiki] of any class from D2, puts a much heavier weight on the other end of that MOAR RANDOMS scale.