Got a few questions about D3 that I haven't been able to find in the forums.

1. Based on the map of Sanctuary, it appears that the world surface alone is easily 25x bigger than in Diablo 2, and I can imagine that including dungeons / caves / alternate dimensions, the game will be even more massive. My question is, exactly how big is the world planned to be compared to Diablo 2? Will the random world / dungeon generator be improved so that it's actually interesting to replay the entire game all the way through, as opposed to rushing as people currently do with Diablo 2?

2. Improvements to Battle.net are mentioned. Any idea what kinds of improvements are planned?

3. In Diablo 2, the difficulty of a game scales up based on the number of players in the game. In Open Battle.net and LAN games, you could use the /players x command to force the game to scale up the difficulty so a smaller number of players would have an increased challenge. Will the difficulty scale up in a similar fashion in Diablo 3? If so, will we still be able to manually change the difficulty?

Good questions, I wanna know these answers too. I Hope they have settings to make the game more challenging for lesser players.

I'm guessing that expansions will probably open up the world map a lot more.

What I'm hoping for is no such thing as a "game/room".

Instead of having to create a game to actually play Diablo III, why not have it all open. Once you log on, you're in the world. You can explore all over Sanctuary, do quests, party with other players.

But, with Blizzard already creating Battle.net 2.0, it seems that there will be rooms/games. If that's the case, then the amount of players allowed per game should be increased significantly. No more than 20 players per game.

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Q u o t e:
What I'm hoping for is no such thing as a "game/room".

Instead of having to create a game to actually play Diablo III, why not have it all open. Once you log on, you're in the world. You can explore all over Sanctuary, do quests, party with other players.

But, with Blizzard already creating Battle.net 2.0, it seems that there will be rooms/games. If that's the case, then the amount of players allowed per game should be increased significantly. No more than 20 players per game.

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That is an MMO...go play WoW or something.

where did Bashiok say that? I outa ... eh

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Q u o t e:
1. If I remember correctly, Bashiok said there is not going to be a random dungeon generator like in D2. The argument is that it made the world look to blocky, since everything was a conbination of premade
terrain parts that could be connected together.

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Actually, the dungeons will be generated randomly... it's the surface areas that will not be done that way. The above ground landscapes will be of static shapes, with randomly generated guts (mobs, bosses, random quests...).

Friendly bump...

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Q u o t e:
Got a few questions about D3 that I haven't been able to find in the forums.

1. Based on the map of Sanctuary, it appears that the world surface alone is easily 25x bigger than in Diablo 2, and I can imagine that including dungeons / caves / alternate dimensions, the game will be even more massive. My question is, exactly how big is the world planned to be compared to Diablo 2?

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This left me a bit puzzled too, since, I think J. Wilson himself said something about DIII actually going to be around the same size as DII/LoD?
Kinda hard to believe if you're looking at the current map and considering each of those locations marked with that little tower (or whatever it is) as a main station (i.e. explorable town/city/nearby surrounding area) of your journey through Sanctuary.

Would sum up to 15 environments including the already confirmed Caldeum and Tristram/New Tristram areas, with each one most likely further divided into a couple (8 each, like in DII/LoD?) of waypoints (like the Tristram Cathedral dungeon).

Official clarification on this would be greatly appreciated.

I would love to know number 1 and number 3, the answer to number 2 will probably come in due time.

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Q u o t e:
Got a few questions about D3 that I haven't been able to find in the forums.

1. Based on the map of Sanctuary, it appears that the world surface alone is easily 25x bigger than in Diablo 2, and I can imagine that including dungeons / caves / alternate dimensions, the game will be even more massive. My question is, exactly how big is the world planned to be compared to Diablo 2? Will the random world / dungeon generator be improved so that it's actually interesting to replay the entire game all the way through, as opposed to rushing as people currently do with Diablo 2?

--> same size

2. Improvements to Battle.net are mentioned. Any idea what kinds of improvements are planned?

--> yes

3. In Diablo 2, the difficulty of a game scales up based on the number of players in the game. In Open Battle.net and LAN games, you could use the /players x command to force the game to scale up the difficulty so a smaller number of players would have an increased challenge. Will the difficulty scale up in a similar fashion in Diablo 3? If so, will we still be able to manually change the difficulty?

--> yes and probably

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Q u o t e:

This left me a bit puzzled too, since, I think J. Wilson himself said something about DIII actually going to be around the same size as DII/LoD?
Kinda hard to believe if you're looking at the current map and considering each of those locations marked with that little tower (or whatever it is) as a main station (i.e. explorable town/city/nearby surrounding area) of your journey through Sanctuary.

Would sum up to 15 environments including the already confirmed Caldeum and Tristram/New Tristram areas, with each one most likely further divided into a couple (8 each, like in DII/LoD?) of waypoints (like the Tristram Cathedral dungeon).

Official clarification on this would be greatly appreciated.

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That's just a map of the world, we had a map like that(but without the change to the Arreat area) back in the D2 manual. That doesn't mean that we will go to all of them. I believe that its already been confirmed that we won't be going to Skovos island. We just got art of it and some other areas because they are trying to flesh out the world. The only ones confirmed are the ones lighted up on the map(Tristram and Caldeum). We'll probably be going to Bastion's Keep, Arreat Crater, and Ureh. Though I think Ureh might be the first expansion.

Just another friendly bump. Hoping for some blue text in this thread. :)

Well if you notice, the two places we can click on the map (Tristram and Caldeum) have a little brown symbol beside them. I count 14 of those symbols in total. Would it be too much to hope for that those are all acts? I think more like places of interest that are important to the game, but you never know.

Those are just towns that are important to the lore. I believe they said the game would have about the same number of acts as D2. So its probably only going to be 4 in the beginning.

I really wanna emphasize something about diablo 2.

Specifically this:

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Q u o t e:
Will the random world / dungeon generator be improved so that it's actually interesting to replay the entire game all the way through, as opposed to rushing as people currently do with Diablo 2?

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The game is over seven years old! The very fact that the game is still being played heavily is amazing. Diablo 2 player base is full of old d2 veterans who've played through the game for years, how long do you guys think the replay value should last? Forever!?

For the first four years rushes included going through most of the quest, but after 4 years of the gme the replay value dropped and the economy shifted from questing, and monster party bashing (Cow levels, blood runs, Arcane runs etcetera) to PvP.

People seems to think diablo 2 has always had a "rush problem" when in truth it's only recently that this "problem" has existed, because the proffered gameplay shifted!

People want to get to level 85 gear their char and duel.

After seven years of the same gameplay this yearn for a more dynamic game via PvP is perfectly acceptable you can't expect much more from it! it's been seven years....

When diablo 3 is released people will want to explore, people will want to quest, and eventually even with these "random events" being added people will get bored, they will see repetitive event play, and they will have quested the game, and they will have explored all there is to see and for many years like diablo 2 the game will be played through as it was "meant" to be played, but eventually players will seek more dynamic gameplay and then PvP will rise just like it did in diablo 2, people will find a way to rush the game, people will no longer be dissuaded to not rush, it's inevitable!

It's not a bad thing either, or a good thing it's just the way it is.

Make the alterations to prolong replay, I'm all for it, but people please stop acting like diablo 2 has ALWAYS been like this, like it's suffering from a tumor, like it's never had good questing, and like it's never been interesting to play.

I've wanted to say this for a looooong time now.

A new MMO sub-type multiple games can be created, each game connected to a single universe that is bound by the "normal laws" associated with an mmo, each "unique" world that anyone can make actually replaces "instances" since each new "unique world creation" will have all the instances until they are killed. every new world has new instances thus solving the "everyone wants to be a hero" dilema

Problems: will people be able to travel to the unique worlds via the "central world" or would it be listed in a chat (for simplicities sake I find it best to make the "central world" only to traveling, and cities.)

It could work