分析《暗黑破坏神3》地狱模式的缺陷(3)

All the player can do then is just wait and hope that the enemy doesn’t finish them off during the several seconds of immobility. Things become worse when the modifiers around enemy shields appear. When an enemy is shielded they are immune to all damage for several seconds. After the shield goes down, players only have a few seconds to do damage before it comes back up.

When you have fast moving enemies who can do a quarter or more of the player’s health per hit, giving them immunity to damage is effectively an “I-Win Button”. Once again this gets back to removing the player’s skill from the equation. It doesn’t matter how skilled the player is, or what their character’s stats are, when the enemy can become invincible for several seconds constantly during a battle.

These modifiers that remove player skill and control are bad enough, but the next detail just seals the deal on the problems with difficulty.

Getting Enraged

Once the player reaches inferno: special, elite and boss enemies will have a new ability. If the player spends more than 5 minutes fighting one set of enemies, they will become enraged. What that means is that either the enemy’s damage output would go through the roof, or by being near the enemy the player will take constant damage until they die. For bosses, it meant that the player will be killed without any way to avoid it.

The problem with this mechanic is that it further destroys skill customization which was already at an all time low. Going into inferno, a lot of the skills and runes available lose their utility thanks to the increased attributes of the enemies. But with the enrage timer, it makes characters built towards defense obsolete, as even if they can take the damage, they’ll be killed once the timer goes off. This mechanic once again limits the skills and runes available and forces the player to focus on offense.

Act 1 Boss Fight

Having the timer for boss fights was an even more confusing decision. As not only does it limit choice, but it punishes players who team up with their friends. As each new person in the group, increases the health pool of the boss. If your friends aren’t strong enough, they can make the boss impossible to kill before the timer goes off by no fault of their own.

In a recent forum post, Diablo 3′s community manager said that Diablo 3 doesn’t have a proper end game and that the itemization is not enough at this point. Without sounding too smug all I can say is “duh.” It took me less than 2 weeks to see the problems with inferno mode and I’m starting to question the design decisions at Blizzard for them not to see these issues after working on the game for years.

The part that has me really worried is that maybe the designers aren’t as foolish as I think they are, and instead planned this as an excuse to sell more expansions. I really hope that I’m wrong on this point as there are a lot of good things in Diablo 3. But the further I played the more problems and quite frankly, stupid mistakes I see with the design.

Diablo 3 could have easily been at the top of my best games of 2012 list, but as it stands the numerous problems are dragging it further and further down. It’s baffling, like watching a high rank Tennis player, lose in the early rounds of a tournament against a lower ranked player. You know they have the skills, but for some reason they just can’t get it together.(source:gamasutra)