> "Maybe Diablo 2 difficulty and savageness belong to another era."
The popularity of the dark souls series would indicate otherwise. I feel the invisible hand of upper management here, using words like "casual" and "accessible" to justify the decision to make games "easier".
Dark Souls lacks permadeath. People are fine with hard but ultimately fair, die and learn the patterns then eventually win.
Diablo 2 could erase weeks of work by one monster spawning an unfair combination. Practically nobody is truly looking to bring that back. Though, people are fine with that work improving further runs with rogue-likes.
Have you even played Path of Exile? People LOVE that shit. Endgame bosses hit you for integer multiple of your HP, the only way you survive is through theorycrafting how to mitigate it (or be one of those losers who has to follow a guide)
Hell regular bosses LOVE massive damage spikes. I'm with you that it pisses me off and I since left for greener pastures (Grim Dawn)
Path of Exile doesn't have perma-death. There is a hardcore league, but dying simply drops your character to the softcore league (rather than deleting it).
This is incorrect. Dying drops your character to Standard league, which is a league that almost no one plays. It's mostly used for testing mechanics/interactions/bugs, etc. Hardcore PoE _is_ permadeath.
It’s not even just endgame bosses that can wreck your day in PoE, a few unlucky rolls and even the first boss you encounter is going to be a tough one to beat.
Hardcore mode adds huge amounts of fun to the experience. You feel so invested into what's going on, calculating how much risk you can safely manage, etc. Leaderboards are more interesting. Finding secondary gear for when your main eventually dies.
Dying because I was being stupid is just part of the fun. Re-role. Use some saved resources to skip the early grind.
Dying because server crashed, internet lagged for 6 seconds, etc. Those hurt. They are the vast majority of deaths.
Getting to level 99 or playing hardcore mode isn’t the objective for 99+% of players.
Diablo 2 is a fairly forgiving and moderately casual game imo. Most builds require only one skill for damage, and respeccing and how easy it is to get a character rushed means it’s easy to experiment or fix builds.
I played D2 pretty obsessively for a few years during my teens and never bothered going higher than 92, rolling new builds was always more fun than endless baal runs for me.
>>> Diablo 2 could erase weeks of work by one monster spawning an unfair combination.
But more than that, even Rogue itself didn't have permadeath if you didn't want it. My dad taught me to shut off the computer just as you died. Turn it back on and your save is preserved. Other roguelikes will just let you turn on a cheat option.
The popularity of the dark souls series would indicate otherwise. I feel the invisible hand of upper management here, using words like "casual" and "accessible" to justify the decision to make games "easier".