Have you played The Witcher? Its not like Diablo, but it is a nice RPG.

You’re familiar with Diablo’s attribute and requirement system, right? You get five points per level to distribute in Str Dex Vit Energy, and you have to meet a requirement to equip it, yadda yadda?

It’s like that with one change; the attributes act kind of like a gauge, everything adds to what’s required of you. For example:

If you have a sword that requires 15 strength, and a helmet that requires 5 strength and a shoulder piece that requires 40 strength, you would need 60 strength to equip them at the same time.

In a sense this _seems_ interesting. And it’s logical; you can only carry so weight at once, right? Like everything else, they bungled it as well.

Instead of requirements just being a part of a base item, the random, magical modifiers added to it as well. +Armor would require strength, +Stats stamina, +mana willpower, etc. The specific way it was budgeted had these effects:

* People didn’t want to upgrade to higher level armor generally. The innate Armor they gave cost more than a +Armor mod, and were generally of negligible benefit.

* Since +Stats added to your feed gauge pool, they were highly desirable. If +All Stats wasn’t on a armor piece, it was junk. Stamina-heavy builds were most powerful, but underpowered and unfun until proper stuff could be acquired.

* Equipment with an unwanted mod or two were doubly punished – not only did you get something that was useless to you, you had to use up space for something you _could_ want.

* And it was possible to hit the cap and be unable to improve. Often.

Later, about a month before they went bankrupt, they rebudgeted things to be less… poopy. Still, point hoarding continued as the norm of course.

I always thought the assignable attributes were a terrible system for this genre, and was enthused when Blizzard revealed it wasn’t going to be in Diablo 3. The player misery and balance issues are obvious, non?

I forgot to mention this game had pee-stained mattresses in it; it is important you know this. Important for everyone:

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n151/malignityomega/LetsPlayHell/screenshot_05000038.jpg

I never heard of that.

There’s six classes, but fewer unique skills than base Diablo II.

The feed system made item hunting pointless – why upgrade your armor when you can’t wear the upgrades?

Tooltip on weapons didn’t display damage. You had to open the advanced view and do complicated voodoo math (read: multiplication) to figure out the damage a weapon did.

The subscription thing was very low on things that mattered with Hellgate – the thing was just an awful game flat out. They’d have to pay most people to get them to play it; have you had a chance to try it yet?

These are absolutely true facts about it:

You know how in most RPGs the scenery and monsters you fight change? Like the boars you see early on will appear later recolored with a green mohawk? Hellgate doesn’t do that. The grey zombie you fight in the first zone, appears, abundantly, throughout the game right up to the end. Scenery works similarly.

A memory leak, that’s worse the higher the setting, limited play to about an hour before crashing. In some spots, the game would grind down to .25 fps. They hired A Guy for awhile, who managed to improve these somewhat in later patches.

Game is rated M for no reason. There aren’t any dismembered body parts or much blood at all – the most graphic thing in the game is sometimes a zombie will lose its torso and attack you by bumping you with his hip. If you’re not going to appeal to the crowd that wants Diablo esque carnage, why limit your market?

Skills are lame. Lasers look like pee, not DoDonpachi-like murderdeathkill waves. They even went out of their way to make skills less interesting than they needed to be, for example: Blademasters have a skill called Crosscutter that throws a sword. It’s cute, and you’d think they’d encourage this as a subclass. But there’s a two-second timer on it. In this genre, a limit like that asks for the skill to drop a meteor on the screen. A one second timer killed Immolation Arrow in Diablo 2, after all.

MMO style busywork quests. Why they put so much effort into them, and why did they make them mandatory – people want their characters to be as cool as possible, so they are more mandatory than most World of Warcraft quests.

The only color in the game is grey. Except for the character art, which is often adorable and is easily the best thing about the game.

All that leads to my conclusion: If they made a game people wanted to play with a viable budget they would have lived.

On the upside, I really liked the idea of premium stuff. Not in the sense of gated areas – that’s a suicidal decision. But in armor and weapon art it could be cool. $15 for three months, get an extra 10% drops on top of your loot table picked from the Super Pretty Princess only table. A shield with a scary face on it, an exploding frog launcher, etc..