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And by hack and slash, I mean Diablo, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, etc etc etc.

I just started playing Titan Quest and it is amazingly fun. But why is this game holding my attention when newer releases like Grim Dawn, PoE (which i DO like a lot), Diablo 3 and such just can't seem to. Is it the graphics? difficulty? lootz? *shrugs*

thoughts?
I think they are but I'm an old man so I think everything older is better.

Of course you named three legendary older games. I'm sure for each of those there are a few dozen complete piece of shit. If we looked at all the numbers it might very well come out even.
Post edited September 01, 2016 by tinyE
true, very true. but i think the newer ones i listed are like the top ones right now, yes? i was trying to make a fairer comparison.

edit: for instance, Titan Quest. there is nothing OMG amazing about it, but for whatever reason, it sucked me in. i couldn't get that from grim dawn. and look at the two, the similarities playwise, hell, even leveling, are the same. just backdrop is different.
Post edited September 01, 2016 by Crewdroog
For a good hack n' slash, try Rune.

https://www.gog.com/game/rune_classic
No idea, maybe just a fresh setting, TQ isn't all dark n' dingy, felt fresh at the time.
Not much separates them for myself...all of them tick the same box etc, well not diablo3 cuz i ain't played it.
I do love Grim Dawn however, love the upgrade builds.
Post edited September 01, 2016 by DampSquib
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TARFU: For a good hack n' slash, try Rune.

https://www.gog.com/game/rune_classic
thanks! i am always on the look out for these games. i love them.
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DampSquib: No idea, maybe just a fresh setting, TQ isn't all dark n' dingy, felt fresh at the time.
Not much separates them for myself...all of them tick the same box etc, well not diablo3 cuz i ain't played it.
yeah i definitely like diablo b/c of the dark horror of it, plus the music and screaming goats. titan quest seems more immersive, so perhaps that is why. you keep coming back to the villages and the npcs have more to talk about.

i also think difficulty and some thinking w/combat may factor in. you can't just spam potions. well i mean you could, but i don't think that's what they are going for. dodging is totally an option.
Post edited September 01, 2016 by Crewdroog
Frankly, I don't think they are :P For instance I liked Path of Exile and Torchlight way more than Diablo 2. And I really don't know about the first Diablo. I have not played it for way over a decade, and I could not say how good it really is, nostalgia aside. I don't think any H'n'S ever nailed the mood quite the way first Diablo did, so there's that.

Still, I'm not the biggest fan of the genre. It's fun for a while, but usually even the best games get mind-numbing after a while. I only play them once in a blue moon. Can't even remember the last time I played one.
low rated
They had heart and soul.
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DampSquib: No idea, maybe just a fresh setting, TQ isn't all dark n' dingy, felt fresh at the time.
Not much separates them for myself...all of them tick the same box etc, well not diablo3 cuz i ain't played it.
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Crewdroog: yeah i definitely like diablo b/c of the dark horror of it, plus the music and screaming goats. titan quest seems more immersive, so perhaps that is why. you keep coming back to the villages and the npcs have more to talk about.

i also think difficulty and some thinking w/combat may factor in. you can't just spam potions. well i mean you could, but i don't think that's what they are going for. dodging is totally an option.
TQ was the simplest to complete out of the bunch for me, GD offers a much harder challenge.
TQ is also a escape to a love of the old Argonauts film/book...so it wins points on a nostalgia level.
Still lost for a solid reason...so maybe it is as you said backdrop, the setting feels familiar.
Thus you relate to it more...i don't know, reaching here and pulling shit from thin air.
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Breja: Frankly, I don't think they are :P For instance I liked Path of Exile and Torchlight way more than Diablo 2. And I really don't know about the first Diablo. I have not played it for way over a decade, and I could not say how good it really is, nostalgia aside. I don't think any H'n'S ever nailed the mood quite the way first Diablo did, so there's that.

Still, I'm not the biggest fan of the genre. It's fun for a while, but usually even the best games get mind-numbing after a while. I only play them once in a blue moon. Can't even remember the last time I played one.
ick, i hated torchlight.

and PoE is SUCH a copy of D2, it's not even funny; even down to the music. don't get me wrong though, i love the damn game.

i've tried playing diablo 1 again, and just couldn't. it was too clunky. D2 is still fun for me.
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Crewdroog: yeah i definitely like diablo b/c of the dark horror of it, plus the music and screaming goats. titan quest seems more immersive, so perhaps that is why. you keep coming back to the villages and the npcs have more to talk about.

i also think difficulty and some thinking w/combat may factor in. you can't just spam potions. well i mean you could, but i don't think that's what they are going for. dodging is totally an option.
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DampSquib: TQ was the simplest to complete out of the bunch for me, GD offers a much harder challenge.
TQ is also a escape to a love of the old Argonauts film/book...so it wins points on a nostalgia level.
Still lost for a solid reason...so maybe it is as you said backdrop, the setting feels familiar.
Thus you relate to it more...i don't know, reaching here and pulling shit from thin air.
you think GD is harder? really? i thought GD was waaaay to easy. however, i was playing it in beta and stuff, maybe since it's full release it's gotten harder.
Post edited September 01, 2016 by Crewdroog
Nothing is better that D2 but I loved Torchlight and I fucking loved Torchlight 2.

It should be noted I'm currently playing FATE and have a lot of fun with that so maybe I just don;t have any taste.

Oh, and Dungeon Siege looked great but it was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO boring!!!!
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tinyE: Nothing is better that D2 but I loved Torchlight and I fucking loved Torchlight 2.

It should be noted I'm currently playing FATE and have a lot of fun with that so maybe I just don;t have any taste.

Oh, and Dungeon Siege looked great but it was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO boring!!!!
i really like Fate too.

ugh and yes about dungeon siege, it was the game that would never end. however, i did try playing it recently, and the game was freakin' hard. i didn't remember having that much trouble when it first came out. maybe games have really gone casual and my skillz are lacking... :( waa-waa
I think part of the reason might be that over time, more and more companies that had early success in the genre, as well as those that are new to it or whatever - realize it is popular and are trying to figure out what makes it tick - what are the things that make people so infatuated to play it. But I think they lose focus of making a fun game that is gamer oriented for the sake of fun and other factors that matter the most to gamers, and they hire psychologists on their teams to find out how to maximize addictability traits in the games which in turn will lead to players playing longer and dragging their friends in, and more or less taking advantage of people by praying on human frailty. This leads to massive amounts of DLC, microtransactions, various game mechanics targetting people's obsessive compulsivity and other psychological tactics. It works on many people and the games make money often, but the real gamers end up thinking WTF??? That's not fun! It is nothing like the good old games I remember and still want to play! Why don't they make new OLD games!?!?

Sadly, it is because those games get broken down into a formula that then gets attempted to optimize it to produce profit, and profitability and addiciton outweigh all the fun things and consumer friendly things that made the games like Diablo etc. so exciting and fresh and new. Sure, Diablo had some of that addiction psychology in it too, and most games do to some extent, but there are degrees of that, and if it is balanced just right you have a hit on your hands that everyone tends to put on the top shelf. When the balance tilts towards gaming the gamer to milk money out of them and pray on weakness, those who are stronger minded about those gimmicks are more likely to see through them and judge the newer games as crap.

That's the crux of my theory anyway. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that though, but I think the offshoot of what I'm suggesting is what has led to the nickel and diming type DLC, microtransactions, and various other nonsense.

Another aspect I find with many games is that more and more they want to make the games cross platform to PC and consoles, and most of the time they either develop the title for console first then port to PC, or PC first and port to console, or a balance - but their mind is always thinking "this has to work on console", and so the game's design ends up having certain elements built into it that cater to consoles and console gamers so that they don't have to maintain two separate forks of the product.

For example, if you were to try to have a game like Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance coming to market in 2016 for the first time it would not be the same game remotely. It would be severely dumbed down and more of an arcade style shooter. Why? Because a PC keyboard has 100+ keys on it with modifiers and you can have 300 ship functions assigned to various keys, to ALT-this and CTRL-that etc. as the keyboard has tonnes of input controls, but on a console you have basiclaly an XBox 360 controller with what 10 buttons? So they have to design the core game play around the limitations of what a gamepad can do even if PC gamers will be using a keyboard, so that they can maintain one codebase and maximize code sharing as well as having a uniform game experience between the platforms so it doesn't seem like two different games. The PC games thus are often dumbed down from what they'd be if they were PC exclusives and they have this unmistakeable feel of consolitis that is anywhere from weak to strong. This is true even if the game is primarily a PC game that gets ported to console and not just games that are console that get ported back to PC. I friggen hate this. Even the Witcher 3 had some signs of this although it was on the lighter side of things and you could kind of ignore some of it and reconfigure around a bit of it, and they addressed more of it in future game patches eventually (such as not being able to rebind keys for example).

Today if a game requires 90 individual keys on the keyboard to do something, that game is simply not coming out for Xbox or PS4 and some companies don't want to do that, so we just wont get those kind of games from those companies.

There are many examples like these. I know your original question was about hack n slash games, but I think the reason behind the answer is actually true for most game genres and not just hack n slash. When profitability climbs higher than creativity and building games that the developers would want to play themselves, then we all lose. What's funny is that often games fail because of this and if they developed an honest game focused on the gamer instead it probably would have sold better, but they never learn...
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Crewdroog: you think GD is harder? really? i thought GD was waaaay to easy. however, i was playing it in beta and stuff, maybe since it's full release it's gotten harder.
uh huh, yeah try vetran/elite, once you've done normal...working on elite myself to try Ultimate mode.
Maybez your romp and stomp skillz are really high and mine suck gopher balls...pffft, that would be about right *sulk*.
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tinyE: Nothing is better that D2 but I loved Torchlight and I fucking loved Torchlight 2.
yeah, I really enjoyed Torchlight and Torchlight 2 also. The first game crashed a lot with certain tilesets and had some game breaking bugs I hit a few times, but I played the hell out of it and really enjoyed it even though it had some flaws too. The second game was so much larger and added so many features missing from the first game that felt like they should have been there that it was like a completed masterpiece of sorts. The graphic style of both games were not as serious and spooky/dark as Diablo, and were more cartoonish like, but I actually kind of dug the different artistic style even though it made the game feel less serious to me, it was a nice change from what I was used to.

I loved the user interfaces too, very intuitive. And the music I could instantly tell had to have been done by the same person that did the Diablo music, you could just tell. From instrument selection to style and various other elements, his signature was all over that.

I'll definitely be doing more playthroughs of TL2 in the future sometime, it was pretty fun. Plus... the multiplayer aspect.