1: The game was aimed at being family-friendly. The lower difficulty settings were for youngsters and newbies.

2: I'm damn sick of this culture that says games have to be hard to be fun. Every game should have some challenge, but that doesn't mean it has to brutalize you every time you play. There are those of us out there that can't play an FPS on anything much harder than Easy, for instance. Besides, I thought Legendary (or whatever the second to hardest one was) was just perfect for a dungeon crawler.

Well duh, Diablo II is harder. But is difficulty really a big selling point for this type of game? It's more about the addictiveness than the challenge, isn't?

Hyperbole is overused.

The game doesn't have to be super hard. But when most of the enemies die from single blow / skill use, it's boring, not fun.
I can't get addicted by game that is playing through itself :P

No, but I agree that normal was kinda easy but only the regular dungeons were easy, the dungeons that you got from scrolls were much harder.
Did you get to the lower levels? The humanoid enemies with a tail that spawned lots of kamikaze green skeletons always gave me trouble.

I predict D3 will go F2P within 1 year of release. At least that's the only way I ever plan to play it.

I think that, on the one hand, it's true that difficulty is not necessarily a prerequisite for fun. Nor does being challenging necessarily make a game good. In fact, challenge can sometimes act as a thorn in the side of otherwise good games. I think that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is a perfect example. I'm not afraid of hard games, by any means. But I found that ALttP's difficulty to be a HUGE barrier. I loved the game, and marveled at how well-designed it was. But at the same time, I got to a point where the frustration just wasn't worth the payoff. I was no longer enjoying the experience.

But on the other hand, I think that there are a lot of cases where decreased difficulty can have a severe negative impact on a game...especially if that game is part of a series. Core game mechanics have the possibility of being lost. Imagine if the Thief series had made it easier to survive combat, for instance. Would anyone have bothered sneaking? Or imagine if Fallout was more forgiving about its character creation and choices. Imagine if every character would have been just about equally competent (oh wait... you don't have to imagine that). I can totally understand people who decry the casual push of today's games. There's so much good that is lost when the experience turns from a challenge into a rollercoaster ride.

Seriously, I just typed an enormous response and figured out how to sum up what I wanted to say in one short paragraph, so I deleted it all. Heh.

A game should offer positive feedback when you do something right, as well as negative feedback when you do something wrong. It is possible to veer too much in either direction, but both are necessary. A lot of new games either take away most of the feedback (by making it nearly impossible to do ANYTHING your own way) or focus too much on one of the two. Demon's Souls was all about negative feedback, while Torchlight (in the form of experience and loot) was perhaps a bit too far on the positive feedback side.

I hadn't really thought about looking at it that way. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yes. Yes, it was. Including horribly outdated UI.

It was already unlikely I would buy D3 after I heard that there is still no customization of character appearance. The news of about single player requiring persistent online connection finalized my decision not to buy the game.

people want a "new" Diablo game, not a "modern" one (I think most people here can recognize the difference between the two) but for all that I have seen this "modern" style D3 isn't even going be a good "modern" game.

I personally wish that Blizard would just hurry up and release the damned thing so everyone can taste how shallow and flawed it is, and then promptly shut the fuck up about it and get on with life ... just like they did with Duke Nukem forever.

Outside of some superficial things (like needing multiple genders per class and a wider array of environmental assets so your not seeing the same shit on multiple plathroughs) Diablo 2 was, on technical elements, a fairly perfect game for it's genera. Dicking with it simply for the sake of "new-a-fying" it for the modern formula of game development is just detracting from what people's expectations are of what it will be.

I can't say that I was a raging fan of D2 (I only played it from start to finish, including the ex-pack, with one character and then contently shut it off), but it was fun for what it was and I too can say that I wont be buying D3 either.

If you want a "new" diablo, get torchlight or titan quest. Pretty much the same game type just newer and quite large games (especially titan quest).

There have been less than 10 games that have made me forget every other game ever made while I am playing through them. diablo ii was one of those games. I'll be buying Diablo 3 the minute it's released in the most evpensive version they sell it in.