While it's easy to burn out on the cynical antics of the AAA market and the tons of freemium MMOs flooding the the Flash portals, it's still a relatively good time for indie developers, and it's easier than ever to vote with your wallet for games that will never see a retail shelf. These days it's only very difficult to make it work rather than nigh-impossible.
Looking to follow the footsteps of games like Defender's Quest and the recently-funded-and-Steam-Greenlit Super Chibi Knight, Dustin Auxier's The Enchanted Cave 2 is another game from an independent developer looking to leverage success on Kongregate to a sequel backed up by more experience and several times the developer hours going into it. (Personally, I think a Flash portal completely dedicated to free indie concept prototypes should exist and have an editorial board or something. That's just another entry to put on my "if I had X million dollars" list...)
The Enchanted Cave is a casual Rogue-lite game inspired by the Ancient Cave level of Lufia 2; fans of Desktop Dungeons will spot a lot of similarities. It's a simplified turn-based dungeon exploration RPG with random floors, simple mechanics, and simple controls in which victory is more about choosing your fights and managing your resources than it is about leveling up. While some uncommon items called Artifacts carry over from one dungeon run to the next, the rest of your gear is totally ephemeral. While it's possible to grind-to-win, the return on investment for stat-grinding is much lower than in a lot of Flash games like Learn To Fly - good decision-making is indispensable. The skill floor on guaranteed success is a good bit higher (though to me, the game feels like it's being played on the second of five difficulty levels, and I'd love to see more options).
The above is an interview featuring footage of the mobile port of The Enchanted Cave. The sequel has some sample art in place, and has a 6-month development time charted out.
The $10,000 Kickstarter has 21 days left as of this writing, and the funding is more or less exactly on pace to just barely make it, but it's hard to predict these kinds of things. Further, the $15,000 stretch goal would surely be beneficial to the final product, possibly making it possible to Greenlight the release on Steam (or equivalent; I'd be more excited about a gog.com release). He's giving away the iPhone and Android releases completely for free during the Kickstarter, so give it a shot.
Further, he's promising lifetime access to all of the games he self-produces for life to $50 backers (it's possible that he could get picked up by a studio in the future sometime, but I wouldn't blame him too much if it happens).
You can also pledge bunches extra to have vanity content programmed in. If you happen to have more money than you know what to do with but zero ideas, send him $600 or so and tell him that you want the Taur Manifester put into the game. He'll know what you mean.
Diablo
III expansion reaps praise, but cannot redeem soul of Diablo
or,
I Remember Diablo II
My
rose-tinted glasses
It turns out that Diablo II is the game I remember playing. It's hard not to clearly remember when one has hundreds of hours under one's belt, spanning multiple playthroughs of Normal and a few playthroughs of Nightmare (and a few ill-fated run-ins with Hell).I
remember the mediocre story, which I'd give maybe a 6.5 out of 10. I
remember the unwieldy potion-juggling minigame, where the player
trades half the screen space for godly amounts of sustain. I
remember Energy, the noob trap junk stat, and tons of junk skills. I
remember Identify and Town Portal scrolls sort of taking up space in
the inventory without really adding any gameplay. I remember the
tedious manual gold pickups which always led to a useless Flamberge
sneaking its way into a 2x4 block of my inventory. I remember over a dozen fetch quests. I remember a somewhat tedious
third act which, even worse, featured racist caricatures of the Pygmy
people as enemies. I remember a short and equally non-varied fourth
act. I remember helpers who were a bit too fond of getting
themselves killed rather than truly putting their gear to "good use". I remember chill attacks being a bit more effective than
necessary, all but invalidating the option to tank through it in any
situation whatsoever. I remember Hell spamming immunities as if it
were the only way to balance a hard mode, and as if only Hammerdins
deserved bragging rights.
And
recently, I remember Blizzard changing the Diablo II Battle Chest
to no longer include the original Diablo, running away from
the fan base cultivated by Blizzard North in pursuit greener
pastures.
It would be difficult to argue that the removal of the Auction House wasn't a
step in the right direction (even if the exact timing was a bit
convenient). The replacement director, Josh Mosqueira, was
absolutely correct to make it a priority to improve Legendary items
so that they stand a fighting chance of being usable, as well as
endowing them with unique twists absent from the bland release-date
legendary items.
And
from the start, Diablo III had all the markings of an adequate
PC action game. It had a smooth and responsive engine – once
enough players quit in digust to get your ping under 500 milliseconds,
anyway. The Monk and the Witch Doctor even had some interesting
mechanics and visual style which hadn't really been seen before in
the series. The game is arguably worth the $20 Blizzard is currently
charging for it.
So
is everything better now? In a word, no. For this gamer there
remains a problem that is too big to solve with mere expansions and
patches, and that problem is this: I remember Diablo II. And
worse, some of the latest changes in Loot 2.0, which paved the way
for the Reaper of Souls expansion, distance Diablo III farther
from its roots than ever before.
Loss
of identity - taking the RP out of ARPG
Both
the Diablo franchise and the individual player character lost
their respective identities with the launch of vanilla Diablo III. Players of Diablo III make no lasting choices in how to
differentiate their character from other possible “builds” of
that character's class. Take, for example, the Diablo II
Necromancer, and its closest Diablo III analogue, the Witch
Doctor.
A
Necromancer could play it classical, raising a dozen or more
skeletons to do his bidding as he sits ducks around behind his ranks
and curses enemies. He could specialize as a “Bone Mage”,
walling away those who would wish to harm him and filling the screen
with projectiles late-game. Or he could choose a Poison build,
spending the early game relying on his hireling and risky hit-and-run
tactics to bring down his foes before later learning to spread poison
from the corpses of his enemies to those still standing in a sadistic
chain reaction. He starts off shooting only a bone sliver or two, or
summoning a lowly skeleton or two, or having to resort to melee
combat to inflict poison damage before the skills ramp up in power
not just numerically, but visibly and viscerally. Most importantly,
he could pick any combination of the above builds (though most skills
were either one-point wonders, mere pre-requisites, or all-or-nothing
skills – the game wasn't perfect).
If
you play one of the above strategies, you might run into problems
later on. In particular, the Bone Mage has the easiest time soloing
act bosses, but that just comes with the territory of choosing your
identity – living with the consequences, learning to leverage your
strengths and cover your weaknesses, and maybe even grinding a bit
extra when the burden is at its greatest. And if you re-roll a new
character and start over, you get to watch your new skill of choice
gradually mount in strength in satisfying ways. New to the game?
You can one-point everything to get a feel for the class as a whole,
have some points left over for your favorites, and still finish
Normal in a reasonable amount of time, despite not being as powerful
as you could have been – and if I remember anything about Diablo
II, it's that I wanted to play through a second time after the
first.
By
contrast, a Diablo III Witch Doctor automatically learns the
skill Zombie Dogs and can summon four of them, period. He or she has
the option of blowing them up for area of effect damage with another
hotkey. He or she can fire Poison Darts that are mostly spammable
from a safe distance. He or she is a jack of all trades, capable of
doing any of dozens of things equally as well as any other Witch
Doctor on the server, but inexplicably can only remember how to do
six of them (and three passives) at any given moment (because in D3,
so much is balanced around cooldowns, and it's necessary to elbow
skills that your character “knows” out of the game somehow when
all skills are always at “max level”). After one playthrough, I
would feel disinclined to play the class ever again – that is
definitely the case with my Wizard, the only character I ever got to
60 (and even then, only because the 50% experience buff made it
bearable, and I wanted to see what the buzz was about Loot 2.0 and
Paragon levels).
In
Diablo II, you can only gain skills at levels that are
multiples of six, and you build up toward them by at least
one-pointing the prerequisites to tide over your damage output. The character was becoming a certain
variation on its class, and the player was looking forward to that
next multiple of six at all times. By contrast, Diablo III
keeps unlocking skills and modifiers for you, inflicting a sort of
scatter-brained mania on characters levels 1-59 by forcing them to
change entire builds around every time a new skill or skill rune
one-ups what they had before. I grew to dread the level-up notice
before I even hit level 30 on my first play-through. First Ice does
the most damage, and then fire, and then Arcane does the most damage
and also does crowd control, and then suddenly Ice has these synergy
passives and runes that make it do the most damage while still doing
its usual crowd control, and... etc. etc.
Ultimately
Diablo III permits the player to choose one of five totally
pre-defined “roles” to play, and all of them are polymaths in
their broader fields of study. A master in Diablo III is
never a specialist with his or her own style – only a typical
general education student with bigger numbers.
As
this pattern is deeply entrenched in the game, I imagine that it
would almost be easier to simply start making a new game than to
overhaul character building in this game, doubtlessly causing a huge
controversy among players who either didn't play Diablo II or
didn't value the depth of its customization options the way that I
did.
Loot
2.0 - Your dude got buffs
It
is rather quick and easy to summarize what life is currently like for
those playing Diablo III with characters below the level cap
after the Loot 2.0 patch – your dude got buffs. Loot drops
are less frequent, but way more powerful than ever before, and the
stat points on your drops are automatically configured to have the
only two primary stats your character could conceivably ever use. All changes to skills have been major buffs – mostly by factors of
1.5 or so, but often by factors of 2-3 and sometimes as high as 10 or
12, giving Loot 2.0 all the look of a fan patch rather than that of a
late-iteration tune-up for a years-old game from a AAA developer. The only changes with any real depth and personality have been to
Legendary items, which in addition to the usual across-the-board
buffs have received some cool and unique special effects more in line
with the Unique item drops of Diablo II.
Some
of these buffs were needed because the PC version of the game had
previously been balanced around having to buy everything at the Gold
or Real Money Auction House, which led to item drops being
consistently underwhelming for the sake of fighting against deflation
in the Gold Auction House (and by corollary, deliciously inflating
the almighty USD in the Real Money Auction House). Aside from the
neat unique effects on legendary items, and the partially necessary
buffs here and there, the remainder is dripping with greasy excess. Lead Content Designer Kevin Martens (perhaps unintentionally) drives home the tawdry excess of the Loot 2.0 patch by promising gamers metaphorical “Lambourghinis” by the hour, like a Californication
version of Oprah Winfrey's Everyone Gets A Car: the ARPG. Why
should you come back to Diablo III? Because your dude got
buffs.
I
find it remarkable that these changes have been more than enough to
garner near-universal praise from the gaming media. Yes, the Auction
House was a cynical abomination. But Loot 2.0 didn't give player
characters a sense of identity, and even worse, it reinforces
existing problems with Diablo III and introduces new ones.
Level
scaling and Paragon levels – because life begins at 60
A
sometimes-hated innovation in the world of RPGs is level scaling. This current trend in RPGs is intended to open up the world, making
it more attractive to explore and re-visit areas by having enemies
level up along with the player rather than become obsolete. “Soft”
versions like in Grim Dawn, which nudge monsters away from
their “base” level gently, can smooth out the challenge curve a
little, but when level scaling is used in its extreme one-to-one
form, as in Oblivion or Sacred, the end result is a
never-ending limbo in which a character can supposedly “level up”
while in reality, they are leveling down relative to their foes, who
don't have to procure new level-appropriate gear. Finding
replacement gear, then, is the ebb balancing the flow of leveling up. The ARPG ceases to be a journey of advancement and instead becomes
the lowly existence of a shipwrecked sailor on a raft, wobbling
endlessly in an infinite sea and given the meaningless option of
grinding all the way to level 60 in the first act if he feels like
it, without ever feeling any more or less powerful from one level to
the next.
Diablo
II was sometimes quite hard, if the player wanted it to be. By
skipping randomly-generated minor sub-dungeons, the player was
allowed to willingly take on greater challenges with less preparation
than may be advisable. Diablo III was, until Loot 2.0, much
the same way. However, Diablo III added level scaling to Loot
2.0 and replaced the natural-feeling choice to rush onward to bigger
challenges with a simple slider bar. But this is merely a slider bar
that changes the weather pattern of the shipwrecked sailor's
particular ocean, not a satisfying set of milestones one journeys
past at one's own pace.
Even
worse, the Master difficulty is easy. It is easier than trying to
play through pre-Loot 2.0 Diablo III without stopping to
grind. To unlock Torment difficulties, the player must level up to
60, and only then can the player (slowly) progress in a way that is
not in lockstep with enemies through the use of account-wide bonuses
known as “Paragon levels”.
If
you want to have a difficult game, or if you want to grow stronger
than your foes at all, then life begins at 60. Those wanting to play
the expansion can look forward to instead having life begin at 70. When you do get to Torment I, it isn't as fun as it should be,
either. While normal mobs were often dangerous in Diablo II,
they are consistently a joke in Diablo III, even at Torment I
difficulty. Aside from act bosses, the only challenge I found in
Torment I was in the form of Elite (“yellow”) monsters. They had
tremendous damage coming from affix sets like Frozen Mortar
Desecrator, but this damage is more or less trivial to side-step. But other affixes grant the ability to instantly grab you and put you
in a box from an entire screen away, namely Waller and Vortex – and
the result when a single monster has all five of these affixes is a
frustrating, artificial-feeling difficulty spike with little
counterplay in the middle of an otherwise easy and mindless grind. There is probably a way to win this by playing “find the exploit”,
but that is a metagame unworthy of further resurrections.
I
understand that level scaling is supposed to pave the way to
Adventure Mode, but frankly, I think they are breaking something that
used to work with this change. My suggestion would be to
re-implement the old Normal-Nightmare-Hell-Inferno progression for
Campaign mode with no level scaling, and open up Adventure Mode as an
optional way to level up on the side, possibly even earning the right
to skip chapters/acts if one skips ahead enough levels. Perhaps
having one version of each Adventure Mode side-quest that is static,
but has selectable versions staggered out 5 levels or so apart could
re-introduce the feeling of progress to this mode as well.
All
in all, one-to-one level scaling is a blow to the role-playing
experience, and Diablo III's post-60 balance is anchored to
over-cheesed monster affixes. These problems should be relatively
easy to fix, but even if this were to be done, there would still lurk
one more demon in the bowels of Diablo III.
The
Journey
"[K]nowing
that you don't have to play story mode over and over again allows
people to relax and just enjoy Act V for what it is; and they may or
may not come back to it after that, but they don't have to. It
doesn't feel as onerous to sit through those things."
Diablo
II may have had its Act III, but “onerous to sit through” is
far from the language that fans of Diablo II would have used
to describe it, let alone the campaign as a whole. Bear in mind that
Martens touted Adventure Mode as “the main selling point” of
Reaper of Souls in the same interview. Again, I am not at all opposed to having more
side-content for the purpose of variety, but it's hard to mistake
this admission of failure on behalf of Diablo III's writing
and exposition team for anything other than what it is.
"Blizzard
also does an excellent job of integrating their awful storytelling
into gameplay; dialogue from idiotic demon lords and cheesy secondary
do a great job of highlighting just how actively and egregiously bad
it all is while you’re in the middle of the action, so all of
Diablo III‘s storytelling failings are very, very hard to simply
ignore. The lore also plays off like audio logs, as you pick them up,
and they expand the world in ways that just make it far less
interesting. Less is more. The less I know that the demon lords were
just a bunch of quarreling and bickering politicians of Hell, the
more I believe that they just are and are going to skin everything
alive, because they’re just evil bastards like that."
Leoric the now-Skeleton King spends most of Act I rounding up his ghost buddies and re-telling his life story in little intermissions everywhere you go. Maghda
stalks you through most of Acts I and II and won't ever shut up; she
always throws a few minions at you and then teleports away, but
inexplicably doesn't do so when it's time for her to be a boss fight. Then Zoltan Koole follows you around mid-to-late Act II and won't
shut up. Then in Act III, the role is taken over by Azmodan, who
repeatedly tells you his plan and dares you to stop him like a
Saturday morning cartoon villain, and is replaced in this capacity by
Diablo himself in Act IV. All of Hell got video-enabled Twitter
accounts, your iPhone is welded to your face, and you can't
unsubscribe. “Onerous” is an understatement.
In
Diablo II, the title character had only eight words to say in
the entire game, and it was horrifying to behold.
“Not
even death can save you from me.”
-
the complete script for Diablo, the Lord of Terror, in Diablo II
As
I said at the beginning, Diablo II's plot gets a 6.5 from me.
But it was a brilliantly-employed 6.5 of a plot that knew its place –
a humble guide on the outskirts of the vast ruins of a civilization
at war with the forces of Hell. This war with Hell was a literal
war, complete with mutilated bodies. I was a young man, maturing
like many other 80's kids side-by-side with a gaming industry that
was just beginning to include such content in its digital “toys”
assumed to be the domain of children. The shock and scandal of
seeing the first few dismembered bodies soon gave way to a somber
realization that this was a world where Terror, Death, and
Destruction were a unified, powerful, and mobilized force at war with
humanity. The quantity of dreadful things depicted in Act I is such
that it's hard to speculate whether a high-fidelity remake would even
make it past the ratings board.
Despite
early claims that Blizzard was paying careful attention to the
difference between “motivated gore versus unmotivated gore”, the dead of Diablo III are mostly of the living kind and
look fit to play a role in Plants vs Zombies. Humans are kept in
cages to be rescued X times to unlock achievement Y. The gore in
Diablo III comes mostly in the form of giant monsters
exploding like piñatas (and as of Loot 2.0, guaranteed to drop a
plethora of blood-soaked Lambourghinis). Another example of
“motivated gore” is the last level of Act I, in which enormous
mechanized cleavers rhythmically slam the ground in a way invokes
about as much pathos as a Mario platformer with extra marinara and a
propensity for shouting, “I amma M for mature, wahee!” every so often. Death is not a plague sweeping across the land – it only comes for
named characters, like the ghosts of the Skeleton King and his wife,
and for Deckard Cain - and in Diablo III, death is never
bloody for people. Blood is merely the paint on the wall, the
confetti in the parade, and the candy in the piñatas.
Breaking
immersion left and right with endless chatter from every NPC from
Azmodan to Zoltan Koole, and celebrating endless violence against
toothless foes, Diablo III does not present a journey into
darkness. Diablo III marks the game in the franchise which
stopped believing that a game can be art, instead believing that the
purpose of art is to sell games.
Having
made the plot unbearable, the way has been paved for Adventure Mode –
a convenient vehicle which could be used to deliver DLCs in the near
future as Diablo III scrambles to find a new business model
for microtransactions.
If
you enjoy some good, mindless action, then I do not intend to stand
in your way. If it were its own game and had no legacy to live up
to, Diablo III would be just another AAA title worth picking
up from a bargain bin some time in the future.
But
I remember Diablo II, and this is no worthy successor. It is
merely another M-for-mature game which is neither for children, nor
for truly mature audiences. I can only dream of what could
have been if the intellectual property and financial resources behind
Diablo III had been placed in worthier hands a dozen or so
years ago.
Well, I got a late start on writing that up and now it's Sunday, so I can't be blamed for not hearing back over the course of 0-2 business days + a weekend since the time I started pitching (rejections either). Still, I absolutely will need to either have clear, established editorial interest, or I will have to post what I have late Monday night for the sake of making it on time to pre-empt the D3 launch (while hanging onto the slimmer hope that it's acceptable to replace the post with a link later). I guess in the future I should try harder to come up with less time-sensitive pitches so I don't end up in weird, tense situations like this. This one's sort of a sore spot, though, what with it being The Disappointment of the Decade Hopefully Everyone Learned A Lot From in the gaming world.
Ok. It seems like killscreendaily.com is one of only a few truly critical gaming websites that attempting to be anything at all like the Roger Ebert of gaming websites. I'd pitch this thing I just drafted to more places, but... there's nothing. Unless I'm not Googling all that well.
So... Good job. I might have to start reading you more often even if you don't buy my stuff.
Yeah, so that's why I've been posting so much D3 content lately. Well, that, and because D3 sucks, but I can't find anything approaching comprehensiveness on the subject yet.
I've finally distilled it to a list of points and some punchy obligatory jpgs, but I'm not sharing it until I've made some rounds and tried to sell it somewhere. Hopefully you'll be getting a hyperlink instead of a blog post sometime in the next week or so.
EDIT: Apparently some publications aren't all about punchy zingers and obligatory jpgs, and obligatory templates that include the word "badass". This can be done. It might be a totally different piece than what I started with, but it might be better this way.
Video games have changed in a lot of ways over the last ten years or so - in fact, the ability to change is a large change in itself. With the advent of the internet, games now change from week to week and from year to year for as long as the developers see fit to fix, improve, expand, and balance.
The filter should be optional, but in my opinion, the default setting should use the filter, and it would include only reviews from the last 12 months (for games which are being actively updated) or reviews since the last update (in cases where games have finalized over a year ago), with a floor of at least 5 reviews in cases where too many reviews would be left out (more than 5 would be better, but there do not seem to be enough sites on Metacritic to support a larger number at the moment). Take or leave the particulars of that, but you get the idea.
For example, consider League of Legends. Currently, Metacritic rates it at a 78. Not horrible, but frankly, this groundbreaking and addictive game has come a long way since those reviews were written, and the early reviewers couldn't be blamed, exactly, what with them being human and lacking omniscience and whatnot. As a case study, only as of October 2013 did Gamespot get around to re-reviewing League of Legends, bumping its score from a 6-with-potential (or as far as Metascore is concerned, a 6) to a solid 9. Currently, Metascore only uses the score of 6 in its scoring. Players who can only play the March, 2014 version of League of Legends are being presented a weighted average of scores of games spanning from post-beta and continuing on throughout years of meticulous balance, graphical overhauls, expansions, tweaks, and so on.
Another example to consider is Windforge. Plagued by a prolonged crowd-sourced development and a buggy release, this game only has two reviews so far, but if it accumulates many more, it is unlikely to ever recover, regardless of any patches it comes out with in the future. Speaking as someone who really wants to like this inspired-but-reportedly-unplayable game, the solution to me is obvious - don't score the game based on potential, but do have its Metascore to be based on the game people are actually getting.
In the case of Windforge, one could argue that rushing an unfinished game to publication comes with its risks, but it's harder to say this about League of Legends, which was designed with constant iteration as a core feature, a hook which keeps players coming back with an eye out for new champion skins. And in Windforge's case, I agree that legacy reviews are valuable for showing a developer's track record (should I bother pre-ordering from them ever?), but in the end, future shoppers looking to pick up a hypothetical, massively debugged and rebalanced Windforge would be consuming information well past its shelf life.
If there is any sense in the world, then in ten years' time it will have become startling to think that we once lived in a world where reviews of sandcastles were routinely chiseled in stone.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Sadly, I have to admit that I was foolish enough to pre-order Diablo 3 a couple years ago, so it's possible that others exist who are even more gullible than me. But it's hard to imagine the experience being anything but a splash of DRM-laden cold water that's un-dodgeable because of latency issues. How could anyone not have learned the lesson by now?
Speaking as an outsider, it's hard for me to say whether professional game critics are as gullible as they appear, or if they're simply forced to march in lockstep with the industry consensus for the sake of their careers. I'm trying as hard as I can not to be cynical about this, but neither of the aforementioned options readily affords the luxury of optimism - one must look elsewhere altogether for that.
Let's give this interview the analysis it deserves.
PC Gamer: Diablo III obviously took kind of a beating out of the gate back at launch. How did you feel about that?
Martens: Well "bad" is the short answer. We felt terrible about the connection issue stuff. I know people that sent their families out of town on vacation so that they could sit down and play the game, and they couldn't connect. So that stuff was terrible and I think we've spent an incredible amount of time ensuring that kind of stuff doesn't happen again. We took that very seriously and certainly feel bad about that.
Clearly not bad enough. More on this later.
I think we did eight major patches on the game. We did many months of support, we added new content, we did big tuning passes. Like anything, best laid plans meeting 15 million people usually means that you're going to learn a few things... or a lot of things in this case. That's what I think I like about expansion development. It's kind of our second at-bat and we know a lot of things about what's actually fun about the game. And we don't have to fight against player instincts or make guesses. We can do what people do; we can see what people like to do, we can read on the forums, and we can interact with them at BlizzCon and other events, and we can make a game that closely matches what people want out of a Diablo game.
The boldfaced parts are either blatant lies, or at best clever misdirections. They CAN read on the forums and make a game that closely matches what people want out of a Diablo game, but they emphatically choose not to. They pay their moderators to treat criticism on the forums the way a toddler treats mechanized and padded pressure plates in a game of whack-a-mole. Their policy is to tune out all criticism until their approval rating makes George W. Bush look like Moose Tracks ice cream and then gratuitously pat themselves on the back for capitulating just in time for the press conference for their upcoming overpriced DLC.
PC Gamer: Do you guys continue to stand by the decision to require an internet connection to play Diablo III? Is there any chance at all of that changing in the future?
Martens: Yes, we stand by it. Diablo III is a co-op game from the ground up, so having the social stuff be there at your fingertips whenever you want it is integral to the experience.
Christ, Marty, you walked right into that one. It was literally the last thing you said, mate! What happened to the line about pulling your head out of your goddamned ass and paying attention to what people want? To the imaginary person who's reading this and is actually taking this douche at face value: it's the DRM, stupid. (A secondary concern is that the game was originally built around the RMAH, and it would probably take a lot of work to enable offline play, but that's just jumping back one link in the causal chain. It's the DRM, stupid.)
This is one of the most pathetically transparent sophist douchebag moves I have seen in some time. How many ways are you inconsistent with your stated motive? Let me count the ways:
1. The PC game is playable in single-player. They could have forced you to wait for four-man queues, but that would piss people the fuck off and make people hate the game even more. Martens just wants them to be forced into a situation where the option to co-op is slightly more readily at their fingertips, but he stops short of going the whole way? Not bloodly likely.
2. Followers are only enabled in single-player. They went to a lot of fucking trouble to implement a system specifically designed for a game mode they're going out of their way not to support. The consistent thing would be to remove them from the game.
3. Console users aren't forced to play online anytime they fail to assemble a four-man local team.
I guess it's better to piss on me and tell me it's raining than to actually hook up a firehose to the local sewer and fill the skies with piss for the sake of consistency. Or not - I don't know; it's a toss-up because I won't be playing the game anyway when alternatives exist that are actually fun.
You want to know what online co-op is like? Well, if you're in a popular grind area like the start of Act 3, it's almost fun, but it's not like you really have a team half the time. If you go to any other place in the game, you wait forever and maybe get one guy to join. A Demon Hunter a few levels higher than you with tons of movement speed and fully decked out with level-appropriate gear from the auction house. He runs way ahead of you and blasts the mobs to pieces, and it takes you a while just to kill the 2-3 survivors from each pack. He's a whole map ahead of you in no time. Then he gets to the boss and drops a portal and he's like, "u coming?", and... are you having fun yet? I would think not, but Blizzard thinks that I subconsciously prefer this to single-player - so much that I'll tolerate ping and server downtime for it.
Do you know the only time I had fun in online multiplayer more often than not with a Diablo game? The motherfucking cow level. You could usually find a game to join on Battlenet to commemorate someone's latest playthrough of Normal difficulty. The level had delivered the simple shoot-em-up bliss of facing a huge, fast horde of stupid melee-range enemies. If you were at the appropriate level or below, you were in mortal danger, and it was a blast watching people teleport in, run for their lives, and scramble to get to their previous corpse to get their gear back.
With Diablo 3, Blizzard took an absolute fan-favorite feature out of the game and in its place erected a big gaudy monument to their own hubris and contempt for their fan base in the form of the giant rainbow-colored "fuck you" sign known as Whimsyshire. The way you get to Whimsyshire is by replaying the same 5 maps 80 fucking times each until rare component items drop, and then you grind Whimsyshire by your fucking self a hundred times or so hoping that the motherfucking rainbow sword drops before you die of the monotony.
PC Gamer: Not too long ago, Blizzard announced that it was shutting down the auction house. Is it fair to characterize it as a failure at this point?
Martens: It did what it was intended to do in one way, which was to make trading a safe place to happen without trading scams and other ripoffs. However, it had a very bad unintended consequence of making trading the best way to get items in the game. The fact is that the most fun way for the vast majority of people is to kill monsters and take gears from their cold, dead claws. Trading became very easy. The auction house lowered the barrier of entry so much that it became the best way to get items, and ultimately players will do whatever is smartest. They will find the golden path and do what is most efficient.
You should play the game to get gear to kill the monsters. You shouldn't get gear to kill monsters because you will get bored too quickly. It stole people's reward curve is essentially what it did; it made it very easy for them to do it. So trading isn't a bad way to get items, but if it negates playing the game, then we've made a huge mistake. And we did, which is why we're shutting down the auction house.
Blizzard didn't invent the RMAH because they wanted the game to be more fun. They invented it because some Blizzard executive was butthurt that someone somewhere was making money off of Diablo 2 and it wasn't him. Since Blizzard's horrible RMAH-centric game balance totally broke the economy of the game and the spirits of most of the people who played it, they're finally removing it - but they're also all but removing in-game trading from the game altogether by "soulbinding" anything that's of any value whatsoever. Yep, they're taking their ball and going home.
I don't know about you guys, but I never had a Diablo 2 game ruined because someone, somewhere was trading haX3d l007. Maybe if you're some basement dweller who grinds in D2 not because it's fun but because you think it's something to brag about, you shed tears over that, but us healthy-minded people? Not so much. Leave the super-hardcore Libertarian mode for special ladder events with periodic resets or something and let the rest of us awkwardly attempt to trade for set items or whatever. Most of us just wanted you to make gear drops not perpetually be 5-10 levels obsolete all game every game because Blizzard was more worried about the deflation of gold in the auction house than all else.
PC Gamer: Sounds like the majority of your efforts since launch have been based around responding to fan feedback.
Martens: Yeah. And the auction house decision didn't come easy. It's not like the day we realized it was a mistake was when we could shut it down. A lot of things had to come together for us to get to that point. And honestly, what the console build did with their loot system... what we have now we call "Loot 2.0," what they did I would call "Loot 1.5." They had no auction house inherently, more because they couldn't than anything else.
So it's been a learning process for us as well. And finally as the loot stuff came together; as the enchanting system was dialed in; as our new legendaries were coming online, we realized that we could get rid of the auction house and get rid of that reward curve problem without causing new problems of people going back to trade scams or people feeling like they couldn't have any fun gear. Now we can give it away like candy, along with all of these ways that people can upgrade it, and all these crazy powers. And you can get it the way you're supposed to, which is by killing a monster and taking it from them.
Whatever you say, Oprah. You know what else you could do? Make a proper fucking Diablo 2 successor. But sure, free candy.
PC Gamer: What else have you learned since the launch of Diablo III?
Martens: I think the randomness thing. We should have made everything random from the start. So the reason we didn't have random exterior zones was because we wanted the game to have more of that real RPG feel; that the world was real and had a sense of place. And like the loot problem, until Loot 2.0 was really dialing in, it was hard for us to figure out what to do with the auction house; it was the same with the randomness. Until the other aspects that made the game more RPG and more connected to the world were dialed in... you know, we've gotten better at storytelling since Diablo III; the world map that comes with Adventure Mode makes Sanctuary feel a lot more real just because you have a map of it, if nothing else, and that's a relatively simple solution to the problem. All of that made us comfortable with introducing randomized exterior zones as well.
I seriously doubt that they've gotten better at it. The whole premise of Adventure Mode is that they let you opt out of having every NPC in the game from Azmodan to Zoltan Koole chew your fucking ear off. You're charging $40 to turn off your obnoxious and shitty content? Christ, give me a fucking break. Maybe I should uninstall the game now before they come up with a way to charge for that, too...
Paolilli: Yeah, and that's actually one of my favorite things that we've done. With the map you have that sense of place, whereas before I think the environments looked great, but you didn't really have that sense of how everything is connected. And I think the map and the ability to go anywhere and do anything helps.
Martens:Dynamic Difficulty is another great example of that. We had our old-school linear difficulty that was inherited from the past, where you had to play through normal, nightmare, and so on. Dynamic Difficulty, which we made for Adventure Mode, allowed us to break that dichotomy for the game as well because otherwise we would have had to have a version of a monster for every possible level. So if you played Act II, we would have to have a Level 31, 32, 33... all the way up to 70 version of every monster for it to be fun. The overall Dynamic Difficulty system removed that burden and let us focus on a grander vision for our gameplay.
Dynamic Difficulty is a great example of how Blizzard Entertainment sucks balls. It's what lots of people hated about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and they're implementing it across the board for Diablo 3 with no opt-out why? Because balancing the game twice would be hard. Well, they're kind of right, in that they can't even be bothered to balance the game once, Waller Vortex Frozen Mortar Desecrator, WTFBBQGLBTQLOLOL.
Here's the current state of game balance: Playing on Normal is like playing Torchlight 1 on Easy. Playing on Master, the highest difficulty available before level 60, feels like having good gear and being a little overleveled in Nightmare in Diablo 2. You know what's harder than that? Skipping side-quests and taking on challenges before you're properly leveled in any Diablo game at any time in history before this goddamned patch. And you have to hit the level cap before you can have any challenge. Just go ahead replace the playable characters by the cast of The Golden Girls, because at Blizzard, life begins at 60. (Or 70, after the expansion. But fuck that.)
PC Gamer: On that note, it seems like Adventure Mode is kind of the main selling point of Reaper of Souls. Is that fair to say?Martens: Yeah, I would say that's it. I would call Adventure Mode the primary feature of the expansion. That said, I think Act V is our best act, so we did take everything we learned there. And you do have to kill Malthael once with one character before Adventure Mode is unlocked. But knowing that you don't have to play story mode over and over again allows people to relax and just enjoy Act V for what it is; and they may or may not come back to it after that, but they don't have to. It doesn't feel as onerous to sit through those things.
PC Gamer: There have been some fans on the internet who have expressed concern that Reaper of Souls may be a bit pricey for the content that it delivers. What are you feelings on that?
Martens: I don't know about pricing as such, but I would say that the Adventure Mode changes the game pretty much completely. It's totally different. And it's not like a linear thing anymore. You don't just kill Malthael anymore and the game is done. And I think that was a little too much the case, unfortunately, in Diablo III. That's not the case anymore. When you kill Malthael, now you're finally starting Reaper of Souls. As good as Act V is, once you get into Adventure Mode and you see the promise of everything random that Diablo does; that makes replayability the point of the game. It's not linear anymore so you're experience is different everytime you come in.
I already addressed this, see: $40, getting Azmodan to shut the fuck up. It's nice that they've finally woken up and smelled the spunkgargleweewee, though. I think.
PC Gamer: Are you happy with the state of PVP as it is right now?Martens:Well, [Brawling Mode] is okay, and it can be really fun if you've got two people of similar level. PVP is still something we talk about a lot. [Former Diablo III director] Jay Wilson wrote a long blog post a couple Decembers or Januarys ago explaining why what we tried didn't work out. And that stuff is still the case.
Mostly IDGAF because I came for the PvE, but PvP will probably have game-wide consequences, which I'll get to later.
PC Gamer: What would you say to the players who felt turned off by Diablo III at launch and gave up?
Martens: It's crazy awesome now (laughs). You're going to get the keys to the Ferrari. I use the car metaphor deliberately. If you had a Corolla before and you're watching people swing by in their Lamborghini all the time; well, everyone gets a Lamborghini now. Everyone gets a shot at it now. Legendaries are dropping now from Level 10 onward, and we have put code in to ensure that everyone gets some legendaries, and a chance at the wacky powers as well.
So the promise of what Diablo can give you, everyone gets a taste of it. And there's still lots to earn for the people who put in the time; they're still going to get better things and more things. But everybody gets some of it. Our game director called that philosophy "endgame for everybody," and he didn't mean that you have to get to Level 70 to start earning Paragon Points to get the endgame. He wanted to take that stuff and move it earlier in the game so people wouldn't have to put in hundreds of hours. However, if you put in hundreds of hours, you still get more.
Paolilli: Yeah, we've done a lot of work to make sure that no matter how much time you put in, whether you're having a short play session or going for a lot longer that you're going to get rewarded for that amount of time. We want to give that sense of infinite possibility where the more time you put in the more you will get, but you don't have to play like an endgame player would in order to get rewarded.
Handing out Lamborghinis? You need to get the fuck out of California, dude. What kind of mouthbreather plays Diablo 3 wanting to rack up five Legendaries before the end of Act 1? It would be one thing if this were just the pendulum swinging a bit too far after they removed the RMAH, and even then, that's the sort of thing that should get sorted out in Beta. But this goes way beyond all that. This is just an old-fashioned transparent bribe, and it would take a delusional nitwit to expect this state of affairs to persist for long.
I predict that a few months after Reaper of Souls comes out, they're going to wring their hands and nerf the crap out of everything as a part of their "PvP balance" patch. They might also make a hat tip to some l33t g4m3rz who get butthurt that "casual" players are able to obtain the same gear as they are.
Diablo 2 didn't thrust guaranteed legendaries in your face. That's because it didn't have to, because Diablo 2 was a goddamned good game that was worth playing. You didn't want to play the endgame at level one because you were in it for the fucking journey. You got to the endgame when you were damned well built up for it, and not a moment sooner. The skills you opted into at level 6 anticipated what you were going to do at 18 and at 30, and you were hungry for that next multiple of 6. You weren't finding yourself sighing and groaning every time you gained a level because LOLOL YOU JUST GAINED A COUPLE RUNES AND NOW THESE TWO SKILLS ARE BETTER THAN THE ONES YOU HAVE NOW, TIME TO RESPEC.
Yeah, Diablo 3 is so totally awesome now. Try convincing your friends of that now, with your account at Paragon Level 50 and holding onto big fat wad of cash you're not allowed to share with them. Deck yourself out in full gear and run around one-shotting everything with your character who's effectively 10 levels higher than they are.
No, Blizzard has no fucking clue what Diablo 2 fans liked about Diablo 2, and they don't give a rat's ass. But they do know that everyone likes Ferraris! So now they're injecting little hits of Level 70 power surges throughout the game in the form of Lamborghinis that go obsolete after an hour or so, just in time for the 2015 Lamborghini to drop.
Anyway... stay the fuck away from Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. Blizzard has to fail for the benefit of PC gaming as a whole.
This isn't a call for a boycott. A boycott is when you don't buy a shampoo because they test it on dogs and that upsets you. This is a simple case of not buying a turd sandwich with extra spunkgargleweewee because it's a goddamned turd sandwich with extra spunkgargleweewee, for fuck's sake.
I realized that I couldn't bear to press on with my comprehensive guide to how, in my opinion, Blizzard ruined Diablo 3. Simply put, any discussion of Diablo 3 that doesn't deviate into a discussion of alternatives is just an excuse for drinking too much. So let's look at some games to play instead of Diablo 3.
Path of Exile is an online free-to-play ARPG, and it is the most successfully executed successor to Diablo 2 that I have ever played.
On my laptop - a Lenovo T430 (laptop) that's been tuned up a little bit - it runs smooth as butter, and rarely suffers ping problems (which are probably occurring on my ISP's side).
They repurposed two character-building systems for this game, one from Final Fantasy VII and another from Final Fantasy X. (if not originating before these someplace I am unaware of)
Your active skills are found in infrequently-dropping gems which are also given as quest rewards at times, and these gems can be leveled up to maintain relevance throughout the game.
FFX: Graph-walk level-ups.
The Final Fantasy X idea is the "path" of passive points the player spends once per character level. The upgrade "tree" is not oriented by level - it is merely a sprawling graph of nodes connected by line segments, and it costs one point to gain a bonus locked in a node. You may only unlock nodes which are linked to those you have already gained. So leveling up consists of walking one or more "paths" toward a particularly juicy-looking sub-tree of coveted bonuses.
While I like the end result, I find the overall mechanic to be overwhelming and self-important. I signed up for an ARPG, but my progression is locked up in a Chinese Checkers mini-game. I suppose a more simplified stream wouldn't have as much flexibility overall, but I would have preferred a compromise on the side of cleaning this up a bit. I do not know if the end result promotes hybrid characters or not. All I remember is having Kimahri join my party mid-game, starting out being awesome at everything, and rapidly becoming someone who sucks at everything instead. I am not yet ready to whether hybrids suffer a similar fate in this game.
FFVII: Materia system (equipment gems granting active skills)
They come in three types, themed for each of the three primary stats, STR, INT, and DEX. Slots in your equipment must have the same color as the gem you wish to place in it. While to some extent this puts some "you are what you wear" into the game, at the very least you go to some lengths set up your character a certain way, and only through hand-me-downs and trading would you be able to re-spec a low-level character all willy-nilly.
Path of Exile also has one of the most balanced and innovative potion systems I've seen in some time, and other developers should take note. Instead of buying tons of relatively cheap potions, you buy, craft, or find flasks, which are (roughly speaking) uncommon item drops which typically hold 2-4 uses when fully charged. These refill as you kill enemies at a rate depending on the tier of enemy killed, and they can even have modifiers like equipment. You only have five flask slots, and unassigned flasks are always empty. The result is an unspamable consumable that auto-refills at no cost, and is integrated into the core game balance. The result is that enemies can be dangerous even if they can't out-DPS the fast heal rate on your potions, and there isn't a need to gratuitously proliferate insta-death.
Path of Exile's economic model is microtransactions, but most emphatically NOT of the pay-to-win sort! The only thing they have implemented so far that seems to have any real effect is stash expansion. And if you play the game long enough to need it, then you might want to ask if maybe they've earned some of your money, at that point.
While there are some guilds and PvP options that may appeal to many players, as well as limited-duration start-at-level-1-with-nothing events, some players - like myself - would prefer to play single-player or LAN games. While it would be nice to be able to pay $X for a hard copy and be able to freely tack on all microtransaction products unlocked in-store, the fact of the matter is that online-only functions as DRM, and asking them to release an offline-LAN-and-open-internet-play version would probably be like telling an architect that you like his house, but could he move it someplace else?
I don't like the online-only aspect, but I respect it enough to play. Diablo 3 tries to have it both ways - you pay tons of money to play the game, but they also DRM the crap out of it by forcing you to play the game online. Incidentally, there was a 1-2 second ping time for lots of people, from release date all the way until people just got tired of playing it.
Free-to-play and online-only can work well together, but it's risky. You simply have to have that much confidence that your players will love the game so much that they'll reward you voluntarily after the fact with real-life money, asking only for cosmetics and conveniences in return. It worked for League of Legends, but I can't suggest that fledgling developers jump on that bandwagon. It seems to me that you really have to know what you're doing, and you absolutely need to be sure that you caught lightning in a bottle. That's what Path of Exile is banking on. Best wishes.
Torchlight has come a long way, making Torchlight 2 the "most improved" counterpart to Diablo 3's "most fallen from grace". If there's any lesson to be learned from this, it's that you should pay attention to the people who make games, not the name of the company. If corporations actually were people, then I guess Blizzard would be kind of like John Nash as portrayed in A Beautiful Mind, except instead of learning the value of human connections and how to manage his mental illness on his own terms, he makes a few billion dollars and turns into Caligula.
Diablo 2 was made by Blizzard North, which saw an exodus of talent around 2003, some time after Diablo 2 and its expansion were released. Blizzard, at the time, was drunk on profits, changing ownership left and right, and slowly turning into one of these things:
Anyway, Torchlight 2. Currently selling for $20 (though often on sale for 50% off or so), Torchlight 2 is a massive improvement to Torchlight 1 on almost every front. If Runic's next product is half the improvement over TL2 that TL2 was over TL1, it will be something truly special. As it stands now, Torchlight 2 is an all-ages Diablo 2 clone that thoroughly covers all the bases. For me, however, it somehow fails to ignite that special spark that separates solid games from groundbreaking ones. It's hard to fault a small indie studio for playing it conservative, though.
Just about the only innovation in the Torchlight series that you may have not expected was the pet system. Your pet is a marginally useful battle ally, but more importantly, your pet runs routine shopping errands, selling your trash gear and buying common consumables from your shopping list.
Other than that, you'll be playing a faithfully modernized Diablo 2 clone with a cartoony aesthetic and tons of mods and modability. It will run on your PC much smoother than most modern games. And you'll be giving money to people who are high on gaming and gaming only - as opposed hubris and filthy lucre.
I recommend this short ARPG highly - and more importantly, I do so as someone who is absolutely not obsessed with Van Helsing, famous for being 2004's Victorian Batman-of-the-month. I actually put off giving this game a shot because I was a bit wary of anything that even touches Bram Stoker's somewhat over-used public domain.
But ok. Open-mindedness is a good thing. So first, I took a look at The entry on Metacritic for Van Helsing. The user reviews give 84%, and critics give 72%. It took me all of five seconds to decide that this was an encouraging sign - my reasoning was that if this game was the opposite in Diablo 3 in even more ways than just this one, then it was definitely worth a try. After all, so-called "professional critics" make a living propping up spunkgargleweewee titles. It stands to reason, at least in a statistical likelihood sense, that a fan-loved game with a lukewarm critical reception is probably an innovative title by a small studio who is hardly paying its own bills, let alone those at IGN.
And... the datum supports the theory. I've only played a few hours of the demo, but here's what you get:
* Three playable classes with a good degree of customization (skill trees, skill enhancements, etc)
* Impressive, smooth controls and pleasing, rich visuals. Very professional, and this is coming from a bargain-price indie developer.
* A rage meter that charges up as you kill things, allowing you to add up to three effects to your mouse button attacks (multiple stacks of a single effect allowed)
* A persistent ghost sidekick, Katarina, with her own skill tree, gear, AI settings, and customized stat leveling. This makes single-player more bearable, naturally. (It may be argued that you're actually her sidekick, though, judging from the game's frequent dialogues...)
* A mage class with a mana pool that's actually worth investing in. (Mana potions can be collected indefinitely, but have a cooldown)
* Campy interactions that are also mercifully brief and non-intrusive. According to taste, this may be nice for a first playthrough, but they shouldn't bog down replays too much.
A quick note - I've been warned that there are occasional difficulty spikes, and that Katarina likes to die a lot later on. I have not verified this, other than to notice that the area before the first town is a cakewalk and the next area is suitably harder. I'm not sure whether the game has built-in controls for issuing basic combat commands to Katarina, but if so, the tutorial does not bring them to attention. A simple button press to assign a movement or targetting command could go a long way.
I haven't finished the game, but be warned that this game is advertised as 10-15 hours long. This is really short by ARPG standards, but it's only $20 on Steam with all DLCs currently - and this is not on sale. I can't see playing without the DLC, since it unlocks the third of only three classes.
They do sell promo packs that are mostly identical to the game, except with a 50% magic find bonus that stacks in multiplayer. In my opinion, this is definitely not worth it unless you really want to support the developer. It's a little distasteful of them to include "pay to win" content, but presumably they're working from under a cardboard box.
So for now, you can play the base game with DLCs and then try a run on higher difficulty with perma-death, if you want to extend the life of the game.
For most people on a budget, I'd suggest giving the demo a try and then pre-ordering the sequel if you're hooked. (Or if you're wary of pre-orders because you've been burned by buggy releases in the past, then you can wait for release instead.)
Full of customization and growing better by the patch, this early-access title based on the resurrected and revamped engine of Titan Quest is an upcoming title to watch, and a worthy game to play even in its current beta state. If this game were actually in its finished state at this time, it may very well take the #2 spot from Torchlight 2.
Much like Titan Quest, this game uses a "pick two" class system where you spend points to level up one of your classes, and then classes of a high enough level reach the next "tier", after which the player gains the option to spend class points on skills at that tier. So you can be a tanky mage, or a fighter with some extra utility, or... whatever the classes allow. As you level up classes, you gain stat bonuses, so rushing to a high-tier skill is a valid option, as well as specializing heavily in lower-level skills and their synergies. The overall leveling system of Titan Quest wasn't broken, and Crate Studios has gloriously opted not to try to fix it - this is one of the wonderful things that happens when you're on speaking terms with your fanbase instead of playing moderator whack-a-mole with their forum posts and online game access privileges *coughblizzardcough*.
I burned myself out on this game several major patches ago, but I will definitely jump back in when I can. Since then, they have implemented a few scenarios in which player choices have lasting impact, as well as unique chests that spawn epic loot, lots of sidequests, a fourth character class, tons of gear with nifty effects, and an Act II. Also, either it's my imagination, but the work that they're doing on the engine is paying off. It's running smoother and faster, and the controls feel more responsive than in early alphas - and indeed, more responsive than they felt in Titan Quest.
Gripe time
There are some things I would change about this game.
There is an oppressively huge variety of element types. I feel like I'm looking at a Pokedex when I gaze upon the massive variety of damage and crowd control types one must take into account when gearing up a character.
Navigating towns can be a bit loopy. Do you want to cross the street? Well, there's an overturned cart in the middle of the street, but you can backtrack a little, go into the basement, fight some zombies, crawl up out of someone else's basement, take the stairs onto the outdoor balcony, kill some more zombies, walk around and across into Joe's house, kill a few eyeballs, walk downstairs - where a pack of zombie dogs will be waiting for you - and finally out the front door. Fortunately, this happens less frequently than in Titan Quest, but clearly the dark mind-fucking tendrils of Lord Cthulhu were hard at work way back when all of these towns were first built.
Finally, the visuals are a little too grimy. I understand that housekeeping doesn't exactly happen much in zombie-infested ruins, but the sun does shine. Unless there's a mild-grade global sootstorm in the lore that I don't know about. Then never mind. But still, dilapidated things can still be colorful and sunlit. Mix it up a little more, I say.
Anyway, Grim Dawn. Good stuff. Also, maybe the legendary Tri-Beer will push you over the edge:
This medium-sized European developer turns out lots of slightly offbeat content that is sometimes a little lumpy in the difficulty curve, but always worth playing. As a huge bonus, they release all of their games on gog.com. Awesome.
(I mention this one first not because it's the best, but because it's the closest in style to a Diablo clone.)
Not fans of false advertising in the slightest, Larian Studios lets you know up-front that they're slightly offbeat, before you've even finished reading the title of the game. It's hard to pin down what makes this game as fun as it is, even though it suffers from some balance woes and is chock full of pause-potion spam exploits. I'd even go so far as to say that this game isn't for everyone. However, it's great.
It starts off with you limited to a single town, and you have to clear out a somewhat difficult and sprawling crypt beneath town before you've even quite figured out how the rhythm and mechanics are going to work in the game. However, once you trial, error, and forum-scan your way out of the first dungeon, you get a pretty easy-going and mildly goofy open-world solo ARPG that's more about checking off sidequest rather than... whatever it is that you're actually supposed to be doing, but you'll get to it when this other stuff is done. For me anyway, this is one of those games that had so many problems, but I can't figure out why I can't stop playing.
Tips - a single rank of poison weapon is brokenly OP for most of the game. You'll need - I forget, three? - levels of Alchemy to keep supplied. Rejuvenation potions are also super effective relative to gold cost once you can start crafting them.
There is also the sequel Beyond Divinity, but I barely started that one before it flopped for me.
This one's a winner at its core, even if I'm not thrilled with the lumpy difficulty curve. Not exactly Diablo-style, because it's more of a WASD movement, 1st/3rd person perspective ARPG in true 3D. Smooth and solid running for me, though it's a bit taxing on the CPU and I have to use lower settings (true gaming rigs should be fine though). Customizable character, etc etc etc, all of the usual. Oh, and you can turn into a dragon.
Yep. (Some restrictions apply; a lot of gameplay precedes the ability to go all scaly and dangerous, but it's ok because that gameplay is solid.)
I didn't appreciate the lumpy difficulty or the inability to grind for EXP as an alternative to hunting for errands. Getting out of the first major town can take one or more entire days' worth of gameplay time simply because if you don't find some guy's belt and snoop around in some other guy's basement for a suspicious ledger or whatever, you'll get stomped by the first boss.
Because you have less exploits available, and you can't explore the entire open world all at once, you're stuck in one area for a long time. The option to use exploits to slay a bunch of orcs a few maps over is gone. Instead, you'll find yourself completing a major quest just to have all the enemies in the next areas are three levels higher and eat you for breakfast. Methodical questers only need apply.
I've heard rumors that the experience is a bit more smoothed out in the Flames of Vengeance expansion, but that's only when you're high level, and presumably newbies won't want to be overwhelmed with 30 levels' worth of content all at once.
Anyway, the real take-home is that you shouldn't be ashamed to turn the difficulty down below Normal if you're not as good at games as you think you are. Sadly.
There is even a turn-based/RTS spin-off, Dragon Commander, but I didn't manage to get into it. Personally, I think they should put it aside for a while and come back when they're ready for a sequel, and then they need to add a robust tutorial campaign. Then it might be a winner. As it stands now, only truly dedicated players will manage to get the hang of playing this first-person real-time strategy shooter with dragons with jetpacks. Yes, really.
Not an ARPG, but built on the Divinity II engine all the same, this turn-based strategy RPG looks to be shaping up to something nice. However, there are some bugs still. We can only hope that it lives up to its potential. Recent patch notes sound promising.
This game is designed mostly as a two-player co-op game, though by its turn-based nature, naturally it works fine in single-player. Players may even disagree with each other during dialogs, though I doubt Larian is going to accept any responsibility for dissolved marriages or friendships. Incidentally, they have helped a man propose to his now-fiance with a game mod, so maybe my cynicism is out of place here. :)
If this is the kind of thing that matters to you, Larian has implemented gender parity in the writing department, and the head dude Swen Vincke has been happy with the resulting addition of depth and color to the writing. They've also toned down some of the "battle lingerie" stuff that pervades the genre, though they were already more modest than the industry mean before the changes. They also claim that delays in the release date have largely been caused by them playing with, implementing, and reworking suggestions they have gotten from the forums.
We'll see how it turns out. If they manage to implement a nice ramp up to full freedom and a smoother difficulty curve, and smash all the bugs, this game might be the best Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale/Neverwinter Nights spiritual successor to date.
As mentioned before, this game was worked on by Arthur Bruno, who later founded Crate Entertainment, developer of Grim Dawn. This game wasn't quite the smashing success it could have been, despite the compelling skill point system in which everyone dual-classes and profits from it. Additionally, the game had "relics" - special items which can only be crafted, and which you're unlikely to begin to complete until halfway through Normal mode. They take a lot of effort to complete, but the mechanism for doing so is much more fair than trying to complete a Diablo 2 set - there is a randomly-dropping recipe, and then there are several components built from shards that are uncommon drops from enemies of a given type, such as a boar or a harpy. The end result is a collection of perks that fit some class combinations better than others. Some relics are late-game powerhouses, and others are slick hand-me-downs for some class combination or other you were thinking about giving a spin.
If you're ready to bunker down, there's enough grinding for epic loot to sustain an account with several characters. But the depth of the gear pool is a pro only assuming that you get sucked in and allow this game to eat most of your gaming time for a month or three. Individual results may vary.
For one thing, Titan Quest was too processor-intensive for a 2006 title. It didn't help that it didn't have "fast cast" on its hotkeys, either - you had to activate a skill and then left-click the target location, rather than having an option to have the keyboard command immediately trigger the skill targeted at your cursor. Even on capable hardware, I found the overall engine a bit unresponsive and sluggish. A sluggish engine with a sluggish interface and too much rendering for the hardware to handle together make for a sluggish game. To be fair, people have learned a lot since then, but this is just one place where the game shows a bit of age. Also, bleeding and poison damage don't scale with core stats and as such become obsolete by the time you get to any "new game +" mode or beyond. Iron Lore Studios no longer exists, and the fan modding community never could get together and push forward a census for an agenda for a pseudo-canonical balance patch, so it never happened, and you just have to accept that bleeding and poison are n00b traps. Sadface.
Sometimes the plot loses interest in itself, and other times it overacts, making the player either grimace or laugh, depending on stuff. Sometimes the overacting struck me as good-natured and intentional - if you get through the demo, you'll be treated to an unforgettable moment centered around a dowry necklace.
So how did I get so hooked on the game? First of all, the skill system. And secondly, the first act starts out in beautiful Greece, and in my opinion, this game never should have strayed as far from home as it did - your protagonist dude from The 300 looks a bit out of place spearing anthropomorphic tigers in China. In the Immortal Throne expansion, you eventually make it to Hades, which has some good moments as well, but compromises the austerity usually associated with the Greek underworld and instead gives you the Machae, these dudes who are little too video-gamey for my tastes:
Protip: If you're aping classical mythology, don't add purple-and-green flame and ZOMG LAZORS. Games are fun because they're designed to be fun, not because their aesthetics scream YOU ARE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME RATED T FOR TEEN.
Anyway, the skill system had plenty of depth, and so did the equipment - competitive with Diablo 2 at the least. If the combat were snappier and the controls didn't make you feel like your arm had fallen asleep a little, it could have been even better.
A somewhat unique game with a troubled history, Hellgate: London was some kind of weird blend of World of Warcraft and Halo. A WASD-controlled 1st/3rd person stab-and-shooter with a big, fat skillbar and some spells, where your enemies are a bunch of space zombies. Or something.
Oh, what could have been. This is one of those games that broke the bank and never squashed all of its bugs or fulfilled its potential. Desperate to pay off its debts, Flagship Studios launched this as a single-player triple-A-priced game playable offline, but eventually started scrambling to tack on enough pay-to-win content on the online servers to bring in enough subscribers to save the ship. The double-whammy couldn't have been all that encouraging to anyone watching from the outside, and it's unfathomable that it could've panned out, given how buggy the game was.
At the time, free-to-play/pay-to-win didn't really have a well-established methodology, so they didn't know. And they were desperate. They bit off more than they could chew, and did too much, and didn't finish it. A torso and two legs that are polished doesn't make up for missing a head and two arms.
Anyway, you can still dig up copies of the disc, and there are nice fan patches out there which unlock the old premium content. It's a lot of steps to follow, but it works. The fan patch is for offline play, and has no multiplayer capability. Bugs still exist, and collisions are handled badly. You can jump 8 feet high, but you can't jump over enemies. You can get trapped in corners with literally no options for getting out at all until one of you is dead. Stuff like that. :-/
Alternately, there is a free-to-play/pay-to-win version. I don't know how long they're going to be around, but to give you some idea of the pay-to-win saturation of this version, know that you may buy up to ten skill points with USD. Enough said. However, you can treat it as a free demo of the disc version you can patch to play in single-player mode.
Interestingly, Flagship Studios used to employ the Schaefers, who went on to found Runic Games. There is a dim hope that Runic Games could make a spiritual sequel to Hellgate.
(Everyone tells me that Borderlands 2 is sort of like this, only more FPS-y in control scheme and people actually play it. Fair enough.)
Class advice I haven't finished the game, but I've played all of the classes some. There are six classes, split into three pairs having moderate overlap in skill availability. (I would have preferred three big classes and some other mechanism for balancing the result, but never mind) Summoner - Gets kind of boring. The Carnagor summon has a lengthy regenerate-and-AoE-taunt-in-one that is pretty reliable against anything but bosses. Summon stuff, taunt stuff, circle-strafe the big guys. All day every day. Evoker - Magey glass cannon. Kind of fun. You can definitely die. Guardian - Tanking is great and all, but in single player, you're just asking for a very long (and probably boring) game. Blademaster - Go crazy. Cut things up. Marksman - Probably like the Evoker, but with guns. I didn't spend too long on this. Engineer - Probably like the Summoner, but with robots. I didn't spend too long on this.
So there you have it. Give it a spin, and maybe bring it up on the Runic forums if it piques your interest.
I haven't played Dungeon Siege III, but everyone tells me that they took out all of the Dungeon Siege and replaced it with spunkgargleweewee. (EDIT: I've also been told that it's not *bad* per se, but my initial impression is that DSIII is not party-based, designed for consoles first and foremost, and therefore not freaking Dungeon Siege, so at the very least, be ready to judge it in a vacuum.)
Playing this game will give you hipster cred, if that's the kind of thing that matters to you. This is one of those games that are sort-of-fun-but-then-it-isn't, and you may find yourself not having fun and wondering why you're still playing it. And then later you sort of figure out that you're kind of having fun, maybe. In other words, a solid #8 on this list. And for some bizarre reason probably having to do with Necronomiconomics, you can buy Dungeon Siege 1-3 on Steam in a package, but with none of the expansions included. So screw that.
I don't have much that I want to say about the plot, namely because I don't remember any of it. I could blame the booze, but if you play the game, you'll probably side with me in blaming the game instead.
Gameplay-wise, Dungeon Siege meets about halfway in between ARPGs like Diablo 2 and solo party RPGs like Baldur's Gate somewhere in the middle. This game follows up its predecessor, which revolutionized some time-saving devices like fast gold pickup and a literal pack mule. You also get fast potion drinking and you can swap your whole party's skill configuration with hotkeys. Perhaps too streamlined for its own good, and not bringing quite enough to the table otherwise, these have been called "games that play themselves", though I'd say that's only half-accurate.
Dungeon Siege 2 also incorporates a few features that are now somewhat routine inclusions, but were missing from the original, such as hot button skills which charge up as you do stuff in combat (one such skill per party member, chosen out of whichever they have unlocked). Each character also has a shiny new skill tree, though it doesn't take that long to figure out which skills are compatible with how you're playing the character and ignore the rest; at most you'll dabble a little in a side tree to unlock a couple low-hanging fruits later on.
Overall, the trouble is that the game gives you a lot of points to allocate, but any given character has no incentive to do more than one thing. The expansion provides two hybrid classes, and the stone-themed class in particular was refreshing, but even this character reduces down to a sort of paladin archetype who is best played one of two (or maybe three) ways.
Ten years later, and Blizzard can only break more things than they can fix. Diablo 2 needed a shared stash, a less-stupid potion system, modern hotkeys, and a skills re-balance. What it got was... well, never mind that. The point is that if I could trade my Diablo 3 access for a fine-tuned Diablo 2 overhaul, I would in a heartbeat.
As much as I hated "downgrading" to a version where your protagonist can't even run, I managed to finish a whole playthrough. I found this game to be pretty good, and it had a certain tight, restrained feel that made it feel like individual stat points mattered. Get some old school with your modern.
Diablo 1 wasn't bad, either. The good news is that since Blizzard is pretending that this game doesn't exist, you can rest assured that no matter how you obtain your pre-owned copy or just the files and no-CD crack, you won't be giving money to Blizzard.
Conclusion
There is a lot of cool ARPG stuff out there, and none of it was made by Blizzard in the last ten years. Check it out, yo.
