Blizzard paves road to Hell with bribery and double-talk

"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.

Take this interview from a couple weeks back.  A couple weeks ago, PC Gamer climbed to the top of Bullshit Mountain to have a chat with Kevin Martens, Blizzard's current lead content designer for Diablo 3, and came back with a tablet on which were carved The Ten Juicy Sound Bites of Our Lord And Master, Blizzard Entertainment.  The media has been uncritically serving this up as evidence that Loot 2.0 and Reaper of Souls is about to make right all that had been wrong.

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.

It appears that they're putting the cow level in Reaper of Souls, but that's a slap in the face, really. Hopefully they add it to the base game, because it's pretty damned close to being the least they could do.  My list of demands remains unchanged.

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.

WOO WOOOOOO!!! Here comes the clue train, last stop: you!   Zero bonus points.

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.

 Jesus, you're thick.  Slap them with DRM with one hand, and 2-second pings with the other, and with your third hand, slap them with the RMAH game balance.  And then turn around and bribe everyone with free Lambourghinis and a pre-launch 50% experience buff.  And while you're at it, pick a random number between 2 and 12, and multiply your damage by that number.

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.

Games you can play instead of Diablo 3 (and its upcoming expansion)

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.

1.  Path of Exile

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).

The biggest thing that this game does that Diablo 3 doesn't do is allow individual characters to have an identity by way of lasting customization.

Side-rant:

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.

 2.  Torchlight 2

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.

Torchlight 2 allows mods - and indeed, some time ago I made the balance and game-flow mods I thought it needed.  (See my forum post at Runic Games for the current complete state of my mods).  Lots of other mods which might suit your tastes better exist as well.

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.

3. The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

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.

A sequel has been announced for April 17!  It looks like it'll have twice as much everything, and it will still sell for $15 (like the unexpanded Van Helsing 1).

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.)

4. Grim Dawn

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:

Love these guys.

5. The Divinity series by Larian Studios

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.

Divine Divinity

(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.

Divinity II

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.

Divinity: Original Sin

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.

6. Titan Quest

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.

7. Hellgate: London (or Hellgate: Revival)

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.

8. Dungeon Siege 2

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.

9. Diablo 2

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.

10. Diablo 1

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.

Blizzard Entertainment lightbulb joke

How many Blizzard employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

All of them, and it takes them ten years to so so. They charge 60-80 dollars, and you have to re-enter the password every day to keep using it. The lightbulb's response to lightswitches is delayed by 1500 milliseconds, and it goes offline for maintenance for a few hours every week, and the wattage and lumens might vary by a factor of ten from one week to the next.

When they're done installing your new lightbulb, they change the locks on your house. Three years later, they come back wanting to sell you a lampshade for 40-60 dollars.

What it would take for me to even consider purchasing the Diablo 3 expansion - List of demands

As a fan of Diablo 2, and as a disgruntled would-be fan of Diablo 3, let me spell out where Diablo 3 went horribly wrong.  Blizzard obviously is unwilling to consider doing anything of the sort just because it would make gamers happy, and money talks.  So I'm counting on you, denizens of the internet, to starve the demons of hubris infecting the once-loved Blizzard Entertainment.

0. Get rid of the Auction House and rebalance the game so that you can actually find usable gear from time to time

This has already been done.  Thanks.  However, it's easily possible that Blizzard may choose to release a patch nerfing loot drops back into the abyss once they've fleeced all the expansion purchases.

At the moment, though, it's hilarious. If, like millions of people, you pre-ordered Diablo 3 but haven't played it in a year, log in.  Play for a few hours. Watch in awe as you effortlessly replace all of the l33t gear you bought from the AH with stuff you actually found yourself.  It's almost like the game isn't drowning you in a sea of inferior pants and seeing how long you can last before you give in to Auction House temptation.  You get fewer drops, but the best drops are consistently better than the best drops you used to get.  You just have 1/4 as many to sift through.

My cynical side really is flaring up, though.  I strongly suspect that this balance state is only temporary.  To really drive home how temporary this heroin shot of raw player power probably is, Blizzard went ahead and gave everyone 50% bonus experience points for the next three weeks.

I'm fairly confident that seven days after Reaper of Souls comes out, someone will already be level 70 with God knows how many Paragon levels and every complete gear set, and then anyone using any other build or any play style other than the optimized power build will get nerfed into oblivion again.

1. Enable offline and LAN play and uninstall your DRM from my bumhole.

Even when there was an auction house, there wasn't sufficient reason to deny us this.  The current online mode could still exist as a secure, super-legit mode where all player progress was constantly validated by the servers, and the rest of us could have enjoyed the goddamned game without 1500 ms latencies killing us all the damn time.

Diablo 2 had this right (well, almost - more later). Single player mode, LAN play, open battle.net play, and ladder play for "srs biznis xhardcorex" online-only mode.

Blizzard's apologetics on the matter are laughable, transparent, and offensive.  Just read the comments and/or just think about it for five minutes.

Even worse, Blizzard loves to flip out over fabricated "suspicious activity" warnings and lock you out of your own account for the game that you bought with your own money.  Lost access to your old email address and/or forgot the answer to your security question?  That's ok, for another sixty bucks, you can rent Diablo 3 for another couple of years.  What a deal.

I haven't even begun to do this topic justice.  I have more to say, and I will.

2. Cut the price in half and add at least one more class

The bonus content is a joke.  They're charging $40 for one new character class (in addition to the previous 5), one new act (in addition to the previous 4), and Adventure Mode, a.k.a., the Shut The Fuck Up, Azmodan toggle button.  It speaks volumes that they claim that Adventure Mode is the biggest draw for buying the expansion.  They're charging the majority of $40 just to remove obnoxious content that wasn't even entertaining the first time through.

Kind of makes them wish they'd though to include in-game pop-up ads in vanilla D3, huh?  Hey Blizzard, how about I PayPal you three dollars so the Templar won't crawl up my ass every time I manage my equipment between grinds?  Pretty please?  I'm only half-joking right now.

3. Make enemy level scaling optional.  Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno wasn't broken.

This is only #3 because it is a point where I could respectfully disagree with someone else.  If you didn't know, the latest Diablo 3 patch makes it so that enemies in the main plot of the game don't have a fixed power level.  Instead, they level up whenever you do, rendering the entire concept of experience levels irrelevant.

YMMV, but I also find that rushing through the game on the highest initially available difficulty level is actually easier than it used to be to try to rush through Normal.  Why?  Because trying to rush used to bring you face-to-face with the brick wall that is an enemy of a higher level than you.  You could look forward to growing strong enough to win if you backtracked just a little.  Now, you just steamroll everything, and if it's too easy, you raise the difficulty and reload, and if it's too hard, you lower the difficulty and reload again.

Which I guess is fine, but that should at most be reserved for the open-world, plot-free extravaganza of Adventure Mode.  People hated when Elder Scrolls: Oblivion did it, and IMO, they should hate Blizzard for doing it now.

At the very least, I think this should be implemented as another game mode, called something like "Legacy Campaign Mode" or something.  I also think that it would be cool to have a mode where you play a character with no shared stash, as if you had to play a brand new account with no leg up for the first time.  Currently, you can't do this.  You can walk right into Tristram and buy a full set of gear.  This kind of sucks if you actually want to play the game, but it's peachy if you just want to grind five characters up to 60 as quickly as possible.  No, thanks.  :(


4. Give us skill trees and real choices.  Give each character an identity.

I would rank this higher, but this would probably be the hardest thing to implement, and it would rock the boat the hardest.  Some people might even like the runes or whatever.  Not me.

I remember Diablo 2.  Choices stuck.  How you spent skill points determined how you could play for the whole game.  Seeing how far you could get with a less-than-optimal build path was often the most fun in the game - Echant Sorceress or Poison Necromancer, for example.  Not that Diablo 2 was perfect - There were too many noob traps, but I still remember that game as a success.

5. Stop fucking up your plots.  Listen to your fans and/or hire people who know what the hell they're doing in the first place (from a perspective of making fun games, not from a perspective of making money and safeguarding your monies)

The damage is already done, and I doubt that it would even be possible to revert a fraction of the dumbfuckery that is the ear-chewingly horrible D3 campaign.

I'll just leave this here, though.  Food for thought, if they ever want to stop sucking on the plot front:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5150111877

FFS, Blizzard.  In the future, hire someone who worked on Dragon Age or something, if you can still find anyone with a soul still willing to work for you.

By contrast, Torchlight 2 kind of sucked at plot too, but god damn, they knew how to get the fuck out of your face and let you play your goddamned game.  It was sort of a sprawling clusterfuck, but they didn't try to force you to care about it with piles of cutscenes, endless hireling chatter, and rampant inconsistency.  Mathematically, less isn't more, but when we're talking about raging ass-suckery, less IS better.

In Diablo 2, Diablo said a total of 8 words, and it was awesome.

What it would take for me to even consider purchasing the Diablo 3 expansion - prelude

The other day, I was curious about how Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls pre-order sales were going. So naturally, I Googled "diablo 3 expansion sales" (those words without quotes).  What follows is hilarity.

At the time, the 3rd hit was a forum thread on the D3 forums written by one of millions of disenchanted Diablo 2 fans.  Like many of us, this player felt that that the failure of the Reaper of Souls would be good for gaming as a whole.  Somewhere on page 20 or so, I agreed and threw in my two cents about it.  A couple hours later, I was curious how the thread I was going, so I reloaded the page.

Or rather, I tried to.

You have to get a cached version to see the OP, and AFAIK the full set of comments only exist in a vault jealously guarded by Blizzard.  (If you can find a cache of all of the comments, let me know.  It's probably a blast to read)

Here's the OP:

12 million and then 120K. I'm actually hoping sales takes a drastic dive; lower sales and contempt are the best way to get a message across. Despite loving Diablo, I am actually cynical and bitter enough at this point to hope any related product in the future bombs simply because I can't stand the developer's cluelessness and lack of respect to not only this franchise's rich history but its fanbase. I mean, a YEAR later and everyone from intelligent forum posters to dedicated fan sites/forums have more clever ideas on how this game should be, EVERYONE but the devs. 

Time to take an overdose of commercial failure to set this right. 

And no, I am not suggesting any type of boycott, just pointing out my personal feelings and curiosities for the future :) 

Best of luck!

How does Blizzard respond to this expression of frustration at "the developer's cluelessness and lack of respect to not only this franchise's rich history but its fanbase"? By deleting the forum thread from the internet.

Blizzard, you wouldn't be in the position of having to play forum deletion whack-a-mole if you hadn't sold your soul ten years ago and transformed into the world's most hated PC gaming company.

So, what will it take to get me to buy Reaper of Souls?  First I'll give my list of demands.  Some of them are more negotiable than others, in my view, and I'll try to be clear about that.  This mess is so tangled that each point, I feel, deserves a post of its own.  If I'm feeling up to it, that's exactly what you'll get.

For a sneak preview of my thoughts, read some of my comments that I made as Disqus user CountBuffon.

Sanguine Kingdoms - first glimpse at a raw prototype

Hey. So I told you that I was learning Flash very slowly... take a look:

http://mtaur.deviantart.com/art/Sanguine-Kingdoms-super-early-prototype-430465831

Below is an un-animated gif, but the flash file on deviantart includes a little bit of animation for the highlighted square for a little visual appeal.

I'm leaving the art in its serviceable-but-mediocre state for now because I'm certain that I have months of programming ahead of me at the very least.

Below is a copy of what I said about it at the DeviantArt page:

Hey everyone,

This is going to be my first Flash game. I just started reading about Flash and ActionScript 3.0 a few months ago, and have only started working with Flash Pro a few weeks ago.

[Tech stuff: Also, it's only been about a week that I've moved toward programming in a document class (Main.as) rather than on the .fla timeline.]

There is no interactivity as of yet, but this .swf file does use a prototype of a tile-laying function, as well as "Character" objects having the usual bundle of stats, though you can't "do anything with them" yet because no interactivity has been implemented yet. So far, the only character stat used is the tile positions, which are used to place the characters on the desired tile as seen here.

The highlighted tile is occupied by a minotaur, and the other character is the ironically-named Sylvara Moonbow. (She does not use bows ever.)

I've slowly been learning Flash

MINOTAURRRR!

That's an animated gif. The Flash movie version has the same content, only it looks better. See it on DeviantArt.

I also have an animated logo for DimOnion on DeviantArt. I would like to add sound to both soon, but I have hardware issues that I'll have to resolve first.

Not much in this post content-wise when it comes to gaming, but I would like to turn my Flash skills in that direction.

Eventually. Someday. Maybe.

P.S. - The Insider may or may not be OP as it stands now. I do know that it's probably still worth buying sometimes even if it costs $5, and that it slows the game waaaaaay down if it costs $4, so I'll probably test it as a $5 card and update accordingly. There may also be an issue with Job Creator having the potential to perpetually bankrupt players who fall behind in a four-player game, which is a Very Bad Thing I'll Have To Think About. Sorry for the lack of updates, hypothetical readers!