"Balance Isn't Boring" demos on YouTube

Hey, figured I should showcase my mods a little on YouTube for people who want to see what they're about without bothering to test them for themselves.  Just two videos adding up to an hour or so at the moment.  I'll probably do at least one for each class eventually, when I feel like it.  Melee Engineer and lightning Embermage (+ frost utility skills) for now:






Balance Isn't Boring rant

Anti-one-shotting mod
Potions overhaul mod - diluted and extended
Cooldown and mana mod - burst vs DPS distinctions clearly differentiated

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.

Balance Isn't Boring

I suppose I should apologize for being a year late to this particular party, but Erich Schaefer's odd remarks about balance rub me the wrong way. Today the "balance is boring" speech continues to serve as the ideal landmark identifying the flaws of Torchlight which Runic "didn't even bother" to address in Torchlight 2.  As you can see from the title, someone needs to play Danica McKellar to Schaefer's Gucci-obsessed Paris Hilton.

It only takes a few afternoons with Torchlight 2 to see that it's a fine loot-centric action RPG with a lot going for it, in general and compared to Torclight 1: great aesthetics with smooth-running graphics that look great on low settings on mildly outdated machines, responsive controls, vastly improved style and variation in level design, more and better bosses, online and LAN multiplayer capability not present in Torchlight 1, and the return of the trademark pets who run your shopping errands for you. But what may turn out to be its saving grace is its extensive modder friendliness.

Indeed, Torchlight 2 comes with the Guts mod editor (so called because it lets you modify the "guts" of the game to your liking). Mods are kept in a folder kept separate from the canonical patch version of the game, and any number of them may be chosen for inclusion whenever the game is launched.

The reason I call this a potential "saving grace" of Torchlight 2 is because of, well, balance issues. Oddly enough, the balance between the player and the enemies is good, but the overall play experience is currently a bit of a spam fest fueled by a never-ending supply of overpowered health and mana potions.

It is a compliment to the game that I think it's even worth modding in the first place, though!

The potions problem

I was only in Act 2 before I broke down and started working on a potions nerf mod, and I'm finding it to be a vast improvement so far. It is difficult to exaggerate how overpowered potions are in Torchlight 2 and the damage it does to the game experience. They are both potent and spammable, restoring health or mana at a fast rate and having little downtime before becoming available again. Mana costs are way too high, but it literally doesn't matter. And health potions? The player has to walk into the proverbial Mordor if he or she is expected to die while under the effects of a health potion - and the game tempts the player to do just that, since potions bolster the player's cockiness up until the critical point at which enemies are overleveled enough to burst the player from 100 to 0 in half of a second, catastrophically breaking the sustain barrier. Barring this circumstance, the net effect of health potions is that the player is unkillable as long as she doesn't play too far ahead and is quick on the potion keys. Runic may as well cut the middleman and simply put up a big golden bar representing the player's wealth which fills up as she gains loot and empties as she casts spells and/or takes damage. Hopefully the reader is as bored by the prospect as I am!

I would go so far as to say that the unbalanced state of potions makes the game more boring. In other words, sometimes unbalance is boring. Anyone who's ever played a first-person shooter with cheat codes for more than ten minutes is likely to agree. Schaefer "doesn't even try" to balance Torchlight 2? Maybe he should try. It's somewhat astounding that potion balance has been totally overlooked when most modern games (see World of Warcraft's cooldown timers, or League of Legend's gradual potion effects) keep them in check. Even Baldur's Gate had this under control!

Let's talk about cooldown timers

Not satisfied with a simple potions nerf, next I set out to break up the monotony of skill use by balancing around cooldown timers. As my examples of the problems I am faced with, I am using my Torchlight 2 remakes of two League of Legends champions - Anivia, recreated as an ice Embermage, and Leona, recreated as a sword-and-shield Engineer.

My Torchlight 2 Anivia has a right-click attack that shoots several bolts of ice in a cone, sometimes (but not always) stunning or immoblizing enemies it hits. She also has a hotkey skill which drops a comparable AoE of ice on the cursor, doing about the same amount of damage and applying roughly the same crowd control effects with similar likelihood. This hotkey skill has a measly four-second cooldown. In other words, I have a second copy of my right click on a short cooldown that adds almost nothing to the game.

I hope this looks like a problem to you too. Imagine if the hotkey skill did several times as much damage, always applied crowd control effects, and had a cooldown timer of something like 10-20 seconds. The result would be that I would have to make a meaningful decision about when to use the hotkey skill. If it also cost a sizeable chunk of non-refillable mana, then things really could get complicated - why, Anivia would become a character having skills different from each other who depends on the precious resources of health and mana! In other words, Torchlight 2 would be a fully-fledged action RPG as advertised, rather than Farmville with mild fantasy violence.


(Forum-goers have also reported that Prismatic Bolts, Anivia's left-click skill, is so overpowered that I could just level that up and let its over-the-top DPS and crowd control more than make up for it being a single-target spell. Much like the Ricochet skill from Torchlight 1, it's a skill that's just too good at everything, so the player can just spam it all day every day - from now until someone releases a better-balanced game, presumably.)
My Torchlight 2 Leona has Shield Bash on right click, naturally. The trouble is that it's too good at everything: zero cooldown, hits in an AoE, applies stuns about half the time, and does more damage than her sword attacks. It's an AoE attack and a DPS attack a crowd control attack all at the same time. I can just spam it all day every day and forget that I even have a left mouse button or... anything else other than my potion keys, really. Shield Bash needs a cooldown timer, and preferably, Leona would have a more appealing left-click option to compensate; the "Sword and Board" passive goes totally unused because it is utterly outscaled by Shield Bash. Boring? Very. Balanced? Not at all.

League of Legends

In League of Legends, Leona would be looking at a cooldown timer of 4-11 seconds, depending on skill level and item bonuses. Anivia has two burst damage skills and a damage-over-time skill which are clearly differentiated from each other. Either of them can use potions to gradually restore health and mana, or buy slower permanent items to do this even more gradually. All game long, each player makes hundreds of decisions which have a real impact on the outcome of the game. Thanks to the balanced state of the game, countless different team compositions can and do win games at every level of PvP play, and they all play differently in meaningful ways. Balance is an important factor in making variety possible in PvP. While a PvE game can afford a little cheese and excess here and there, a PvP MOBA game with an international championship league simply can't afford to have genuinely overpowered skills or champions.

League of Legends has 100+ champs who are balanced and fun to play, but each champion is restricted to a single axis of viable play. Many of these champions have fun-but-not-viable variations that simply can't be used in competitive play. AP Master Yi is no more; AP Lucian was nerfed to the ground before released instea of made into a balanced alternative; Taric's mana-scaling basic attack damage was nerfed into afterthought teritory; Alistar was nerfed into the ground after he won a couple tournament games in mid lane a while ago and has hardly seen tournament play since; supports released after Season 2 are never viable in mid. It is still up to debate whether LoL is overzealous in role restriction, or if it really is impossible to balance along extra dimensions (but they're not there yet).

In any case, PvE games have more freedom to liberate the player from a single pre-defined path. In PvE, all that matters is whether progress is possible and fun. Fluctuations in the power curve don't make a dramatic win vs lose difference before anything else can even be considered. A wobbly game has more chances to balance out in end.

Is balance boring?

It is true that Schaefer's examples were more along the lines of saying that cheese and excess can add excitement to the game as long as it's all balanced in the end:


I could expound on the complexity forever, but it’s pretty dry to discuss and probably not that much different from any other RPG, so let me digress to where I think our methods are different, and where it gets fun, for me, at least. I don’t even try to balance the game! … There are too many systems and too much randomness for my puny brain to deal with. But the more important reason is that I think balance is boring. I specifically want you to find a weapon that’s just too good. I want you to discover a skill combo that makes killing certain monsters seem too easy.

A few levels deeper into the game, you might be struggling to find a replacement weapon, your skill combo won’t work as well against the new monster varieties and your pet will start to seem weaker. The multiple, overlapping systems and heavy randomness work to my benefit in this respect … So all my spreadsheets and assumptions become less important as we finish development, and I concentrate on playing over and over again, getting tons of feedback, and ironing out the really crazy peaks and valleys. Fun always trumps balance.


The trouble is that his remarks, on the whole, feel like a false dichotomy. He says "balance" when he means "completely homogeneous blob-like state of never-ending same-ness". I personally prefer to think of Shaefer's ideal game state as a form of dynamic balance, a balance which the player labors to tip in her favor in order to achieve progress and complete objectives, as opposed to static balance in which everything is indistinguishable from everything else and it's all just a matter of clicking enough times.

Incidentally, Schaefer's idea of "balance" describes Torchlight 2's world of never-ending potion spam and cooldown-free, mana-unrestricted AoE/DPS/CC all-in-one right-click skills.

On his own terms, maybe Schaefer is right. Maybe balance is boring. Maybe Runic needs to let fun trump balance.

I'll be working on my mods. See you around.