Friday, 27 July 2012

The Problem With Diablo 3 - Part 1

The problem with Diablo 3, shall be a returning segment on just how far the Diablo 3 apple fell from the beloved Diablo tree.
I know you're thinking this...

 I shall return to these whenever I can muster the courage to talk about one of my favourite franchises of all time ( ALL TIME!! ) being bastardised and cut up to make Blizzard some more dough.

#1 - SKILL TREES AND STATS
 
Diablo 2, if any of you knew me, was one of my favourite games. The hours pumped into the online battle.net service was sickening and I played almost every other day for a good number of years. Constantly reinstalling to have one more crack and build up some new characters, make them my own,figure out how I would regain my riches and become a badass Summoning Necromancer or a Poision Necromancer OR BONE NECROMANCER. (yeah, I had a thing for the Necromancer class).

Ahhh the ole Posion Nova. *nostalgia*
It was a simple system, classic Blizzard you could say. When you level up you put points into a move and that move is more powerful, meaning that each person, could hone their character towards a certain playtype having some specialisation. Something to stand out from the crowd. Say you liked raising Skeletons from the dead, well pump it into your summoning skills and dont look back until level 80 by then you would have an army of little dudes running around and effectively doing your job for you.

This along with the easy to use Vitality, Engergy, Strength (required to wear items) and Dexterity (defence) stats page you could decide who you wanted to be, how you were going to do it and stuck by it. Actual progression with a sense of reward when you'd figure out "THAT BUILD".




Fastforward to Diablo 3, where they have dumped both of these systems completely. You no longer decide what powers you want to get, levelling them up as you go, choosing a favourite and developing your own way of playing your class.

Now you level up every other level, World of warcraft style and are handed preset skills, on preset levels. Unlocking a modifier that changes the skill, on preset skills, on preset levels.

"I WONDER WHAT ILL LEVEL UP NEXT, OH WAIT I ALREADY KNOW LOL"

Starting to sound a little boring? I hope so.

 Now I can only think this measure was taken to try and make each class soloable and not being completely wasted if your skill tree can't match up to those champion mobs in the Inferno difficulties and having the option to switch your build around as you please. But from what I have seen, It has made all but a few moves completely unviable. Some just dont match up to the power of those you unlock at a later date, and using them makes you look like a fucking tool. I tried setting up for a Homing Rocket Build on my Demonhunter and that lasted all of about 3 seconds, when I could just swtich back to the tried and tested quickfire that every Demonhunter in the game uses. Had I the choice in later levels to pump skill points of a sort into homing rockets It COULD be Viable, but in this present system experimentation yeilds little reward.

So let me make my feelings on this change clear. When you do this. EVERYONE IS THE SAME. Demonhunter 1 is Demonhunter 2, except he has painted his hat blue!

This makes rolling another character of the same class pointless so effectievly the maximum number of characters you will ever have in Diablo 3 will be 5. Great.

I found this such a backwards step. Say you want to play with friends, both you and your pal are set on the Wizard class. You will level up, exactly the same, each level, unlocking the same skills. Only your items will define you.

Subject A is Subject B, Subject B is Subject C and Subject C is Subject D.
So to conclude rather then bang on about this point for the rest of my life.

They have taken away the things that made Diablo 2 a world beater and a genre setter. Diablo has been watered down and turned into another arm of Blizzards money making scheme at the expense of gamers everywhere. They had the time and the tools to make this game better, In every regard. Improve upon ALL the systems which they have used to great effect in other Blizzard games. Just not this one.

This of course falls in line and becomes alot clearer when next we will talk about problem number 2, Loot....


Saturday, 14 July 2012

Steam summer sale, DRM, and Games for Windows Live

As most PC gamers know the steam summer sale is now on providing most of us on the PC genre with a host of deals and goodies to take away. Me myself getting in on the action picking up the sequel to Bioshock (one of my all time favourite games).

This should be a tale of joy, me excitedly telling you of my joys of returning to that fabled place Rapture. But alas, all I have here for you is a tale of woe and Windows.

 Hope you enjoy it....


Today was gunna be a good day

So after installing this puppy as soon as possible I sat down to play it, eager beaver status was achieved and I fired up Bioshock 2. Only to bear witness to one of the gaming worlds biggest nightmares rearing its ugly head once more...

Oh, shit...


DRM in singleplayer games on steam is bad enough, not being able to play any of the games I've paid for when my Virgin internet decides to shut down is already a punishment in itself. But nothing can truly compare to the horror of Games for Windows.

This client is something personally I cant stand, the clunkiness and the time spent literally going around in circles to do the simplest things such as trying to invite friends to a game or look at your achievements made me want to ram my face into a wall until the stupid stopped. But having not tangled with it since my Dawn of War 2 early days (before THANKFULLY, the franchise moved onto being hosted by steam) I thought.

"Ok, you wanna dance? Lets do this".

Knowing I have an account, I made sure to log in to the Windows live website first to check it was working and attempted to access my account through the ingame login screen only to first be met with. "Unable to download account, windows live service may be down".

"Ok, well its not, you know what nevermind. Run as administator!"

*log in again, same message*.



"Look Games for windows, I've just bought this please dont makes this Age of Empires: Online, hmmm, alright I've added your client to my firewall, and steam thus giving you both full access to my machine"

*Click, "Windows Live is unable to download your profile, please check the network status of Games for Windows Live".*

"SONOVA..., OK ok ok, I read somewhere that you can launch game for windows games through thier client marketplace program, I'll just download that mofo, launch it, log-in from there and hey presto!"

Easy.... or so I thought.

After fighting with the installation of the client and trying to boot it, only to be met with errors the first few times, I had managed to sell my soul to the devil to somehow help me and after some light swearing and a few admin rule changes we were back on track!

Your mine now BIOSHOCK 2, MINE!!
 *tappity tap tap to login, and CLICK!*

..............

"FUCK YOU".

*Games for Windows Live: "TROLOLOLOL"*

Sunday, 1 July 2012

League of Legends: Pwnage Update #1

Yes, I play that free-to-play game League of Legends, hate me, ridicule me but frankly its fantastic. I shall now use this blog as platform to throw screenshots and in the future possibly videos of my merry jaunts throughout the world of DEMACCIAAA!

Here was lastnights clusterfuck I delivered unto the masses.

Play Yorick, Acquire women.


New post, could be alive again..

This is the new Blogger poster ey, Its all very good and pretty. But im sure for those of you with crappy internet service providers *VIRGIN, COUGH* youve all stayed on the orginal Blogger as the load times for some pages now ARE HORRIBLE.

Jeez. Progress.