Diablo III - Impressions

So now, that I finaly have my hands on Diablo 3, I managed to play it through with every class, which sadly (or luckily, considering how much time I have available atm), didn't take very long.

Most people who check this blog, know what Diablo is about, so I'll just focus on the new aspects and the overall feel, stead of explaining, what a "Action-RPG" is all about.

So here are my impressions so far.

Starting from the Diablo 3 main menu, it all pulses with this "Diablo" feeling. The music, background, dark atmosphere, it all feels familiar. The menu's are simply and straightforward. The graphic options, not very numerous, but as often with Blizzard beta's I'm sure there's more to come.

After typing in your account name and password, you get into the character selection screen. I have to admit, that at this point i had quite some negative impressions. When creating a new hero, you are presented to 10 different (5 classes, 2 genders) character models, of how each of them could look like in later stages of the game and sadly some of those models are butt-ugly, overpixely and the faces make me feel like I'm playing Morrowind. Luckily enough, apparently those are only models, because, both faces and appearance of real characters look way more solid.

count the polygons

On the bright side however, you can create and design your own banner. The process reminds me of the World of Warcraft tabard creation process, but you have way more options and you unlock more of them, by geting achievements. I have to admit, I really like this idea. Speaking of achievements, even the beta has quite a few of them, using the same point system, SC2 and WoW uses. Each achievement grants points and those increase the length of your e-peen. It sounds silly, but I wouldn't complain, I'm sorta bought by the system in starcraft too...

banner creation

After selecting the class and entering the nickname, the game starts. I guess the release version, might have some sort of cinematic or individual class video going on, but it feels good the way it is too. For the sake of this post, I'll focus on the barbarian as a class. Now I never liked him much in Diablo 2. With the exception of his ability to literally yell at the opponents corpse and make it drop more items, which was both hilarious and useful. In diablo 2, the Barbarian was monotone, more or less a buff up and leftclick class, usually using either Frenzy or Whirlwind only, sometimes swaping into Zerk to defeat enemies that were masochistic and didnt care about physical bashing.

Anyhow, I named my mighty barbarian "Rawr". You start out with an axe, that you can use to perform a basic attack, which you mostly won't use at all, since you also have the ability bash with level 1, which as expected bashes away at a nearby baddie on click, sorta stuns, deals bonus damage and also generates fury, instead of costing mana like in Diablo 2. The fury is the new barbarian resourse. Some attacks generate it, others use it.

It all starts with the event of a mysterious "star" falling inside the old tristram cathedral. And you are there to investiage it. You start on a cliff, near a village called New Tristram, the village where people enver learn. There was the apocalypse starting twice there, within 20 years or something and they try it again and again to live there. Obviously the town is under siege by the undead once again. You bash away some zombies and the guards let you in.

zombie siege

 Talking about bashing, the combat is impressive. You can pretty much feel the strength, of the attacks, since both sound and visuals are impressive. Defeated enemies fly away, dragged by the force of the amazing Diablo 3 physics engine and death animations are various. Critical strikes add even more eye candy. Each option: Dual wield, two handed weapons and one weapon/shield, has different animations for every attack for every weapon type. It gets even cooler, when you get new attacks. "Hammer of the Ancients" releases the accumulated fury, to smash down a single poor fellah with a summoned huge blue hammer. Cleave, is a fury generating ability that slices down opponents in front of you, with a pretty red animation. As you progress further, more and more skills get unlocked. Leap attack, allows you to jump huge heights and distances and deal AoE damage in the target area. Great for both mobility and damage, especially considering the fact, that it generates fury.

looks very juicy in motion

The big trouble is, what will you pick. In the beta, you will eventually unlock up to 4 skill slots. And even with the limited options of skills, it's still hard to decide.

A "cleave"+"leap attack"+"ground stomp"+"war cry" combination, will offer you good AoE damage and huge fury generation, but your single target damage is limited, have high cooldowns and you will have a lot of unspent fury, which feels like a waste. The "Frenzy"+"Cleave"+"Rend"+"Revenge", will offer, both single target and AoE damage, but is situational and lacks the mobility and buffs of the first build. And once again, you get to the 2hand VS dualwield VS 1hand+shield question, since 2 handed weapons generate fury slower, but the fury-using skills also deal more damage, since all damaging skills in Diablo III scale of your weapon damage and their speed is weapon speed dependent. This is better then it sounds by the way, since it also makes balancing the game a lot easier and reduces the ammount of all-around-everyone-uses-a-single-skill cookie cutter builds.

approaching

I'm not sure how many players can claim that the hammerdin in Diablo 2 was really fun to play, even if it is very effective...

The final version of the game will (is atm suposed to) offer around double the abilities per class, 2 more ability slots, 2 more passive skill slots (and lots of other new passives) and also runes. For those few who doesn't know what runes do in Diablo III - they modify an ability. Runes come in 5 types and 7 levels each and each ability gains a different or enhanced effect, with different visuals and sound effects.

The ammount of different builds, possibilities and combinations sounds pretty amazing, asuming, it won't be removed or something, like the way they removed (even if possibly accidently) the scroll of companion - a item, that can be used to summon a small critter/minion, that would pick the gold up for you, very useful, considering that gold is fairly important in Diablo 3.

party

You use gold to buy items, craft items, repair items, upgreade your stash, upgrade your artisan to craft items, auction house .... I actually hope that there will be some sort of a gambler like in Diablo 2.

Talking of items and gambling by the way, I'm slightly confused and disapointed here. There seem to be a lot of things missing or just wrong here, at least in my eyes. First of all, at least in the current version, I really don't like the way the merchants work. Browsing their items, isn't really as fun as it was in Diablo 2, I really miss this "item cluster". Also the items sold by the merchants are nearly allways: 1) the same 2) useless garbage 3) lack variety, even in the begining. I'm yet to see one of those guys selling a 2-handed sword.

Also maybe I'm the only one, but I also don't like the item management system. Especially with the bigger inventory and the fact that we should NOT pick up white and grey items, after the last patch, since they are nearly not worth any gold and are not needed for crafting any more, I really want bigger items icons back. You rarely get so many magic items and all of them use 1x1 or 1x2 slots (in D2, there were 1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2, 2x3, 1x4, 2x4), making the inventory look like a huge mess and the items look to similar and silly ( i need the same space for a dagger and my plate armor ). Besides there was some charm in the old item system, which the current one sadly lacks, at least in my oppinion, also you had to think if you want to pick up the item, considering inventory space, price, usefullness etc. Atm you just gather every blue thing you see up.

random encounter

 Another thing, which is disturbing, is that you find every blue item identified allready. Identifying the items, was some sort of an "present unpacking" with "attention giving" thing, at the moment, blue items rarely gain your attention, even if sometimes they are better then your current one.

I'm also a bit scared, that the current build is lacking affixes. Compared to Diablo huge list of affixes, including +skills, +/level +on-hit spells, +% damage, +% chance to hit, +% defense, +recovery etc etc, the current system appears a bit simple. On the other hand, it might not be the fact, but I it's just the way it feels, especially considering the fact that some of the current affixes are not too useful, like "+2 range on health globes pickup" and "+2 experience/kill", considering how rarely you need the health globes and how fast you level up. Also I sorta miss jewels,  (old) sockets and etheral items, but I'm pretty sure those will be back ingame after a while.

However, I'm not complaining about the difficulty to be honest. Sure, it's pretty pretty simple at the moment. But thats not the point. You can die in the beta, if you play for the first time, with an untwinked character, if you are uncareful and potions have a cooldown. Meaning that in the later game and difficulty, dying should be VERY simple, since potion spamming is out now and you will have to run through all the dungeons to get to the boss you want to farm, instead of waiting in Act 5 town for some random maphacking player or bot with Enigma to tell you, "throne is cleared". I really hope that the Diablo 3 anti-cheat protection will stop me from programming, the game from becoming a huge spam, dupe and cheat fest once again.

About coop by the way: It's great. The inability to steal other players items, encourages to work together and even with random parties the fun factor goes 1UP. The allready amazingly randomized maps, with a lot of random neat events are even more fun, when in a party. And I'm actually not a fan of random parties (pubs...).  I just sorta wish that you could see what other players find (at least yellow/rares), at least for bragging rights. Also the chat is a bit annoying, since it gets constantly spammed by NPC's, so you cant actually see the lines written by the player.

next level

By the way the physic engine mentioned in the begining also really impresses, with the environment. Pretty much half of whatever, you see in a dungeon or cellar or graveyard, with the exception of the floor and huge walls, can be destroyed, also often instantly killing NPC's. The much more important aspect of it, is that it looks great. It really adds to the battlefield feeling (not talking about the game), enemies flying away, projectiles beign fired from both sides, explosions and objects being destroyed everywhere. Awesome.

 

 

 

before

 

 

 

after

Will write reviews on the other classes and more aspects in a few days or weeks, gonna go to the gym now.

ceremony

interupted

Game Programming - Motivations

So, I'm learning applied C# programming in a part of my free time. Since Im a geek at heart and apparently spent some days (*cough*) playing at the PC in my life, I decided to give game programming a short. Im using XNA (apparently I allready blogged this a while ago, damn, Im bad at remembering stuff and keeping it up to date...).

While, I have some defined examples of some games that probably will be fun to play and sorta innovative, they are pretty complicated, so I want to start small.

Some Jump&Run will do for the first I said myself. So I wanted to look up some simple games I know. Soon enough I re-remembered Canabalt. ( http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/ )

The game design is simple, yet amazing and addictive, especially if you got an exam next day. A big part of its charm comes from them music. So after doing some tracing, I soon found out what other games had music written by the same author...

Especially 2 are noteworthy:

Super Meat Boy - Now I know this one since a while. What identifies it primary, is it's difficulty level, that is pretty much absurd. Basicaly it's your good old mario, with the difference, that the fireman is replaced by a cube of meat with legs and arms, princess peach with Bandage Girl and the big fat green ugly turtle boss, by the charmant Dr.Fetus.

(I still have no idea why Bandage girl is called this way, besides considering the fact that she's geting kidnaped ~320 times in this game, they should rather call her bondage girl).

Oh and the world. Basicaly you dont jump on anyones head or shoot fireballs or collect shrooms. The world is mostly grim, bloodred (actually only in the hell chapter, but dying >200 times/hour, covers surfaces with red stain quite a bit and no im not exagerating) and 99% filled with things that move, are sharp and will kill you instantly if you get too close.

  To sum it up: here haf a video: 

A second game by the same "meat team" (what fiting name), is Binding of Isaac, that features a small kid who is trying to get murdered by his fanatical mother who hears the voice of god... so he hides in the basement, that is filled with horrific things that all want to bite and kill you, starting with flies, over zombies and mutated kids down to the four horsemen and even satan himself.

Luckily there are hundreds of upgrades Isaac can collect, which makes this game so awesome....

TL;DR: this thing distracted me for like 3-4 days from my thesis


It might be the D&D blood (+1) talking in me, but if something can buy me, when it comes to games, its upgrades and randomness. And Binding of Isaac pretty much shows a good level of it.

So i might try to make a project like this I guess.

Sure it wont be even close to this complicated, "good" looking and interesting, but its all learning I guess.

No I don't

Actually, I sorta got bored of the game and don't even get to playing anything lately with all the stress around me, but I like the vid :)

Skyrim

For those few people who does NOT find that games are a spawn of satan and will bring doom and oblivion (well they sorta brough doom and oblivion, even if oblivion was definitly a better game) to us all, the partielly longawaited game oblivion was released 2 days ago.

And I have to say, it is quite impressive. A good skillsystem, huge and amazing world and fun gameplay mechanics makes it a great playexperience.

The downside to this is, that I still have to finish a huge ammount of work until monday and chances are i wont be able to finish the game so I can focus on my thesis :x