5 Things We Like and Dislike about Diablo 3

May 15th, 2012 Keen and Graev 20 Comments


We Like…

Skill Runes
You can use a skill one way for a long time, but then you use a rune and suddenly the skill can change completely.  For example, the Witch Doctor’s fire bats start as a cone with limited range but with the first rune you send out one big bat that does considerable damage and flies a bit further.  Upgrading the poison dart turns it into a 3 shot burst.  We like the added, and much needed, diversity.

Global Stash
Your stash (treasure chest in town) is the same for all of your characters.  Transfer items to other characters you play easily and stay organized.  This is a simple but great change from the way Diablo 2 kept characters on the same account very separate.

Crafting (so far)
It’s nice to have an alternative to selling all the magic items you can’t use.  Salvaging magic items yields materials used to craft upgrades with random stats.  In a way, it’s like gambling.  Crafting is also a money sink.  We have no idea how well the crafted items will scale through difficulties, but if they remain very competitive with drops it’s a nice addition to the game.

Individual Loot
This has been a real joy.  There isn’t a rush to pick up items when they drop.  There isn’t this nagging fear that you might miss something.  If something drops, it’s yours and you don’t have to worry about being too greedy or thinking about others.  Sounds totally selfish, but it works for Diablo 3.  It’s also mandatory given the RMT system — can you imagine the drama if something worth $20 dropped and it was a race to see who picked it up?

Convenience and Improvements to Ease of Use

There’s a minimap so you don’t have a map open all the time in your face. Joining friends is really straight forward and quick via the friends list.  The Banner system lets you instantly join friends by teleporting right to them.  That annoying stamina bar is gone. Taking up inventory space with a book of town portals and identify is gone, and it’s harder to quickly escape via TP.  Putting points into stats has been eliminated — let’s face it, there was really only one best way to do it.  These are conveniences that don’t hurt the integrity of the game and, in our opinion, allow for more enjoyment.

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Might have found my favorite GW2 Class today

May 14th, 2012 Keen 31 Comments


Center Keep of Eternal Battleground is huge and fun to siege!

I managed to get some play time in Guild Wars 2 today before succumbing to the 95% load screen hang; Having to Ctrl+alt+del out of the game and then having to restart the comp to recover wore me out after the fifth time.  Definitely performance issues during this event, but that’s the whole point of today. WvW was very, very laggy with massive framerate issues — everyone on ventrilo was complaining about it and I was getting < 10 FPS.

Found a Class I Love!

During the few hours I played around I tried an Elementalist for the first time and fell completely in love with the class.  I felt like a bender from Avatar with the four different elemental schools.  I could switch to fire, water, and air with one more school locked which I assume was earth.  Switching to the different schools gave me different abilities for each element.  Switching weapons gave me additional different abilities.  I tried three different weapons, with three different school, giving me more abilities to mess around with than any other GW2 class I’ve tried.

I managed to play a little bit of WvW before I simply couldn’t handle the framerate issues anymore. The Elementalist is really fun to play because I can target my AOE’s everywhere.  Using my water staff attacks/heals was useful to my team.  The air speed buff was great utility.  I felt useful and had fun, which is all I can ask for in a class.

I’m afraid of Elementalist being overplayed… but I was reminded that GW2 has no raids, individual loot, and little need of balancing classes within a guild.  I can play whatever I want as long as I can get past the psychological effect of seeing my class everywhere.

Keep at night (Thanks to Eternity for the screenshot!)

Game Breaking Overflow

Overflow is still terrible.  Randomly being separated from my friends with no control over how I get back to them is unacceptable and game breaking.  ArenaNet must fix it so that group members can transfer to the same instance their group leader is in, or some other solution of bringing people together.

WvW Fun

Despite the lag, my friends and I went to the Eternal Battleground (center zone of the WvW) and contested the big keep in the center.  We took down the outer door, inner door, then had a massive battle against the red server on the ground floor.  We ended up being wiped, all 50 of our server there, because half our server went up the stairs to fight the boss and the other stayed on the floor.  It didn’t take long before we were overwhelmed and wiped.  Tons of fun!

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Diablo 3 stuck at “Updating Setup Files” Fix

May 12th, 2012 Keen 217 Comments


Graev was unable to play Diablo 3 during the beta due to a problem with the launcher giving an error. After pre-ordering tonight and downloading the client to be ready for Tuesday, we ran into the same problem and thought all hope was lost.  Graev has Windows Vista and could not get past the “Updating Setup Files” little window that came up.  We scoured the support forums for days, Googled, and had no luck until tonight.

Here is the fix that finally worked for Graev:

Fix #1

Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services

Scroll down and find “Secondary Logon”

Right Click > Properties

Change it from ‘Disabled’ to ‘Automatic’

Run your Diablo 3 setup as administrator and it should quickly go through Updating Setup Files and bring you to an install screen.  Congratulations, your game now (hopefully) works!   If this solved your issue, spread it around.

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This is why I can’t leave Graev alone…

May 11th, 2012 Keen 5 Comments


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Cross-Realm Zones

May 11th, 2012 Keen 17 Comments


Blizzard is introducing a feature into the Mists of Pandaria beta called Cross-Realm Zones.  This system works the opposite of Guild Wars 2′s Overflow Server.  Instead of making new zones when the one you want to go to is full, Cross-Realm Zones bring players from zones on other realms together.  This combats the opposite problem a game just launched faces; When a title has reached the eight year mark and players are no longer flooding the lowbie zones it can be a lonely experience for someone leveling an alt or even a rare new player.  (Edit: I want to add in that it also handles Overflow like GW2.)

Overall, I like the idea.  I play MMORPG’s to play with other people.  I want to see others around me experiencing the same thing.  I’m one of those weird people that has more fun when I know I’m sharing an experience with someone else.  When I come across a quest I can’t complete alone, the whole point of playing a MMO is to find someone else to help.  If no one else is available, my enjoyment plummets.

The key to Cross-Realm Zones is they’re coming at a time when the game is older.  If this system was introduced earlier in WoW’s life, or didn’t work only on the realms suffering from population deficiency, then I would be worried about server identity issues and the community being disjointed.  The reality facing a game like WoW is that there isn’t much of a community for the lowbies to participate in while playing in empty zones.

Graev and I were talking about this and the only real downside we could think of was a ganking issue, or if I actually don’t want anyone else around me while leveling up.    If a level 85 wants to roam around zones for low-level prey, now it will be easier to find zones populated with poor defenseless lowbies.  Exploiting this system is something Blizzard will have to watch.

In my opinion, this system would actually help breathe new life into WoW for many players.  In fact, I hope SWTOR, Rift, and other games struggling with population issues in lower level (and higher level) zones adopt Cross-Realm Zones.

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Quest for Glory releases on GoG, Victory is Mine!

May 10th, 2012 Graev 4 Comments


Quest for Glory collection is now available on GoG.com!  I like to believe that I single-handedly made this happen.  Forty-three days ago I launched my “twitter campaign” (@Graevyard) and today victory AND Quest for Glory 1-5 are MINE!

You must buy these games now. Right now!

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Single-player and Multiplayer Worlds Collide

May 10th, 2012 Keen 4 Comments


Single-player might one day be the new multiplayer.  Sitting back on your couch with a controller in your hand adventuring off in your own single player world, disconnected from any other players doing the same thing as you, is becoming a thing of the past — in an awesome way!

Many of you are familiar with Demon’s Souls.  If you’re connected to the internet while playing you can occasionally see ghost-like images of other players in the same area, a bloodstain showing where someone died and the ability to see how it happened.  You can also leave messages for others to find in their single-player games.  There’s even a competitive play mode where you can actually enter someone’s single-player game and become a black phantom to try and kill them.

Dragon’s Dogma, a game releasing May 22, is doing something really cool with asynchronous events.  There’s an extremely difficult dragon boss called the “Ur-Dragon”.  Via Xbox Live or the Playstation Network, players combine their attacks, in their single-player game, on the Ur-Dragon until it is finally killed globally.  The player who deals the killing blow gets some extra rewards, but everyone who participates in their own single-player game gets rare items and all who participate get their name in some kind of hall of fame.

It won’t be long before players form guilds in their single-player experiences yet somehow work with other players.  Imagine a game like Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning where players might be able to come together at a guild hall in a city but when they leave the doors they’re back in their single-player World, or a global auction house available in the city of your single-player game.   There are lots of neat ideas, and asynchronous events are just the beginning of entirely new types of games.  It gets my imagination going to think about how other games or features from games can combine together.

You can watch the Ur-Dragon video after the jump.

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Virtual Worlds and Social Consequence

May 9th, 2012 Keen 31 Comments


We had a discussion today and some intriguing ideas came up about player psychology.  We started talking about how just because players can do something doesn’t mean they should.  We ended up theorizing ways in which virtual worlds, not necessarily “games”, could be constructed to facilitate a deep and meaningful experience.

In Open-PvP when players come across one another it is common to instantly try and kill each other. I start thinking about game theory; Will that person attack me? What if I don’t attack them first and they get the drop on me?  In almost every game I don’t think about anything beyond the act of engaging in PvP.  What if the consequences for being bad really did alter the way the game played out?  What if I had to think even further about what my actions would mean for how I would be allowed to continue participating in the society or community of that virtual world? Suddenly we’re talking about more than the choice of being bad — we see a choice to be good.

In a virtual world you could have people that attack anyone and steal their stuff, but there would be a real consequence for those players to avoid.  Then the criminal players have to either be really competent and savvy, or pay the price.  A bounty might be set on their head.  Guards might get called.  There might even be a player jail or penal colony island the players are sent to if they are caught.   A simpler system might banish that player from territories owned by the faction the good player belonged to, and the criminal player would become shunned.  I see a faction system like EQ working well with that system.

The hardest part is getting players to understand the system, recognize the consequences and risks are in place to create a purpose for the opposite side to exist.  This isn’t about making something less fun, but making something real.  Being a “Rogue” can have more meaning than “I use daggers.”

I get really excited when I think about virtual worlds and how there’s more to them than high scores, what items you have, or winning at something.  When I create scenarios for people to actually participate in the lifeblood of a game my imagination takes me places I wish modern games could go.

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