Grimrock

eharper256 wrote: But, if its anything like prior Diablos, quitting after town portaling or using a waypoint = enemies respawn. Also, TP scrolls are a kinda pricey ingame commodity in the early game. Sure, they become cheap as chips later, but that early part is gonna be nasty. Again, its a waste of game resources for something that should be costless.

Actually, there are no TP scrolls in Diablo 3. It's now a free spell everyone learns early in act 1.

eharper256 wrote: However, I retract my comment about Origin. For some reason I got it into my head that Blizzard was owned by EA. Because, hey, it feels like everything is owned by EA these days.

Ain't that the truth.

eharper256 wrote: Even if ALT-TAB does pause, the problem is if the game doesn't negotiate with the server for X amount of time, it disconnects and ends your game. By the sounds of it, the monsters and drops are actually generated by the server rather than your machine... (making it sound remarkably like an MMO)

Duping was a pretty big problem in Diablo 2, so this hopefully solves that. We shall see.

And I totally get people being peeved at removing a true offline single player mode. I think that stinks, even though I probably wouldn't use it myself.

Kthanid wrote:Won't support Blizzard or their continued push toward ridiculously binding DRM. Constant internet connection required for single player? No thanks, Blizzard, I prefer to still be be able to play when your servers are down (or my ISP is). Also, are you aware there are plenty of people in the world with bandwidth caps or no constant internet at all? Seriously, screw you, Blizzard.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09 ... ffect-you/

EDIT - I say this as an avid fan of both Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 (some of my most played games of all time). It's a shame to see how much we're collectively willing to give up as gamers. It's truly sad how chained we are to behemoths like Blizzard and the stranglehold their popular series' have on us. I realize my boycott places me in the vast minority of gamers, and I doubt our small impact will be seen or heard, but I can't help but place my principles above my desire for a single video game.

-Quoted for excellence.

You're not alone my friend...I already have a growing list of publishers/games that I boycotted as well...
UbiSoft
EA
Bioware...IE: EA lite...
Blizzard, though not too broken up by this as I'm not a Diablo or WOW fan...

We still have outstanding indie devs, Bethesda, Obsidian, CDPR, Valve, Piranha Bytes (Much respect for them in dumping their crappy Publisher JoWood) and now Almost Human, so we still have plenty of quality games so any boycott won't effect us at all!

To be fair, I would add that if Blizzard were to nix the AO DRM, I would certainly snatch that game up, along with I & II!

Darklord wrote: You can't pause the game?! That is crazy... I don't think I'll be buying this game.

Ah well, hopefully we'll get to start making LoG custom dungeons by then anyhow.

Daniel.

You can pasue the game if you are playing solo. Not if you are in coop mode or made your game public and waiting for ppl to join.

And regarding to your previous post about hating torchlight. Same thing happened to me too. Hated that game after a few hours. But been playing the D3 beta for the last month and i am enjoying it.

But IF you are not in to constant clicking and killing 40 mobs at the same time. It is not for you for sure.

It is true that you have more quests in D3 than the previous 2 but it is still a hack and slash at it s best. Whole idea of the game is getting loot and you get it by killing mobs. And with the real money AH it is gonna be more killing for money

earthyearth wrote:I tried the D3 Beta

This may seem ridiculous, but I have one question:

Do you have to click every time you want to attack? Because Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 generated a severe repeated motion disorder I have still to recover from (bordering on carpal tunnel syndrome). If your DPS is still tied to clicks, I fear no Diablo 3 for me...

EDIT: Nevermind. I just the post above this...

TZO2k12 wrote:We still have outstanding indie devs, Bethesda...

Funny. I boycotted Bethesda a long time ago because of their deceptive business practices (the Crash of the Year edition of Fallout 3 on the PS3 was the primary reason: they repackaged the whole thing and never bothered to fix any of the game-ending bugs). I've never looked back. And smile sometimes as I read the tech support forums at Bethesda, especially on the PS3 side. Same old crappy engine bugs in Fallout 3 made it into Skyrim. Amazingly greedy developer, in my opinion. Sure, they want to release on PS3 - but their product is a disaster. I would never ever group Bethesda with "indie devs"... that's a broad insult to the true independents out there.

I have played all of the classes through to the end of BETA, the game is good, but as mentioned, not a ground-breaking release.

The game "Path Of Exile", which is also in BETA maybe a better game in many respects and it's about a year from completion, yet you can play it by signing up for the BETA or donating 10 bucks to buy in for unlimited playtime (more if you want pets). It is a multiplayer/single player game.

I haven't checked into the different modes that D3 was offering. I've only played the stress beta, and obviously that required you to be online.

Honestly I thought they did it like the way in D2, where you had Open and Closed games. Closed games was exclusively multiplayer online. It saved your character on the B.net server, and this should have made it cheat-proof (but didn't). Open games on the other hand saved your characters on your local computer. This was the option for those players that couldn't be online all the time, and I used to play that back in the day, as I didn't want huge phone bills. The downside was that it was really easy to cheat in.

I thought they would go with the same flow for D3, except that you'd probably had to log in once after installation, just like you had to do with SC2, to activate it. I wasn't aware you had to be online constantly. I guess Blizzard is thinking, we're 12 years ahead, everyone has broadband nowadays.

It doesn't really affect me, since I would've only played online anyhow, but I can see it being a problem if you either don't have a permanent internet connection, or want a pause feature (Alt-Tab really doesn't do anything in multiplayer games, since the game is essentially played on the server).



As for the game itself, it's a little more colorful, less grimmy looking than it's predecessors, but that might of course just be the first part of the game. I don't regret the loss of raising your own attributes (which in the end came down to, do I want more survivability or more damage output, and if you go for damage output, and get some guys that specced almost entirely survivability in a multiplayer game, it was *yawn*). The loss of raising your own skillpoints strikes me as a tad peculiar, though. The deviation between characters are now "What skills/runes do you place on your hotbar?", rather than "What skill points did you pick?" At higher level, you'll be forced to choose among which passive skills you want to use as well, but you can easily swap between them. It feels a little eased down, but we'll see.

Oh, and you can hold your LMB to attack repeatedly. It also automatically picks up all the gold you walk over, so there's less mindless clicking involved. Also, each class has a few basic strikes that raise energy, rather than lower it, which replaces mana pots altogether.

The thing I really do regret is the hireling abandoning you the moment there are 2 players in the game.

Thels wrote: It doesn't really affect me, since I would've only played online anyhow, but I can see it being a problem

Yeah I would likely be online too but I think Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw got it right when he said:
"All games must stand up on its single-player. If a game is only fun when you and your friends do it together then that's a review of your friends, not the game."

I played the beta and I felt that it was very similar to D2. If you didn't like D2/Torchlight, you won't find any pleasure in D3. There is in my opinion no big story improvement compared to D2. D2 definitely had a story compared to D1 but in the end Diablo was always about hack'n'slash. The story is just a way to point the player to the next dungeon. Nothing has changed in that regard.

The two biggest differences I noticed in beta was that first of all potions have a long cooldown which I think is a good change. So you're not constantly spamming potions. And secondly that the entire skill tree has disappeared. I mean graphically it is still there, but it serves no purpose anymore. I even got confused because there is always only one spell/ability that you could get each level and you still had to level it by clicking on it. What's the point? Just light up the icon and tell me I got a new skill.

People have been discussing about how this change is better and how it allows for even more variety. That might be but I don't think that is the reason why they created this kind of system. Think about it. Blizzard removes all skill builds from the game and allows customization of characters exclusively over items. At the same time they want to release a real money AH which will give them a small share of every transaction.

This doesn't mean that the new system isn't brilliant but I think it is very clear what Blizzard intends to do here. On top of that we have the always on DRM. In the end to me it seems as if Blizz has given up fighting the gold farmers... they are trying to find a way to make money with them. You will probably be able to buy most "characters" by buying the right items of the AH for enough money. Blizz won't care if their legitimate player base found them or some gold famers. Somehow I think that is a little sad.

BlueSpace wrote:You will probably be able to buy most "characters" by buying the right items of the AH for enough money. Blizz won't care if their legitimate player base found them or some gold famers. Somehow I think that is a little sad.

Yes it is.

Daniel.

Arctor wrote: Funny. I boycotted Bethesda a long time ago because of their deceptive business practices (the Crash of the Year edition of Fallout 3 on the PS3 was the primary reason: they repackaged the whole thing and never bothered to fix any of the game-ending bugs). I've never looked back. And smile sometimes as I read the tech support forums at Bethesda, especially on the PS3 side. Same old crappy engine bugs in Fallout 3 made it into Skyrim. Amazingly greedy developer, in my opinion. Sure, they want to release on PS3 - but their product is a disaster. I would never ever group Bethesda with "indie devs"... that's a broad insult to the true independents out there.

Actually, I was listing them beside not with them, and re reading it, I can see where I goofed, I wrote it wrong...And I don't do consoles as they're horrible as far as custom gaming is concerned, and you cannot mod them, you have to re develop your entire game just to fit the game system's closed format. And Blizzard, EA, and UbiSoft are much, much worse, you're biased against Bethesda, (You probably have good reason, I simply don't share the same reason) so I disagree, I've never had a reason to contact tech support as there was always patches that fixed a lot of the bugs, but then again, I don't game on the console...Now if you want to talk greed...

BlueSpace wrote: People have been discussing about how this change is better and how it allows for even more variety. That might be but I don't think that is the reason why they created this kind of system. Think about it. Blizzard removes all skill builds from the game and allows customization of characters exclusively over items. At the same time they want to release a real money AH which will give them a small share of every transaction.

This doesn't mean that the new system isn't brilliant but I think it is very clear what Blizzard intends to do here. On top of that we have the always on DRM. In the end to me it seems as if Blizz has given up fighting the gold farmers... they are trying to find a way to make money with them. You will probably be able to buy most "characters" by buying the right items of the AH for enough money. Blizz won't care if their legitimate player base found them or some gold famers. Somehow I think that is a little sad.

Yeah, it's cool to be a part of the *"HardCoreGamer" cool-crowd by calling Bethesda the evil empire of all gaming, yet shit like this is much more insidious than buggy games, and not having one's game-play consisting of getting constant one-shotted-death at every step just so one can swing their stiff one all around the Internet gaming forums loudly proclaiming their superiority over taking 15 hours of real time just to earn 1000 virtual coins, so one can feel "Satisfied at a job well done" all the while playing a single player game, at home...All...By...Themselves!

So at the exact moment Bethesda includes an always-on DRM scheme, and quits fully supporting the modding community by NOT providing a wiki, several videos, and free DLCs, then yeah, I'll boycott them just as quick as I will Blizzard, EA, and UbiSoft!

*Don't get me wrong I love my challenge as well, I just don't see the need to brag about it, and force everyone else to...