Auction House Online: The Game (Diablo 3) is a MASSIVE decline

Where are those "victory conditions" appear ala "you cant claim you finished game untill" ?

Are they written somewhere or they just made up on spot?

Because only way i see it - you "finish game" when final boss is slain and you get final movie and credits roll (with possibly "The End" text).

 

What's your people's problem now? What's the point of playing L4D? What's the point in playing side scrolling shooters and beat 'em ups? What's the point in fucking Tetris? Where do games end? Should they be replayable? Why Grimrock sucks story-wise? Minecraft, whatthefuckisthis?

Fuck, you people are really trying too hard.

 

Your argument is a bullshit one. Do you barely scratch the surface of your character build after running through one difficulty in TW2? Do you continue building the same char in higher difficulty, while also getting better loot and more unique enemie types? TW2 is completely different game than Diablo clones.
And yes, you did not finish Diablo 2 until you've ran through all 3 difficulties, because the game was intended to be exactly like that, not because some fanboys made this up. For me it doesn't even start to be really fun until higher difficulties, Normal is always just a warmup. If you don't like this type of deal, than you don't like this type of game and it's not even your place to spout useless opinions about it. It's a well made repetitive grindfest, for people who enjoy repetitive grindfest.

 

There is character building in Diablo 3? Your stats are auto-increased by computer. Your skills are chosen by computer too, at certain levels, up to your character is given every active class skill possible at lvl 30.

Oh, you mean - you can change character stats with items. Well, then there is character building in Doom too (combat armor improve endurance and rocket launcher improve DPS).

 

Butthurt Blizzdrones ITT.

It's entirely possible to keep playing/replaying a game after completing it.
A game is completed once the last mission/level in the single player campaign is over and the "A WINNER IS YOU!" victory music plays.
Diablo 3 can be completed in 6 hours.

 

Must thank Blizzard for of trolling I must say. I mean, fuck. RPG = Gear Upgrades means most FPS qualified as one. Heck, Counterstrike, Battlefield 3, even Binary Domain is RPG.

 

1) $60 for what appears to be averaging out to a 10 hour aRPG on first run through.
2) Persistently online connected to the real money Auction House.
3) Already talking of patching in new loot with their updates. Which "special" items are sure to end up on the AH.
Every step of the way, Blizzard gets a cut. And people are lapping it so hard they're waiting in lines.

Blizzard has successfully raised its Pickpocket skill to unprecedented levels.

 

Put about 3 hours into it so far. Two hours online with a couple friends and one hour online in the single player ( ). Not enough time invested for a review, so here's some observations: plays smoothly (no bugs) now that server shit is over, the mix-match skill setup works well so you're not just slapping level two ability into each slot and continuing on your merry way, production values are obviously very high (one thing Blizzard does well that I can be genuine about), the female monk reminds me of the Handmaiden so now I will never let her go.

 

I wasn't really talking about D3, rather than Diablo-likes in general. I haven't played D3 and I don't trust anyone else's opinion except few rare people who have proven to be consistently non-retarded.
And yes, equipment choice is part of character build in these games, in Diablo 2 in particular, some items/sets have severe impact on your build in it. If that implies to you that FPS'es with item choices are RPGs then so be it, it's your fucking problem not mine. I don't even think Diablo-likes are RPGs in the first place.

 

I believe a training montage is in order. They've certainly had plenty of time since diablo 2.

 

I'm sorry MD, I'll try not making a joke in this prestigious forum next time. Please don't fuck me.

 

Don't be an asshat. The problem is with the use of gear as the *only* character defining aspect of D3, now that stat allocation and skill choices have gone up the window.

 

Without structure or permanence, there is no "build," since you're not building anything. Anything you can change out at will is a kit. Diablo III has a lot of kit-outs, just like a lot of military FPS's do. In fact, recent FPS's have you unlocking new and more powerful kits the more you play, as well as promoting you in level rank. The parallels are uncanny.

 

Yeah but guns need player skills while Diablo 3 doesn't. It's basically passive stat enhancers when executing skills. It'll take time to get a FULL set to have MAJOR impact, maybe weeks or months, and I don't really intend to invest THAT long on hack n slash anyway, which is why I'm not buying D3 and settling for a $20 alternative to keep myself occupied.

 

But, but balancing stats and skills and stuff is difficult.

Anyway, people are buying D3, so stats probably weren't that important in the first place. And loot is the only relevant character changer because Blizz (potentially) gets a cut. In b4 Blizzard offers limited stat allocation as DLC.
Why is this thread in GRPG again?

 

Exploring = enjoying scenery views?
Wow, that's dumb!

 

Yeah, I'm sure you're the 0,01%....stop trying so hard. Besides, I prefer to first see & play the game, then see how I can tweak it to my likings. And I've never even heard of such a important gameplay-changing thing hidden on a config menu...

And the game IS quite good. I just finished ACT I and gotta say it was larger, longer and better than I've expected. And my BR connection is perfect, not a single disconnect or error since I started playing, just a couple of rare lag spikes....I hope they don't ruin the game at higher difficulties.

 

Does the game "open up" in later acts/higher difficulties or is it all linear corridors like the area in the beta?

 

Unability to troughfully look through options. -2 points for being dubm.

Lack of personal initiative. (or lack of curiosity, a 14 year old girl would try it.) -2 points.

-2 screwed up by tooltips.

You know when 20 mill monkeys would connect the same day, then after a week they would turn off, it's much larger load than in a MMO. In addition it has different structure. One of possibilities how to deal with this is to temporally lease servers to help with initial load...


-2 points for lack of technical competency.




You know considering you are claiming to be a reviewer you capabilities are quite low. -8 points under 6 posts...

It looks like the smartest person in this thread at D3 release was the ferret. He discovered the problem, said he didn't slept 24 hours, and went to sleep... The problem solved itself meanwhile. (It was limited to NA servers anyway.)

 

At last, it's running smoothly. Any bro wants to team up on euro servers?

 

Those FPS's are more like an RPG than D3. You have player choice in what guns you unlock. You don't have choice with item drops in D3, you just play the RNG until the gold flows.

 

I'm "dubm" for expecting a game that claims itself is an RPG to allow for character customization without having to turn on "not-an-idiot mode"?

When the game gives a billion stats (most of them useless), shouldn't it be expected that it also lists something as basic as the damage your spells and skills does?

Actually, the tooltips are ambiguous. They say "increases damage by X% for class Y" but they word it to make it sound like a fixed percentage (so the formula is something like DPS * (attribute * .30) instead of one that changes as your attributes go up. And once more, it's my fault for expecting an RPG to explain its mechanics properly without having to turn on the "advanced tooltips" option?

Blizzard Entertainment

1. Have the largest MMO in the world
2. Have the most advanced server infrastructure in the world
3. Have done multiple game launches like this in the past and have had more than enough chances to work out the kinks
4. Specifically did a lengthy beta test and a stress test in order to determine how many servers to allocate and work out bugs
5. Have been making Diablo III for over ten years
6. Apparently have no problem with making their users wait for potentially days to play the game they already purchased
7. Apparently also have done this solely out of penny-pinching as not renting some extra server space for a few days would cut into their undoubtedly mass profits
8. Have no apparent intention of apologizing or trying to make it up to fans
9. Have a reputation for being one of the best if not the best PC developers in business (reputation, not necessarily truth)
10. Seem content to contribute negatively to that reputation, without making attempts to change those perceptions even though if it keeps up it could have ramifications to their bottom line down the road (since Blizzard are a company whose entire business model only works because they can expect to sell millions on reputation alone)

But yeah, I'm a moron for expecting Diablo III to, you know, actually fucking work when it comes out. How silly of me.

For someone with such a sense of smug superiority you're kind of a colossal idiot.

 

I think a tiny fraction of all that cash really go into game development , so no surprise that their games have the exact same problem has any other game studio, yesterday plenty of my friends had trouble even to install.
Apologies ? you will never get any, vivendi is a big corproration customers are worthless to those, any customer support with them is completely deshumanized. Its fun game but way overrated as everything blizzard produced.

 

I break the self-imposed silence with quick impressions after a few hours of gameplay (as said earlier, I pre-ordered D3 weeks ago because it's the only game I will get to play with my siblings in years).

Art style, you say? This game is an eyesore. Literally, I have chronic dry eye syndrome, and it was starting to make my eyes hurt, trying to focus on the blurred outlines of shit.

I would even be fine with it if it had WoW art style, but it has none. WoW had environments that weren't blurry and murky. It had a sharp cartoon look (ironically more like Torchlight 2).

D3's environments are but a texture covering the barren gameplay grid underneath - both visually and in terms of layout. Half of Diablo is the presence of the environment, but Jay Wilson's "artistic vision" involved blurrying shit out so characters "stand out more".

I installed darkd3.com filter, which is a MUST for retaining a semblance of sanity, but there are two problems:

1) Sharpening unsharpened images is like zooming into a police photo expecting CSI-like enhancement. It works better than I thought, actually, but there's no free lunch.

2) When you're running through a monochromatic dungeon and your character is lit up with the dungeon's "color theme" (SICKLY GREEN), no post-processor will fix it. This is why I signed the color petition in 2008, among 64000 others to be summarily laughed at and dismissed by Jay Wilson and the rest of "NU DIABLO" team. If character are to "stand out more", why is my screen all green? Why is my character green as I run through the dungeon? Am I running this on a monochrome monitor from the 70's?

Remember when I said that Torchlight 2, a low-budget indie game will be able to compete with Diablo3 graphics-wise? Well, from the latest videos of T2, it looks exactly that way. Not only it has environments that actually come together as a whole, it has a dungeon generator that is more expansive, it has skill trees, it has characters that don't look like ass.

My male Wizard looks like an Elf of ambiguous gender, by the way. His voice is what I'd expect from a mage, and it completely mismatches his appearance.

The attacks... feel passable (better than Titan Quest, which was awful), and look mediocre. Demon Hunter has a chaingun at level 6 or something, and Wizard has a spell which looks like a bitmap of THE UNIVERSE, rotating and expanding. And a giant laser. There seems little rhyme or reason to the nature of these attacks. Like the game's dungeons, they're a thin overlay over DPS mechanics, designed to make you feel like you're doing something important, rather than having any semblance of strategic weight. Or just plain old "oomph" for that matter. None of my attacks match the Sorceress' fireball in pure feel. Instead, it feels like using an overpowered wand in WoW.

This feeling of immediate feedback between what you do and what happens to enemies, is crippled by the obvious use of WoW engine, in a lazy way. Major parts of code had to be rewritten for it to work as a Diablo game.

They clearly weren't changed enough.

The WoW stench is all over the game - from hearthstone, to the spell bar, to strangely instanced bosses, to the lack of single-player mechanics (why did you think they left them out? Because WoW had none to port over).

When my cousin Barbarian runs, his animation doesn't finish before looping. If the animation is X frames, it goes somewhere to X*0.7, then back to the first frame. That's right, the animation/network engine is doing that in a Blizzard game in 2012.

With all their focus on coop mechanics and simplicity (they removed distance limit for party XP gain, after all), Blizzard somehow managed to fuck that up anyway by introducing items which boost XP gain. Eventually this is bound to unhinge the progress of various party members from one another, and I have no idea of how the game will handle a level 30 fighting alongside a level 36. Blizzard completely ignored the ingenious party scaling "sidekick" mode from City of Heroes (2004), and somehow I don't think it's in Diablo 3. It sure as hell wasn't in WoW. Pun intended.

The game looks like something terrible happened in 2008-2010, and they restarted completely from scratch, in emergency mode. Or maybe they just wasted a lot of time. They took code from WoW team, used Raven Cemetery and Darkshire as template, combined it with Warcraft3's "in-game storytelling mission cutscene corridor design", and off they went.

Jay Wilson is the Blizzard's version of George Lucas. Destroying a franchise for money, by trying to appeal to lowest common denominator, which, luckily, happens to align with the apex of his own imagination and taste.

Diablo 3 is not a "bad" game. It's better than many Diablo-alikes out there (like Titan Quest). But, whatever the reason, there's no "Blizzard touch" to be felt. Not even close. The sanctity of the franchise has been fouled.

 

bonescraper#2992. Feel free to add me.