Tag Archives: Blizzard

Diabolic

While StarCraft: Remastered seems to be pretty well regarded, not all of Blizzard’s efforts to rejuvenate their older games have been so successful. With that in mind, I was highly skeptical of Diablo II: Resurrected. It was only after hearing great things about the title from some trusted podcasters that I decided to check it out, and even then it was kind of a random, impulsive install. Regardless, I found myself getting hooked by the gameplay and story despite having played through it so many times before.

Playing a fire build was a good choice with this new lighting engine.
“Playing a fire build was a good choice with this new lighting engine.”

In short, this remastered version looks, sounds, and plays exactly how you probably remember it from back in 2000 and 2001, but the ability to dynamically toggle the graphics between the old and the new really shows just how faulty our memories can be. Knowing that the game was remastered had me engaged, trying to spot little changes and differences, and likely mistaking a lot of things I’d simply long forgotten as enhancements. I got so hooked, I ended up buying it for my Xbox Series X as well to give playing with with a controller a spin, utilizing the cross-save feature to swap between platforms whenever my mood demanded it. I didn’t play much further than the first act, but I was very impressed by the craftsmanship put into this new version, and while most of the potential to modernize some of the more dated features was skipped in favor of staying faithful to the original game, it’s hard to fault that. I’ll return to Diablo II: Resurrected one of these days, but the main reason I bailed so early was because I knew more exciting things were on the horizon.

I didn’t pay much attention to Diablo IV until relatively close to its release, when I started hearing positive things from those lucky enough to try the game during preview events. Blizzard had a couple of “server slam” stress test weekends a few months before release, and I managed to get into the very last one and try the game out for a few hours myself. I preordered the game shortly after that. That’s how much I enjoyed it.

Fending off a horde of skeletons.
“Fending off a horde of skeletons.”

Diablo IV feels, in many ways, like a love letter to Diablo II. Something of a “what if” scenario where Diablo III never happened, and the team that made Diablo II and Lord of Destruction immediately dove into developing a sequel, only after the entire studio was somehow transported 20 years into the future. This has positive and negative connotations. On the positive side, the game is an absolute return to the dark, moody tone of Diablo II. While maybe slightly less bleak, it pulls no punches in terms of showing the grim and gory world of a Sanctuary under the influence of evil: you’ll find far more corpses laying around randomly, piled in stacks, hanging from trees, and impaled on spikes than living NPCs, for example. This is also reflected in the graphical style, which resembles the 2D pixel art of Diablo II far more than the more stylized, simpler 3D models of Diablo III. The series’ sound design and particularly its music has always been consistent with what was established with the original Diablo, and Diablo IV feels continues this trend with a lot of direct throwbacks to those classic sound effects and compositions.

While I have seen the odd accusation of the game looking dated, I suspect that this is largely a side effect of trying to translate Diablo II’s look into 3D. I’m a fan. Besides the underwhelming character creator, my only nitpick is that I wish I could zoom the camera out just a tiny bit more, and we know it’s possible as many of the game’s cool in-engine cutscenes play with the camera, sometimes leaving it zoomed out further than normal. The prerendered cutscenes are absolutely amazing too, but we expect nothing less from Blizzard at this point. The aforementioned sound and especially music are masterfully executed as well. One of my telltale signs that a game has good music is when I actually notice it and stop to enjoy it, which I did more than once during my playthrough of Diablo IV’s campaign. So, that’s all good then, what about the story?

I admit it, I kind of love Lilith.
“I admit it, I kind of love Lilith.”

As a random wanderer, your character stumbles across a village that has been recently taken over by the influence of the demon Lilith. You soon meet up with some allies and the investigation of Lilith’s plot, with the eventual goal of stopping her entirely, guides the rest of your adventure. Lilith is very interesting antagonist in that, unlike your usual demonic invaders, while sure, there’s definitely an evil corruption at play, her charisma and the dogma she imparts seems to do just as much of the heavy lifting as she builds a following of humans rather than the usual shtick of simply wanting to wipe them out. In fact, she claims to want to save Sanctuary from further destruction by the machinations of and conflict between Heaven and Hell. Of course, that would mean her coming out on top, and who knows at what cost, so perhaps she’s actually just full of shit, but I like that she always comes across as a little sympathetic, and her true nature is always left at least a little ambiguous. I also loved the concept of the angel Inarius, banished to Sanctuary where a religion forms around him. In a twist to fans of the previous games, Inarius is not really an ally to your character in any real sense, and while he’s an important part of the story (particularly the backstory) he’s barely featured. Neat stuff, though the way it all wraps up comes about as close to begging for an expansion or at least a proper sequel as you can get without the story feeling unfinished.

Diablo IV also all but pretends that many of the revelations that came from Diablo III’s story didn’t happen. I don’t believe there was a single mention of Nephalem, for instance. In fact, the only real connections I picked up on (although, it has been quite a few years since playing Diablo III) were the now rather old Horadrim Lorath, and the fact that the Horadrim (and Sanctuary at large) feels particularly devastated, which makes sense after the events of Diablo III’s Reaper of Souls expansion. I could imagine this confusing if not disappointing a lot of Diablo III fans, though I for one prefer the much more serious tone of Diablo II and Diablo IV to the more fantastical, and at times flat out silly, writing of Diablo III.

Lightning Sorcs can make quite a mess.
“Lightning Sorcs can make quite a mess.”

Mechanically, Diablo IV does very little to build off of the systems that appeared in Diablo III, feeling in some ways like a bit of a step backwards. Your character feels a bit weaker and the action tends to feel a bit slower than the utter murder fests that fights in Diablo III would turn into. Skill progression is similarly old school, as you pick a number of abilities, both active and passive, from a fairly large tree, versus Diablo III’s much more stripped down progression system where you’d pick from a small selection of active abilities and apply a single modifier to them. The endgame “paragon” system does make a return from Diablo III, but is similarly much more complex. Naturally, some people will prefer Diablo III after so many years of live iteration, and some will be taken aback by Diablo IV’s slightly regressive mechanics. Personally, thanks to giving us just enough quality of life enhancements and overall polish, I think it works well. My only real gripe is that progression tends to be a bit front loaded, and by the time you near level 50, you’ll mostly be spending all of your points on relatively boring passive abilities, and after that you’ll progress to the aforementioned similarly boring and definitely more than a little convoluted paragon system.

Gear progression is in a similar boat. Diablo IV’s legendary items have “aspects” which can often have a major impact on the behavior of core class abilities, but I find myself missing some of Diablo III’s wacky, sometimes overpowered legendary weapon effects. There are a thousand other differences, as well as some Diablo II mechanics that didn’t make it in (like runes and rune words, despite there being a gem socketing system) but I suspect there’s a good chance of many of them showing up in the inevitable expansion. Not being one of those hardcore players who has sunk thousands of hours into the endgames of previous Diablo games, I don’t think I want to go too much more in-depth about the mechanics. That is to say, there are definitely better qualified people than me to provide this kind of analysis.

Welcome to the Burning Hells.
“Welcome to the Burning Hells.”

Perhaps the biggest change a casual player will notice is that Diablo’s world map is now completely open, sprawling, and filled with side content. The size and openness of the world doesn’t actually impact things too much, as the campaign questline will inevitably lead you through various regions and some of their sub-zones in a similar, albeit less linear fashion as the previous games did, and traveling isn’t too much of a chore thanks to the all too familiar system of waypoints (and when you get a horse later on, even less so.) No, the biggest issue I have with the open-world is the huge amount of side quests, dungeons, and other distractions you’ll run into in your journey. On one hand, I appreciate the content, but on the other hand, trying to complete every quest you come across and clear every dungeon you see is going to seriously derail your campaign progress. I started playing the campaign at the same time as a few colleagues of mine, and even when our playtimes were similar, I noticed I was well behind them in the campaign. It was the damn side quests! Once I started totally ignoring them and focusing exclusively on campaign quests, the game stopped feeling like so much of a slog, and I was able to dig myself out of the burnout that was setting in.

I should make a quick mention of another major change while talking about Diablo IV’s more open-world nature. The game is now something of an MMO in that you’ll run across other players in the world while playing. If you’re asocial, you shouldn’t let this concern you, as I rarely ran across anyone outside of the major cities, and even when I did, we’d almost always ignore each other and go our separate ways. There are “events” across the map (more or less the “public quest” system introduced in Warhammer Online) which work best when tackled cooperatively, but these are the only times I really played with random players. Even still though, I personally enjoy seeing other players in the world, and the opportunity for casual co-op play, random chat, and the like is pretty cool, never mind being able to fairly seamlessly play with your actual friends when you want to. I just wish this was an optional feature for those who’d rather (or can’t) always play online.

Lorath and I unloading.
“Lorath and I unloading.”

I’ve personally never been even a little enamored by Diablo’s endgame. In the original game, it was grinding for better items, sometimes with friends, and of course PKing and otherwise griefing other players. In Diablo II, it meant running through the campaign multiple times with increasing difficulty until focusing on that brutally repetitive Act V item grind, trying to find the best unique equipment, set items, and runes. Diablo III did a good job of trying to make this less of a repetitive grind by introducing “Adventure Mode” which would give players random quests to go slap a series of enemies, and rifts, which were randomly generated dungeons. Diablo IV leverages its open-world for its endgame. Since enemies are always scaled, all of that content you may have skimmed over while playing the campaign is available to grind through, as are the Tree of Whispers random quests, Helltide events, world bosses, and a number of other challenges and collect-a-thons. There’s a lot to do, although it’s a tiny bit of a bummer that so much less of the game is randomized now given that it was such a notable element of Diablo’s roguelike origins. Regardless, at the end of the day, all of these iterations come down to one thing: fairly pointless grinding. No offense to anyone who enjoys it, of course, but It’s amazing to me that Blizzard would focus so much on an endgame which is going to be so unappealing to most people. *shrug*

That’s worth mentioning, because it seems that certain types of games are judged largely by a hardcore, vocal minority of endgame players, and yet I can really like a World of Warcraft expansion, for example, based solely on its campaign and the gameplay changes I experienced therein, regardless of the raiding community thinking it’s the worst expansion to date. Diablo IV’s endgame is just one of the many popular topics that commonly pops up in criticisms of the game. It’s bizarre to me how divisive of a title Diablo IV is. Some of it, like the ridiculous cosmetics store, ham-fisted nerfs around the season 1 patch, and how slow Blizzard has been to address certain things, is legitimate, but pop into any comment or discussion thread about the game, and you’ll see a lot of people spouting absolutely ludicrous, objectively untrue nonsense about it. I guess there are tons of people always primed and ready to hate on anything Blizzard produces these days. Shame that, because while I certainly don’t believe it succeeds in taking Diablo II’s crown, I really did enjoy my time with it and will definitely be dusting it off again in the future.

Forecast: Blizzard

For some indescribable reason I decided to further my vacation from my consoles for a while longer and dove headfirst into Diablo 3, mostly due to all of the hype surrounding the new 2.0 patch and the (then) upcoming Reaper of Souls expansion pack. First: good news, everyone! My concern in Lightsabers and Labyrinths was unfounded and Diablo 3 does in fact hold up quite well in the atmosphere department. The setting still feels very much like the grim world of Sanctuary from Diablo and Diablo 2 and even then some and the music is still great and perfectly atmospheric. The graphics, while a tiny bit cartoony compared to the previous games, actually feel ike a perfectly logical evolution of the previous style and overall look great. I had other concerns too such as hearing that they packed in much more backstory and dialog (including from your character!) than in previous games. I was somehow picturing a bunch of cheesy in-game cutscenes which would probably change the feel of the game quite a bit. Instead most of the dialog is delivered using something akin to ye olde “audio logs” and the follower interaction and plot related cutscenes that are there are mostly delivered in fairly unobtrusive ways too.

I feel like Conan most of the time I'm playing my Barbarian. Fuck yes!
“I feel like Conan most of the time I’m playing my Barbarian. Fuck yes!”

Gameplay wise, I rolled a Barbarian and played through on normal difficulty – Barbarians being one of the simplest yet funnest classes from Diablo 2 I figured it would be a good starter character to try out and I was definitely right. If anything I could have stood to bump up the difficulty a bit. I feel like it bears stating that yes, this playthrough took place entirely AFTER the 2.0 patch which included a lot of the refinements of the earlier console ports of Diablo 3 including the apparently greatly improved loot system so I have no first hand account of how things used to be. All I can say is that what is there now works quite. I felt like loot drops were aplenty and upgrades came fairly often, at least in the first few acts of my adventure. Perhaps some of the best praise I can give Diablo 3 is that despite just playing through all of Torchlight and the last act or so of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, I not only managed to avoid getting burnt-out on the simple and repetitive ARPG gameplay but even somehow wound up totally addicted like I was playing Diablo 2 back in 2000 all over again.

I might as well mention the expansion since I bought it and played it inline with the original campaign and it’s still somewhat new on the shelves as of this update: it’s largely more of the same. The new zones, monsters, and events are awesome, the story, journals, items, and powers fit perfectly in with the core game, etc. etc. Really, the bulk of the biggest changes in the game outside of new content were those patched in (to everyone, expansion or not) with patch 2.0. The other big change is “adventure mode” which I’ve only briefly dabbled in so far. Regardless, it certainly seems like a better way to grind out levels and new gear than playing through the campaign for the 30th time. I think my only real surprise with Reaper of Souls is that it’s not just a straight continuation of the plot like they did with Diablo 2’s Lord of Destruction expansion. Instead it’s a new story entirely. That is, while continuing where the plot of the core game left off, it’s not just “and then a bigger, more badass demon showed up and you had to kill him too!” kind of thing. The only problem with this is that the stakes will always have to be extraordinarily high given your character’s story and the fact that you already managed to save the world from total annihilation in utterly epic fashion the first time around. Hey, if they can keep that expansion cycle up more power to them!

Someone call an exterminator?
“Someone call an exterminator?”

Overall I found Diablo 3 a total fucking joy to play through – capturing what I loved about Diablo and Diablo 2, refining some of those systems, and giving a slightly deeper look at the world of Sanctuary and its lore. Sure, the story arch feels a bit of a rehash of Diablo 2 in some ways and the game is still a simple blend of remorseless clicking and inventory management, but Diablo 3 delivers exactly what caused me to be captivated by the genre in the first place and does it with the usual top notch Blizzard polish. I’ll definitely be heading back through the campaign with another class against at some point in the future, probably multiple points even. I’m ecstatic.

Blizzard also updated their… err, updater? Okay, their “launcher” recently to serve as a single launch (gah, I did it again!) point for all of their newer Battle.net games and on that list is there new free-to-play collectible trading card game “Hearthstone”. Hearthstone plays like a simplified version of the old WoW TCG which itself was highly inspired by Magic: The Gathering and its ilk. I’ve heard great things about Hearthstone from friends and on some of the podcasts I subscribe to and, being the sucker that I am for mounts in World of Warcraft, seeing the little advertisement for a special mount for trying Hearthstone out was all the extra push I needed to give it a whirl. A whirl turned into a couple of whirls and then more whirls and now hours and hours of whirls. Man, this game is fun!

Hot troll on troll action.
“Hot troll on troll action.”

I’ve never been a TCG/CCG guy – I tried Magic out when it first hit in the 90s but it just always felt slightly too complicated to me for what it was trying to do. I also had a love/hate relationship with the whole collectibility part of it. Hearthstone, by streamlining the rules so much, really nullifies most of those complaints. The game is really fast and really easy to pick up on. Sure, there is still a “he with the most cash wins” aspect to it but I feel like the streamlining means that even the most rare (err, “epic”) cards aren’t too crazily overpowered. That, and Blizzard has the free-to-play mechanic fairly fine tuned so far so that you can pretty consistently unlock new cards without ever dropping a dime of real money. Add that addictive gameplay to some Warcraft aesthetics and some good old Blizzard polish and man, this game is rad! Given the repetitive nature of something like this I doubt I’ll play it too much more besides trying to master a coupe of more “classes” but so far I’ve really enjoyed my time with it.

Blizzard has definitely still got it.

...and I log in to immediately start grinding fucking Archaeology again. Ugh!
“…and I log in to immediately start grinding fucking archaeology again. Ugh!”

As an aside, yes I know I probably shouldn’t care too much about World of Warcraft mounts given that I don’t actually play World of Warcraft anymore but… *sigh* once an addict, always an addict! I loaded up my level 50 something goblin hunter the other day and played through a whole zone and actually enjoyed myself once again. I suppose I’m getting hyped back up for the new Warlords of Draenor expansion coming later this year. I truthfully barely have enough energy for the game left in me to remain interested enough to buy this expansion. I almost didn’t buy Mists of Pandaria as it was back then. The new character models and the free level up to 90, as shallow as those offerings are, help sway me. The bigger thing is probably just having to personally come to terms with what I get out of the series nowadays – a few months of hardcore addiction before I put it back on the shelf until the next expansion, and honestly that’s totally fine with me.

Hacking, Slashing, and Blasting into Space

While still not gaming particularly heavily I’ve certainly had my nose in all kinds of different things lately.

First of all, I’ve been slowly blasting my way through Fallout 3 on PC. I knew I’d love this game from when it was first revealed, being a fan of both the original Fallout games and the Elder Scrolls series, and I was right. I was toying with the idea of doing some kind of a “Garn” like Let’s Play though probably scaled waaaayyyy back to quick journal entries or something but as my main inspiration for starting up Fallout 3 was to play something similar to Oblivion in between writing my blog updates I decided to forgo doing anything like that and just play the game at my own damn pace.

Charon doing what he does best.
“Charon doing what he does best.”

My character started life as a chaotic good (or some approximation thereof) energy weapons loving, grenade chucking hacker and medic and so far I’m not regretting the choice, despite hating the hacking mini-game and having an ungodly huge stash of Small Guns ammunition stockpiled thanks to some major early game ammo shortage scares. I’m having a ton of fun with it and will probably play it again on 360 at some point in the future. I also can’t wait to dive into New Vegas though I’ll almost definitely play that one on console to fix up my achievement sickness. 😉

All the ghouls love my Protectron's Gaze!
“All the ghouls love my Protectron’s Gaze!”

Hmm, what else? Inspired to do something more creative but not really having the time for an all out coding project I started playing around with the original Neverwinter Nights engine on my old laptop and eventually started to run back through the original campaign. It was hard for me to slog through this thing when it originally came out and I started hitting road bumps real early this time as well. I still think the old module creation toolset is pretty awesome but I more or less lost all inspiration to create something with it once I subjected myself to the campaign proper again.

I’m not sure what inspired it, other than maybe not having that much fun with NWN and having a copy of it lying around, but I then moved on to the original Dungeon Siege. So far it is part intriguing and part horrible. I like being able to lead my party around and have them fight automatically which feels kind of novel for this genre (somehow?) but not having any special abilities or much else to do other than navigating and popping potions me makes it a little boring after a while. Short play sessions have been mandatory so far. I’ll probably finish it one day since I had never played it before and I have definitely been getting some enjoyment out of it.

I was still feeling the hack and slash itch and with all of the Diablo 3 buzz going on in the last few months I figured I might purchase and run through the XBLA version of Torchlight. Theorycrafting with some build ideas I decided to simply try them out in Torchlight on PC since I already own it. Hours later and, yes, I still like the game quite a bit. I’ll probably still break down and buy the XBLA version of it soon. I wonder if Torchlight 2 will end up making it to console? The XBLA port of the first game was apparently ported quite masterfully.

Like an old glove...
“Like an old glove…”

After all of that I finally decided that, yeah, I really need to buy Diablo 3. I really wanted the collector’s edition but missed the original window and couldn’t find it anywhere on launch day so, feeling a bit defeated, I still haven’t go around to buying it. Instead I decided first to play through Diablo 2 once more to refresh myself on the story and whatnot. I honestly wanted to start with the first Diablo but I figured I’d save that for a review/retrospective sometime later.

Now, I’ve played through normal difficulty probably a dozen times with most classes and while never a crazy Diablo 2 addict I’ve certainly gone into higher difficulties and even played hardcore mode some. This time I picked a Paladin which I had played before but never gotten out of normal with. So far, despite having trouble adjusting to the brutal way 800×600 resolution looks on my flat panel, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. The creepy, dark tone and sense of isolation and despair the game sets is just perfect and, as influential as Diablo 2 was, still feels quite unique all these years later. Awesome. Now I’m absolutely salivating for Diablo 3.

The look on their faces says it all.
“The look on their faces says it all.”

Finally, after hearing the Rebel FM crew (and others) talk about it on podcasts I grabbed Kerbal Space Program. Hours of fun, this. There’s nothing quite like building your own rocket and then laughing hysterically as you struggle to get the thing off of the ground without some marvelously epic disaster. The real challenge starts after you finally manage to build a decent rocket and then find yourself having to actually learn a thing or two about the real life science of space travel as you attempt to actually orbit the planet, change orbits and orbit the moon, and then finally make a successful moon landing. If you’re real ambitious you can even try getting your little Kerbalnauts back home in one piece.

This is definitely a game I’ll be dusting off every now and then to check out new version enhancements and give a spin. I’m loving where indie game development is right now…