Tag Archives: RPGs

Diablo 3 Announced!

So Blizzard‘s mysterious mystery image mystery is no longer a mystery! Or something… Diablo 3!

In better fashion that most game announcements Blizzard has simultaneously released a great website with plenty of cool info, lore, screenshots, and a couple of videos including a 20 minute game play movie.

“Who knew you could set your camera like this in WoW?!”

A few quick impressions:

The game play movie looks awesome! Day 1, collector’s edition purchase for me.

It looks quite a bit like Diablo 2, only refined in some areas and using a much more modern 3D engine. The 3D engine, from what I can tell, actually reminds me quite a lot of Titan Quest‘s and doesn’t look to be all that advanced which hopefully means the game should have relatively low hardware requirements. One advantage of using a 3D engine is greater control over animation and many of the animations shown in this preview are fluid and much more expressive than those of the past games. So expressive, in fact, that I can’t help but wonder if the player avatars will be more fully fleshed out characters this time around. It does appear that the game has an overall slightly more cartoony, stylized, and less gritty look, with simpler looking models and a brighter, less dreary color palette than the previous two games. This is sure to irk some hardcore fans of the past games, especially those that despise World of Warcraft, but honestly it isn’t taken to WoW extremes and doesn’t stray too far from the previous two games.

“Apparently the world of Sanctuary is 80% bridges.”

There is apparently going to be a lot more randomization in dungeons and available quests and events this time around which should make replays a lot more entertaining and varied. This is definitely a good thing as the random elements of the Diablo series strike me as one of its appeals but not one that has been sufficiently explored considering its Rogue-like roots. Of the two classes shown in the preview the Barbarian looks to be very consistent with the design of the Barbarian class from Diablo 2 while the witchdoctor looks like he was put together to replace the Necromancer. The mini-boss they showed in the trailer is fuckin’ huge! This gives me hope that the bosses featured in Diablo 3 will be a lot more epic than those of Diablo 2 – I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was amazingly unimpressed by The Lord of Terror himself. There were some other nifty things like destructible environments and both sexes available for every class as well but those seem like minor bullet points to me.

“Making undead corpses dead corpses.”

Beyond the videos I found the content on the new site to be quite awesome. The descriptions of the few released classes, monsters, and locations are all done in character with the renowned scholar Abd al-Hazir telling us of his research into these various topics. Pretty good reads and I loved the quip about the skeletons hiding in barrels for hundreds of years. Good stuff and I can’t wait to read more.

We’ve also got Deckard Cain’s journal. Anyone who played either of the previous two games should remember Cain and it appears as if he has a major role to play in Diablo 3 as well, maybe even larger than in previous games if some of the hints I’ve read are to be believed. Anyway, Cain’s journal sums up the plots of the first two games from his perspective, complete with his delightful Sean Connery-esque accented voiceovers and even all of the cut scenes from Diablo 2 thrown in as well. This stuff is a must for Diablo fans to dig through!

All of these screenshots are Blizzard’s and not mine. Of course, if they were mine this post would be much, much more interesting.

Now Under Construction!

Last night was interesting. I fully intended to play a little GTA4 which I have been neglecting hardcore lately for Age of Conan. I’d decided I’d go ahead and play a couple of hours of AoC first before moving on to GTA4 to finish off my tiny amount of free time for the night. This was an incredibly stupid decision as MMOs are infamously addicting and GTA4 is a game in which I’m not heavily invested yet and the inevitable happened. Yep, I ended up playing AoC all night.

Well, I’m not sure “playing” is the right word as I didn’t do all that much of that. I ran through the “Outflow Tunnels” instance solo once to finish up a quest there and I ended up leveling while turning it in. A few guild members talked casually on about the game on our Ventrilo server which eventually lead to an interesting discovery about the fact that map waypoint data could be copied to other machines/accounts which means that once someone had mapped out all of the crafting resource locations (which are static!) that file could be shared and the hard work wouldn’t have to be duplicated.

“Plumbing, Hyborian style”

So, I get these resource waypoint files installed myself and wander out to a resource area to start training my gathering professions which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while now but had put off for various reasons. Sure enough my zone map is littered with waypoints and I start gathering away. This should save me tons of time!

Later conversation on the Ventrilo server shifted to the subject of our guild city. My guild had already claimed a guild city location yet hadn’t actually built anything there due to the massive funds involved. We’re a casual guild and most of us are still in our late 30s or lower. It turns out the architect supplies needed to build our Keep (which is sort of the foundation in the build process) require about 2 gold pieces which is a hefty sum for anyone at these levels. A few days earlier one member had suggested that we make everyone level 35 and over donate 10 silver which, by his estimation, would get us the gold we needed no problem. The guild leader instantly decided that this was, in fact, a great idea and started telling people left and right to throw some silver into the guild bank. With no records or logging of any kind I was hesitant to drop a third of my money without some kind of guarantee it would be used properly or that I wouldn’t be accused of never submitting it. Eventually I gave in and several others donated their silver as well. So the majority of the members on the Ventrilo server reach the conclusion that our Keep should go up tonight with several of them pledging additional funds to make it happen. Nice – I’d get to see it go up!

Soon a few guild members, more than we’d ever assembled in one place before to my knowledge, met at our guild city location (which just so happened to be in the same zone I was gathering resources in) to witness the event. We all casually chatted, joked around, PVP’d with each other a bit, and soon our keep was on its way up.

“What do the hardend, blood-splattered warriors of Hyboria do when they get together? Why dance of course!”

Even in a video game it’s pretty surreal watching a massive man-made structure just raise out of the ground as it did. Definitely cool.

“Raising the roof, yo.”

So now we have our very own Guild Hall!

“Time for a house inspection…”

Of course, like almost everything else in Age of Conan, it was buggy and/or unrefined as hell. You couldn’t use any of the chairs or other decorations in the building apparently. The design of the structure itself seemed less than ideal for defense – it didn’t take much imagination to realize that glitch jumping off the towers onto the ledge above the opening in the hall’s ceiling produced a potentially useful defensive position yet by the design of the building that obviously wasn’t the designers’ intent. There were numerous odd collision issues, particularly with climbing the stairs of the towers. The whole thing was targetable and with being a massive structure fighting in and around it seemed to produce a lot of difficulty with click targeting never mind the ugliness of having the whole structure highlight on mouseover and your tooltip constantly up. To make matters worse any errant clicks while you were in or around the Keep often produced a popup box showing information about upgrading it to the next tier. Highly, highly annoying.

“Death from above!?”

Still, it was kind of nifty I suppose. I’ll withhold judgment on it until we’re much further a long in the game but so far I don’t feel that AoC’s take on guild structures completely delivers on the player owned structure concepts of some of the more open ended games such as Ultima Online or Eve Online though the PVP orientated “battle keep” guild cities of the end game hopefully address some of those concerns. I’ll continue on with that whole discussion in a later post though.

Totem of Splurgin’

The new MMORPG “Age of Conan” was just released a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been playing it heavily in my quest to find my ultimate dream MMO. While this clearly isn’t that game it is pretty cool and I like the Conan mythos quite a lot anyway so for now it is pretty entertaining. More on the broader subject of AoC in future posts I’m sure.

One interesting thing about Age of Conan is that there are several exclusive items that can only be acquired by dropping down some extra cash. It isn’t as crazy as some of these newer Asian MMOs where in game items can be bought left and right with real money but it isn’t necessarily too far gone either. There are a couple of items that come with the Collector’s Edition of the game, there were a couple preorder items, and then there is this one: “The Totem of Origins” which comes with the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine.

“What? People still read these things?”

Well, I’ve got to admit that I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole “pay for advancement/items” thing and really the whole issue of “microtransactions” in gaming period. Despite being somewhat against them in general I’m hypocritical as can be – I’m a total whore for these kinds of things. If I’m really into a game throwing out a few bucks here and a few bucks there for a rare item or ability doesn’t seem unreasonable at all to me and God knows I’m “really into” most of the MMOs I play even if only for a very short time. I guess as I’ve gotten older and my time is more at a premium I’d rather drop the cash than to spend countless hours grinding away most of the time. Combining my limited time and anti-grinding mentality with my love of collecting, and my obsession with MMO games is a recipe for fucking critical levels of impulse buying.

Anywho, I broke down and spent way too much time (and probably gas) trying to track down this latest issue of PC Gamer and finally found it last weekend. I entered my code and claimed my Totem of Origins yesterday and tried it out for the first time this morning. Pretty sweet item!

Here’s the lowdown: In AoC you have one “teleport” or “recall” type ability that, as exactly like World of Warcraft, lets you teleport to a single “bound” location (of which there is a limited, static selection across the world) once an hour. It is a pretty limited ability but it does save you a bit of time traveling on occasion and god knows you’ll be doing a lot of traveling all over the place while questing in AoC which is even more tedious than in most other newer MMORPGs due to all of the zone and instance loading screens you’ll encounter.

“Skinny lewtz!”

The Totem of Origins is essentially an item that casts that same ability, permanently bound to your faction’s capital city, useable once every 24 hours. This means you’ll almost never have to worry about binding to that particular city and, being on a different timer, it allows you to potentially use the two different abilities to travel between 2 places very quickly if needed. Pretty cool, especially since the 3 capital cities are regional hubs in the game and you will be traveling to/through them often. The item’s cooldown isn’t a huge bummer for me because with the hour cooldown on the other ability I typically only recall once or twice per session of which I usually only have one a day. If anything I’d actually say the biggest disadvantage of the item is having to keep it on you when inventory space is such a limited commodity in this game.

“Waiting for the “happy ending”…”

Is it useful? I think it might be, sure. Is it game breakingly powerful or otherwise unbalancing? Nah, definitely not. Is it worth the 6 or 7 bucks at the newsstand? That is the tricky one. On one hand, virtual item buying ethics aside, you’re paying god knows how much equivalent in game cash (the game hasn’t been out enough for those exchange rates to stabilize) for one item of limited use. On the other this is supposedly going to be a limited, fairly rare item. Once everyone who wants one snatches up these magazines the people who passed it up or came to the game later have no chance in getting it and that is what really seals the deal for me. Items are usually another way of customizing your character and having an attachment to your in-game avatar is very hard to put a price on indeed.