I’ve had some fun with D3 with two characters just over level 10, but it has problems, problems that might be OK if it were an MMO and I liked MMO’s. It’s not an MMO and the problems with latency, the rubberbanding and error 33, patching errors are just ridiculous, especially in (drum roll) single player. Your mileage varies I’m sure but to put it bluntly, D3 is not a very good single player game. It’s linear, it’s pretty boring so far except for the boss fights and seeing all the stuff in the environment you can blow up. This is par for the course with the Diablo series: they are not that great single player games– the Zyel mod was created specifically to give players that wanted a good single player experience a better one than could be gotten off vanilla Diablo 2. And, please, go back and try to play Diablo 1 without falling asleep in your chair.
Multiplayer– that’s where the game shines and while it’s been fun it’s been marred, of course, by lag– maybe acceptable in this early stage if the two core things people want out of the game are fulfilled: fun combat and fun item management. The former is OK. I’m still on the fence about it. The concept I want to talk around with D3 is the idea of RELATIVE fun. On it’s own, D3 is good, it’s not great, but when you put it up against Torchlight 2 it falls completely flat.
I reiterate some of my earlier posts– once you play Torchlight 2, it’s really tough to go back to Diablo 3’s slow, ponderous gameplay. It feels like going from fast paced hyper Gauntlet madness with craziness at every turn in Torchlight 2 to slow, static and, while visually appealing, fairly stagnant fighting in Diablo 3. The second point of fun, item management, is a fucking chore in D3. While I’m still low level, drops are shit and from what I’ve read and heard– it doesn’t get much better. The items so far are bland and overall the crafting really feels like a combination of Hellgate London and Titan Quest with all the breaking apart of items into more crap and crafting into….yay more of the same crap you picked up! Basically you take all your blue items and yellows you do not want, throw away the white items (they are totally useless in the game–and the grey items? what in the flying fuck are they doing in the game?), break the rest of them apart because they don’t fit your character and then take the sub items ( like subtle essence) to create some type of item with a reroll on the effects— in turn this item may not work out for your character so you break the produced item apart and when you have enough sub items again, you get another reroll which may or may not work out for you. There’s no way to influence the reroll (like a cube lock for example) There’s no path of crafting other than this that I’ve seen (sockets and jewels– though no runes or rune words). From what I’ve seen so far, it’s quite tedious. I made 11 or so belts and they all had almost exactly the same powers– nothing special, nothing that gives your character access to anything outside of his set of attacks (like a summon power for a barbarian).
Act 1? Nothing compared to D2’s act 1. It’s very short– it’s got one big boss at the end and that’s it (the Butcher). The fight is boring.
So now I sit waiting for a patch that looks like it’s going to take an hour to download and I’m thinking:
1979. I’d already been exposed to the cultural virus that is Star Wars and had seen Battle of the Planets and Starship Yamato and Far Out Space Nuts– but nothing could prepare a young person of the 70’s for the dribble if urine from the void that is JASON OF STAR COMMAND. Part of the financial drive to make kids shows with real people rather than the far to expensive cartoons of earlier decades (ala Kroft Supershow and it’s ilk), JASON OF STAR COMMAND starts with the worst robot you’ve ever seen before and then digresses into a rather complex plot about body doubles and for an 8 year old, abject confusion. Since this was a plotline that should have NOT been attempted before any character development had taken place so we (the 8 year old audience) could actually tell the evil doubles before the characters in the show could rather than just wondering what the heck is going on and hoping some stuff blows up (like the Wiki robot or, best yet, the clothes off Susan O’Hanlon).
Well, this fucking show is on Netflix now and if I could I would force you to watch it to share that little piece of my childhood that died drowning in astral urine and to know for certain when I talk about failed MOO clones or the people complaining about the Mass Effect ending and deem them all sorts of sprays of SPACE PISS, I’m channeling JASON OF STAR COMMAND into your open mouth.
And speaking of the 70’s, look at this holy shit piece of plastic for the rich kids:
Watch me die THRICE, see the explosions, see the no lag, see the ability to add skill points, see the ability to dodge enemy attacks!
Dare I say it: Torchlight 2 beta > Diablo 3 beta. This is not to say that these are not great games– they are both amazing, but judging from the beta, TL2 was just a better experience. Here’s why:
1) It’s a better game. It’s more fun to play, especially if you’ve played a lot of Diablo 2.
2) It’s more respectful of your time. There’s very little B.S. story stuff. It gets right to the kill, loot, item manage, kill cycle that is the core of the game.
3) No lag for no good reason -sure other players will lag but that’s a normal reason for lag. If you’re playing against someone in the BFE of the internet, BFE lag is what you’re going to get. What you won’t get is client side prediction coupled with an overburdened server.
4) Hit lag – when a monster attacks and you are nowhere near that monster you do not get hit. In Diablo, the client side prediction means you will get hit anyway. This takes a huge amount of the tactical play from the game.
5) You can play at the highest difficulty right out of the gate without slogging through the game. This is the main reason why the TL2 beta is better.
This isn’t to compare the final versions of each game–I haven’t played either. Diablo 3 was a beta I felt I +had+ to play, but TL2 I cannot WAIT to play every time I get the chance to.
As I’ve said before, Diablo 3 will be great to run through once on normal and dabble in Nightmare a bit, probably a full month of play and you will get your money out of it. For the long haul, the game you will be playing in a year is going to be Torchlight 2.
YEAAAAHHHHHHHH. Got in an hour or so on Elite Hardcore as the Engineer with a couple random guys and died at level 7 in a huge mosh of undead. Great stuff– and I am pleased to report that even in multiplayer games YOU CAN DODGE ENEMY ATTACKS. For gaming value, even from what little I’ve seen so far, TL2 is pure gold 20$ for this? It’s crazy.
Endless Space. Community Driven 4x space game by some French peoples. When you play, in the distance you can hear the cowes lowing out MOO. Shot out onto the internets via Steam in alpha format if you pre-order the game, and while it is definitely an ALPHA, the game and interface shows a great deal of promise for those of use that feel we have been urinated upon from a great height by games like Sword of the Stars and Galactic Civ.
High points:
Combat is tight as Seven of Nine’s uniform and will work for both single player AND multiplayer
The interface is Jeisa Chiminazzo. Extremely impressive both functionally and visually.
Ship design is easy.
BauriceMastard did a video of some play where he and I were babbling about it and of course it’s worth a listen– all fourty three minutes and twenty six seconds of it.
With the Magic: the Gathering resurgence, you’d think some of the others would rear their heads as well to get some attention and here we are with a big one: Netrunner.
While a great game from back in the day it was too was fun to play with just a starter deck– so fun that no one bought any more cards and the game didn’t have a long lifespan, or any lifespan I can remember. There were towers of Netrunner cards along with the MTG land cards at Gencon one year, and that was sad because there’s nothing like Land in the netrunner card sheets. Announced today, Fantasy Flight has gone ahead and removed the CCG part of the equation with the new edition, in the Living Card game format, branded to their “Android” universe. Looks like a must buy if you like that genre– I for one loved the old Netrunner, but never got in more than 20-30 games, which was still at great deal for an 8$ starter deck.
Diablo 3 is just shy of a week away from release. Following this game for so long, many of us have seen from the periphery a lot of the design paths that didn’t make it into the game (especially Maurice!Bastard who played a demo at some Warcraft tournament eons ago and actually read the website from time to time). Here’s a list and why I think each change was made. There is probably an exhaustive list of this somewhere.
Health Potions in addition to the health globes: Originally there were no health potions, just the health drops in the form of the big red globes. Now there are health potions and globes. Why: I think they just couldn’t work this one out with the testers and the game became too dangerous without the player’s ability to heal whenever they wanted. During the beta, any time I died it was because I was trapped by one mob and being shot at by another. I don’t think this matters, but we may see the health globes disappear in the final…
No basic weapon attacks: This one is really odd. You always attack using your skills, rarely the weapon you have. If you equip a bow and are not a character that has archer skills, you will never see an arrow fly from your hands. Yet the weapon will add to your DPS and any other effects. It’s very strange. Why: this has got to be the real money auction house. There’s no other explaination possible. Blizzard wants users to be able to use (and that means buy from them or other users where they get a cut) as many weapons in the game as possible so where it seems like there was a constraint on weapons for characters to make them unique, this is gone.
No weapon animation for skills: This ties into he point above and the monk is the most noticeable character for this. When you have a weapon and your character uses a skill (such as any attack) the weapon disappears. If you are carrying a bow and you want to punch someone as the monk, the bow disappears until the skill animation is over. Why: Again, this looks like the real money auction house. They want all characters to buy all items in the game and since characters can use any weapon (but only attack with skills), they would have to animate all skills with all weapons for all characters. That’s easily done if you started designing the character animation that way like pretty much all the other ARPG’s I’ve played– but if you have to go back and redo all the animation after someone said “hey we need a revenue stream here with the weapons” it will take forever and a day.
Character animations aren’t that great compared to the monsters: This is one that has not changed and probably should have. The monsters look incredible– just awesome incarnate. The characters are sadly, just OK– nothing really special at all and their run animations are bit loopy across the board. The worst is the witchdoctor (male version) with his shaking palsy and hunch–quite inspiring to make one select him right? Why? locked in because of Armor sets. Totally constrained changing or iterating over the character models at some point during development (far too early from the looks of it).
Characters are the same but you can tell they were originally designed to be different: Baurice!mastard complains about this one quite a bit. The characters are all either close or long range DPS generators and though they look different and have some different types of mana, they are essentially the same across the board. Why? It’s suspected that they were trying to balance out the PVP and wow who gives a shit about that at all? I would say the only character that feels different is the Witch Doctor. If you play the Demon Hunter or the Wizard it really does feel like the same character with different animations for stuff.
After the beta, I’m really on the fence with D3. I played D1 for about a month and then picked it up a couple years later because of various LAN’s that destroyed my dwellings from time to time. I played D2 again for about a month and then picked it back up because of the ZYEL mod and well, yes, played a shitload over the years. Instead of being more like ZYEL with it’s insane monster rushes and mentally unstable level of crafting options, D3 is looking to be another play for a month, play it a bit with friends here and there after but with Torchlight 2 swinging out soon after, it may be completely eclipsed. That said, the D3 gameplay is jewel-like in it’s polish and very very fun. If they had abandoned any ideas around monetizing in game items would it be a better game? Signs point to Yes.
I promised myself to play Warhammer a full ten times before writing a review of the new edition and it happened, the review, which you are reading, and ten games (fourteen actually). Finally after months of waiting, I can spout off about how much I love the current edition. I love it so much I now (shockingly) have three armies for the game. I wanted to get a second so I could play with people that don’t own anything and I got a deal on a third that I simply could not pass up (my main is Beastmen, second Dark Elves, and last Chaos). One could say I am all in on this version, so if this review seems a bit of self-justification that’s because it certainly is, gods damn it. Note, that reviewing a game like Condotierre or King of Tokyo after 10 plays means a few hours of play here and there, reviewing and edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle after fourteen plays means 50+ hours at the table throwing vats worth of dice and probably 30+ more hours teaking an army list or ten, painting and priming and building a rather massive army of toy soldiers (if you can call packs of slavering, rapine goat-men soldiers).
A wave of unpainted goblins assault the partially painted undead and fully painted dwarfs.
To frame this review, I have to relay the shameful nerd path I have traveled in the hobby. It’s not very different than many people who were closeted nerds in their youth during the nerd-harsh 80’s–but I have to say I’ve always played GW’s big games rather casually and vastly preferred the skirmish games to the big fuckall table spreads like the current 40K and WFB. I started playing WFB just after junior highschool, around the same time Warhammer 40K first edition came out. After saving for and buying the rather expensive 3rd edition hardcover, I dabbled in the game and got a few of the miniature box sets (rudlugs armored orcs, etc) that were around at the time, but never really played a ton because, quite simply, there was no way to afford enough lead to put out a decent sized army like the pretty pictures in the book. Even in this early time, some of GW’s first plastics had come out, and while a few of the sculpts were OK, they didn’t stand up visually against the lead that was out at the time (this has drastically changed). We did get in a few games, mostly with our old Grenadier D&D miniatures (which had also been used for a battle using the ancient and comparatively rubbish TSR Chainmail/Swords and Spells rules) and a handful of citadel chaos warriors.
While Warhammer Fantasy Battle proper was an unrequited love in High School, both because I was trying to eschew the kids stuff like D&D and gaming altogether (this failed after only a few weeks in 1987 after I found out almost the ENTIRE wrestling team not only had played D&D but wanted to again RIGHT FUCKING NOW!). I didn’t get into the game hardcore until college when the Realm of Chaos supplement books hit the shelves. This introduced a variant of play where you start with a small force of maybe 8-12 fighters and then slowly grew a warband as you fight battles against friends min a narrative campaign, eventually to gain daemon-hood from one of the fickle and capricious chaos gods. We chewed through many weekends (and a lot of class time) grinding through short, decisive skirmish battles in a long campaign where dozens of warbands would be rolled under the dirt and new ones arise. Notably, only one champion made it to the highest “honor” during the campaign. The rest either croaked or became slathering, mindless spawn. Great times, but that’s most of the Warhammer I’ve played, well, until now.
Fourth Edition, the edition rightly-deemed “Herohammer,” really set the bar high for production values and components to help you play. Gone were the big hardcover rulebooks (for a time that is) replaced by a big box with lots of plastic guys and softcover rulebooks, all the templates you need, magic item cards for everything rather than having to dig around in a book for them, and tons and tons of dice. However, even from cursory plays, it was obvious that the rules were really about decking out a hero that can destroy armies all by themselves and started the system down the path of a highly competitive game that people would focus play at tournaments and leagues of one off games. Rather than some scenario concocted with what miniatures you have, or a narrative campaign like Chaos Warbands, two guys get together with armies balanced out by points and fighting it out for the win. This was to be what Warhammer is all about from this point on: single, competitive battles with pre-made armies, usually just a slugathon rather than any type of scenario. Though I played a few dozen times, the game headed in a direction I didn’t want to go (and I still couldn’t afford to put an army on the table really, deciding to eat, however meagerly, instead). Yet 4th was the ‘break out’ edition, and tons of people played and love it. Additional distractions from GW at this time were Epic 40K and Necromunda– along with 3rd edition Blood Bowl, so while I was playing a lot of GW stuff, it wasn’t Warhammer.
I ignored 5th edition (what with Blood Bowl 3rd edition, Necromunda and Mordheim around at the same time, who needed it?). After Mordheim fizzled out (our campaign went from 22 people to 6 or so in less than a month and that wasn’t due to anything but the rules being not too good), and with the release of Warhammer Fantasty Battle 6th edition I started officially! on my beastman army—and I really did want to play the normal, non-skirmish way that all the other dudes played–actually taking the time to put together a big army rather than a bunch of ragged bands of (unpainted) chaos warriors. I picked up the main book and the army book for the Beasts and gave a run at painting on a regular schedule, but just couldn’t keep the momentum of painting and buying figs to get enough to the table. Going from painting a few figs a year to a row of 50+ was quite daunting, especially since I refused to play the game with anything unpainted.
7th edition came so fast due to real life I barely noticed and it seemed only for the hardcore tournament players anyway and really just an update of 6th– and then came 8th in 2010, down from the heights of Nottingham to us gamers, what is, in my humble and rather inexperienced opinion, the best iteration of the game so far with the best production values for books and miniatures I’ve seen out of GW. At a time in life where I have a couple kids, a pretty demanding job and just general “I have responsibilities now” chaos, I knew it would be a tough row to hoe trying to even find time to paint, let alone play a game– but THIS is the edition to set aside severely limited freetime for. The hardback book is nothing short of incredible (and shockingly priced at 80$), with absolutely lavish illustration, photography, graphic design and content. Granted, as a rulebook, it’s a heavy fucker to carry around, but it’s easy to find the pages you need to find via the index– it’s just that well over half the book you will simply not need during any given game as most of the book is not the rules at all, but page upon page of backstory stuff, illustration, and a giant painting showcase. None of this stuff about the book quality and photography would matter if the rules themselves sucked–but they don’t and here’s why: from 7th to 8th the designers made some fundamental changes to the game, some subtle, some drastic, to make the game flat out more fun. Now, 6th edition was fun with getting rid of the herohammer a bit, hell 4th was a great time until people were able to ‘break’ the game a few months in– but 8th blows them all away and while the reasons in the rules are below, the core reason is simply this: they let Jervis Johnson all over it and he made it more fun than it’s ever been.
First: any stuff can kill any other stuff. If GW learned one thing from Rackham’s Confrontation, it’s that it’s important that every model on the table can pose a threat. This is a huge change from earlier editions. Essentially, from 4th edtion on, you had stuff on the table that could not be hurt at all by most other stuff on the table. Picture a bunch of goblins are running around with spears. We all know goblins are terrible in combat, run away a lot and generally get stomped, eviscerated, eaten, boiled, and basically harvested like bilious green wheat. However, goblin players bring a lot of goblins to any dust-up, so many that for every 20 or so you mulch, 40 more are there to poke you or net you and scream insults. In older editions of Warhammer, no matter how many goblins were out there, they were not going to be able to hurt your pimped out dark elf lord on a black dragon– even with the best rolling, they couldn’t touch him. The lord could fly around without a care in the world if the table was filled with just goblins–essentially they became tar pits that he could get stuck in for a period of time murdering them, but they weren’t dangerous to him or his gods damn dragon at all. In 8th edition, it’s the dark elf lord that’s afraid of the masses of goblins. If he doesn’t position and plan right, he has a good chance of getting swarmed and trampled by little green hobnails because GW added this simple rule: a 6 always hits and a 6 always wounds. That means no matter how badass you are, you have a 3% chance with every attack of having to take an armour save, no matter how high your weapon skill or toughness. When you are rolling dump-trucks worth of dice, as goblin units are wont to do, that 3% happens a LOT. Even with a 2+ armor save and a ward save of some kind, death can come quick to the heroes.
Second: charging distance is randomized. A huge, simple and most welcome change, one that will be with the game probably forever after. Charges are now 2D6+movement. So dwarves with their short little leggys can charge minimum of 5 inches (their max before was 6) and maximum of 15 inches on boxcars. In older editions, units had a fixed charge range, usually double their movement. This meant that people had to be very precise about when they charged and positioned. This took a long time and it wasn’t very fun. Random charge distance makes things crazy fun. This was the rule change that when I saw it, I had to buy and play the new edition. Along with number three below, while the games may not be shorter, you are spending your time on the fun stuff and not the boring stuff. This is key.
Third: you can measure everything at any time. Another positive thing about randomizing charges is that it allowed the designers to simply let the players measure every single distance they want at any time. Want to see how close your archers have to move to be in range of the pumpwagon? Measure away! Want to check your distances before declaring a charge? Well you better! This just cuts down a lot of the fiddling around with units and positioning stuff and painful guess work. For measurements before 8th edition, I would set up my armies and then measure out the table– memorizing little landmarks like the side of a bush or a shadow on the table and such so that I knew that from X wall to Y scratch in the table it was 6″, etc. This was just not that fun and felt beardy as hell when you are placing dice on the table and not moving them to mark off distances…
Fourth: the poor bloody infantry is king. This is something 40K already had figured out: people like to see big close in dust-ups between big groups of models. Battles are decided by positioning, tactics, magic usage, dicerolling all as part of getting your best infantry units winning combats against your opponents infantry units. Games come down to one or two big blocks of guys hacking at each other and that’s why people want to play, so they made it king and called it a day. Sure heroes are important, but they are so much better in the midst of some crazy combat than fighting alone. Can my 9 minotaurs stomp their way through 60 goblins before being perforated? Can my horde of bestigor sustain the horrific casualties from the initiative 6 black guard to attack back with their slow but powerful great weapons? Because infantry fights in huge units in 8th edition and has massive advantages over any unit that is unranked (such as the dread lord on a black dragon listed above), infantry dominates the battlefield: as it should be since the tactics around infantry positioning, movement and when to charge should be the meat of this type of game. What changed? Hordes (see below), the fact that the second rank can lend a supporting attack to the front rank fighters, even on the charge the fight is in initiative order and finally, the ranks behind the front can step up where there are fallen to continue the fight ( so no more charging units wiping out front ranks of units with no retaliation that turn).
Fifth: Hordes! Hordes are units with 10-model frontage. All this rule allows is another rank to add supporting attacks (so you need a minimum of 30 models to get the most out of a horde formation). Normally the front rank gets their attacks, plus the second rank can lay in a single supporting attack (with the exception of monstrous infantry that get more). With a horde, your unit will get two ranks of supporting attacks. This is a great example of a simple rules change that has massive effects on the game. The Hordes rule particularly combines with the “any stuff can kill any other stuff” above to help make the game a game of infantry fighting and not ‘my guy on the dragon kills everything without a scratch’ fighting. You want to throw your Hydras up against a 40+ goblin horde with spears, the outcome is going to be one stone dead hydra while the infantry unit is still probably viable. Combine an assault by some Dark elf spearmen with the hydra supporting or hitting the flank of the goblins, and you have what the game is all about.
Six (and this is the last one, I promise): Terrain does stuff. Almost every game of Warhammer 8th will have some crazy-ass magical terrain that has an effect on play, sometimes drastic, sometimes not. Phantom towers shoot out bolts of lightning into anything nearby, altars give every unit within range blood rage, and mysterious forests have random effects only discovered when entered by troops. One could say this just adds whimsy and randomness, but it creates a bevy of critical tactical decisions that can be the key to victory. Unlike mob-swarm 40K, unit placement and movement is everything in WFB, so tactics and placement around terrain that benefits or hurts your army is huge. The eleventh game I played had a Dwarf Brewhouse right smack in the middle of the table, giving anyone nearby “Stubborn.” Since I was up against Lizardmen who had a unit that was innately Stubborn, fighting around the dwarf brewhouse nullified that advantage because we all had it.
Games Workshop has had almost three decades to work out the kinks with Warhammer Fantasy Battle and with this ruleset, it shows a change in the ideas behind the game moving away from something akin to controlled, balanced play and far more into the fantasy world of Warhammer with all it’s insanity and things getting sucked into the void at the worst times (for you anyway!). While good tactics, placement and unit counters will win you the day, there is so much randomness in the game , and yet so much focus on having a balanced army, that I can see where it would put people off that are used to older editions. For me, it all adds up to big death and big fun. This is the best big miniature game out there.
