The new release trailer came out right after the Pax interview this morning and It’s great. If you played in the beta, you can see how some of the skill graphics have changed for the better. Needless to say, I’m pretty stoked and will be counting the days–likely taking off work the 21st for good measure.
There are rumors of a simultaneous Mac/PC release but this has yet to be confirmed.
Ok, that’s enough Torchlight fanboism for awhile.
11 AM central time! Too good! And yes, it will be worth the (relatively short) wait…
Remember– we’re going to try to do a ELITE HARDCORE BLIND run to start so if you want to join up, stay out of the game, and yes, there has been some spoilage by the beta for a few of us, but we will be taken down just the same… believe me.
This is a short and very sweet talk about stories in games by the developer of Avadon the Black Fortres– essentially how this guy and his team make sort of crappy looking games with good stories and it’s the stories that build fan affinity and bring in more cash. I love how he readily admits his engines and graphics are not even in the realm of modern all the while being very comfortable in his niche. His slight digs on Mass Effect and Diablo 3 are essential listening and would probably bring out the “fuck that loser” from the D3 development team if they weren’t so busy lighting cigars with your money. The questions at the end are also awesome “You sell a game for money and that’s it?”
This post is for matt as scenes from this video-game should be old hat for him.
Not that this happens often, but there has been some actual pen and paper RPG that has dropped this year: couple Dresden Files games and one abortive session of Bulldogs! with tabletop forge using Google Hangouts. While the session was taking the piss due to it being just character creation, the tool proved to be pretty great and now they have a kickstarter (like everyone else) to make it better and better. I threw 35$ in because even that one night was worth it.
Secondly, alright! finally something good coming out of the old school D&D craze. This was released in 2011 as a boxed set. That’s right, a BOXED SET. Champions!
And speaking of D&D, that died the day 4th edition came out because the designers couldn’t stop for more than 10 minutes from playing WOW, 5th edition (the community edition) is still in the works and it looks um…yeah….they’re still playing WOW.
It’s sad when you go out and buy a game the first day it’s out, then just run out of time on the Xbox to get anywhere at all on it before it’s My Little Pony and fucking Calliou all over the place. Owning a M-17 game with kids around is the drizzlin’ shits, and Dark Souls has been added to the list of games like Crackdown 2 and Red Dead Redemption that I haven’t finished SPECIFICALLY because I cannot play with the kids even conscious in the house (they can hear the big death and cursing and I’ll turn around and both of them will be standing there while I’m shooting up a saloon or slapping some zombies around).
So the fact that this is coming out on Steam means I will actually get a chance to get my ass kicked by it over and over… and that’s a good thing. Now if I could only think of an excuse to why I haven’t finished GODHAND…
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:
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.