Matthew on 7/8/2008 at 19:11
I'm sorry, but without basically foregoing your character's strengths some parts of DII were damn near impossible; taking a Spearazon up against Mephisto springs to mind.
june gloom on 7/8/2008 at 19:12
Strong multiplayer focus is fine. Just don't, you know, forget about the people who prefer to play by themselves!
Also lololol "it was easy even on hard u prolly just suk" lolololol
ZymeAddict on 7/8/2008 at 21:52
Damn, people on Kotaku are such a bunch of stupid fucking lemmings. :rolleyes:
Typical quote: "Good! I'm not a
Diablo fan, and I like the new direction. If you don't like it, you're just a fucking goth who has no taste and only likes brown and grey. Blizzard can do know wrong! All hail Blizzard!"
BlackCapedManX on 8/8/2008 at 00:14
My problem with the art direction in DIII is that we already have World of Warcraft. What we don't have is a next-gen Diablo 1. Real quick, any of you who own an original copy of the game, go grab the manual. Look at the art. Does that evoke fucking rainbows in your mind? I've yet to find another game that was so evocatively atmospheric and, yes, dark. Diablo was swords and demons, there was no randomly glowing (unless it was, you know, fire... or lava) stuff, no wispy angel wings, it was grit, dirt, stone, metal, probably some blood too.
Goth? Sure, but goth like the architecture movement back in the medieval era, not goth like "oh woe is wearing too much makeup and 30 pounds of chains, ie me." I haven't seen too many games pull that off quite as well as D1 did, and sue me if I'm presumptuous, but I always thought it was supposed to be more horror than fantasy? I feel like that's how old Blizzard thought, look at the old Starcraft cut scenes, the demonic magic and corruption that pervaded through Warcraft I/II. Diablo 2 came out and it was a like any other hack and slash fantasy game with what could benignly be called "monsters" rather than "sanity-testing demon spawn." The Death Knights were skeletons with armor that did what? Oh yeah, they glowed.
It really concerns me that the person they interviewed keeps insisting that they want to be unique and unlike all the other "photo-realistic" games out there. Because it doesn't look unique to me. It looks like Gauntlet: Legends. I mean, higher quality, but similar aesthetic. It's gone from really powerfully gritty to generic fantasy. And, I mean, maybe I'm way off the ball here, but if I had to guess it's because of how astoundingly popular WoW is, and how that aesthetic seems to be really approachable for people. Okay, money, I understand. But all the people who bought WoW, have already bought WoW! The 54 thousand (of the vocal at any rate) fans of something, you know, interesting, would probably prefer Blizzard try something else. Or they wouldn't have signed the petition, as would be my guess. Personally, I haven't signed the petition, because I don't have any faith that Blizzard is going to head in a direction I find engaging, so I'm not going to even assume that if they did listen to the people who used to like them that they'd even get it right anyway.
catbarf on 8/8/2008 at 01:19
Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX
...any of you who own an original copy of the game, go grab the manual. Look at the art. Does that evoke fucking rainbows in your mind?
A perfect summation.
Are they trying to get a T rating? Perhaps they're afraid that if it is too dark, it'll be rated M and they'll lose a potential market?
MSX on 8/8/2008 at 01:21
I really, really want to like diablo 3. I do. I was one of those teens to played the crap out of diablo 1 (you know before the ESRB got all stick up their collective asses about games retailers ignoring them). So I got on the bandwagon for the Diablo2 beta.
I wrote volumes of feedback on how they fucked up game play (from the first area I could tell full well I would not like the game), was ignored, and based upon D2's success and popularity I was wrong. However that doesn't mean everything was roses and I played it anyway dancing in the fields of blablabla. At best a friend convinced me to try it after the expansion pack came out and we played co-op to the desert part and I had to tell him I hated it and could not continue.
I very much disliked D2. I can take rainbows and "wow gayness" if theres no sprint/jump crap and has a greater amount of difficulty that makes for strategy. I mean why be scared at all if you can blast away from mobs at a million miles an hour. Sure it may not be realistic or be considered 'crappy control' but it gives for spine tingly moments (where your moments from the exit with monsters that will kill you on your heels). That and stupid skill trees. Tech trees are fine, but skill tress are dumb.
Oh and all the outdoor stuff is fine from an visual standpoint, but the whole blue coloured brick is really stupid.
BlackCapedManX on 8/8/2008 at 02:40
I'm glad that there are other people in existance who agree with me that D2 is a mere shadow of D1 in terms of gameplay. Everything got "balanced" and sped up and flashy-ed. Castrated, I think comes to mind. In D1 you lived in darkness, drudged along under the weight of 85 lbs of armor (and all that gold and potions), and regardless of class you could churn your way through hordes of enemies with a good mana shield, rapid chain lightning, and a belt of mana potions (okay, so probably not warriors, dumb brutish heathens anyway.) But the fact that all of the characters shared the same magic and some were just better made a lot more sense, in D2 everyone essentially got a full suite of "magic" (it costs mana and kills enemies, I don't care if it isn't called a "spell" or doesn't have an element, it's just as much magic as fireball) that they are perfectly able to use. There was no struggling to make a tele-kill warrior, or an infintely healthy (read: mana-sheilded) sorceror with 25 vitality, or even the raw challenge of naked maging (raw, get it? haha... yeah.) D1 played like a horror game and felt like one, D2 is an action game. Maybe I'm way out on a limb but I want Blizzard to grow up and make a game where demons jump out of the shadows at me again, none of this fucking "but it's not fun if you can't see them" crap, don the Veil of Steel and march into darkness!
[edit] Somewhere it was quoted that the (now gone) art director wanted to make D3 look like a painting. If he looked at impressionism when he thought of "painting" I would buy the shit out of this game regardless of any other factor. I'd probably buy it two or three times if they could make it look like an impressionist work. Instead he looked at Thomas Kinkade, who any self respecting artist would kill themselves over before trying to emulate. I think that might be the root of the problem. D3 reminds me of Kinkade, even if it wasn't decaying gothic like D1, I could respect a game that tries to resemble good art. D3 does not appear to be doing that.
Maddermadcat on 8/8/2008 at 07:13
I'm surprised to see so many on here sharing my opinion. Most of the people I know think it looks great, probably due to too much exposure to WoW.
Sulphur on 15/8/2008 at 11:17
I didn't think Diablo II was anything hot either. The original got me well and good; Diablo II, despite its additions and fixes and other mishmash and general good (or bad) intentions, was just more of the same. It was like, the moment the game opened out onto that first act, my mind said 'oh, skippit'.
So I kinda did. Kinda, because one of my friends revelled in child-like glee whenever he got to show me a game's ending, regardless of whether I'd finished it or not. So, well. Good ending. I didn't mind the cinematics.
Diablo 3 looks like a good change of pace. I'm glad they're doing something new, because if I wanted something dark and gothic, I'd play Diablo I again. Or Abuse (crack.com, you guys rock! Huh? What do you mean, I'm 12 years late?).
