asmo29a

@doobie said:

@jakob187 said:

@Xeirus said:

@Panpipe said:

@paulwade1984 said:

That's not a letter, its a series of lists which read like politician bullshit rhetoric.

I stopped playing d3 about a month ago. Only actions will bring me back, he can take his letter and shove it up his ass.

Why are you so aggressive?

It's a video game.

I also think it's hilarious people played Diablo for 50+ hours yet complain how worthless it is. How many games can you get more than 8 hours of for the same price?

People love to complain.

50+ hours was easily put into the game BEFORE 1.03 patch.

People have been complaining the most AFTER that patch came out.

The overall community has dropped about 60% consistently since that patch was released. I personally haven't launched the game since a couple of days after the patch hit, and I don't plan to launch it again anytime soon.

Maybe once I'm done playing Titan Quest...in a year or so...and even then, I'll probably just launch up Torchlight or possibly even start up another character on Champions of Norrath before I go back to Diablo III.

Hell, I've played more Diablo II recently than Diablo III. At least I have fun on Diablo II.

what is it that make D2 fun and D3 no fun

Maybe the fact that there is way more Hack & Slay in D2 than in D3. While it provided a decent challenge, D2 always kept you blasting away tons of enemies all the time, even on the highest difficulty level, which makes it a really satisfying experience. First time Act 2 Inferno in D3, you see a bee or two and maybe an additional couple of cats, and you have to GTFO. At that point, it becomes more of a waiting and kiting game than anything else.

Add to that the fact that you can only have 4ppl in D3 opposed to fun and frantic 8ppl parties in D2 and that grinding Inferno solo is actually more efficient than coop right now..

And you could have more active skills in D2 as well as a significantly greater variety of viable character builds.

And the loot was more interesting.

I bet I could think of a few more things that were better in D2 if I took the time.

Bottom line: noone I know is playing D3 any more, we're all waiting a few months to see if additional patches will make a difference.

Way too long. I'm interested in this game right now. Next year.. who knows. Probably not PSO2, though.

Great for the guys I guess, hoping for the best, even though I'm rather sceptical. They've said time and again how great it is to be doing what they're doing specifically because they're such a small group of people, and now it's all "we've got to grow so we can do the things we want". I guess I'll see what happens and maybe I'll like it, but I'm.. sceptical. Pretty much everything I like about the site comes down to them being as small a team as they are.

And come on, don't try to assuage people saying GB is going to stay GB, nothing's going to change in this or that department, bla bla bla - this is a huge change which will necessarily have huge implications on pretty much everything. Which seems to be the intent of this deal.

Much of this seems to contradict what they've said and done before (even though they have apparently wanted to do this for a long time, which I also cannot reconcile). And now they're assuaging/patronizing their customers, talking all businesslike - which is something I thought I would be spared on this site - so I find myself being weirdly disappointed. Maybe I just got the wrong impression. I dunno.

The visuals and the music(!) are awesome. The narrator's VO is great.

This does not need to be interactive at all, in fact I think it suffers from it. It would have been okay as a 15-30min machinima, it's not so okay as a thing where you have to walk yourself. And walk the whole way back at that creeping speed if you dared to stray off the beaten path just do discover that, in almost every case, there's nothing there to see.

I'm also no fan of the "plot". There is some clever stuff in there and it's great when a game (or a movie) has deep athmosphere and some story fluff to it that didn't necessarily have to be there. But ~90% of this are made up of atmosphere and fluff, the actual plot is not very substantial and not even very imaginative or interesting. Some parts also got way too artsy and pretentious for my taste.

Different? Definitely. Worthwhile? Not really. And the value proposition of 10$/8€ for sitting 74 minutes in front of your home PC screen just sucks, whatever the content.

I'm from Germany, and I just buy most of my games from the UK, sometimes from Austria. Many of them are easily available on the amazon.de marketplace (and often even cheaper than the german versions) and there's also a decent austrian webstore that delivers about as fast as amazon normal shipping and has okay pricing. Due to EU wide free trade zones or whatever there's usually no problem at all when importing stuff from those countries.

The only real bummer is Steam, because it scans your IP and determines that you can only get "low violence" versions of certain games like Rage, Borderlands, Half Life and whatnot. Some titles, and that is what makes me really upset, you cannot even buy on Steam if you are in Germany - Dead Space 2, for example. Dead Space 1 is readily available on Steam in Germany, but 2 isn't. Always fun to click on a sale advertisement in Steam (most of the time, the advert will even be translated into German) and then get redirected to an empty page because you cannot fucking buy the product. It's digusting.

@ptys said:

I'm surprised the points cost the same worldwide?.. I guess that's pretty cool for lower currency countries. As a dual console owner, always feels like PSN users get the short straws which is unfair. I'm in no rush so I'll wait for the pricing to be concrete before making the purchase, esp. as Sony has a history of making up for it's mistakes.

It's not quite exactly the same, though the difference is small. Where 800 MS Points cost 10$ in the US, 1000 Points cost 12€ in the EU, which means 800 Points cost 9.60€ (~12.21$ US atm). I bet some brilliant marketing research went into that convoluted pricing scheme. Might be different still for other regions and currencies, so it's not really "the same worldwide" at all.

@DeF said:

@asmo29a said:

I just got the Valve Complete Pack. Never played HL2 but I'm completely uninterested because, of course, even in the gift it's the fucking German "low violence" version (which is probably also locked to German language.. fuck that). Probably won't even get anything for that in trade.

It's not language locked (I don't even think there was German voice over in HL2). In the case of HL2, low violenceis not even that big a deal.

Now that's good news, thanks :) I looked for info on the language options of the low violence version, but couldn't find anything. If it's all playable with the original VO, I might actually open the gift and play it.

I just got the Valve Complete Pack. Never played HL2 but I'm completely uninterested because, of course, even in the gift it's the fucking German "low violence" version (which is probably also locked to German language.. fuck that). Probably won't even get anything for that in trade.

@Forum_User said:

@Kookro said:

That wasn't much of a skill calculator...

Seriously, this is shaping up to be WoW: Diablo addition. Blizzard doesn't know how to make a Diablo game and now they're just going to ruin it for the real fans of the series.

Poor Blizzard North, I miss them so much.

Inb4 someone who doesn't know the difference between Blizzard and Blizzard North tries to convince me that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Oh, you mean hoarding points that you get in early levels for later skills since they are generally way more useful? Yeah, that was a great system. (Yes, I know they added the passive bonuses way after launch to try to make it a little more interesting. I don't think it changed things that much in all practicality.)

As much as I love Diablo II, putting one more point in primary damage skill of choice was not a terribly interesting gameplay mechanic. Hard to say if I'll end up finding any glaring issues with the new skill system, but it certainly sounds better than what they had before. In particular, I like that every single skill can be useful at high levels, instead of them simply becoming worthless when you get new ones. There should be a much larger range of viable builds and playstyles. (Note I said viable, not optimal.)

I think there were a whole lot of viable builds in D2, in addition to many that sucked if you didn't know what you were doing, which means you needed to actually think a little. And if you wanted a really good build, you had to read up, crunch some numbers, do some math and combine some tables, which was the fun part for me (as the gameplay itself wasn't that deep).

Seems like they got rid of all that. Which might be a smart thing to do in today's market, but might also mean that this game won't be for me. So far it reads like the WoW skill system, but without talent trees, 6 quickbar slots instead of up to 120, and you only get skills up to lvl 30. Which would be completely ridiculous, in a bad way.

But those runes being the only way of individualising your character and also coming in multiple quality levels will sure be a nice bump for their RL money item shop where they get a cut on every transaction.

@Eaxis: Yeah I like to listen to the various Whiskey Podcasts while playing anything grindy. I'm actually rewatching the magic of the DP Endurance Runs during my own playthroughs :). Chapter 23, almost done..