Bombin' the A.M. With Scoops and the Wolf: 08/11/2014

Cool

Wasn't able to make it on time to watch the live stream, so this is great! Thanks ya'll!

noice

350 hours on Diablo, which it nothing by Diablo standards. I'm not buying it for PS4 because my progress doesnt carry over, which to me would be a no brainer. It's also costing them a sale, becaus I would LOVE to play on my PS4.

IS Diablo III really that serious? My Demon Hunter and knight companion are always quipping.

Why not give hitbox.tv a try? Almost no delay.

Yea, it's definitely the atmosphere and story of Diablo III that kept me from returning to it. There was just waaay too much dialogue; every line the demons spoke robbed them of their mystique and power.

The game just didn't have the dread and foreboding tension that made Diablo II so great.

Yay, Google can tongue Alex's ass!

I want to try it, but I would need an actual capture rig. The fact that the PS4 has native streaming via Twitch and Ustream makes them the easy/cheap choice for the time being. The day one of my broadcasts gets muted, however, is the day I shell out and ship out.

I think Diablo's lore is pretty neat :(

It's just that D3's story kinda sucks. One or two bad ass cutscenes but nothing compared to the awesomeness of Diablo 2.

Really struggling to recall anything about D2s story that could be considered much better though.

Wait, Diablo games have stories?

Well to each their own I suppose.

I don't think it's some super engaging drama or anything. More of a bad ass popcorn flick.

I think the general narrative path of D2, following in the footsteps of the Wanderer across the world, always one step behind with state-of-the-art cinematics was pretty incredible. The scenes with Tyrael in Tal Rasha's Tomb, Diablo finally being revealed by disgustingly bursting out of the the dude's body and walking across a bridge of bones with the freaky looking Mephisto and his ghastly voice. The cliff hanger ending with Baal tricking Marius into giving him his soul stone which leads into the expansion. The epic scene with Tyrael muttering words to himself and tossing his sword into the Worldstone.

It was decent stuff alongside the super addictive gameplay. Then Diablo 3 came along, killed off Deckard Cain, added this annoying girl, turned the unfathomably awesome Tyrael into a whiny, emo weakling human, made Imperious (the Angel of Valor) into a huge asshole, has Diablo return via the annoying, pointless girl Leah, makes Diablo look weird and kind of feminine (my theory is that his form is based on the vessel he came from, this time a young girl) and sound like a whiny emo demon for the last boss.

Also, I've read two of the novels. One takes place leading up to Diablo 3 and the other leading up to the Diablo 3 expansion. Both were meh and don't really add anything to the game experience but whatever. It gave me something to do in the week or two leading up to the releases.

For Diablo 2 I enjoyed the story stuff a bit, as in I didn't mind playing through the game over and over like you do with new characters, and was thoroughly addicted to the gameplay. Diablo 3 on the other hand has a lame story with lame characters so not any fun to re-do it on new characters, and the gameplay for the initial release was lackluster but has been vastly improved with the recent expansion/patch.

well once you deck yourself out. Coming out of the campaign I can't really clear T2 rifts in under an hour, let alone try a T6. So it's that climb that can be hard.

I just now realized there was an audio-only version of this when Patrick mentioned it at the start of the video. I always just watched the video in a separate tab haha. Yep, I feel dumb.

I definitely don't think D3s story is great but I dunno, there was something likable about it. Just kinda feel that way about every Blizzard story.

Cause they're all the same.

It looks like CBSi might have Lync infrastructure. If they do, It might work a out better than Skype. It's got recording to local disk and screen sharing. I honestly don't know if it's good for this kind of thing, but it's probably worth a shot.

1. Diablo 3's story was like the juvenile, carnival ride version of Diablo 2's story. What with its goofy in-engine cutscenes (where your character just kind of stands there while people get murdered and betrayed in the room in front of them), bad guys constantly showing up to taunt you like Saturday-morning cartoon villains, and a "you must literally save the entire universe yourself" plot that made it feel like the only events that were happening in the whole world were waiting to happen until you showed up.

It deals with a lot of the same ideas and themes as Diablo 1 and 2, but those games are so much more restrained, creepy, and mysterious that they seem downright classy next to Diablo 3. (It's still a really good game though.)

2. When it comes to Twitch, the solution to their terrible new policies isn't to use an appeal button or spend hours making highlight reels or take special measures to avoid ever hearing music in your games. It's to stop using Twitch. They're not a good service anymore.

With Diablo and Starcraft I can't help but feel like Blizzard could afford better writers with the amount of time and money they spend on their games. Eh, Diablo 3 was still enjoyable, but yeah, I sort of skipped everything story-based after a while.

I tried really hard, for quite a long time, to convince myself that the story in Diablo 3 was actually well written and added to the mythology in a positive way, but then I stopped drinking. I honestly don't think there's much creative talent, writing wise, left at Blizzard. So much of their lore is by the numbers fantasy fare (or sci-fi) these days that its almost impossible not to be able to predict exactly where the story for one of their games is going as soon as you get even the most vague synopsis. Diablo 2's story was fantastic because it wasn't overblown and it was dark, emotional and personal. The characters were fantastic, the writing didn't come off as cheesy (which so much of D3's dialogue was) and it oozed a sense of mystery and intrigue.

Instead of following in that vein, Blizzard decided to just slap a typical good vs evil "the whole universe is in peril and you're the only one who can stop it" fantasy struggle onto the franchise and call it good. There's no mystery to D3, no personal struggle like with Marius, most of the characters were one dimensional and it was just boring. Nothing about the actual game felt sinister either: I remember seeing the reveal of the Black Soulstone trailer before D3's release and thinking "This is great, this is Diablo", but then once I was actually playing the game I didn't feel it portrayed that same tone or feel at all. Maybe I'm just jaded because I'm looking a this whole thing while wearing giant ass rose tinted glasses but I honestly don't think Blizzard cares much about their stories anymore. They spend a lot of time polishing game play, and their games do play fantastically, but everything else is so generic and that is so disappointing coming from one of my favorite studios of all time.

Hahaha great opening Alex:"Fucking google!!"

Great show once again!

Thus started The Great Google Revolt of Fourteen.

Christ, that Yerli interview just sounded so gross. All that talk of "loyalty" to the company through dire financial circumstances... just fucking tone-deaf and creepy. Exactly the type of clubhouse mentality you never want in someone who holds your livelihood in their hands.

Powerbombcast later this week? I'm honestly looking forward to that more than Summer Slam.

@alex@patrickklepek I'm not sure if either of you have played the original Diablo, but I think that's still a great game, probably much in part because of it's smaller scope. I actually really liked the story in that one, focusing pretty much entirely on the little town of Tristram and the dungeons below. The narrative was sparse but effective, and the bosses felt like they made sense within the story. While not going as far as the Souls games in telling stories within item descriptions, I think the first Diablo still falls pretty close to that style, rather than the ridiculousness of Diablo II and 3, where you travelled across the world and somehow all the bosses from the first game were reused (in both games!). I played through Diablo I without really getting into the loot aspect, it felt much more like the older CRPG's where you stuck with the same weapon throughout a large portion of the game.

I couldn't get into Diablo II and III, though I did finish the second game in co-op, whereas I gave up in Diablo III's Act II as I just couldn't stand it anymore.

On the whole content ID thing, one reason for false positives could be that so many use royalty free loops from Garage Band etc. these days (if I recall correctly, parts of the Bastion soundtrack do that, as well as some pretty popular artists here in Sweden), as well as preset sounds on synthesizers/VST's, or using the same sets of TR-909 samples. Even if the samples/loops themselves are royalty free, I'm sure if a song that gets added into that database uses them, they may trigger for all other songs that also use them regardless of if those songs permit people to play that music freely.

Holy shit, that Cevat Yerli dude is such a fucking 1 percenter it's ridiculous. Is he the same dude who was bragging on Twitter about how many crunch dinners the staffers of Ryse had to have?