Diablo 3

[Seppuku]

I don't have Diablo III, but I've got other multiplayer games on Steam, so anybody here is perfectly welcome to add me if they so wish. http://steamcommunity.com/id/seppuku05/

[Omen]

Anybody else on STEAM, play Portal 2?  Both Portals are happy, happy games.
http://store.steampowered.com/

On steam and have portal 2, http://steamcommunity.com/id/omensign/

Dungeon Defenders ( single or multi ) is a fun first person tower defense game, that's also pretty cheap.  I also have borderlands and of course other multiplayer games.

[pingnak]

battle.net: EvilDave#1483
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197996088564

[Seppuku]

I play Dungeon Defenders, it's a pretty sweet game, it's not so much fun playing solo, but when you get a group together with friends it can be pretty fun. However, I've not played in a while, so I'm behind on getting its DLCs. Heck, since getting SW:TOR, I've barely played any other games, which I suspect is what Diablo III players are probably about to face.

If there's enough people here on Steam, I think we could prolly set up a WWGHA Steam group.

[Omen]

If there's enough people here on Steam, I think we could prolly set up a WWGHA Steam group.

That would be fun.

I also run a minecraft server on my home network for friends.  Sometimes I stream through JTV ( justin.tv ) playing both single and multiplayer games.

[Death over Life]

If there's enough people here on Steam, I think we could prolly set up a WWGHA Steam group.

That would be fun.

I also run a minecraft server on my home network for friends.  Sometimes I stream through JTV ( justin.tv ) playing both single and multiplayer games.

I sent friend requests to everybody, but I think I'm having a problem trying to get my profile posted (particularly cause I set it to private lol).

So far 4 people, and concerning me, with the sole exception of Pingnak, Seppuku, Omen, and I do have a similar discography of video games. One day I may need to challenge Omen to Warhammer 40k if my comp doesn't move so slow.

A WWGHA steam group would be awesome imo! I'd definitely join that group.

[jaimehlers]

So, how is Diablo 3?  I've got a guest pass courtesy of my brother, and while I will say the game's interesting so far, I'm not sure I'm willing to pay $60 for it.

[Seppuku]

I've set one up.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/wwgha

I know I've got a couple of Christians on my friend list, but I'm sure they won't notice and if they do, they're not gonna be bothered by it, but it'd probably be taking the piss if I invited them, even if it is a tempting thought. 


Oddly enough, I'm managed to avoid Minecraft, I have a friend who keeps telling me I should play, so far, I've done a good job at ignoring him. 

[edit]

My brother grabbed Diablo III and he's got it running on his MacBook Air, so I might be tempted to bug him for a pass so I can test it on my laptop. I know the MacBook Air has a slightly better Intel GMA than mine, so it might at a stretch.

[Avatar Of Belial]

I've set one up.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/wwgha

Whelp - I'm in!

[pingnak]

I finished the first chapter, and then everything started mobbing and insta-killing me. 

I hated the big, bad, boss butcher dude near the end.  It must've got me ten times in a row, with additional side-trips to repair everything.  I hate #@& boss fights in a game. 

I ended up searching the web for him, and fortunately found someone playing the same character class, otherwise I'd have probably ended the game there.

[Omen]

I killed the butcher, grabbed two yellow items, and the game lagged ( Note: single player ).

Returned, butcher is still dead, yellow items gone... rage.

[pingnak]

I started playing the witch doctor, but the voice was too annoying.  So I switched to the demon hunter, but she's grating on my nerves, too.  They all talk like "I AM BATMAN".

I was dragging that holy roller warrior guy around with me for a bit, but instead of engaging the bad guys, the bad guys just swarm around him and attack me, without exception.  Or instead of engaging anybody, the 'helper' follows me around within ten feet, and won't leave my side, when I'm trying to find a spot to shoot from, and even a split second to do it.  Be a help, go thump on something with that super-special @#$^% sword I put in your retard hand!

Oh, and NOT auto-equipping the health potions?  WTF?  I'm OUT of health, but I have 18 of them in the inventory.  And 'recharge' on health?  A hundred copies of something are tearing me a new one, and the character is whining about being 'about to die', it doesn't matter how much I click on the thing (which means I am not driving, anymore), no health.  One of the times I got STUCK, pinned between a health fountain and the butcher, and the edge of the big grill, and I couldn't even make the character drink from the fountain.  Until dead, restart, etc.

It's possible that the game ramped up the difficulty because I let the helper follow me around, twice as annoying as a puppy, and just as useless.  Skyrim was very nice.  Between sniping with a bow, and summoning things to go occupy the bad guys, I could slaughter everything.  Of course the 'helpers' were just as useless, but at least the AI counted them as 'threat'.  In D3, the AI just swarms YOU, no matter what, and more or less ignores the NPC helpers, except to walk around them.

I like the summoning things and sending them off to their doom, fighting FOR ME, which is the whole necromancer/witch doctor thing.  But the character is like scratching a chalkboard. 

Maybe if I turn the voices OFF, I can play the game without wanting to go hunt down the writers and voice actors IRL and brutally slaughtering them.  Some of the voice actors were good.  But the one you have to listen to... all... the... time... is annoying.

Has anyone ever seen the video sequences?  I have never seen more than a second of any of them without chopping.  I'd gladly watch a much lower resolution version, just so it doesn't talk like Max Headroom.  Buh....ha.....ga....nuh............ick....da.....bluh....

[MadBunny]

I assume you did the obvious and turned the voices off and subtitles on?
It's a shame about your cut scenes, they're generally really well done.

[RNS]

Does anyone play c-s[1]? If yeah you'd find out what RNS stands for![2] xD

1.	1.6
2.	not that it's particularly interesting or special... more embarrassing I guess

[Seppuku]

I've got Counter Strike: Source, but I've barely played it. When I did try it I always found I'd have to download custom content therefore it'd take a while a load a map (I don't have a good internet connection even at the best of times, saying that, it has improved since I last played). So, I guess, I don't know what RNS stands for.

[pingnak]

Yeah, killed all the voices, turned on the subs.  More tolerable.  I might turn off the subs, too.  Even the writing's kind of annoying.

Maybe my big problem with the Witch Doctor voice is that it's the zebra from My Little Ponies.

When I allowed the 'download' to complete the last couple of gigs, it seems the 'optional' content was the cut scenes, so now they play fine.  They don't stream worth a damn.

I got a little further with the witch doctor girl.  I like the pet doggies.  'Specially blowin' dem up in a crowd.

It took at least ten tries to finish the grill boss with the WD, too.  Basically that flaming floor.  Being dragged onto flaming floor, or otherwise pinned or rendered immobile on flaming floor makes that boss harder than any of the bosses in the game, so far.  Even the girl with the moths on her shoulders.  Pure luck to get through that.  If you have a spell/skill that lets you 'dodge' or 'go fast', that helps, because it tends to 'unstick' you.

One little side-note if you've only played one character: The money and 'stash' chest and blacksmith are shared across them, which (if memory serves me) was the case in Diablo II.  So once you've blown umpteen thousand dollars upgrading the blacksmith, you can craft higher goodies for your other 'new' characters to use.  Also you can share the odd trinkets and goodies between them, as long as they're a high enough level to equip it.  Or strip your helpers in one game and load them up in another.

So one strategy with a cohesive group of friends would be to give one player lots of money and blacksmith components to max out and use their blacksmith, and share the results.  Then make one each of character classes for that smith account, since the 'special' stuff, per class, tends to match the character who's playing.

While playing yesterday, one thing I noticed was that ALL NPCs would 'teleport'.  That makes it rather difficult for the witch doctor, since, you know that big grippy-hands spell that slows bad guys down, and hurts them?  They just snap to the opposite side of it, unharmed and unhindered.  What's happening is, their position is displayed wrong.  After about the hundredth time of 'missing' a group of baddies, I noticed the dogs would always run to an 'empty' position, with nothing there, and attack air.  Presently, the monster teleports to the 'right' spot.

Maybe this has just been the way it always worked, and the load is still overwhelming the servers they set up for it.

So it looks like for at least several more weeks, the game will be buggered, and unstable, and prone to hiccups and glitches, as they patch it in circles, trying to make it work right.

[Omen]

I think I've come back around to being ultimately disappointed with D3.

1. Skill system has been simplified, characters are not unique in their abilities now like they were in D2.
2. The graphics are on the low end texture wise, even playing at high on everything lots of textures have noticeable blur.  Cut scenes are nice and some background scenery looks nice.
3. The story is meh.
4. Lag - The game punishes you for desiring to play single player, personally I was one of those that didn't know it had to be online at all times, and should have put more effort into reviewing the game before getting it.  The lag is not crippling in the sense that it happens all the time, but when you've been working all day and you just want to relax for an hour or two you're competing at peak times with people just to be able to play a single player experience.  The result is laggy and choppy game play, sometimes causing your death and at worse robbing you of quest rewards as I complained about earlier.  This isn't true in all instances, since I managed to have a multiplayer experience with a friend in France for nearly 5 straight hours without incident this past sunday.
5. Auction house.  I'm not one to consider this a 'feature', if anything it only serves to annoy you since people seem to find items of immense capability that you never seem to find yourself.  I am also not going to spend a single penny more on a game to improve it, a game should come with everything I need in the initial 60 bucks I paid.

[MadBunny]

1. Skill system has been simplified, characters are not unique in their abilities now like they were in D2.

This actually annoys me.  You can choose to use alternates to the 'most current' power available, but ultimately without the idea of a power tree to focus on you're really not doing anything all that different.

Also, I miss Druid.

[pingnak]

I miss necromancer, too.  They basically slapped an over-sold 'witchdoctor' on top of the same character.

But now I'm up to four doggies and a big gorilla thingy.  So finally have enough followers to keep monsters at bay while I hose them down.  And I'm kind of on a hair trigger with detonating the doggies.  After all, they can all get killed off in a big battle pretty quickly (poison seems to do 'em in almost instantly), but if I blow 'em up, they can finish the battle, or at least thin out the numbers, right away.

I can understand (to a degree) wanting to do the single player through the multiplayer engine.  After all, it means you maintain ONE version of the game.  Smart server, dumb client.  Also, for the various exchangeable goodies, you can lock them down pretty well if the generation and storage is on the server.  Harder to clone or mod what is generated for their 'economy'.  Not a real fan of the 'real money for equipment' (or money in the game) thing that they propose for later, though.  And since the single player version is no better than the multiplayer, I suppose it encourages multiplayer games, or perhaps wording it differently, it doesn't discourage multiplayer games compared to a smoother single player experience.

I have not finished the game, but I have to agree the writing is crap.  As an example...

(SPOILER - About 2/3 through Chapter 2)
Everyone spends several hours of play time constantly complaining that one particular NPC will betray you, then, as predicted universally, the character betrays you.  Boss fight ensues.  A real mastermind would've kept his word and kept his cool, and been a decent candidate for the new villain for Diablo IV.

(PROBABLE SPOILER)
I may be wrong, but I predict one of the angels is a devil, or is an equivalent villain.  They're writing it on the walls in big letters, in all different colors of crayon.  The melodramatic writing is too poor to render any kind of subtlety to the plot.  They have about 15 minutes' worth of story content to stretch out over the entire game.  I think they just designed the boss fights and strung together excuses for them to fill the time in between.  Unless they wrote the plot by throwing darts and rolling dice.  Which is also possible, and would foil my prediction.

[jaimehlers]

Blizzard has never been especially strong in its plot writing, even back to its earliest games.  And yes, I've basically played all of Blizzard's games, so I think I can safely say that they aren't significantly worse than they ever were.

My brother ended up buying me Diablo 3 as an early (as in, three months early, but I think he wanted to be able to hop into my games, which I don't mind), so it ultimately isn't costing me anything.

Personally, I like the skill system in this game.  Yes, it's simplified, but I've never been a fan of having to have two or three skill bars in order to do everything (as is especially bad in WoW).  And the way it was set up in Diablo 2 was a mess.

I haven't really noticed much lag (certainly nothing that caused loot to vanish), and I've played during peak hours.  This might be an issue with the computer; even a good computer can have problems if it's been a while since it's been maintained.  My gaming computer is about six months old, and I maintain it fairly regularly, and I've only noticed a little bit of rubber-banding lag.

[Seppuku]

Blizzard has never been especially strong in its plot writing, even back to its earliest games.  And yes, I've basically played all of Blizzard's games, so I think I can safely say that they aren't significantly worse than they ever were.

They should hire me! For £20- £30k per annum I'll happily write them decent plots! But not even Jagex would hire me as a writer because I lack industry experience (but they were nice enough to offer an interview though).

I realise that it comes off as arrogant to say I could write a better plot, but to be honest...as you've said, they're not really strong in the plot department, but to be fair, I'm pretty sure writers have to write within the constraints they're given rather than seek to come up with new ideas and make it stronger. You might find a lot of Mills & Boon writers are talented, but they have to work within M&B's specifications and in a short time period.

But I am not liking the sound of the skill system. Seriously, it's been a while since I've played an RPG with a skill system that isn't dumbed down. I love it when they're more complicated or just offer you lots of options because you've got a lot of choice, you can experiment and get creative. Not even my favourite game series of all time, Final Fantasy, does that anymore. Seriously XIII's battle system is dull and uninteresting, hence I've not bought the sequel. WoW's isn't that complicated, you just cycle through the same macros over and over, SWTOR is the same. If I were to compare MMORPGs, FFXI would win on the class system because it's not cookie cutter and it leaves plenty of room for experimentation - heck, it's not as simple as: tank, dps & healer. I'd still play it if it wasn't a bigger time sink than WoW.


However, I should be ashamed to admit this, but I've never played Diablo I or II,, so I really should go and pick up a copy as dungeon crawlers are fun and from the sounds of it, much more up my street than Diablo III will be.

Yes, it's simplified, but I've never been a fan of having to have two or three skill bars in order to do everything (as is especially bad in WoW).  And the way it was set up in Diablo 2 was a mess.

You should see my macros when playing Scholar in FFXI:Online. You had macro pages and macros sets and each page was 2 bars. Each macro set had a total of 10 pages. I filled 2 sets (3 if you include my additional one for different play styles & for use in skill chains, but they were just an alternative 'shortened' version of the other). I did use some bars as a directory so I could flick through my macros quickly. But Scholar was one of those more complicated classes that had lots of things to do and were counted on for being adaptable, so mid battle you might switch to being a nuker, healer, enhancer, enfeebler, DoTer, or a mix of each and with it came a system of stratagems you could launch to enhance your spells in the most appropriate way for the fits. So you might increase the next healing spell by 50%, halve the casting time of the next nuke, increase the accuracy of the next enfeeble, turn that enhancement into an area of effect spell, increase the effectiveness of the next DoT spell, reduce your enmity and do all sorts of crap. Hence it took soooo many macros. But I loved it. My Monk & Puppetmaster? Both of them only took 2 bars.

So I hope that makes you feel better about your 3 bars in WoW.

[jaimehlers]

Well, the skill system is somewhat more complicated than it's been described, but it's all behind the scenes.  You have to plan out how you want to fight before you go into combat, which makes sense for an action RPG like Diablo.

[pingnak]

The 'teleporting' died down last night.  There are many factors besides the computer right in front of you for that, and a 'borked' computer won't generally magically 'fix' its self.

Besides, melting down is more of a Windoze thing.  OSX stuff is more encapsulated and NOT allowed to bugger the OS in a million and one kinds of ways that Windoze apps are allowed to.

When I used to run windoze, I'd partition the boot and data separately.  The windoze/programs go on a smallish 'boot', and everything else goes on 'data'.  Usually another partition for infrequently accessed 'stuff'.  Just to keep drive optimizations (also unnecessary for OSX - especially with SSD) from tripping over that.

Configure windoze and your software just the way you like it, and optimize everything.  Then make a drive image of the 'boot' partition to external USB.  Make new images as you add software, etc., but resist deleting 'old' backup images, in case you 'back up' a problem.  While you're at it, get rid of the dumb 'restore point'.  Makes your REAL backup images bigger, and they seldom help.

That way all windows problems are fixed in ten minutes (the time it takes to overwrite 'boot' from backed up drive image).

Got infected?  Restore
Got some odd new 'symptom'?  Restore
Installing or uninstalling 'broke something'?  Restore
Got fragmented?  Restore (quicker than defrag)
Driver update broke something?  Restore.
Boot takes too long, all of a sudden?  Restore.
Want to unregister software and still use it on this machine?  Deactivate it, then restore.  Or install it in a virtual machine.  Then you can copy that to other computers.

You get the picture.  Very powerful, no need to 'figure out' anything, ever again.

BACKUP: It's THE most critical piece of PC security, and the single most neglected, too.

[Omen]

Meh. If I don't render a gadget in my house a brick at least once a month, I'm not trying hard enough.  The only thing I haven't been able to restore has been an old RAZR V3 phone.

[Omen]

I'm waiting anxiously to get my hands on this:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

( as well as this: http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/19/raspberry-pi-camera-add-on/ )

As well as a few of these:

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/05/this-alligator.php

I have so many plans.  So many plans.

[pingnak]

As for plot creation, realistically, big games like this are 'designed by committee'.

Such committees are usually completely manipulated and overridden by a brainless, milquetoast middle manager type, who 'outranks' all other participants, because he went to business school.

He gets final say, even over the people who are paid to have 'final say'. 

What such managers usually ENFORCE on top of the meeting is something exactly like what they saw in a different game that they personally liked.

So, even if you got the job as a writer, they would basically dictate the plot to you (story-board output from 'design committee') and make you fill out disconnected dialog stubs and chatter, just like you see in the game.

Then they will make you do it over.  And do it over.  And do it over.  And over and over.  They don't know what they want, but they can tell you what they don't want.  Same for art, music, AI behavior, special effects, everything.  Oh, and just when you think it's 'final', and voice actors have all gone home?  Yeah, do it over.

If you don't like being bent over like this, and work 80 hour weeks, then you're not a 'team player', and promptly laid off.

If you do everything just the way they like, and say, "Please sir, may I have another?" even as your family leaves you, and they tell you to work for the 18th weekend in a row... they'll lay you off.  Once they've locked down the writing, they don't need you anymore.

[Seppuku]

Well, the skill system is somewhat more complicated than it's been described, but it's all behind the scenes.  You have to plan out how you want to fight before you go into combat, which makes sense for an action RPG like Diablo.

That's a little more hopeful, I might be getting a guest pass off of somebody, so I'll be able to test it out and judge for myself...assuming my laptop will let me, it runs SWTOR (on lowest) and I've seen MacBook Airs run it (like my brother's), so I am kinda hopeful in that respect too. If it disappoints, I'll just go and grab Diablo II from GAME when I go to Cambridge next week.  Heck, I might do that anyway.

[Omen]

Another tip for reducing lag on D3, when you bring up the launcher don't hit 'play' immediately.  If you look to the top left of the window you will see 'options', select that.  Then select downloader preferences, then remove the check mark from "Enable Peer to Peer transfer".  This is a built in updater that downloads new updates as you play the game using the same P2P file sharing as torrent.

[Nam]

I loved Diablo 2. Never really liked Diablo, though. I am sure, though the 3rd is awesome, and someday I'll be right there with ya.

-Nam