Silversword / Diablo III

A few weeks ago, a mate showed me a computer game on his iPad called Silversword. It is a game that pays homage to the old The Bard's Tale series of computer games from the 1980's. I am seriously thinking of buying an iPad one day just so that I can play Silversword. The game's website is at the following link:

http://silversword-rpg.com/





When the computer game Diablo was first released, it blew my mind! It had f*ing amazing graphics for its day! I was completely addicted to it! The game has beautiful music! I had so much fun playing the game cooperatively (multiplayer) with a mate. The game pretty much pioneered the action RPG genre of (mouse button mashing) computer games. I played the Warrior in Diablo.

I played, completed, and enjoyed Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion. The game has beautiful music! The game was an improvement over Diablo in terms of game mechanics, with more playable classes and the innovative introduction of customisable skills and item crafting, but I felt that the original Diablo had a more memorable dungeon and more memorable music and a MUCH bigger impact on the games industry and game innovation/evolution. I played the Barbarian in Diablo II.

After a 12 year wait, I am SO disappointed with Diablo III! It was one of the computer games that I was most looking forward to playing, and I assumed that because Blizzard was making it, it would be an improvement over Diablo II. I have not played Diablo III, but the fact that the graphics look a little bit cartoony (like World of Warcraft - a style of artwork or graphics that I don't like at all), the fact that Blizzard have dumbed down the game so that it has fewer playable classes, the skills are no longer permanently customisable, you can no longer choose which attributes to increase whenever your character levels up, the game is MUCH shorter, and the game difficulty is so easy that one can easily complete the entire game without dying, and (most importantly) the fact that one needs to be logged in to Blizzard's server in order to play the game single-player have made me decide to never buy the game.

I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are of Diablo III if you have played it.

 

I personally will not purchase anything with the Blizzard logo on it.

After what they did to so many players with SC2 I actually uninstalled anything they made, (including SC2) and will continue my one man boycott of their products until the cows come home.

I may not be able to change the way they do business, but I CAN change who I give my pennies to.

EDIT: I have Silversword on my iphone and it's a fun $1.99 trip down memory lane.

 

Ummm... what did they do to so many players of SC2? I've been playing for a while now, though I only play single player. For most of the first year or so, I played off line only. Their license has some annoying features, and I certainly won't be generating any content for them, but it's still fun to play.

 

Blizzard accused many single player fans of cheating and canceled their accounts without notice, they just turned off the player's access to the game.

In SC2 you can play off line, but you still have to let them ping you, (so to speak) each time you start the game up.

Diablo 3 you don't even own your game, but lease a spot on their server and lord help you if you anger the Blizzard gods, or their server gets bogged down ... oh wait, that's already happened.

The whole way they are doing business now just sits wrong with me.

BTW, they accused me of on line cheating in SC2 and WoW and the funny thing is I have never played SC2 on line and have never played WoW period.
They chose not to believe me and said they canceled my account, (which I had never created) for suspicious activity.

Thousands of players had swamped their forums to the point of any thread with the word suspicious, cheating or blocked was locked.

Way to go Blizzard, show how much you care about your fan base.
Oh, wait ... their fan base is Korea where companies actually had record breaking called in sick days on the opening of SC2.

It's a shame you can't read most of what was written due to their forum being purged to save face, although there are a few fan based sites that still have a lot of the comments.

OK, rant done :roll: NEEEEEEEXXXXTTTTTT!!!!

 

Thanks! I hadn't heard any of that. Even if they hadn't purged their forums, I don't read them anyway. And as far as rants go, that was very coherent, so thank you for that too.

 

I feel great shame ut what is SC2?

 

StarCraft 2.

I didn't know about the controversy over Blizzard's aggressive anti-cheating policy either. It's sad to think that a once great and much-loved game developer has become nothing other than an annoyance. I might install Diablo II again soon to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Is it possible to play that game over the internet with friends (without being logged in to Blizzard's game server Battle.net)? If so (or if not but one can join up with friends on Blizzard's server (assuming that Blizzard is still running a Battle.net server for Diablo II)), anybody wanna team up with my level 46 Barbarian to play Diablo II together?

 

I've played a lot of Diablo 3 in the last week. The first 30 levels are fun. When you finish Act 4 on Normal, that's about the limit of interesting game play.

The story isn't that bad (it's not great and not terrible), but I cannot be bothered to repeat it all over and over. It's too much of a grind after a while, and after only 1 week I have got bored and fed up with it.



Moving on,


If you're looking at similar tablet games, GameLoft's "Dungeon Hunter 2" is not bad, it's essential a Diablo 2 clone with a touch interface. Available for Android tablets as well as iPad.


Oh, and you might already know about the GemRB thing, Infinity Engine for Android. Runs Baldurs Gate 1 and 2, although not fantastically well.

 

Somehow, I did not play SC2 nor D3, nor do I think I will, despite I've played SC and D2 (and D) a lot... Maybe it is age taking its toll... I... Just... Do not want to... Finally... I am free... Well, relatively. Free from new games.

 

I've been getting notifications from Battlenet too, and I've never had anything to do with them.

I play Skyrim, and while I like easy access to mods, I'm spoiled by the days you could just start and stop your game at will. D3, SC2 and many other just aren't going to get any play from me.

 

Hey GA, if you're talking about Steam mods for Skyrim, there is another place to get your mods and with a larger selection.

Skyrim Nexus has had mods for many games and for quite a while longer then steam.

There are actually mods on the Nexus that the authors will not post on Steam.

As always, click on the yellow text for a link.

 

Phishing for Battle.net is about 20x more prevalent than phishing for Banks and other Financial institution websites.

It's probably the 5th most common form of spam I get, these days.

So yes, everyone will get them, regardless of what they do / whether they've ever played a blizzard game in their life.

 

I must be lucky then, because I haven't seen a single one.

 

gazra's review of Diablo 3

I saw Diablo 3 on special at my local software shop (due to end-of-finacial-year sales) and I decided to buy it while it was at a reduced price.

I pretty much agree with Philip's review of Diablo 3 earlier in this thread.

I chose to play the Barbarian. I intended to have the Enchantress follower but I found the game too difficult with her, so I went back to having the Templar as my follower. The Templar made the game playable for me with my Barbarian and my playing style. I chose all of the healing skills for my Templar, so he kept my Barbarian juiced up with Hit Points for most of the game.

I really enjoyed Act 1 because it was incredibly addictive! The game gave you just enough magical items as loot to keep you hooked on the game. My Barbarian found Act 1 way too easy because he never died and he could just use the Cleave skill to damage and kill multiple opponents at the same time.

My Barbarian died a few times in Act 2 and Act 3, and only once in Act 4 (when fighting the final boss in the game (but that was only because I chose a very poor left-mouse-button skill for my character during that fight (because I didn't know what I would be facing in that fight))).

I fell in love with the NPC Leah. I was stunned at how life-like and beautiful the cutscenes were of her. I've only ever fancied 1 other animated character before (the lead character in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within).

Act 3 and Act 4 have some amazing dynamic battlefields where you really feel like you are in the middle of a raging battle. You can see soldiers, angels and monsters battling each other in the background. The graphics are stunning at times and the player character's usage of special abilities look very colourful and pretty!

I became fatigued with the game and thought that the game was dragging on too long by about the end of Act 2 or about midway through Act 3 (I can't remember exactly when). The gameplay was so repetitive that I was struggling to maintain interest in the game by this stage of the game.

The boss fights are one of the most disappointing things about Diablo 3. I vividly remember the 4 main boss fights in Diablo 2 because each one was very different and genuinely difficult and required different preparation beforehand (e.g. equipping fire resistance-boosting items before fighting Diablo). The boss fights in Diablo 3 are all pretty much the same. I was killing monster bosses so quickly and so often and so easily in Diablo 3 that I didn't really have the opportunity or inclination to rememeber their names.

Act 4 is the highlight of the game (even though it is such a short act compared to the other acts, it condenses SO much into fewer maps). The locations in Act 4 are amazing to discover and wander around in! By the beginning of Act 4, I figured out the best skills to have ready for my Barbarian, which made the game WAY too easy as my character could kill entire swarms of monsters in seconds with optimal usage of his selected skills, and I found all of the monster bosses too easy to kill (in Diablo 2, I had great difficulty with some of the monster bosses and some of the spellcaster monsters!). I was SO disappointed with the final boss fight at the endgame because it was so quick, disjointed, too easy, and the game ended abruptly with no real reward for completing the game.

There are some genuinely superb moments in the game when your character overhears NPCs in Bastion's Keep talking about your character. One of the conversations made me laugh out loud, and some of the conversations genuinely make you feel proud as the NPCs praise your character's world-saving accomplishments in the game (my follower (the Templar) also praised my character's combat prowess after my character obliterated huge groups of enemies quickly and in an impressive manner in Act 4).

For me, the followers and the game's cutscenes are the real highlights of the game.
The followers have so many voice samples that they genuinely feel like real people who are adventuring with you. You can choose to have 1 of the 3 available followers to be in your adventuring party. The first follower that becomes available in Act 1 is the Templar (he is a VERY righteous melee-specialist paladin). The second follower that becomes available in Act 1 is the Scoundrel (he is an archer/crossbowman). The last follower that becomes available in the game (early in Act 2) is the Enchantress (she is a mage). You can equip your follower with a 1 or 2-handed weapon, 1 amulet, 2 rings, 1 type of item specific to that follower, and the Templar is the only follower that can equip a shield. One of the best things about the game is that you get to choose which 4 permanent special abilities (or skills) that your follower has (you can reset your follower's skills at any time by paying gold).
The game has the best cutscenes that I have ever seen.

Diablo 3 is a significant improvement over it's 2 predecessors in terms of graphics, cutscenes, and followers, but the game is a step backwards in gameplay because the gameplay isn't as good as Diablo 2. Diablo 3 suffers from the same problem as Dungeon Siege 2 and Dungeon Siege 3 - having active skills that are SO powerful that they NEED to be used in order to survive in the game makes the game suck because the player is constantly looking at active skill slots at the bottom of the screen (so that the player can activate an active skill as soon as the cooldown expires or as soon as their character has accumulated enough resource points to be able to use the active skill) instead of actually seeing the characters and monsters on the screen. SO stupid!

What's really disappointing is that for a game that has been in development for approximately 10 years, Blizzard haven't gotten the game difficulty balanced in Diablo 3. Some Acts or parts of the game or monsters or monster bosses are too easy to kill, others are too difficult. The character interface is so unintuitive, confusing and poorly displayed that I didn't even realize that my character could choose 3 passive skills until my character was approximately level 21 (it may have been even later in the game, I can't remember exactly).

It took me ages to figure out why I couldn't use healing potions. You have to right-click on the potion slot (at the bottom of the screen) and then left-click on which type of healing potion that you want to have ready to use in the healing potion quick use slot. That's SO unintuitive!

The game has some stupid game mechanics! A character's Strength contributes to the character's Armor. A character's Intelligence determines all of the character's Resistances. The damage that a spellcaster does by casting spells is determined by the Damage of the weapon that the spellcaster has equipped. SO stupid!

By far the most annoying thing about this game is the lag that one experiences when playing this game (due to having to play the game on a Blizzard Battle.net server (even when playing the game single-player (which has to be one of the worst decisions EVER made by a game developer!)). At times, I experienced lag SO bad that I had to wait for up to approxmately 15 seconds before I regained control of my character again. Nice one, Blizzard!

Considering that it is the year 2012, I am quite disappointed with the simplistic gameplay and limited playable character choices in Diablo 3. You can't choose the race of your character. You can't allocate points towards your character's attributes (i.e. Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Vitality). You can't choose permanent skills for your character (every player has all of the skills available any time for the character class that you are playing (so there is no real character customization)).

The game NEVER crashed! Hats off to Blizzard for releasing a computer game that doesn't crash.

Now that I've finished the game, I have no desire to keep playing it single-player because there is no new plot to unfold as the game progresses, no new areas to explore, and no new monsters to fight. Now I am impatiently waiting for Blizzard to release expansions for the game so that I can continue the game with my character.

I'd be very interested to know what the game was like (in terms of game difficulty (on the Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty settings) and skills used) for other players who played a different character class than the Barbarian (or who played the Barbarian with a different follower than the Templar).

I'd also be very interested to see screenshots of other player's character's stats at the end of the game.

Anybody wanna play the game cooperatively with my level 32 Barbarian on the U.S. server?

Here's my Barbarian at the end of the Normal difficulty game (see screenshot below):

 

So, what you're saying is ... even though you didn't like the game or the fact that Blizzard had to be able to watch as you play or you can't play, you still are waiting for the expansion?

This seems to me as the exact reason why the tight controls and restrictions. If you prevent someone from doing something they enjoy when ever they want and instead limit it to just enough to "HOOK" them, you can wrap them around your finger and eventually charge them for server time as they will be renting time on the server to play the ever awaited co-op play.