Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 51 of 55

KingsIsle Blaugust Prizes

August 20, 2015 by Belghast

KingsIsle is Awesome

Some of you may know KingsIsle games as the creator of the wildly popular Wizard 101, Pirate 101 and the upcoming mobile monster destruction game Rise and Destroy. For those who do not they occupy a unique niche in the MMO industry. They create these awesomely rich cartoon worlds populated with tons of content, and all of aimed at being appropriate for pretty much all ages to play. I’ve not spent a ton of time playing these games but on a whim one weekend some of the AggroChat folks spent it rolling brand new characters in Wizard 101 and wandering around together. The game just exudes charm and I had enough fun that weekend that I decided to spend a little money on the game even though I really didn’t intend to keep playing it regularly. I’ve always heard they have an amazing community, and that KingsIsle in general does a lot to try and foster this. However I was pleasantly shocked when I was contacted by a representative from KingsIsle yesterday and handed some prizes for our Blaugust event. They handed me several codes for special bundles in both Wizard 101 and Pirate 101, each bundle having a retail price of between $29 and $39 bucks. That is absolutely awesome, and I actually spent a bit more time playing my Wizard 101 character yesterday. For those curious, I dug up the release videos for each of the trailers. I have yet to decide how I will reward these but it is awesome to have more options in the prize pool. If you interact with any of the KingsIsle employees, seriously give them a huge thank you!

Grand Tourney Gauntlet Bundle for Wizard 101

HooDoo Bundle for Pirate 101

Exhaustion Hits

Last night is traditionally the raid night for my second static group in Final Fantasy XIV. However we were missing a significant number of the key players, namely our second healer and tank. For a bit we considered other options, and were on the verge of just running an expert for the day and calling it good. Problem being as I sat there at the keyboard waiting for things to happen I kept dozing off while leaning forward, literally waking up when my head banged my boom microphone. So instead of doing Final Fantasy XIV shenanigans I retired to the couch to peacefully doze in and out of consciousness while waiting on my wife to get home. I didn’t really want to go to bed for real yet, because once I conk out I am often times dead to the world… and I wanted to make sure she made it home safely and didn’t have car trouble or anything out of the ordinary like that. Before the attempt at raiding, and a small bit afterwards I continued playing some Diablo 3. The game worked mostly because I had no one relying on me, and quite frankly I was playing on normal level which means I can doze off for a second here and there and suffer zero consequences from it. After I beat the normal storyline and unlock the content I will end up dialing up the difficulty as I attempt to level to 70 before the 23rd.

This is really a stupid mission I have set out on… largely because I really need to be in Final Fantasy XIV instead capping esoterics for the week. The interesting thing about Season play in Diablo 3 though is it feels like they have ratcheted up the drop rates of everything. While my profile has not updated to show it yet… at level 13 my crusader already has three legendary drops… including Genzaniku the awesome axe that summons a spirit to fight for you. When I entered into this seasonal thing I fully expected to lose my character at the end of the season… because I didn’t actually do any research before saying “sure” and clicking on the seasonal button. I guess however everything you earn in season just rolls over into your normal characters at the end of a season which is pretty frickin cool. So even if I don’t make any real progress in season 3, I will absolutely be starting a fresh season 4 character to play as well. I guess in the coming days I will be popping into Final Fantasy XIV to get in an expert or two and then popping into Diablo 3 because it makes an excellent way to wind down for the evening. I mostly enjoy soloing over there, but I am always looking for people to chat with while I am doing it. I finally got around to adding my friend Byx last night to battle.net and I know there are tons of other people that I should as well. I am finding that I am really enjoying the crusader, but in truth all of the classes I have played so far have been enjoyable in one way or another. I just find it so bizarre that at this point, World of Warcraft is probably my least favorite Blizzard game.

Remote Gaming

August 19, 2015 by Belghast

Distractions

This morning is not going how I expected to go in the least. About 3 am a massive storm blew in, and with it thunder, lightning and torrential rains. This of course woke me up, because rain sometimes means bad things. We have some issues with our wooden siding right now, and it is causing two leaks to happen when the rain is particularly vigorous. We have contracted someone to come out and fix all of this… but that won’t happen until sometime in September when their next available slot is. In the meantime each time it rains I either dread the potential for a leak, or like last night have to listen to the constant dripping from the top of our bedroom window. Needless to say I did not exactly get an amazing nights sleep after that all started. As a result I have been moving around this morning extremely sluggish and easily distracted. I set out with the simple mission earlier of trying to find out what my Wizard 101 account name was… and wound up playing for about fifteen minutes. The distractions are real, and plentiful and I am getting a very late start writing my morning post.

Then to make matters worse when I actually sit down to start writing, I find out that apparently WordPress has released its 4.3 patch, and I now have eleven updates waiting on me. Instead of waiting until AFTER I have advertised a post, I decided to go ahead and update everything right then. It is surprising how long twelve updates take when one of them is a new wordpress version, and a major version at that. It is going to be an interesting day I can already tell it. I have a cat on my desk right now stalking me, because she thinks she is hungry and the kitten playing around behind my monitors which always freaks me out a little bit. Thank god for coffee is pretty much all I can say at this point because otherwise I would surrender to the desire to curl up in a ball like my cats…. and join them in sleep. The cats are absolutely not helping the distracted part however, because they are both being adorable. This may or may not be the worst blog post I have written in years.

Remote Gaming

I guess in the grand scheme of things I should have known this morning would end up like this, because last night was equally spastic. Instead of gaming, I spent a lot of time “trying to game remotely”. I have this dream that someday I will be able to play games on my less than stellar laptop downstairs, from the gaming machine upstairs. I know at this point you are preparing to interrupt me with “but steam in home streaming!” but quell that for the moment. There are a huge number of games that I play that do not run, and ultimately don’t work right through steam in home streaming. I know… I’ve tried. One of them for example is Dragon Age: Inquisition that is locked behind the layer of bullshit that is EA Origin. So instead last night I started trying a different route, namely Splashtop. Some time ago I watched a video from Linus Tech Tips about creating a “Ghetto Shield” to play games from a phone/controller combination. This is all fine and good… but I don’t want to play games from a tablet or mobile interface. I hate touch screen interfaces with a passion, and all I really want is to be able to treat my laptop as a thin client for gaming purposes. The dream is simple, because in theory it would allow me to stop caring about getting a “gaming laptop” and instead just get a decent office type laptop and stream through my gaming machine. The problem has always been that there is enough lag that it ultimately ends up pissing me off.

Last night I managed to get Dragon Age Inquisition largely working, but I ran into two issues. I was running fraps on both my gaming desktop upstairs and my laptop so I could see the FPS of the two systems. My gaming machine was running DA:I around 60 fps just fine… Splashtop on the other hand was running in the 15 to 20 fps range which pretty much wrecked any playability. To make matters worse, for whatever reason whenever I attempted to move “mmo style” while holding down the right mouse button to turn… the mouse input lagged to painful levels making me pretty much abandon the mouse and start keyboard turning. I kept trying this over the course of roughly two hours, and even tried to figure out a way to get it running smoothly through Steam Streaming without much luck either. The reason why I was sent down this path yesterday is the updates to Windows 10 streaming from an Xbox One console. That is cool enough, but for the love of god… will someone make it work between two windows machines without issue. The last attempt was to try and figure out how to install the Splashtop gamepad driver, so I might try that again tonight. Everything I have read online is that the mouse support in Splashtop is just bad. I guess they are emulating the input instead of simply passing it through to the other machine…. which seems insane… until you realize that the software was designed to allow people to connect from tablets to desktops… and not necessarily desktops to desktops. I will say however it already out performs any remote desktop tool that I have played in the past. I booted up World of Warcraft as a litmus test and it ran flawlessly. There was some strangeness with the mouse cursor updating slowly, but the movement was nice and smooth.

Revisiting Tristram

I am not entirely certain if it was my recent foray into Hellgate London, or my recent railing on click to move as a control scheme… but for whatever reason I have had an undeniable craving to play some Diablo 3. Last night ultimately turned into a night of updating drivers and things, and in the process I installed a new Nvidia driver. One of the things I do periodically is flip through what it is suggesting as my “optimized setting”. Some of the suggestions are pure crap, because out of laziness they really have not tested any of the settings. However every now and then you get one that is really well optimized, and that seemed to be the case with the configuration it was suggesting for Diablo 3. My newest video card is capable of doing the spiffy trick where it renders the game at 4k and then down-samples it back to 1080p. Nvidia Experience ultimately suggested this mode for Diablo 3 and I have to say playing like that is absolutely gorgeous. I am not sure if you can actually see the difference in the screenshot but in game it just feels smoother than traditional anti-aliasing usually does. On a whim I decided to create a Season 3 character, even though Season 4 is only a couple of weeks away. Not sure what I am hoping to accomplish because I doubt there is any way in hell I will get a character to 70 before the season ends.

I made it to level six and the blacksmith apprentice quest before ultimately deciding I needed to log for the night. I could have likely stayed up for a few more hours playing, but I was hoping to prevent the level of groggy that is already well underway this morning. Either I am getting better at click to move, or I am getting lazy… because in truth I didn’t really do that much clicking last night. I mostly ran around with my left button held down allowing the game to auto attack most of the mobs, occasionally throwing in a shield slam. I am still not a huge fan of the control scheme, and the announcement yesterday of Marvel Heroes 2016 introducing game pad control was welcome news. That said I am maybe okay with playing it every now and then. I have been feeling terribly disconnected and Diablo is the perfect kind of soloing but still having people to talk to type gaming experience. I booted up Wildstar and attempted to play for an hour or so last night, but ultimately felt horribly lost in the expanse that is Whitevale. Diablo 3 provided me tight and constrained corridors without much thinking, and that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Tonight however I will have to put on my productive adult cap, as it is raid night and we are likely going to be doing more tries on Ravana.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

July 16, 2015 by Belghast

A Meaningless Term

Yesterday I witnessed a conversation unfold that I have had a dozen times myself with various folks. A friend of mine made the idle comment that they would really like to see a “PVE MOBA”, to which someone else predictably replied that you cannot have a “MOBA” without PVP. The problem is that there is absolutely no clear definition of what exactly a “MOBA” is. Additionally each player seems to refer to a slightly different set of mechanics when someone says “MOBA-like”. So for some people it is all about the match based pvp action, and others it is all about the interesting class design. If you simply dissect the term “MOBA” you get Multiplayer Online Battle Arena… which in itself is another absolutely meaningless term. Multiplayer Online is clear enough but the Battle Arena part is complete nonsense. What are you battling and what sort of arena are you battling in?

For me personally the key elements of what make a MOBA intriguing have nothing to do with player versus player combat. I like the different characters and their unique sets of abilities, and the way they interact with other characters and their abilities. In fact I would be happy spending my time in lane killing creeps because I honestly enjoy doing that way more than engaging with other players. When I play League of Legends I will almost always play against bots, and have long thought that it would make an interesting game to make it purely co-operative against interesting challenges. The problem is if you say this.. you get the reaction above that it cannot be done… because MOBAs are PVP games dammit! But what I am presenting is that folks are assigning a specific mindset to a term that is absolutely meaningless on its own merit. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can describe so many games and is likely why the term gets blurred so much to describe games that are absolutely nothing like the original Defense of the Ancients roots.

Keep the Interesting Bits

For me the interesting bits about what we generally refer to as a MOBA are the Character design that I have talked about before, and ultimately the payment model. I like this concept of purchasing individual champions, and having a rotation of free champions to play to consistently keep testing the waters and trying to branch out. The key part as well for me is the way that MOBA titles grow over time. If you look at the evolution of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, in both cases they are constantly releasing new content to satiate the appetites of players. I think this has been key to the success, that every few weeks there is something new being introduced to the game to shake up players expectations. League for example has over 120 different unique champions that they are doing a decent job of keeping balanced against each other, and Heroes is adding at least one champion a month it seems to catch up. So I feel like the big success of this genre has been constant incremental evolution of the product.

This variety helps deal with the “special snowflake” syndrome that happens in MMO design. Often times there is a demographic of players that wants to play a specific class in a manner that was not intended to be played. Granted this happens to some extent in build system MMOs like league, but it is always clear that this is not necessarily a “supported” play style. The champion system instead lets companies roll out lots of hyper focused characters that play to very specific niches. So in this case what would be a “special snowflake” like the “melee hunter” would simply just be another champion they could build to fill that desire. So instead the focus becomes on mastery of a specific set of abilities unique to that champion, rather than a much larger set of abilities as seen in most “talent tree” systems. I feel like this is crucial in allowing someone to adapt to a brand new champion quickly, but at the same time feeling confident enough to branch out into things they have yet to try before. There are game play modes like ARAM (All Random All Mid) that encourage this branching out because it forces players to play with a random champion.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

So the quandary I am in is that I love the League of Legends lore and champion design, but don’t love the game itself. I have long thought that it would be awesome to have a PVE centric version of League of Legends where you play the same champions with the same abilities in a Diablo like setting. Instead of fighting in Summoner’s Rift against five other players in a battle to destroy the opposing teams nexus, it would be a co-operative experience as five players venture into a procedurally generated dungeon with a treasure at the end. The idea is that each map would be harder than the previous until you reach a boss battle for the final treasure in the dungeon. You could even keep the build mechanic in the form of at the beginning of each map level you could have the same merchant that exists just outside of your teams Nexus in the Rift. After venturing a certain way into each map level he could travel to the next level, making it so that players could only buy new items at the beginning of each map.

For the hyper competitive players, you could still keep all manner of stats from number of monsters killed, their average difficulty rating, how fast it takes your team to clear a map, and of course how many times you have died during a specific encounter. Personally I would go with a counter strike approach where each player gets a single life per map, making it progressively harder the more players that you have lost. I would introduce the ability to purchase resurrection potions, but again that is an opportunity cost… since you have limited item inventory slots and limited gold to keep purchasing items with. Similarly I would introduce a “lives” mechanic in the number of times your team can retry during a specific dungeon crawl sequence. This would encourage the team to stick together and work on group tactics rather than going off on their own and risking getting overwhelmed. The thing is… I would absolutely pay to play a game like that, and would probably rope my friends into playing it to. The key impediment however is that folks seem to keep thinking that “MOBA” style mechanics cannot also apply to PVE game design. Someone make this game happen… I am looking at you Riot.

Pairing Down

June 24, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about. When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people. Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block. It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head. It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole. Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been. Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention. When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading. However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong. A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051 Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them. Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove. While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone. Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process. While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor. However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future. I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to. Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact. As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche. As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be. So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year. ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere. So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it. Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play. They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase. They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me. I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options. EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it. Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me. The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis. I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it. That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70… hell I would like to get my monk to 70. I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it. It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises. For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it. Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it. I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting. The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it. I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends. I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with. The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time. That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players. As far as Hearthstone and Hex… I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time… so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation. Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it. So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content. I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can. Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us. I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game. That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online. I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn. I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon. I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim. I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty. There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil. They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring. Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people. That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm. Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game. Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience. Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together. We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while. It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online. I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye. That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit. As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being. I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above. Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`