Diablo III, Starcraft 2, and Other Games

Diablo now includes Barbarian boobies, how can we all not be excited??….

Well, Diablo III has now officially been announced by Blizzard and there are even several videos displaying the games visuals and gameplay.  The game looks freakin amazing.  They got it perfectly right this time.  And by this time I mean that blizzard did not try to go campy or change the overall essence of the game.  In fact, as one of my friends noted, they brought back a bit of the darker side from the original Diablo while enhancing all the great features of Diablo II.  They’re even bringing back an updated version of everyone’s favorite online service, Battle.net.  As a lifelong Barbarian class fanboy, watching the Barbarian in action in the videos is incredible.  So far, all my fanboy hopes have been answered and vindicated with what they have shown.  The artwork and detail in the game are incredible and they did not sacrifice these things in favor of Warcraft III/WoW-esque simplicity.

Regarding the gameplay though, they did introduce something new that I think will enhance the gameplay to a much greater degree.  They got rid of the need for potions!  Completely.  Now, instead of having to stockpile potions and hammer down on the belt buttons whenever you were attacking, they have enemies drop health orbs that instantly heal your character.  While some may find this cheap or a dumming down of the gameplay, I wholeheartedly disagree.  The potions in Diablo II especially became an incredible hassle towards the end of the game and during boss fights.  All they have simply done is streamlined one facet of the game which allows you to worry less about inventory management on the fly and allows the player to stay immersed in the action longer.

Increased access to the skill try on the fly also means that more and more diverse skills can be used by each character greatly enhancing their combat abilities.  Before, in Diablo II, essentially each character was limited to 1, possibly 2, skills while in combat simply because attempting to switch skills mid-combat against more brutal enemies typically ended in death or the selection of the wrong spell.  They have now gone to a more MMO style skill bar at the bottom of the screen which is instantly accessible and gives the character the ability to manipulate multiple spells in quick succession (mana willing).

They also included the ability to be a female or male character of any of the race/classes in the game.  This may seem simple enough, but for the Diablo franchise that’s a big deal.  Before, a player was forced to be a female/male based on the class they chose.  Considering the amount of work that goes into each character and the relative age of Diablo II it was an understandable and wholly overlookable aspect of the game.  But now, people expected to be able to choose the gender of their character in free-form RPGs and its cool to see the developers take that same tact with Diablo III.  Now you can smash enemy’s heads in while looking fantastic at the same time, ha.

Who knows when this game will be released, but from the looks of it, it would seem that a 2009 release is not out of the question.  Granted, it would be a late 2009 (think T-day or Christmas) but it seems probable.  That leads me to my next topic….

Starcraft 2:

Speaking of campy ….

I must admit, it was somewhat of a shock to see Starcraft Warcraft III-ized.  The overly bubbly, high-octane colors of WIII and Red Alert 2 work well for those franchises but I always saw SC as a much darker game encompassed by a much darker and more sinister color palette.  This is what I was afraid they were going to do to Diablo III, hence my great relief as expressed earlier.

The real story on SC2 though is that according to various rumor mills, the previously “leaked” December 3rd release date was early by about six months.  Now the release date is rumored to be sometime in the Winter/Spring Quarter of 2009 (roughly sometime between late Jan and mid-April).  Personally I don’t mind the delay as Blizzard has a wonderful habit of releasing awesome well-made games which don’t require huge mind-numbing patches just to play them.  (not to say that the occasional patch isn’t required)  Blizzard’s “it will be released when it’s done” policy bothers me non-too-much in this case.  I just hope the hype doesn’t go overboard like with Half-Life 2 (which, while being an amazing game, I don’t think lived up to its full hype/potential).  Also, Blizzard has a ton more credibility with such a policy than say, oh, I don’t know… 3DRealms and the non-existent disaster that is commonly known as Duke Nukem Forever.

Republic Commando:

I mentioned in a previous post that I was playing through Republic Commando finally.  Well, I finished the game and I must say that overall, I was impressed and enjoyed myself throughout.  My biggest complaint would be that my squad mates, for being Commandos, simply didn’t do enough or died very quickly putting me into very tough situations at awkward times.  Despite an initial driver related issue with Nividia’s driver set, I was able to play through the entire game without on fatal flaw or error, which has been a rare occurrence in my experiences.  The driver issue is specifically Nvidia related and involves having to turn bump-mapping to low in order to play the game.  Even so, the graphics still looked good and were than enough to create an immersive atmosphere very familar to Star Wars fans.  While the entire campaign only encompasses 3 “missions” they were sufficiently long enough and tough enough to create a satisfying experience.  Many other reviews critize RC for being too “simple” in its squad execution.  While it may be simple and the ability to place squad mates at any laoction would have been an added bonus, I did not feel that the game was overly “dumb” at all.  It was clear that the developers had created a lot of set-piece battles and at those locations sufficient sniper/heavy weapons/grenade locations were available as to make the squad useful and fun to use.

Unlike my experiences with Jedi Knight II, there were thankfully no places in the game where I was stuck reloading a level or instance 30,000 times in order to get lucky enough for a grenade or somesuch to take out just the right enemies (or for them to miss me) in order to survive and move on.  As mentioned earlier, this did not mean the game was challenging, by no means no, but it didn’t have extremely frustrating and arbitrarily impossible points either.  Overall I was extremely satisfied with my experience with RC.  My last knock against the game was the somewhat hackneyed ending which felt really contrived and tacted on at the last minute.  After fighting a vicious battle to destroy a Separatist cruiser, suddenly one of your squad mates is in trouble and unable to make it to the extraction point.  Rather than let you help him, or give you a choice of obeying orders or not (obeying would have meant extracting without him) they simply end the game their by air-lifting you to “safety” only then to tell you that a full-scale Republic invasion is going on.  If such is the case, then why not let you go back and get your squad mate?  It just felt like the story-writers really dropped the ball on the ending which could have been much more satisfying.  But, neglecting this perhaps overly personal opinionated flaw, the game was fun and I would highly recommend any Star Wars fan to play through it.  Also, as an added bonus, many fans of SW games may recognize one of the squad mates as the voice of Carth in the blockbuster BioWare game SW: Knights of the Old Republic.