Tag: Diablo III

Torchlight 2 got many things right, starting by the composer, Matt Uelmen, who came up with the masterpiece from Diablo I and II, that later got ravaged by the Diablo III soundtrack team. The same thing happened with the fey Morrowind theme from The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (one of my favourite game tracks) when it was adapted for Skyrim.

The phantasmagoric theme of Diablo would of course not translate well into the more light-hearted Torchlight universe, but it still retains a touch that makes it reminiscent of the Diablo franchise. I would say that even more reminiscent than Diablo III itself. In that calculation enter the mechanics and the philosophy of the game as well. That boastful claim that TL2 is the spiritual successor of Diablo II is actually true, despite the atmosphere being completely different.

But that does not matter because the team behind TL2 got right the most important thing: a loot-based dungeon-crawler must lean heavily on the looting. It is more easily said than done, since for the loot to feel rewarding a fragile balance must be maintained. On this topic dad and I held countless discussions. He was expecting Blizzard to wave his wand and fix the game so that the loot would feel epic again. That cannot be achieved for as long as an auction house is present and the game balanced around it. 'Epic' meant for him, and I agree, that there would be unique affixes to the items, allowing you to be not-game-breakingly-but-almost overpowered; that a looted item would goad you to create a new character with a specific build to test out a different way of playing (such as a dot-based assassin in Diablo 2); epic loot meant being awesome beyond adding +50 to your primary stat. In Torchlight 2, very early in the game, I already completed a blue set that gives me +20% health steal, a stat that I have yet to encounter elsewhere, as its more common peer gives a set amount of life on hit. And I expect legendary items (the category beyond 'unique') to be much more interesting.

But you know what? If they are not, there is an easy solution to it, that Blizzard threw off the window: mods. Modifications to the game made by the players, to suit what the players want and to reduce the forum-crying. Mods will be the core element of Torchlight's success in the long run, as it was for Neverwinter Nights, and to some extent for Diablo II. I can say that about a third of my played time for Diablo II has been in fact spent in mods, and it would have been much more if I had picked them up earlier, and if I had not been so absorbed in vanilla Diablo II in my school and teenage years. Some Diablo II mods improved the game to such an extent that the original felt like a foundation for the amateur developers to work on. I am sure that many of you have felt the same way after you have tried a couple of mods for Morrowind or Oblivion, even for Skyrim, although there has not been yet enough development for the polished story mods to come out. Just to get a glimpse of what passion for a game means for the players, take a look at this Oblivion mod, The Lost Spires, which adds a beautifully crafted storyline with new areas, lore, npcs, objects - the whole array, put together so masterfully that it appears to be (better than) official.

I am loving Torchlight II so far, but always with an eye on what will come next. I suspect that the game, even on elite difficulty, will be more accessible than Diablo III Inferno pre-patches, as Diablo II was. But at the time of Diablo II, players had not yet been drilled into endgame submission, and they were (I was) capable of enjoying a goalless path. Azuriel voiced the same concern about GW2 not long ago, and I agreed with him that, for me, there is no more bliss in pointless pursuits. In Diablo II I could happily hoard for the sake of hoarding. Now, I look forward to making as effective a character as possible for the added challenge of the mods that will come out soon.

There is room for all kinds of playstyles in Torchlight 2, unlike in Diablo III, where the only favoured playstyle was that of the savvy economist. For collectors there are plenty of unique items with special affixes; for theorycrafters there are many viable talents that result in abysmally different builds for the same class (wand-wielding bersekers, that is definitely an option); for achievers such as myself there are means to bring yourself to the limit, and if they are surpassed, an unrestrained modder will come up with something tortuous enough.

Finally, a word on the lack of respeccing: it is brilliant. When I started up the game and found out that I had allocated my skill points in an ineffective way, I was enraged. Apparently I skipped the first stage of grief, denial. A couple of stages later, I accepted it and allowed its philosophy to seep into my brain, and understood: I had been playing that same way many years ago, and had found it delightful. I made three sorceresses in Diablo II, each one of them bringing me closer to my preferred playstyle. I remember the skill tree of each of them. They were individual and untransferable. With WoW and its track-on-the-sand talent choices and cookie-cutter builds, my character was no longer defined by the choices I made for her, but mostly by her gear, as it recounted what she had gone through. Since classical MMOs are so focused on the endgame, it would make no sense to prevent respeccing, as it would force players through another month of grind to get an endgame optimal character. But why does this mindset have to apply to ARPGs too? There is fun in creating a new character to try out a new build with that special set you had looted. There is less fun in making the same wizard with the same stats and build of every wizard out there (and your failure to comply can be easily corrected in five seconds).

In any case, if you do not like how it is now, be it the respec, the music, the dungeons, the colour of your pet, it will all be solved by our passionate modders. Blizzard, the players knew what they wanted from your game. You should have given them the tools to customize it to their liking, instead of trying to direct how your game should be played.

In the advent of patch five-something of WoW, an hilarious bug was found and smashed. For a day or so, druids in stag form could climb on top of each other and overpoweredly fly above the sky limit. Blizzard saw this as unacceptable and crushed the druids' dream to reach the moon. When the ruling hand of Blizzard smashed this flimsy bug, I felt a pang of sadness and disappointment, as if it had been a nerf. Well, it was, in some way: it nerfed the player's creativity. Here's the bug, if you're curious:

In the last few years, Blizzard has been nerfing here and there not just for balancing reasons, but for streamlining ones as well. In Diablo 3, game that brought me a lot of joy from its polished mechanics, and a lot of sorrow from its design decisions, Blizzard's hand has been as unwavering as if it were an MMO, if not more. The playstyle that I usually adopted since Diablo 2, the glass cannon, was made extremely inefficient through the rising of repair costs and nerfing of attack speed. It was not the intended way to play, mind you. Diablo 3, being a gear-based game, would prefer you didn't "cheat" by using a cheap 0-resistance DPS set. It is all business, you see, players are not allowed to progress through skill, they have to buy their way through.

But this was not the only thing they streamlined: farming Siegebreaker was too popular, so they nerfed the chests, the nearby dungeons and boosted Siegebreaker with some nasty reflect damage affix. Resplendent chests had been too lucrative for the effort they required (although they forget that in order to get to most of those, you have to fight your way through a couple of "real" loot-pinatas), so they nerfed the chests, and the community sarcastically baptised them as "supply chests" because they only drop potions and gems. Oh, and let's not forget the preposterous thought of weapon racks always dropping weapons - that had to go away!

Back to bugs. I don't see the reason why some of them had to be deleted from the game. Take for instance the glitch that allowed rogues to enter Karazhan Crypts with Shadow Step back in TBC. It did not harm anybody or destabilized the game in any way. Hyjal was also a touristic spot that the most dexterous players bragged about having reached. They did not only nerf (or more politically correct: fix) wall-jumping, but when the virtuosos of jumping still made it, they installed a teleport that bounced them back where they should be. Wall-jumping in itself is a controversial subject, since it was used for actual harmful exploits such as jumping off the battlegrounds' fences before the race began. But I can think of other ways of preventing that that do not involve hijacking an interesting game mechanic (raise the walls, make them insurmountable, make a faux invisible ceiling, etc).

Why such rapacious reaction against creative bug-employing (not exploiting, there is no benefit made from it)? I believe it goes hand in hand with Blizzard's authoritarian policies of hyper-balancing. The game is supposed to be played/farmed *this* way and none other, which leads to the ever-nerfing of out-of-the-box ideas that the players come up with, such as 5-man rogue tanking of Gruul in TBC. My rogue friends drooled upon watching this video, and dreamed about being able to do that one day. It bespoke of the classes' possibilities beyond what was "common knowledge." It was all nerfed, since rogues are not supposed to tank. Raid encounters have gotten a similar treatment as well. I remember TBC encounters as being much more tolerant of different strategies. No, I don't just remember, I have seen it in action just a few months ago: King Maulgar could be handled in different ways depending on your raid setup. Enough tanks, and there was little need for hunter-kiting. Fewer healers? Then you may kite Maulgar around instead of face-tanking the whirlwind.

On the other end of the spectrum, developers such as Bethesda, which will always hold a little piece of my heart, and will probably be mentioned in my testament, have taken a much more laid-back approach to bugs. If it is funny and not game-breaking, we leave it there for our players to smile. My favourite one so far was the skyrocket sabercat. I encountered a sabercat in the wilderness, drew my bow, shot an arrow at it, and it just blasted off to the skies like a veritable rocket, leaving me there agape and loot-craving. Such wondrous world, Skyrim. You can be anything, even an astronaut.

Summing up: This bug fixing triggers in me some reluctance, because it reminds me too much of other creativity-nerfs, so abundant these days with Diablo 3. When will they learn that the more unique a player feels through her actions and decisions, the more attached she becomes to her characters and her individual game experience?

I intended to have a sirius blog, but I just had to share this with you.

PD: Thanks for the link, dad.

The AH, that feature that is to guarantee the maintenance of the servers (and Blizzard's entire crew retirement plan, once they finally release the RMAH) has harmed many player's enjoyment on many levels. Also literally: in Normal/Nightmare it makes the game trivial; in Hell it removes all the need for grinding; in Inferno... In Inferno Diablo 3 becomes AH 3.

You might be one of those players who decides not to use the AH at all, so that the game remains somewhat challenging (from Nightmare onwards, and if you're playing with just one hand - seriously, did they balance the early levels for 12 year-olds? I was 12 once, and farmed Mephisto and Cows in Hell. Why do they underestimate their players so much?). I am guilty of wanting to be at the endgame as fast as possible, so I bought the equipment off the AH and proceeded until the end of Hell and the beginning of Inferno, only to find out that Diablo 3 turns into a completely different game at Inferno. Not because of the difficulty (I have been doing the same kiting procedure that Azuriel loathes since Act I Normal), but because I am supposed to turn from a happy-go-lucky adventurer into a successful entrepreneur in order to advance in the story.

As many other bloggers have noted, the game is balanced around using the AH at the highest difficulty setting, and before that it might be detrimental to your enjoyment if you gear up using it. I didn't mind much, as I wanted to get to the "real deal" already, knowing how Blizzard spoonfeeds us these days with the challenge levels. I used (abused?) the AH joyfully. That was until it became a serious business.

One of my friends has managed to become that successful entrepreneur that I could never be. In part because, as I explained to him, I cannot find it in my heart to sell an item for a price that I would never buy it for. Apparently other people can afford those items and dispense with their hard-earned money gleefully. My friend has advised me to farm Butcher and put the items that could be useful at 500-750k, but I end up putting them at 150k and see it as a victory when they get bought. I am a business failure, but that is beyond the point. My point is: Why should I be doing finances in a mindless hack&slash lootfest?

You may say that I could ignore the AH completely, but let me tell you one thing - the loot is so infuriatingly random, and the difficulty step between the acts is so steep, that unless you thrive on running Butcher 10 times a day for 1 month, you will never get further than act I. Blizzard has acknowledged that the balance is somewhat off when in Act I you can tank 3-4 hits with a (decently geared) ranged, while in act II you get those snakes that go invisible, pounce on you and kill you in one shot. For the sake of the discussion, I'm going to disclose my stats: I am a Demon Hunter running at 31k life and 35k dps with a survival build and lots of crits and crit-damage. None of this helps as I still get killed with one single shot from many enemies in Act 2. It's not that much of a problem in most cases, as I enjoy the challenge of avoiding ALL damage. Nevertheless, you cannot count on avoiding it all. I cannot kill Belial because his snakes in phase 1 and 2 pounce on me when I'm out of cds and one-shot me. It is also important to note that Act I has become trivial for me in my current gear. I don't find it fun to farm an area that has ceased to be a challenge.

My only way to defeat Belial seems to be farming early act 2 or Butcher to find items that could be sold at the AH, to amass money to buy even more +vitality gear. I would need to carefully plan my expenses (don't craft, it's overpriced and useless) and my auctions to be able to progress.

And if that wasn't enough, Blizzard put a limit on the number of auctions we can have. I guess they did it so the market could not be dominated by the AH moguls that have honed their skills in WoW. I wish that limit would only apply to the real money AH, because I usually end up selling my stuff at a reduced price so that I can make sure that it will be bought, so I don't have to wait 2 days for my auctions to end to attempt a new sell. The gold AH as it was devised for WoW worked just fine, why couldn't they implement it without these exasperating tweaks? A fellow player has told me that they ought to have done it for the reason above, to control the market-controllers, and to prevent prices from dropping too low by an oversupply. Prices are rock-bottom already; in a week, a crossbow that I had bought for 500k I had to resell it for 145k. The economy is absolutely ridiculous. People want to sell rather than having their auctions sit there for 2 days, so they cannot risk putting it at the price they would want to sell it at, but at the price that should get it bought.

The AH is madness. If you're undergeared, wait a week and you'll be able to buy all of my gear at 10k per piece. Very good gear, at that. You won't still be able to kill Belial, though, you might want to farm for that 1.1k dps weapon at 2m gold.

I think that this post has turned out quite passionate in tone. I had been enjoying the challenge so far, actually. I agree that, from the perspective of a veteran MMO player, it is a baby WoW. I had months before the release been talking about how inappropriate this type of game is for the current times; it is just an old game design without longevity nor incentive beyond the most primal greedy urges. Nevertheless, it is fast-paced, and I like its contrast with more cerebral gameplays (such as TBC WoW, with its mana management and tactical healing). It is a challenge for my reflexes and an easy, fast gratification. I don't know why Blizzard thinks every "hardcore" player has to be an AH player though.

I feel uneasy about Diablo III. As many other bloggers have pointed out, it's a well-crafted game, bearing the trademark Blizzard polish, and offering a very slick and engrossing experience. Still, there's something inherently wrong about the game which is rooted in its most basic concept, in addition to a series of design faults. I can play the game without caring much about either, due to the addictive nature of its gameplay, but once I step out, I feel its incoherence weighing bluntly on me.

Let's start with the little things. Some design mishaps that hurt the social web that Blizzard has most fervently spurred for its game (by word of mouth, I would say).

My father and I have been unable to cooperate effectively almost since we started playing. Having different gaming paces, I was usually ahead of him as he levelled multiple alts. At some point we were able to group with our mains on equal terms -extremely important if you don't want to ruin the other person's experience by overpowering him-, but we quickly found out that we were much more efficient on our own. That was due to two factors: first, as a Demon Hunter, most of my abilities are tuned for solo play, and I cannot share anything valuable with the group apart from my own survavility (which is one of the highest). My dad, as a Witch Doctor, could not contribute with much either. Both our classes are designed without group play in mind, unlike the Monk with its healing, the Wizard with its high dps, and the Barbarian with its tanking capabilities. As a matter of fact, those 3 classes were the ones that Method selected for its presumed world first kill of Diablo on Inferno. So, as it stands, in order to group effectively without hindering your partner's progress and actually being more effective than solo, you must be highly synchronized in talents and even in classes. I am not as knowledgeable in D3 as to be able to determine if X class is actually solo or group material, I can only speak from my limited experience of my class (DH) and what I've seen from other classes in group play.

Another experience that serves to prove my point. Some days ago, a friend (Wizard) and I (DH) were running our solo games, both being at the same stage of the quest chain (late act I Inferno). He was whispering to me how hard it had become for him with the latest nerf to his armor, and I told him to come join me, as I was not having that much trouble. He told me that if he left his game, he would lose his Nephalem Valor buff (a buff that you start receiving at level 60. For each elite mob pack you kill, a stack is added to it, and your magic and gold find increase). He is one of this hardcore MMO players who like min-maxing his playstyle, and for him it was intolerable that Blizzard felt the need to penalise him for playing the game as they had marketed it ("play with your friends seamlessly" "hop into your friends' game just with one click"). Perhaps for some other people it is not such a big deal (I forfeited my 5-stacked buff to help a friend with one elite in Hell difficulty), but it makes the otherwise accessible parties rather awkward when you're at top level.

Actually, at top level everything changes (quite as in MMOs). Up to late Hell-beginning of Inferno, you could arrange a party of 2-4 people and deal with the mobs in whichever way you fancied, not having to concern with what others could provide to your playstyle. If a friend is roughly your same level, you could pair up with her, perhaps making the game progress slower, but still without hampering her too much. At the endgame, you rather sigh in relief when your friend leaves, as those pesky elites are much more manageable on your own. I will always remember with sadness the attempts we did at Butcher Inferno my Wizard friend, a Barbarian friend of his, and me. The Barbarian could withstand his melee hits no problem, but The Butcher had doubled his life pool and was one-shotting us ranged dps. After several wipes, we had to ask the Barbarian to leave, and let us try on our own. We downed him at the first try. As I said in the beginning, there is something inherently wrong with a design that gives rise to such situations.

Why is it that way? I could only fathom that Blizzard did it that way to prevent people from rushing through Inferno in a "perfect" group. They have to safeguard the loot of the endgame content, making it accessible only to a few extremely well-geared players. If you can game the, uh, game, and surmount the gear barrier with a finely tuned group, the grind at the earlier levels of Inferno would be unnecessary and people would be able to play without the AH. In order to keep their fragile system in check, they have made group play impractical and awkward, only viable for the elite. Yes, I could join a friend's game at Inferno and still progress, but it is self-evident that we could do better on our own.

Another thing that irks me is that Blizzard felt the necessity to erect a gear barrier at Act II Inferno. I like my games being about skill. You could argue that MMOs are about gear, but not to such an extent and not so bluntly; they require individual knowledge and familiarity with the class, and strategy and raid cooperation. In Diablo III, the difference between my killing a pack without dying or not is not how quick I respond or how well I kite, it's the amount of DPS I'm able to put before I run out of cds. Nonetheless, I understand the idea behind the gear barrier - to make players farm early content and prevent them from reaching the endgame too fast, while forcing them to play the AH to buy gear (which in turn you can only buy if you've been lucky with the drops and got something worth selling). Many bloggers have also been worried about the use of the AH as cheating. As most of us come from an MMO environment in which +4 spirit from the Campfire is an invaluable buff, it is inconceivable not to min-max every other (multiplayer) game. Because it is not a singleplayer game from the moment you add your first friend on Battlenet. If you join a friend's party and fall behind on DPS, hampering his game, you can either leave and continue solo, or go to the AH and become a valuable asset (and get invited to the raids?). Stubborn tackled this problem from another perspective.

Blizzard could not do a singleplayer game as most people were demanding. They rely on the factors that drive us to min-max, to care about our equipment and play at our finest. Of all the issues I've commented, none of them are a design overlook whose improvement/redesign would make the game better (for Blizzard). They had many years to consider how to best mine money from their users, and Diablo III in its entirety is what they came up with. From Blizzard's perspective, the gear barrier is there so you are forced to buy to continue; the barrier to grouping in Inferno is built so you cannot be too effective at higher levels, and are forced to grind on your own and buy loot; the enforced multiplayer exists solely to apply peer-pressure to your gearing up, so you need to resort to the AH to play with them.

What I feel that is most wrong about Diablo 3 is the game concept itself. Tobold has made a very accurate analysis this time, trying to abstract himself from the subjectivity with which we regard Blizzard's games. As it is a Diablo game, we have to cherish certain features that we would abhor in others. Didn't we fight against repetitive content in Wrath of the Lich King? Didn't we progress beyond the artificial rewards of earlier games towards the persistent world model, with many more paths and options for the players? What sense does a game like Diablo III make, a game that is a remake of a very ancient concept that we abandoned for greener pastures? I am aware that there are people (me included) that like simple lootfests from time to time. But having tasted the variety that MMOs have to offer these days, I could no longer run 30 Mephistos a day. Neither 30 Butchers, no matter how slick the gameplay is. There has to be a point behind the grind, be it new content, joining your friends, whatever it is.

Blizzard knew there had to be a point for it, and they designed the RMAH. More on this later :)

I know that everybody is too busy massacring to pay attention to why they are doing so. I understand, I have also been playing as if I had a blinker on and could only move straight from boss to boss. That's the nature of Diablo. I am a bit concerned, though, that they have made several narrative choices that conflict with this known nature.

For instance, the recorded diaries and journals. Somebody at Blizzard identified a problem: People don't want to read. People often say: "I would prefer not to." (And then proceed to revolutionarily stare out of the window). Solution: we remove the written text and substitute it with a recorded voice which will be playing while they slaughter. People love to have voices narrating some oblivious story while they're struggling with a boss pull. Maybe they didn't catch all that was said and want to actually *read* it... Then we make the access to the notes in their appropriate order so convoluted that they will desist.

There's several problems to this method. First, most of the notes are part of a large series which, unless played in order and not too distant from each other, will make their continuity falter. Secondly, the Lore tag by the corner appeared interesting at first, but is ultimately obnoxious and not readily removable. It keeps blinking until you click on it and cancel the narration. Thirdly, I found some of the diaries to be rabble which did not offer any particular insight on Santuary and its inhabitants. I found especially intrusive the boss-orders series, with Belial and Azmodan acting in their obvious villainous role. I don't know if it was intended or a by-product of the diary marketing, but I found these demons much less serious than their predecessors. What made Diablo a terrifying creature was his alienness and untranslatability. He wasn't issuing mischievous orders to petty mobs you were slaughtering. Pure evil cannot be made explicit, or it loses its abstract power. Similar to one of the suggestions that actors are given on stage: you cannot enact a pure emotion without instilling a reaction against patheticism in the audience; they'll probably laugh it off. It's difficult to take Belial or Azmodan seriously. Even with this last Diablo apparition I found it hard to feel any awe.

There has been some discussion on the subject of ambience and how D3 doesn't meet the standards set by the previous titles. They have argued that it was the illumination, which was much more contrasted in D2 or 1; the bright colours, although D2 also had a good number of sceneries that were well-lit and coloured; the music, which does not set any tone at all, much less tension. The Diablo 1 tracks were renowned for their eerie quality. No need for a big orchestra and fancy effects, they could do much more with less. Check it out:

The aforementioned arguments are indeed correct, but they have not taken into account some other aspects of the game that, no matter how gritty and dark they turned their sceneries, would ultimately detract us from experiencing any awe. The gameplay and mechanics do not allow the necessary introspection of terror. In D1 you had a hard time from the beginning, without any tutorial areas to hold your hand; the normal (not unique) enemies also required you to be alert; getting hit meant getting stuck in an animation which would slow you down, while the hordes gathered around you; the gear you collected was scarce and usually a trade-off of stats, some pieces being so wicked that they actually hurt you more than they did good; even the shrines played a part in setting an atmosphere, as you could never be sure that the next shrine wouldn't cripple you. I am ignoring D2 for the sake of discussion because it had already departed from the original idea of D1. What we have in Diablo 3 now is a tutorial mode, Normal, which can made even more simple by purchasing 3 or 4 weapons from the gold AH (even Nightmare is a breeze with one or two rares that other people dispose of); normal enemies are laughable; no stun-lock animation, thank goodness; gear is abundant, and if you don't get lucky, other people will for a pretty decent price (of gold); actually hurtful traps? None.

Regarding the sceneries, and watching the D1 video of the Diablo theme below, I've noticed that in D3 we have a compensatory abundance of gore details that do not actually provoke any response in us. Differently from the minimalistic scenery of the previous game, where there are only pentagrams, torches and Diablo. It is similar to the scenery in D2, which was still threatening despite of the bright colours.

I am also concerned with the decision of Blizzard of forcing the players to go through the story over and over again in order to farm. I cannot predict if that will make the game wear off more or less; what final consequence it will have. I had argued before that it could help set a clear, canonical notion of the game in the players' minds, much as Cain's line "Stay a while and listen" had been embedded in our gaming culture because of that same repetition. It could also prove to be tedious and degrading for the story elements.

I've taken heed of some things that D3 did well in the narrative field and that I expect to be carried into other titles when appropriate: clear-cut but not excessively rigid personalities for our PCs (unlike Shepard, who for me was less of a vessel of my personality/the personality I wanted her to enact, and more of an actress). They have found a perfect balance between allowing personal identification and delivering some character-based flavour. The same thing happens with the companions. I have enjoyed listening to their personal stories. Short but with a concise property which teased me, and did not overwhelm me with too much straying speech, which is the scourge of modern novels these days (R.R. Martin, I'm looking at you). Another neat element are the conversations that you hear from the NPCs around town. They set an unique flavour; engrossing without being intrusive. Blizzard has been doing well in this regard, except for the diaries part. Who did really think that we wanted to hear disconnected pieces of narrative while simultaneously fighting and looting?

On a final remark, I am very annoyed by the repeating lines of my Templar. My Demon Hunter is too polite to tell him that they already had that conversation before; twenty minutes ago, and two hours before, and last night. I hope Blizzard will implement an option to shut him up.

I would like to try this game. I'm willing to pay for the pre-purchase, even though I know it's a pernicious business move for the consumers, because I'm curious about testing it myself in the beta. What I am not sure about is whether I should. My concern is not about the legitimacy of the business practice, but with some of the game decisions that perpetuate a kind of gaming community which I feel uncomfortable with. It is a question of integrity.

My qualms are about female representation in video games. Guild Wars 2 does nothing to alleviate the problem, it even fosters it. Its female characters are tall, extremely thin and scantily clad, wearing high heels and revealing armour to the battle. Their faces could have been modelled after any doll of our childhood: lifeless, perennially smiling, childish or aloof and seductive. Perhaps there will be alternatives at character creation, but so far I have only seen these impossible figures that appear in every commercial, and in so many games, where we get to embody them and be flawless too.

I have also felt disappointed at Blizzard for their female characters in Diablo III. I was fine about the Wizard, to some extent, because I had grown with the Diablo II Sorceress, and was accustomed to her looks. I didn't perceive her as sexualized or seductive, or ridiculously clothed for the job. The Demon Hunter, however, perpetuates the notion that women would keep wearing high heels and revealing neckline (not in the trailer, but in the art works and early armour of the game) as if it were natural, instead of the handicap it actually is; not to mention in life-or-death situations such as fighting demons. Any real woman would wear what is most comfortable, that is a truism. But why don't developers ever acknowledge the artificiality of high heels, and subsequently of their female constructions?

In Diablo III I solved my qualms by playing a male Demon Hunter. It is not the first time I do so. I was not comfortable with the female Blood Elves in WoW, and thus picked the opposite gender. Besides, the (male) Blood Elves were the first WoW race that were aesthetically pleasing to women. The other male characters are built to accommodate to the idea of heroism and physical prowess, even the traditionally slender and graceful (Night) Elves. It is a fantasy designed for men, and not necessarily related to what women find attractive in men. That is why most of the conversations about superheroes with enormous muscles as sexualized for women are wrong, because their characterization is based on a male aspiration. Needless to say, this aspiration is as artificial as the hypersexualization of women.

I left Age of Conan earlier than most people, and probably because of different reasons. I was not comfortable with my characters. Any female I would create had the biggest bosom I had ever seen, in such slim bodies. That constitution is either very rare or artificial. Then I decided I would have a male healer, as slender and unimpressive as possible, as you would expect a caster to be. No chance. He looked horrendous, and still much bigger than any men I had seen which was not coming out of a gym. Both the female and the male characters were designed for men who ascribed to the superhero/Conan fantasy, in which women are sexualized and men are depicted as powerful beasts. And, despite being half-naked in their barbarian attire, the intent is not for them to appeal to women, but to be a vessel of masculine power. The patriarchy system works in both directions, it supplies unattainable ideals for the men too.

What will I do in Guild Wars 2 to tackle the issue? I might yet again create a male character. I could discard the game completely, but I don't want to deprive myself of an enjoyable experience. I had been playing video games which are disrespectful towards minorities since the dawn of time, and it doesn't look like it's going away. I shall be content with drawing attention to the problem, so that more people will perhaps reclaim an accurate representation of 50% of the population. Speaking of which, Borderlands 2 will again feature three male protagonists and one female. Such an old issue. There is one little test I sometimes put to practice when watching a movie, called The Bechdel Test, which accounts for the number of females that actively participate in a movie, without being related to the male leads. It's surprising, and disheartening, to learn how many movies fail this test, reinforcing the notion that male is the default, and female the Other. I wonder if we could adapt this test somehow to the gaming genre. I know of at least one rule that I would propose: "Do the female characters wear comfortable clothes when required?" Can you think of other rules?

If I had to divorce myself from every cultural activity that conscious or unconsciously misrepresents minorities (although women are not a minority at all, they might still be so in the gaming sphere), I would not participate in any mainstream entertainment. I do not watch TV anymore, do not go to the cinema, do not read best-selling books. I read the canon, and sci-fi with a clear notion that it is also full of ideologies. I am on guard most of the time. I would have my games not misrepresent me, but if I had to adhere to that creed I would not play almost any games. What is one to do?

Edit: I received some info through the comments about the gender structures in the game and I feel that, even though the physical representation of women is way off, I couldn't discard the game completely because of its treatment of gender: 3 out of 5 faction leaders are women, and women are constantly featured in the game as prominent figures in power. That is indeed a step forward. Still, a battle has to be fought regarding the sexualization of our characters. Here's a post by Kadomi which adds more to the issue than I had.

My original opinion on Diablo III's method of telling its story stands. What I wanted to add is not so concerned with how Blizzard achieves an engrossing experience, but with how these methods signal a particular trend in society that I'm beginning to grow wary of.

Having bits of the story told in the background while you are able to move, keep advancing, and killing, encourages you to precisely do that, which in turn drives attention away from the piece of lore that is being read. Now, this called my attention to the contemporary trend of multitasking, which owes much to the computer and its ability to perform multiple tasks, and by extent to allow us to divert our energy back and forth between activities. Nowadays it is not uncommon to have a social network or messenger open while engaged with some other activity that ought to require total focus from us. In the case of Diablo III, if you choose to listen to the lore excerpt, and get into combat at the same time, you better be on Normal, because you might receive a few hits; if you choose to engage in combat without paying much attention to the text, it will be completely distorted by your lack of attention. I've listened to the diaries of... a hundred times, and I don't even remember the name of the character. That the diaries are physically separated and fragmentary in nature doesn't help, but it was my adventuring in the meantime that made me ignore them completely. So, in theory, this storytelling might be innovative, but in truth I haven't been able to draw so much from it because I was urged to keep slaughtering. That is what Diablo does, appeal to an appetite for performing actions for a reward, this time even more tangible than it was with its predecessor, because the reward can bring real money in addition to the satisfaction of virtual power.

You might argue that this game isn't focused on a story and that the inclusion of these diaries is not a core portion of the game, and therefore it is of no consequence to miss them. I agree, and that is why I say that Diablo's appeal is independent of its story, no matter the resources allocated to compose it, because in the end the game will be a set of sceneries with an array of creatures that line up to be killed and spill their loot. My intent was to supplement my initial consideration with some thoughts on how the game works, something that we don't usually discuss because 'games are just games'.

Our games reflect our lifestyle, I'm just stating the obvious. Nonetheless, most of the time we limit ourselves to judge them as a complex of story+gameplay, without engaging in a discussion of what they reflect from our society, as we would do with a literary text or a film (if the criticism was less concerned with the recommendation and more with the text itself). That we have such a game that stimulates our desire to achieve, and rewards us more frequently and sometimes more powerfully than real life, that is what we should acknowledge. Not entirely condemn, because most entertainment is either like this or a simple brainwash, but still we have to bear in mind its implications.

Beta Patch 13 notes: Diablo III EU Forum, Skill and Rune Changes by Jay Wilson.

The last patch might also be the last in terms of major game changes: there's nothing else of relevance to implement, analyse or tweak; not even to sweep away like some of the systems that were initially announced (the gold-collecting pets, the cauldrons that allowed you to disenchant objects on the run, the mystic artisan). I am sure that this will be the last big patch before release, and that release will come somewhere around April, perhaps May because of Blizzard's usual apprehension of giving wings to their baby; almost an adolescent after all these years of development.

Regarding the changes that I've been able to evaluate in the beta, I'm very confident that they made the right choice in those areas that were problematic: runes and the skill system. I'm not so contented with some particular classes (Demon Hunter, Witch Doctor), but I'll probably play the Wizard anyway. I'm a sorceress at heart and I couldn't manage to pick up any other class in Diablo II. In WoW I even made two druids, same server, faction, class and race, because I needed an extra toon to farm my mats.

This time, which Diablo III, I wanted to try the Demon Hunter along with the Wizard, but I felt that the former was underpowered. It might be the fault of those few initial skills that you are given in the beta, which obviously do not reflect the playstyle of higher levels, but most of the skills that I tried seemed more awkward to use than those of the Wizard. For instance, the Bola Shot, although it's concept is appealing, is sometimes difficult to use effectively if the enemies are not all clustered together. You end up attaching the bomb to the faster-moving zombie that is at the forefront, while his allies remain unharmed. When compared to the jaw-dropping Arcane Orb that the Wizard gets at third level, which deals more damage in a larger area, the ability of the Demon Hunter feels puny. Yes, I know that the Demon Hunter's is a resource-generating skill, whereas the Arcane Orb is resource-consuming, but I haven't found yet a worthy Hatred-spending ability (at the initial levels, which is what I can test). Rapid Fire exhausted my Hatred too much for what it provided, and was a canalised ability, which hinders the character's preferred playstyle: hit-and-run; or Impale, which deals a ton of damage, but to a single target. I needed far more crowd control, by running around and putting traps, than with my Wizard, which shot three orbs and cleared the field. This is just a beta, alright, but the first impression should be of empowerment and potentiality, and I felt clumsy instead.

On the topic of the runes, some people have been complaining about the removal of the item (the rune that was dropped, and had different colours and levels) for the inclusion of a system that resembles talents/glyphs. There is no penalisation on changing runes, nor a grind requirement: runes are very much like talents in their availability through levels, and similar to the function of WoW's glyphs, which modified skills. Before it was changed into this convenience, we had a system that involved grind and trade of an imposing amount of runes, which could be counted by the thousands. There were disadvantages to this system around just every corner: inventory collapse, inflexibility of build, saturation of the market when most people had their runes, etc. The advantage: having yet another item to trade with in the AH, which is beneficial mostly to Blizzard, which would have profited from the transactions of a highly-valued commodity (would you rather spend money on a sword that might be replaced later, or on a rune which will allow you to have the ultimate skill?). They had to let it go because of the inconveniences, and now the playerbase will be able to tweak and modify their skills with much more ease, and less panic of spending a rune on an ability that you would end up dismissing.

Finally, regarding the skill system change, I'm also quite pleased. We must recognise that this final tweak was made bearing in mind the casual players, or rather the inexperienced players that come to Diablo completely fresh, and which might not make the connection between resource-generating and resource-spending abilities, and how they are supposed to build their character balancing those, adding an armor/chakra/summon, a defensive ability, etc. This way, the newest players will always choose among skills that have a similar function, which are equivalent, and the choice would be a matter of taste. For the veterans, the Elective Mode can be unselected and the more creative builds allowed, although I wonder why anybody would pick Ice Armor and Storm Armor at the same time. This is not absolutely unthinkable; I'm sure that we'll be seeing those things soon in "Elitist Jerks: Diablo Edition."

Videogames are audiovisual interactive media, which makes them more closely related to cinema than to literature. This is why we have 'cinematics', narrated preludes with fancy artwork, and CGI trailers which could be used for the next Final Fantasy movie. But these features are peculiar to the film and not the videogame genre, whose main characteristic is the inclusion of the spectator in the story in such a way that she is turned into the driving force of the narrative.

Diablo III did exceptionally well in this regard. Somebody could argue that the story is not the pinnacle of imagination or maturity, and I would agree with this statement (after all, I've read the insipid, cliché-filled Diablo novels of Richard A. Knaak; not even my adolescent fantasy books were that terrible. Some other day I'll tell you about the quest upon which I voluntarily embarked to finish those "books"). Despite this act of cruelty against literature, the Diablo world is very rich and vibrant, as you can see in the Diablo III beta, and probably throughout the game. The main reason is that its story and lore go along the game instead of interrupting it.

The Diablo III gameplay is what will make this game last, which is why the story cannot detract the player from experiencing the game from the first second you enter it. Instead of being introduced to the events from inside the village, your character arrives to the town through the besieged entrance and experiences the conflict first-hand. In fact, the first thing you are presented with is a couple of zombies chewing on some corpse. You'll have to kill those zombies to pass by, as a means to getting acquainted with the controls and abilities of your class. [✓] Player involvement; [✓] Show, don't tell; [✓] Tutorial that doesn't stand back from the game itself.

Then, once you go through the doors, you will witness several instances of environmental storytelling: the efforts of the townspeople to get rid of the corpses of the risen, throwing them into a pyre; Brother Malachi turned into a doomsayer, foreboding the end of the world; the townspeople changing into zombies inside the tavern, while you are in the middle of a talk with Leah. [✓] Environmental information not tied to a conversation that the player must trigger.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having an NPC tell the player some details, but it is much more convincing if the situation is self-evident; and absolutely ridiculous when an NPC tell us how dire it is for people, when you see neither contingents nor dragons harassing the folks (like those dragons in Skyrim which would not go inside the big cities for fear of treading over the palace garden).

In Diablo III, once in the wilds, whenever you encounter a monster that is unknown, and after having defeated it, your journal is added an entrance in the form of a narration from Cain, or a traveller who has encountered this monster. You can click on the entry and receive a brief summary of the monster's characteristics interspersed with an anecdote of the narrator's. The narration doesn't interrupt your massacring, as it plays over it. I consider this feature a very clever and much more engaging way of revealing mechanics of monsters, plus a bit of background about them. Very similarly to this one, the feature of the journals that the player finds in the crypts and cathedral discloses lore details without forcing the player to interrupt the game. [✓] Learn about the world without being drawn away from it. What most players want to do when they log into a game is play, not read a book or glossary! I don't care about what you don't show me, or at least hint at, in your game.

Of course, there is so much information you can deliver through these means. Although it is not necessary for the game, you can learn more about the events in the nostalgic way of Diablo II: Talking to a character about one of the set topics for which he has a recorded dialogue. I'm glad that this feature was included in the new game, because it is convenient to have something to do around town while your colleague is arranging his stash. Back in Diablo II, I spent lots of time talking to the townspeople, to the extent that I almost learnt their dialogues by heart, because my dad would spend thirty minutes per session cubing gems and runes and loging in and out of mules. Now I'm certain that I'll be learning the Diablo III character's dialogues too while my father travels between blacksmith and stash for half an hour.

For a while I was worried that the decision of forcing the player to replay the quests every time she wanted to farm an area was a risky one, that it would be to the detriment of the narration. Now I'm convinced of the opposite. Whenever I go back to Diablo I or II, I feel a connection that comes from familiarity. Instead of being pissed off by Cain's trying to tell me about the Horadric Cube for the fortieth time, I feel fond of the old man, and repeat his words out loud before hitting escape. Akara's "There is a place of great evil" makes me nostalgic too, and reminds me of the time when the Diablo II zombies seemed creepy to me. Izual's "Tyrael was a fool to have trusted me!"; Ogden's "Greetings, good traveler, welcome to the tavern of the Rising Sun" in the first Diablo had a special intonation that I can imitate pretty well. As well as the cows from the Secret Cow level - I'm quite sure that I can recite all of the 'Moos' that had been recorded.

Therefore I believe that the repetition that we'll see in Diablo III will contribute to ingrain it in the videogame culture as it did with its predecessors. [✓] Repetition gets the message through, and works for this franchise. Nevertheless, it's not something to be cherished in all kinds of games. Diablo gets rid of the negative consequences of it by not focusing much on the story, bringing the farming to all of the game's areas, so you won't get fed up with one particular zone, and having the loot as its main driving force.

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