Results tagged “Diablo III”

Your Pentium 4 Northwood @ 3.06 GHz came out in 2003. That's seven years ago. Even though the guy who sold it to you told you it was "the most kick-ass über-machine ever conceived", technology kept evolving.

To help you understand my point, this is how Grand Theft Auto looked back then:

There used to be a time when playing games was a thing only freaks did. Believe me, I was one of those. Even if there wasn't really difficult to find anybody that played videogames, those who did it were considered "strange", and, if they did play quite a lot (as I did, for example) socially disabled. We spent our hours playing with that shrill machines that moved some weird anthropomorphic forms on the screen, instead of going outside and playing football, or hanging out with friends, or whatever kids for our age were supposed to do, apparently for no reason.

At that time, games were hard. They were often frustrating, as well. Maybe they weren't better, but even the most random title had a life span of years. I still play the first Metroid every now and then, or Contra, to name a couple, and they are almost as good as they were. Intense, hard. Normally, you won't be able to make it to the end if you haven't trained at least for a couple of weeks, in some of them.

But that's not happening anymore. At least not on the "mass market"; because that's what it is. Games aren't meant to be original, creative or even interesting on 95% of the cases. They are meant to be sold, as much as possible. Is Modern Warfare 2 the best shooter ever? I doubt it, but certainly has sold more copies than any other one.

Is this change necessarily bad? Well, it surely has brought games to a wider audience, although I wonder if something has been lost in the path. Luckily, nowadays, creating a game is easier than ever, and we get tons of great games made by "normal" people, independent developers that just want to do their games as they want them to be.

Internet is often the only way to know about these titles, and I can't but think that I'm missing tons of great titles just because I wasn't able to find them. I try to follow as many websites as I can, checking for anything that might catch my eye (because, of course, another of the consequences of the current "ease to create games", is the huge amount of not-so-well-resolved games), and still I keep learning about games that apparently came out years ago and got almost no coverage, even on these "expert" publications. Sometimes is just a signature on a forum, or a link on a comment in a blog.

And I can't, but remember the time when almost every single game had at least a page on the videogame magazines. And then I rant.

As you can see on the Official Diablo Twitter channel. Apparently, Blizzard is considering a different approach on Diablo 3 to how the skill system will work, moving away from the classic skill trees we could see in Diablo and Diablo 2 (and later on its version for World of Warcraft).

Jay Wilson gave some more details on the interview he was made by DiabloFans. So, even if there's nothing decided yet, the game is being developed around the idea of a "skill pool / path" per class rather than a tree. Even if this isn't too enlightening, by reading the rest of the interview you can already expect a game where there's no possibility to fail when building your character. Why? Because Blizzard even removed the stat points.

Yes, you won't receive the infamous 5 points anymore. This time they will be fixed per class.

What can I say? Probably it will appeal to way more people than the previous system, but not to me, that's for sure. I guess the main end of producing a game is monetizing it as much as it's possible, isn't it? And that's something Blizzard knows how to do better than anyone else.