Archive for the ‘ZOMGICFW’ Category

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been pining for Diablo 3 a little, of late—Scouring the news/rumour sites, searching for any scrap of hope, a release date, a beta program perhaps?

The world is quickly approaching it’s Final Act and I still haven’t had a chance to lose myself in nearly enough demon-bashing, loot-w*****g, or click-click-click-clicking!

To that end, I’ve been devoting some time to mimics of the genre: Torchlight (TL) and Dungeon Hunter 2 (DH2)—Not bad games really, and yet, still unable to satisfactorily scratch my gothic-action-RPG-itch. Why? Well, it’s the little things.

Top Ten

My top ten commandments for the genre should help explain—Diablo 3 devs take note! (who am I kidding?):

#	Thou shalt not…	D2	TL	DH2
10	…force me to drag a pet along that all/most of the time, does very little
9	…make the ‘normal’ game too dang easy
8	…drop loot from almost every monster
7	…make me trek back through a map to find the one spot I missed before
6	…send me on a quest to kill 5 snarks—unless there are 5 snarks out there right now for me to kill, and even then… just don’t
5	…obscure good items underneath piles of c**p ones
4	…make me identify each item manually
3	…snag my movement on obstacles
2	…make me click to pick up gold manually
1	…produce a game too similar too WoW *

^* For example:

• Don’t make me ‘fish‘ in a game
• Don’t make the game look too colourful and/or ‘cute’
• See Commandment 6.

You know, I’ve learned something today

Diablo 2 still stacks up pretty well. And if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s ‘high resolution’ mode is only 800×600 I’d probably still be playing it.

We already know that Diablo 3 addresses a number of the issues from previous iterations, will require more strategy behind each click, and is starting to look freakin’ sweet!

I for one look forward to welcoming our new demonic overlords.