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.
