Diablo III - It's official

If they're not releasing D3 this year there'll be another WoW expansion due in 2012 (because I can't imagine them releasing another this christmas, although I sure wouldn't mind if they did, as Cataclysm's longevity and fragmented experience has been a rather big letdown for me.)

I can't imagine them slow-cooking D3 until 2013. That'd be insane.
 
Joystiq posted a short blurb the other day:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/10/blizzard-investigating-diablo-for-consoles/

This isn't really news of course, Blizzard has already stated publically they're considering D3 for consoles this past Blizzcon, or if it even was the one before that. I just thought I'd gauge people's reactions on this.

Personally I think it's great, as long as it doesn't delay the PC release, or limits gameplay in some fashion. They'd also need to bring battle.net connectivity over to the consoles so you wouldn't end up with one character for your PC and another for consoles, that would suck, royally. Of course, that would pretty much neccessitate cross-gameplay between PCs and consoles, which could be tricky regarding balancing and such. Just for example, how do you quickly and efficiently place Hydras for example with a joypad?

Thankfully, the D3 team has already stated in no uncertain terms world PK won't be a part of the game, and instead confined to arenas with their own modified rules, so PvP balance will be easier to accomplish then.
 
How would it not delay the PC release? As soon as they decide to go ahead with console, MS will throw a bucket of money their way and get an exclusive release, or at least minimum same time release.
 
If they do, I just hope they don't go console first like so many multi-platform developers.

I'm not sure anyone has enough money to make Blizzard do something they don't want to do. :p

Regards,
SB
 
Grall said:
Personally I think it's great, as long as it doesn't delay the PC release, or limits gameplay in some fashion.
Click to expand...
How can it not? In a 2D plane the difference between mouse and controller gets even worse ...

They would either have to severely restrict the type of ranged attacks available or do design and balancing for the PC and console version completely separately.
 
MfA said:
They would either have to severely restrict the type of ranged attacks available or do design and balancing for the PC and console version completely separately.
Click to expand...
These don't seem high on the list of problems I would associate with Blizzard. Come on. This console-spaz is really silly. :p
 
Hmm, would be quite interesting if SC2 had a simultaneous console release. Pretty sure the lack of zoom level and missing zoomable minimap or second monitor support wouldve been blamed on them.
Bliz and Bethesda seem to be the only companies that get away with any serious kind of public/professional criticism where others would face a shitstorm for way less.
 
Is it just me, or could Diablo 3 work really well on a touchscreen tablet? Just sayin'. Storage would be a problem, I guess.
 
You're right, it could work out nice on a touchscreen, with enough thought put into the controls. You'd have to have a system that can properly differentiate between attacks and movements for example.

As for storage... Reduce rez of the art and bitdepth of textures. Maybe drop some flavor sound effects and stuff if neccessary. Torchlight is only 840MB, and it looks great IMO so it wouldn't have to consume gobs of space.
 
Hmmm, now I'm tempted to install Diablo II or even the first Diablo on my Slate PC and see how well it works with touch interface. :D Only problem with that is having to play a 4:3 game stretched to 16:9 otherwise the touch interface doesn't match what's displayed. 4:3 centered with a capacitive touch interface means if you have to touch say the right edge of the 16:9 screen in order to touch the right edge of the 4:3 image. It's a bit disconcerting. One reason I'd like to see a 4:3 Windows slate released.

Regards,
SB
 
Why doesn't it readjust the touch area to the display area when not showing native 16:9 resolutions? That's idiotic.
 
Because of a few factors.

1. Then entire surface of the display is the capacitive touch sensor. So that can't be adjusted.
2. This isn't GPU scaling (intel pinetrail doesn't have that I "think"), it's display panel scaling. As such whatever is displayed whether stretched or with black bars on the side is assumed by the OS to be the entire size of your display. Hence the leftmost capacitive touch point is mapped to the leftmost edge of your display/desktop. Not a problem when the two are the same. Becomes a problem for touch interface when your interface is different dimensions than your desktop/display area.

I'd imagine if this was an AMD or Nvidia GPU with the option to enable GPU scaling that it "might" be able to deal with something like that. But then again it might not as the GPU guys wouldn't have thought of something like that. So even with GPU scaling it may be that windows is still presented with the 4:3 display area as being the sum total of your display/desktop. And thus you'd still have the left most edge of your capacitive touch interface being automatically mapped to the left most edge of your display/desktop area.

Hmmm, that makes me think of another way to maybe get this to work. Is it possible to run Diablo or Diablo II in a window? That would solve that issue.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
1. Then entire surface of the display is the capacitive touch sensor. So that can't be adjusted.
Click to expand...
But software can interpret the input from the capacitive sensor to limit the valid touchable area to that which corresponds to the current display resolution... All that's needed is a bit of programming.

Anyway, it's probably a maturity issue, touchpad devices are still in their infancy, in a few generations I would think these kinks will be straightened out.

On the other hand, it might actually be more likely that legacy apps will be left as-is with kinks and all, and new apps be built that don't suffer from these issues in the first place...

Is it possible to run Diablo or Diablo II in a window? That would solve that issue.
Click to expand...
Yes, there's a command-line switch for it. If it isn't -windowed or such, then it's listed on Blizzard's support pages for Diablo2. I looked it up myself a couple months back. It works pretty well, but the game feels very dark when played in a window with a bright(ish) desktop background. It's not very ergonomic/comfortable, but that applies more to desktop PCs I'd think and less to a pad device. :)
 
Grall said:
Yes, there's a command-line switch for it. If it isn't -windowed or such, then it's listed on Blizzard's support pages for Diablo2. I looked it up myself a couple months back. It works pretty well, but the game feels very dark when played in a window with a bright(ish) desktop background. It's not very ergonomic/comfortable, but that applies more to desktop PCs I'd think and less to a pad device. :)
Click to expand...

Sweet. When I get the time I'm definitely going to give this a try. :D Today my replacement SB MB is arriving from Newegg, so likely won't have time today.

Regards,
SB
 
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