Diablo III - It's official

lol, does it support massive EyeFinity resolutions?

 

In the newest patch I believe they added GPU scaling to widescreen resolutions, so you don't have to worry about anything.

EDIT-sort of...

"Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be
maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users)."

 

Gah, forget it, I'm not bothering with trying Diablo II after all. Blizzard's download service sucks serious ass compared to Steam. It's crawling along at less than 100 KB/s AND somehow slowing down my connection. Guess it's due to the fact they use BT for file distribution and they have D2 hosted on a slow connection. SC2 wasn't nearly this slow.

I really wish they would get their heads out of their arse and allow their games to be sold/hosted at Steam.

Regards,
SB

 

The switch for windowed mode in Diablo 2 is -w. Hope this helps anyone who wants to window it.

 

I think the eventual goal is for battle.net to be their own version of Steam. The leaked Blizzard product schedule mentioned "3rd party battle.net" as coming down the road.

 

If they continue to use BT exclusively even for older titles which won't have very many uploaders, I hope it dies a horrible death.

Regards,
SB

 

Must be some temporary anomaly, when I DL:d D2 and D2X the process was speedy and painless.

Anyway, is anyone on the Euro realms sitting on a couple Manald Heal rings (or any other jewellry with mana leech on it) they might want to bestow on my poor little amazon gal? I've only gotten a truly crap 3% ring even though I've gambled like mad, and I'm like level 35 or something for chrissakes, and 3% isn't nearly enough unfortunately. I can strafe a few times, then I'm totally dry.

The resource system and its reliance on random-drop leech items is one of the weakest points in D2 gameplay. If the game refuses to drop you any leech stuff you're screwd.

 

It seems the random item generator does its job, however I know how frustrating it can be.

 

Maybe you guys saw this already, but THEY'RE CRUNCHING!

In my book that ought to mean mere months until release. Blizzard knows extended crunches aren't good for the staff.

 

Wife laughed when I told her this was going to be a good geek year. She asked why and I said Diablo 3, the 5th ASoIaF book, and Game of Thrones on TV. Gonna be a banner f'n year at the Reynolds residence.

 

There better be some mod(s) to get rid of the colourful style.

 

The footage shown from Blizzcon 2010 doesn't look inappropriately colorful. I think they toned down the pastels and rainbows somewhat after the initial negative public reaction, last year's game looks simply stunning and awesome.

Don't forget that D2 was pretty colorful and plenty bright too in a lot of areas, and nary a word of criticism was ever said about that at the time.

 

For any other company sure, for Blizzard their crunch-mode probably lasts two years.

For Infinity Ward/Treyarch crunch-mode is 3 months...

Spoiler

after the game ships

 

Just in time for next-gen consoles!

 

No, interviews with blizzard staff have stated they know crunching for too long is bad. Many/most of the senior staff are now family mothers and fathers, they have spouses and kids they need to spend time with. Crunching for months and months (let alone 2 years, ye gods) doesn't work very well under those conditions.

They did basically a year-long crunch at the end of WoW's development (the list of major, important stuff that got finalized/implemented during that last year is simply staggering) and I'm sure Blizzard does not want to repeat that.

 

Guys - for someone that is not in the industry, exactly what is a crunch? I think I can guess, but interested to know for sure...

 

It's when a team gets to the end of a project, sees the last deadlines coming up and goes into "crunch mode" to get it finished. Normally this means working stupidly long hours, like 15+ hours a day, six or seven days a week for the last 1-3 months. Anything more than that, and you're just burning through your staff, but some devs and publishers don't care about that as they are intending to can all their staff after the project goes gold anyway.

Usually it's a sign of a bad developer/publisher, and poor project management if you have to crunch for more than a few weeks.

 

Given the release state of modern games ... they all have bad project management and crunching helps fuck all, cause they still have what would in any normal mode of development be termed release critical bugs. I can somewhat understand this for games which have long running marketing campaigns ... but why was say Magicka released in the state it was?

PS. after a single 80 hour work week operating a coffee machine becomes a complicated operation for me for the first couple of hours in a morning ... I would clearly not be suited for this.

 

It's a typical management failure in the game crafting business, having fucked up schedules and asking the engineers to compensate.

 

Actiblizz conference call, game in company-wide internal testing as of the other day, open beta in Q3 (july 1st hopefully! ), gunning for release in '11, but no specific date is set; "when it is ready" still prevails.

I personally think we'll see it out for christmas this year, come hell or high water. Soon it's been twelve years for chrissakes, they've slow-cooked this turkey long enough now.

In other news, WoW loses several hundred thousand subscribers, down below 2008 levels. Personally I'm not surprised; all games peak and decline eventually and WoW's had a soon seven-year-long run. I'm wagering they've made more moolah from this game than any other game has ever made throughout the history of mankind, so they've reason to be really-really happy about that. And it's not as if the game's dying just yet. It's in a lull, there's been no major new content released for five months now (don't really count the rehashed troll dungeons as it's all been seen before, including all of the loot in them).