Diablo III - It's official

[pcchen]

Any difference on buying a retail copy vs just DD? I don't care about having a box.

AFAIK normal retail copy (i.e. non-CE version) is basically just some CD with a serial number.

I tackled a bit with its AA settings. I am not impressed by the in-game AA (which seems to be some form of FXAA), but NVIDIA's driver basically disable any forced AA for this game. It can be overriden with some tools, but the results really aren't any better. So I guess that's it.

Another function I really want to see is the ability to change the text size... it's really small and those traditional Chinese texts are all messed up especially on a smaller monitor. Many people reported this issue in close beta, but I guess it's too late to make any significant changes.

 

[Malo]

In the box is the DVD + key, 3 guest passes for D3, 1 guess pass for WoW, small manual and a D3 notepad. Oh and my wife and I each got a double-sided D3 poster with our copies as well, though I assume that was from Gamestop for pre-ordering or something.

 

[Kaotik]

Any difference on buying a retail copy vs just DD? I don't care about having a box.

Yeah, you get a key with retail, DD you don't
(You can only get DD from Blizz, and they just add it to your battle.net account, no keys or anything)

 

[RobertR1]

Ended up with DD. I'm lazy! Will play tonight.

 

[Grall]

Any difference on buying a retail copy vs just DD?

Retail copy installs way faster of course, unless you have a trunk line from a major ISP internet switch coming into your house...

I had to reinstall the game, because first time the game ended up on my SSD by mistake without me noticing it. D3 loads so fast when you switch areas it doesn't really matter where it resides though, so then I was really glad I could just pop the DVD back in and have the game reinstalled in minutes instead of hours.

Ended up with DD. I'm lazy! Will play tonight.

Grats to you. It's a fabulous game!

I'm level 22 now with my Wizard, and hydras are fecking AWEsome. I put it up ahead of me when I'm running into new, unknown territory and it starts firing at anything in its line of sight, then my templar mercenary charges in and tanks the mobs while I burn everything down with the disintegration ray. Then loot.

My setup is frost nova and that pushback nova whatsitscalled, magic missiles and hydra on the keyboard hotkeys, then sparks and the beam on the mouse buttons. Glyphed split on magic missiles, and electric explosions on the sparks. This setup works really really really well. If I could have had a seventh skill though, that would have been awesome, but these cover most everything really.

 

[RobertR1]

I'm going to setup my hotkeys like Dota2 so it's easy to transition back n forth.

 

[Rodéric]

So... I finished it with a friend after 18 hours at level 31, and it feels like a streamlined Guild Wars to me.

You auto level, auto unlock skills, the story is fine but nothing great, you pick 6 skills from your list and assign them to 1-4 plus each mouse click.
You also select your equipment, and the big white number is meaningless (which is odd given it's the biggest number when you mouse-over).
You can't zoom (well 1 level...), you can't move the camera, the gfx are nice though, but nothing amazing.
(Also the ruby and such are in white, like the loot you don't care about later in-game, would have been nice having them in a different colour.)

There's no "wow!" moment in the game.

It feels un-memorable, if it was a dish, I'd say it's lacking salt or something to make it stand out, good yes, but no more.
(Certainly nothing like what I felt when I played Diablo demo many years ago.)

 

[AlphaWolf]

It's a bit more interesting on nightmare because there's some challenge with the various elite packs (I'm into act II on nightmare), but ya this is a very polished game, that just doesn't really do anything impressive that we haven't seen before.

 

[Grall]

I'm very impressed myself with the graphics myself, I'm only in act 2 so far so I've taken the opportunity to stop and look at the details, and there's a ton of that to find if you just look for it. Check out the clickable bloated corpses you find here and there, like in the sewers for example. The way they're animated when they explode is just disgustingly awesome.

Also, audio. There's TONS of it in this game. Monster noises and death gurgles are fantastic and varied.

One thing that annoys me a bit with the graphics is there's no dynamic lighting anywhere. It was one of the big new things with Diablo 2 twelve friggin years ago, and it's nowhere to be seen here. Very strange! I wonder if it's a performance consideration or if they just plain don't want the dark areas illuminated; IE for artistic and mood reasons.

Started over from scratch with a Demon Hunter, and it's a bit rough initially compared to the wizard because you get no early area-of-effect attack. You get two with wizard, those sparky things, and then energy orbs, but DH gets nothing. After you get the Uzi attack it gets better though, and that is fairly early. It also helped that I had stored up a yellow quality bow that I found off the skelly king that I could equip at a low level. Together with three yellow armor pieces I'm fairly rockin' now at level 9 or maybe 10, I'm not sure. Skelly king wasn't a threat at all, I was able to avoid several of his big hits by just vaulting away from where he was about to charge at me, and then gun him down. A full bubble of hate took off at least a third of his life, so killing him wasn't all that hard.

Good gear does help a lot!

 

[Malo]

Blizzard are just following their direction of what they've been doing for years now, making things quick and easy for players so they can just kill shit and not have to think. I'm hoping I'll still enjoy this playing co-op with my friends but I doubt I'll have the same addiction to it like I did with D2 (being much older doesn't really help with that either though).

 

[Dresden]

http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mi...and-wizards-against-unicorns-and-teddy-bears/

No way, hahaha.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

So... I finished it with a friend after 18 hours at level 31, and it feels like a streamlined Guild Wars to me.

You auto level, auto unlock skills, the story is fine but nothing great, you pick 6 skills from your list and assign them to 1-4 plus each mouse click.
You also select your equipment, and the big white number is meaningless (which is odd given it's the biggest number when you mouse-over).
You can't zoom (well 1 level...), you can't move the camera, the gfx are nice though, but nothing amazing.
(Also the ruby and such are in white, like the loot you don't care about later in-game, would have been nice having them in a different colour.)

Classic case of consolitis, probably induced by Activision?

There's no "wow!" moment in the game.

It feels un-memorable, if it was a dish, I'd say it's lacking salt or something to make it stand out, good yes, but no more.
(Certainly nothing like what I felt when I played Diablo demo many years ago.)

Although I've never played Diablo III, I can say almost the exact same of Starcraft II.
Maybe all the people with a knack at telling a story and developing characters from Blizzard Ent.'s late 90s and early 2000s have left the studio during the several years of creativity void that WoW created?
AFAIK, the CGIs are still awesome. I don't know if they're made by Blizzard Ent. themselves or if they pay someone else to do it.

 

[AlNom]

Classic case of consolitis, probably induced by Activision?

Clearly, they were afraid Diablo III wouldn't sell otherwise.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Errr, have you actually played D3? It's not cartoonish...at all. It's very gruesome and gross, blood and gore smeared all over the ground and exploding from dying monsters, dead mutilated bodies strewn about, gutted monstrous carcasses hung from chains on walls, stuff like that.

Oh well, then I guess all these 64000 guys have been wrong this whole time, and all the controversy that came up in 2008, that ended with the game's art director resignation, were unfounded..

There are plenty of video walkthroughs of Diablo III around, and I've seen some. The "cartoonish design" comes from using saturated colors, bright environments and human characters with unrealistic body proportions.
It has nothing to do with the amount of blood and gore.
There's lots of blood and gore in "happy tree friends", but you wouldn't argue it's cartoonish, right?

 

[Rodéric]

Classic case of consolitis, probably induced by Activision?

Clearly, they were afraid Diablo III wouldn't sell otherwise.

I'd rather say it's for "casual" gamers, it doesn't exhibit anything from the list of the article.
(Besides being unable to remap movement to WASD, but it's not critical.)
It's reminiscent of theme parks, everything has been made simple for you, just go along for the ride.

 

[Jedi2016]

Clearly, they were afraid Diablo III wouldn't sell otherwise.

I actually brought this up on the beta forums (and, typically, got no response). It was right after they "dumbed down" the Skill interface in patch 13, and they even said that they did it so that new players would have an easier time of it (they called it a "guided" experience). Truth be told, the original skill interface was, IMO, much easier to understand, easier to use, and made a lot more sense overall.

The point I made at the time was that they were tuning the game for people who were not their main audience. That's why there was such a fuss about those changes, and other things like the removal of the leveling stats, and putting points where you wanted them. The people who were going to buy the game, the ones who did buy the game, and the ones who continue to melt their login servers... these are the people who wanted D3 to be, if anything, even more in-depth in terms of tuning and customization than D2 was.

There is definitely something shady going on in the design department. It's obvious that their beta test was nothing more than an extended playtest and bugcheck. They gave us forums for providing "feedback", but the only thing they were really interested in was bug reports. Whenever someone had any actual feedback on the design portions of the game, they were flat-out ignored. Patch 13 is a perfect example (with the Skill UI change). The forums erupted with feedback, all of it negative, and it got not a single blue response, and nothing at all changed between then and release. They completely ignored the feedback that they asked for and did it anyway.

I'm going to be really pissed if the whole reason they made all those changes in the first place was so they could use that interface on the Playstation. Now that I think about it, it does feel very much like a console interface, which in turn makes it very clunky on the PC, whereas the original skill UI was obviously PC-based, which is why it worked so well.

Granted, the game looks great, and it runs great, and it's a blast to play, I'm really enjoying it, through and through. What we have is fantastic, but it could have been so much more.

 

[AlNom]

:/ That's disheartening considering it's not even going to be hitting consoles (if it does) for a long long time.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

:/ That's disheartening considering it's not even going to be hitting consoles (if it does) for a long long time.

It would play awesomely on the Wii U, using the touchscreen for item/skill/spell selection.

 

[Kaotik]

No.
This is completely incorrect, since it's essentially an attack to every gamer's freedom of speech.
Anyone who purchased the game and tried to play it for several hours (more than a day, even) with no success is, at the very least, entitled to make a review with a score of 0.

- If I purchase a printer and it decides to never work on the first day, and I find out that the printer model is having the same problems around the world then you can bet I'll be making a review and give it a 0.
- If I purchase a book and the pages come out blank and I find out every book is like that and it's not me who has a defective book, I'm going to rate it a 0.
- If I go to a buffet restaurant where I pay upfront and there's no food in the serving tables after 2 hours, I'm going to leave the place and rate it a 0.
- If I purchase a blu-ray that comes with a blank disc and I find out every other blu-ray disc coming from that movie is also blank, I'll return it. And rate it a 0.

I'm not going to patiently wait 5 hours for an employee to fill the tables, or wait for the book/blu-ray publisher for weeks until they send me a replacement. Likewise, I'm not going to wait days until the HP's/Epson's servers start working again in order to re-establish their draconian DRM control over my printer so it can print pages.

The product is either ready for market, or it isn't. A service is either prepared for its customers or it isn't. If there's not enough food output, the restaurant can't accept my reservation. If the books/disks are blank, they cannot be sent to the store. If the printer doesn't work, it can't go to the store either.


A very serious and very grave fault such as the game not working at all must not go unpunished or unspoken.
Customers owe nothing to publishers. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever why someone should wait in silence for days for a single-player game to be playable, after having to pay the full price up-front.

To rate a game that doesn't work by 0 is, by itself, a responsible action. After returning the game and asking the money back, it's the most relevant action any gamer could - and should - do. It's sending the proper message to other buyers: that the game isn't good enough to be bought. It isn't, it isn't even playable in many countries.

The gaming community must show Activision/Blizzard that they won't take faulty products and stand idle. Just because they're milking a popular franchise, it doesn't mean they can sell snake-oil. And that message must go through, as it went with many other games with much lesser problems (DNF, for example).


Look how I'm not even going into the draconian DRM thing, or the pay2win stores or the design change from realistic horror to childish cartoonesque.
That was widely known from day one, and to any person who would at least bother to look at the game's box.

I didn't write any review either because I didn't purchase the game, and I'm not interested in playing, honestly.
But to try to stop people from letting the world know they've been tricked? Based on what, brand loyalty? That's just wrong, IMO.



Regardless of your opinion, Skyrim was playable and awesome at day one.
Some did go to the MC site to bitch about bugs and gave it a 1. Some considered the bugs too irritating and gave it a 5. Others (most, apparently) rated the game in the later months and gave it a 9/10. In the end, the average user score was 8.1.
The game's rate did suffer from bad reviews at the beginning because of the bugs, and the final score is reflecting that.
But that's the brilliance of statistics. There's this enormous amount of people who gave their opinion based on their experience and 8.1 is the score that you, or any other, will most probably give to that game.

Diablo III's current 3.5 score isn't any worse or better deserved than Skyrim's 8.1 score.

Don't worry. When the game works, people will start giving it better reviews. I don't think they'll be as good as you're hoping for, though.

No publisher could ever do anything about this:

Guess where Blizz servers are located on the map

That's right, nothing. It doesn't deserve the bad "reviews" from people who encounter problems simply because connection & server capacity is imppossible to meet, there's no infrastucture out there to handle that

 

[Deleted member 13524]

That's right, nothing. It doesn't deserve the bad "reviews" from people who encounter problems simply because connection & server capacity is imppossible to meet, there's no infrastucture out there to handle that

Take away the forced connection so the players can play the single-player campaign - if they desire so - and that issue is no more.