Like I said in the Diablo 3 review two years ago: this is going to be complicated.

Depending on how you look at it Reaper of Souls is either the best expansion pack Blizzard have put out since, oh, Frozen Throne back in 2003, or else an incredibly mediocre experience on par with last year’s underwhelming Heart of the Swarm expansion for Starcraft II. The reason behind this little dichotomy is that most of the admittedly excellent changes Reaper of Souls has ushered in aren’t part of the expansion pack itself. Instead, they were introduced nearly a month ago in the Loot 2.0 update that everyone who owned Diablo 3 got to experience free of charge. And when Reaper of Souls itself is retailing at a ludicrous £30 (which is more than I paid for the base game), it’s important to know what you will and will not have to pay for

So this review will treat the two as separate entities. On the one hand you have the much-vaunted Loot 2.0 patch. As the name implies, this is a complete and fundamental overhaul of how Diablo’s loot system works that was necessary in order to walk back possibly the most stupid mistake Blizzard have ever made in one of their games: the Auction House. It’s gone now, and so is the miserly loot system that underpinned it in a misguided attempt to encourage players to actually use the sodding thing. In its place is a far more satisfying mechanic that practically showers the player with loot; you now pick up roughly one magical (blue) or rare (yellow) item every minute, and a legendary (orange) every hour or two. Even though the yellow magical super enchanted items are now much easier to find than stock white items with no affixes whatsoever, this somehow never gets old. Diablo as a series has always been about killing monsters and getting loot, and looking back on it it’s astounding how hard the base game failed at the latter half of the formula. 90% of the time you’d get all excited about a yellow item dropping for your Wizard only to find that it was a Barbarian mighty weapon that you couldn’t even use, and so you’d inevitably end up schlepping over to the auction house to buy the things that wouldn’t drop for you in-game. The previous loot system was intentionally crippled so that this would be the case, and it was by far the most obnoxious thing Diablo 3 did in terms of mechanics.  I called it out back when I originally reviewed the game, and it remains a stupid, stupid idea.

Now, despite a year(ish) of denials that they totally hadn’t taken a hammer to their loot system in order to try to get people to spend money in their auction house, Blizzard have finally admitted that the process of getting loot was nowhere near as fun or compelling as it would have been had the auction house not been included, and their solution is to remove it and beef up the loot system massively. With Loot 2.0 not only do you get more loot, and not only is it fundamentally more awesome (I’ve still got some legacy items left over from before the patch hit, and the Loot 2.0 items are roughly twice as powerful), but thanks to a new smart loot system it will almost always be loot with affixes that make it good for the class you’re playing when you pick it up.  This means that every single time an item drops it has a genuine chance to be an upgrade from what you’re using right now. Often it isn’t – in fact most of the time it isn’t – but Blizzard have successfully rekindled the almost gambling-like thrill when you pick something up: it pays off often enough that you’re excited to find out what it is, and the loot drops often enough that you keep on playing.  Hell, the much-improved legendary item drop rate on its own is enough to keep me hooked for the time being; pre-Loot 2.0 I picked up a grand total of three legendaries in 100+ hours of play. Now I’ve got two stash tabs full of the things, and about half of them have unique properties that’d make me completely redo my build in order to take advantage of them. When you see an orange item drop you get a little twinge of excitement in the pit of your stomach that it might be something game-changing like Fate of the Fell or Jekangbord.

It really can’t be understated how much of an improvement this state of affairs is over the base game, and it goes hand in hand with a new dynamic difficulty system that scales with player level. The old static difficulty settings of Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno have been consigned to the dustbin of history, and in their place is a transparent set of difficulties that are both finer-grain (i.e. going up a difficulty level isn’t the huge leap that it used to be) and which straight up tell you the increased rewards you’ll get for playing on a higher difficulty setting. The scaling is a little bit disappointing since getting ahead of the curve is much more difficult when the curve simply adjusts itself to catch you up, but unless you’re playing on the highest difficulty setting it’s still possible to make a build that’s hilariously overpowered, which is all I really ask. The upside to the scaling is that since enemies scale to your level all they loot they drop – as well as the XP you get for killing them — does as well, meaning that playing earlier acts of the game no longer feels like wasting your time.

There are other changes that have been made as part of Loot 2.0 – for example all classes that aren’t Demon Hunter are noticeably more fun to play than they were two years ago, although I haven’t been playing in the interim so this may just be the result of two years of balance tweaking – but the headline shift in how the game doles out equipment has been a huge success in my eyes. Diablo 3 always had a particularly polished set of mechanics in terms of killing the monsters, and now the loot they drop has been adjusted to be equally satisfying.  The best part is that you get this fix absolutely free; you can go back to Diablo right now and level a new character from 1 through to 60 under this much more enjoyable system without paying a penny. Once you get to 60, though, you’ll have to start thinking about whether you want to fork out for the actual expansion part of the expansion or not, and this isn’t anywhere near as much of an unqualified success story.

Reaper of Souls itself makes the usual expansion improvements, including:

• A new class, the Crusader. The Crusader is basically a paladin from WoW; if you’ve played WoW you know that means armour like a tank and a bunch of long-cooldown abilities focused on survival, but the tradeoff is that you might as well be hitting the monsters with one of those rubber bats used in movies when nobody really wants to hurt anyone. While it is possible to make a build that’ll vomit out an absolutely obscene amount of burst damage with the right skill combination, most of the time playing a Crusader is kind of dull and feel distinctly underpowered compared to the other walking-tank melee class in the game, the Barbarian. It’s possible to give it a power boost with endgame gems and enchantments, but then I could stick that on a Wizard I was levelling and kill things twice as fast; perhaps in the future they’ll tweak it so that it’s less boring to play but right now Crusaders aren’t exactly screaming “BUY ME” at anyone thinking of shelling out for RoS.

• A whole new Act. More on this in a bit, because it is laughably bad and deserves a more systematic beating with the Hating Stick. The only good thing it does is give Blizzard an excuse to raise the level cap to 70.

• After you’ve finished that Act you get access to the brand new Adventure mode for all characters, which is a grudging concession that Diablo 3’s plot was awful and that the game would be much improved if the story was removed, as evidenced by it removing the story and opening up all the waypoints; you can now go anywhere and kill anything and the hideous cutscenes will get in your way far less than they used to. It also gives you Bounties, which are mini-missions to go somewhere and kill a monster/clear a dungeon/do an events; do the Bounty and you get a lump sum reward of cash and gold along with some Blood Shards that can be gambled for random items. You also get fragments of the keys needed to enter Nephalem Rifts, which are dungeons generated entirely randomly using any combination of monsters and tilesets found throughout the game.

• A new crafter, the Mystic. The Mystic lets you reroll stats on items (for a fee) and also changes the appearance of your equipment, which is important for fantasy dress-up purposes.

Of these four major additions, only two – Adventure mode and the Mystic – are actually good. The eleven hours I’ve spent playing a Crusader haven’t exactly been a trial, but at the same time I’d feel a little cheated if I’d bought the expansion for it. And then you have Act V, chronicling the continued struggle against new big baddie Malthael and his angelic groupies, and this is notable because it is utter balls.

Diablo 3’s story is really bad. Famously bad. It was so bad I wrote a whole extra blog post on how bad it was, and I was far from the only one to notice the badness; basically the entire internet pointed out exactly the same flaws (i.e. all of it) as I did. Faced with this overwhelming quantity of negative feedback Blizzard have taken a long, hard look at their story and writing process… and proceeded to make exactly the same mistakes they made in Diablo 3, and Heart of the Swarm, and Starcraft II, not to mention god knows how many WoW expansion packs. After everyone pointed out how shit it was to have Azmodan call the player on his holophone every time they thwarted his plans and tell them it totally didn’t matter, he didn’t care anyway and that he was still going to win, even as you systematically slaughtered you way through his armies and into his house and stuffed him into a hunk of rock, I’m utterly astounded that they’ve chosen to do the same thing with Malthael. He appears to you every so often throughout the Act, and while he isn’t quite so full of himself as Azmodan was his lieutenants are still spouting off the “YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT US!” one-liners even while you’re busy burying your maul into their skulls.  Reaper of Souls spends far more time exploring Tyrael’s difficulty with the concept of eating than it does Malthael’s motivation for trying to kill everyone on the planet (as far as I could tell it was because he was corrupted, because Blizzard have been telling the same fucking story over and over and over since at least Warcraft III)  and the ending is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in gaming. I honestly think I would have preferred the game to dump me straight back to the desktop a la Syndicate rather than inflicting something so stupid on me I’m afraid I’m less intelligent for having been exposed to it.

Even if you can ignore the story, there’s no ignoring the fact that design-wise Act V just isn’t up to scratch. Where the main campaign is fairly no-nonsense in having you travel from A to B while hitting a bunch of monsters in the face on the way, Act V’s zones are huge and meandering and take you forever to get anywhere in them. One of them is a swamp level, and my objection to swamp levels is well-documented¹ There’s a pretty cool bit where you have a big fight on top of a battering ram while it smashes its way into the Pandemonium Fortess, and Pandemonium itself is probably the best bit of the Act, but the rest of it doesn’t show anywhere near this level of imagination and ends up being dreary, depressing and dull; it also doesn’t help that the dynamic difficulty scaling goes a little out of whack here and starts giving monsters several million HP each the closer you get to level 70, meaning that travelling from A to B takes even longer because you have to spend whole minutes whittling down each individual monster pack on the way. Act V was mostly just a slog, and I eventually jammed the difficulty down to Normal and zipped through to the end because I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to get to the good stuff in Adventure mode. For the single biggest addition to the game it is incontrovertibly terrible and not at all worth buying the expansion for.

As a package, though, is Reaper of Souls worth buying? If it were retailing at regular expansion prices I’d still say yes; the raised level cap, new items and the Crusader class would probably be worth it at that point. The issue here, though, is that it isn’t retailing at regular expansion prices. It is actually retailing at a price point higher than that of most full releases. I know Blizzard like to project a reputation as the premium PC developer to justify their premium prices, but that projection is currently falling quite some considerable way short of the reality, which is that if you divorce Reaper of Souls from Loot 2.0 it’s not actually that good, and certainly not worth £30.  If spending that kind of money on an expansion pack makes you stop and think about whether or not it’s really worth it, it very likely isn’t and you should save your money, or spend it elsewhere. As for me, well, I’ve had enough fun with it that I don’t begrudge the money spent, but I can’t promise you won’t too.

The post Thoughts: Reaper of Souls. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

INTERIOR: A well-lit tavern. The sound of quaffing and carousing fills the air, along with the twangs of some unmentionable stringed instrument. The camera focuses in on one table to reveal three men deep in discussion. Observing the noble cut of their clothes, the fine pleating of their beards and the ostentatious jangle of their chains and jewellery, one would suppose these gentlemen to be talking of matters of great import, of the rise of kingdoms or the fall of grain prices. We zoom in further, to reveal they’re…talking about Torchlight 2.

Hentzau: So we’re all sitting here, trying to figure out how to kickstart this review/discussion.

Jim: Okay, easy one to start. Why the hell did you buy Torchlight 2. Sinny?

Sinny: I bought it because ARPGs feel like games that should be cheap, simple and quick to play. Torchlight was all of those things, and Torchlight 2 promised to patch up what was missing. I know Jim was somewhat ambivalent towards the original, why did you get Torchlight 2, Hent?

Hentzau: I have been trying to figure that out for the last five minutes. Trying to peer back through the thick fog of boredom and loathing to see what my thought process was before I bought the game. Largely it was a matter of inertia; Torchlight 2 was going to come out before Diablo 3, it was going to provide an ARPG fix while Blizzard put the finishing touches on their Ecce Homo mural, it wouldn’t matter so much that it was good just so long as it existed. Then it was delayed. Then it was delayed some more. Then Diablo 3 was released, and almost immediately afterwards the Torchlight 2 preorder came up, and at this point I’d been waiting so long I blindly jumped aboard the nearest 4-pack without really paying attention to what Diablo 3 might have meant for the genre in general.

Jim: I think ambivalent is nowhere near strong enough to describe my love-hate relationship with the original. I’ve always shied away from these obsessive-compulsive clicky clicky RPGS, but I played Torchlight until the tendons in my wrist ached and that is pretty rare because you could crack nuts with them or use them for bridge suspension they are just that strong. I got obsessed with it for a week, rushed through it and ended up despising not only the game, but myself. I found my old review of it a few weeks ago, it was very succinct. “The worst game ever made, made perfectly.”

Sinny: So we’ve got me, a guy who picked it up specifically as an antidote to Diablo 3, Hent, who bought it to hold him over until Diablo 3, and then Jim in the middle, who can’t work out whether to punch it in the crotch or marry it. This should be a relatively even-handed review, I should think! I’ll start with the sweeping statements then: Torchlight 2 isn’t worth any awards this year, but it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made.

Jim: Justify yourself!

Sinny: There’s nothing here that moves the industry forward or emerges from a flock of doves to the strains of a string quartet. Nor is there anything that feels so polished, cinematic, or packed with human flourishes that it deserves a place in history as a shining example of videogame development. What Torchlight 2 does is take a genre, find out every idea that is key and core to it, and then removes everything else. And it does it in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost that, yes, Diablo 3 tries to.

Hentzau: Oh, that’s certainly what Torchlight 2 does. The problem is that the genre is the ARPG, and the key ideas — the core concepts that are at the very heart of any ARPG worthy of the name — are hitting things, and loot. Torchlight 2 has plenty of both, but that’s all it has. There’s a lot of colourful invective thrown around about ARPGs about how they are basically games about watching numbers get bigger. The numbers on your items. The numbers on your character. The numbers floating out of the baddies’ heads when you smash them in the face with your giant wrench. This is certainly a part of their appeal; however, it is only a part, like butter in a sandwich. Eating butter on its own is probably not something I’d choose to indulge in all that frequently; it needs something more added to the mix in order to make it interesting and give it that addictive APRG tang. What Torchlight 2 is missing, and what it appears to have consciously removed, is the bacon.

Jim: There’s something that really bugs me about the streamlining process and it’s that complexity is necessary for a game to be a dynamic and interesting experience. Torchlight does pursue this gradual chipping away of everything that could be a hassle or a bore with a particular ruthlessness that I think drains a lot of the potential fun out of the game. You start with this overly complex, kind of sharp statue, fine, you sand it a bit. You don’t remove all the arms and legs to make it easier to deal with.

Sinny: I think there’s something to be said for knocking the arms and legs off to achieve a particular effect. I worry that this review might end up at a rather depressing conclusion, because the thing I appreciate most about Torchlight 2 is that it has that satisfying ebb and flow that Bejewelled has. It’s this “blissful productivity” that game designer Jane McGonigal talks about – this feeling of getting things done, even if the final goal is sort of nebulous or maybe entirely non-existent. It’s why you arrange things in neat piles when you’re bored, or why it’s sometimes strangely satisfying to tidy a room. And it’s also why playing Torchlight 2 is simultaneously frenetic, and almost meditative. I suppose the question is – is this an acceptable goal for an ARPG?

Jim: I can see where you’re coming from but I think that clashes with how they’ve packaged the game. Bejewelled looks like it’s meant to go on forever, you play until you’re too bored to carry on, but T2 is a campaign. It’s got throwaway mechanics poured into this epic RPG mould (save the world, kill the bad guy). I’d argue that in the map design stakes, they’ve taken a step backwards from the original. In the first, your goals were “clear this floor of the dungeon, get to the next level”. It was simple, measurable progress that was clearly compulsive. Now, it’s bigger and prettier but there’s no flow. Main areas are gigantic without focal points, and the various event caves dotted around are more or less identical. I think my problem isn’t with the general idea of mindless questing, it’s how it’s implemented.

Sinny: I agree that level design takes a step back here, though perhaps for different reasons: I have a sneaking suspicion that all random map generation has been removed in the sequel, which is a shame. That said, I like the open-plan hub areas. To me, a lot of the areas conveyed a sense of adventure: the swirling snowscapes punctuated with fiery-red caves to quest into; the gaping chasms cutting through the desert. It’s more organic than the original’s cramped, single-minded design. And the art style supports that too, with big brush strokes and the obligatory abundance of particle effects throwing fireflies at you one second and sandstorms the next.

The art is just one of the ways that Torchlight 2 distinguishes itself from a depressing trend throughout Western RPGs to always include dark medieval nonsense, self-important extended metaphors wrapped up in exposition, and the colour grey. Torchlight 2 is vibrant, colourful, and juicy – that great game terminology for a game that moves and shakes and spurts with every player interaction. It’s a lovely-looking game, I think.

Hentzau: The art style goes for a relatively simple and spartan look, probably to make the most of the limited resources the developer had to begin with. NPCs and baddies are picked out in pastel, painterly shades that are a long way from the grimdark look so beloved of other entrants in the ARPG genre. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this and I actually think it works well for rendering the game’s world. Unfortunately the environment I run around in is background only; it generates atmosphere but it is secondary to the creatures populating it and the items you prise from their cold dead fingers, and here I think the game misses two crucial points. The first is that dress-up is a large part of ARPGs. Make the items you pick up and equip look good on the character; when I find an orange pair of trousers I want them to look just as awesome as the stats imply. I don’t want them to look like a pair of skintight lycra pants. It’s not true of all equipment, but most of it is visually bland and unexciting, making the finding of loot that much less interesting.

Jim: In theory the game looks fine, it’s consistent and colourful and full of little elemental fireworks. It’s just that they went for the archetypes of the RPG world. Forests! Snowy forests! Deserts! Fucking swamps! There was no point where I was impressed or cheered or creeped out by the art, but it is competently made.

Sinny: Sure, but Torchlight 2 is Archetype: The Game…

Hentzau: There’s actually a reason the game is set up like that, Jim, but that’s something we shall discuss later. AS I WAS SAYING, my second point is that killing baddies is also a large part of ARPGs. Make the baddies you kill distinctive and recognisable. Make their attacks easily-identifiable. Remember that the player is going to spend pretty much the entire game in this zoomed out isometric view, and that looking at them from fifty metres up at a 45 degree angle is going to make them look very different from what they look like close-up. I’m not sure if this counts as visual design or animation or whatever, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the name of a single baddie I killed in this game, they were that unmemorable to me. They were just things; swarms of things that ran towards my character to be dispatched without thought or mercy. It’s almost like the game has taken its slavish streamlining of the ARPG to its logical conclusion and rendered the concept of enemies down to its most abstract form possible. They simply exist, and Torchlight 2 deems this sufficient.

Jim: I don’t think that’s just a product of the visual design, though, it’s the mechanics underlying them that render everything a little bit of a soupy mess. Ultimately, you barely actually look at your character and what they’re doing. Your two friends, the things that you keep your eyes fixed upon, are the health globule and the map. The bucket o’ blood because the only thing that is happening in these fights is that health is going down and you need to stop it going TOO far down, and the map because it’s impossible to have a general idea of the space you’re in without it. It’s a fine health sphere, sure, there’s little bubbles in it and everything, but it’s not what I want to spend my weeknights glaring at.

Hentzau:  Ah, but the importance of the health globe is actually rather down to the game’s poor visual design/feedback in communicating damage spikes to the player. You’ll be fighting a bunch of things just like the last ten bunches of things you thought, and everything will go well at first, and then suddenly your health will start dropping dramatically with nothing appearing on screen to indicate you’re experiencing a particularly damaging attack except the rapidly-emptying health globe. So combat largely consists of watching this thing and pressing “1” to gulp down a health potion whenever your health gets too low rather than, you know, fighting the bad guys.

Sinny: I think a lot of this might come down to the game’s insistence on throwing colours and shapes at you from the get-go, so as it tries to ramp up the difficulty it’s hard to make things bigger or badder than they were before. But I’m not sure I agree entirely about the visual signposting or the health dependence. Some classes have their issues, but I had quite fun combat experiences with others. Which classes have you both played as?

Jim: Engineer! I cleverly named her “Enjimeer”. There’s bits and pieces I really liked, the variety of robots you can have sauntering after you is a highlight, but as I played more the game did seem to boil down to the health thing. See, I was trying to play elegantly at first, I had a healing robot and I was determined not to use potions because I hate using potions, so I was running away to my portable dispenser all the time. It was tense! It was sometimes exciting! I died a lot! Then I realised that the game spits more potions at you than you can physically carry and there wasn’t really much point in continuing to cripple myself, so I stashed them all in one of those American ball game hats with the two straws going directly into my face.

Hentzau:  Engineer, with an additional hour spent as a Berserker to see if it was just the class that was the problem. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

Sinny: The classes take a few hours to open up, which is a big problem with the way they’re designed, but the Berserker has a lot of interesting skill combinations that encourage you to dash both towards and away from danger. I found that I was focusing on healing a lot less, and more about acrobatic skill usage when playing as him.

Hentzau: TRAP SPRUNG. This is the point where I start railing against Torchlight 2’s skill system and how much I hate it. Specifically, the almost total lack of respec capability. Torchlight 2 lets you pay to refund the last three skill points you spent, which at least allows you to try new skills, but skills on their own do not make a character. You see, in most modern ARPGs skills combine into what we call builds: multiple skills which work together to form something more effective than the individual skills on their own. Torchlight 2’s limited respec system makes the testing of builds impossible. If you’ve invested in the hit-things-really-hard ability and then ten levels down the line realise it doesn’t synergise particularly well with the robomancer your character has become, there’s no way to get those skill points back. It’s intentionally letting you fall into the trap of crippling yourself if you don’t already know what all of the skills do, which I regard as unforgiveable in a modern game. It discourages experimentation, is what it does; there’s loads of skills but you’ll only ever use a small subset of them because bringing in an additional skill is risky when it might not work with the ones you already have.

Sinny: I feel like we’re butting against the same point more than once here, which is that Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 embrace very different design philosophies, and Hentzau and I seem to come on opposite sides. With Diablo 3’s abandonment of skill points, the player is protected from cornering themselves with a build, but with that loses the feeling of genuine uniqueness and specialisation that permanence confers. Equally, Torchlight 2 – while it tries to let you see how a skill feels with the limited respec points – ultimately is willing to punish the player for changing tactics halfway through a game.

The problem with allowing arbitrary re-customisation of a character is that you’re left with choices feeling meaningless and entirely temporary. While it might be kinder to players (both the expert experimenters and the novice alike) to allow hacks and changes galore, for me it dilutes part of playing an RPG – which is that I chose this path, not this one, and that seeing a pistol drop is a flash of excitement because pistols are my thing.

Whichever side of the debate you fall on, though – Torchlight 2 has already been cracked open, and infinite respeccing is modded in. That’s the beauty of the way this game has been designed. Friendliness extends beyond design decisions, and right through to the openness of the game itself. No Internet connection required.

Hentzau: They’re not meaningless, though! If a player tries a skill and a build and doesn’t like it they have gained valuable information: that build is not for them. Why do they have to be penalised for finding this out? If I try a build and it doesn’t work, I don’t want to have to start a whole new character to try another one. There’s enough skills that a player can spend literally hours fine-tuning their build and homing in on one that works best for them. This is something Diablo 3 got very, very right; I went through like five or six iterations on my Wizard before I finally settled on something that felt right to me, and the game didn’t make me roll five or six Wizards to do this.

Jim: I think conceptually I agree with Sinny, to be honest. Hard choices should be made and you should be punished for making them wrong. All the information is there, dammit, and if you want to go around making wrong decisions then I’m not helping you. There’s also a lot of give built into the system if you are sub-optimal, because you die and you respawn and that’s it, there’s no cash lost if you don’t want to, there’s no experience penalty. I mean if you’re playing Ironman yes, but I suppose by that point you have to accept that you should know what you’re doing. That’s not to say I think that Torchlight’s skill system is particularly great, because the skills are, with a few exceptions, phenomenally boring, all plus percents and plus damage a bit and okay yes the occasional helpful robot. Also, nothing really seems to stack together.

Hentzau: Arguably any flexibility that exists in the system does so because the combat is based in large part around constantly guzzling health potions. As long as you don’t run out of health potions you will win.

Sinny: I don’t know how the Engineer works later in the game, but I know that a lot of its abilities are geared towards firing-and-forgetting, particularly the robot pet stuff. Other classes definitely have synergistic skills, though, but not as many as an ARPG should have, certainly. One thing I do feel, both from writing this review and reading others, is that spending six hours with each of Torchlight 2’s classes gives a better picture of the game than spending twenty-four hours with one of them.

Jim: Playing it through with one class doesn’t give you a picture? It’s going to take me thirty hours to finish my first playthrough and I don’t think I could take much more.

Sinny: I said it gives you a better picture. Even at thirty hours, if you were truly drained at that point, you paid a third of what Diablo 3 is currently going for on Amazon.

Hentzau: And so we come to the elephant in the room: the Diablo franchise and Torchlight’s love-hate relationship with its older, pricier sibling. Torchlight was a modern update of Diablo, in that you descended through a dungeon underneath a town to slay the boss at the bottom. Torchlight 2 is unarguably a modern update of Diablo 2; the action transitions to an overworld and you travel from town to town chasing the bad guy. The levels are even the same, since you start off in your green foresty level (although it swiftly transitions to snow), and then act two is the desert level, and then act three is the swamp level. If you really love Diablo 2 I guess this isn’t so much of a problem, except…

…well, here’s something it took me a while to realise about Torchlight 2 and why I hated it so much: it missed its window. Diablo 3 was taking such a gosh-darned long time — and there had been so few other ARPG titles in the interregnum — that a modern update of Diablo 2 wouldn’t have seemed anachronistic at all. But then Torchlight 2 was delayed to the point where it released after Diablo 3, and the moment Blizzard’s effort came out Torchlight 2 instantly aged twelve years and started to resemble a misguided Spanish lady’s attempt to restore life to a dated work of art. Diablo 3 isn’t perfect by any means and there is much about it that I didn’t like, but it’s taken Torchlight 2’s deliberately retro approach to make me realise that many of the changes it made to the formula were changes for the better.

Sinny: I think I understand everything you’re saying about missing its window, and Diablo 3 shifting the goalposts somewhat, yet for me I was happy to see the Diablo series sail off in search of new waters. Just as Team Fortress 2 retained the fun and vibrancy of first-person shooting, in the face of gritty, noisy, moody militaryfests like CoD, Torchlight 2 offered a respite from the course Blizzard was charting for the ARPG genre, and allowed me to enjoy the genre in the way I wanted to.

Perhaps this is the sad tale of Torchlight 2 – that it turned up for a big fight with Diablo 3 behind the bike sheds only to find it had graduated and gone off to big school. These two fanbases, these two opposing schools of thought on the genre, they’re really not talking about the same types of game any more? I think that’s okay though. I think it means that the old ways get to continue to live and look beautiful and have Internet co-op, while the huge development machine that is Blizzard pushes the core of the genre in the direction it believes it needs to go in?

Jim: Beautiful as that is, I would point out that I am someone who eschews other ARPGS, who has never played a second of Diablo, and those flaws still stuck out like the massive thumbs of a novelty foam hand. I’m sure that Diablo 3 has hammered a few more nails into its general reception but T2 brought that on itself by being such a predictable and derivative game. We haven’t even mentioned the plot or the cutscenes or any of the attempts to stitch their reasonably-fun monster-smashing into a big ol’ game, but they are so, so awful. I think the problem is that it overreached. Torchlight was successful and deserved to be successful, it was a cheap and cheerful game that tried doing things in a completely new and streamlined way and novelty counts for a lot. Torchlight 2 is, well, bloated beyond fun.

Sinny: To me, it’s the realised full game that Torchlight was the proof of concept for.

Hentzau: And to me it’s obsolete. Redundant. Supernumerary. I appreciate that not everyone has the moolah to splash out on the premium rates Blizzard charges for their games, but Torchlight 2 isn’t really an alternative to Diablo 3. It’s something different, and to my mind inferior Its low price point is certainly a point in its favour, but that’s not going to help if it’s not what you were looking for in the first place.

Sinny: I’m sticking with my composite ship-sailing, schoolyard-sparring metaphor. 2012 has pinned the Diablo and the Torchlight series to the opposite ends of the ARPG genre. I’m genuinely excited to see where both of them go next, and the fact that Torchlight 2 could do this without changing its core philosophy is really wonderful.

Jim: I’m middle class, I look up to him and down to him.

The post Diablog: Torchlight 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I promise this is the last Diablo 3 related thing I write.

Diablo 3’s plot is astoundingly bad. Staggeringly bad. It’s so bad I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out how one of the world’s foremost game developers could do this to one of their three flagship titles. I even went back and had a look at the manuals for Diablo and Diablo 2 — these being written in a kinder, gentler age when having 50% of your manual filled with backstory was seen as a requirement rather than a regrettable waste of paper and money – and something that struck me was that the background blurb there was just as poorly-written as Diablo 3, if not more so. Awful plots are clearly not a new thing for Blizzard, and yet it was not something that I particularly noticed when playing through either of the previous Diablo games.

Why is this? Well, the answer’s fairly obvious: while the manuals flesh out the backstory to Diablo in all of its hideous glory, almost none of it is mentioned in the games themselves. Maybe Blizzard always wanted to fill the Diablo games with interminably long expository cutscenes that pop up every five minutes and it’s only now that the technology available has allowed them to realise their artistic vision, but no matter the actual reason the fact of the matter is that the first Diablo game basically doesn’t have a plot, while the second chooses to paint what little plot it has in very broad brush strokes that leave plenty to the player’s imagination. There’s almost no detailed background on the Sin War or the Horadrim or the Worldstone or the Prime Evils. There is just you, the player, single-mindedly chasing the Dark Wanderer across the various continents, and everything else is incidental to this.

Diablo 2’s plot may be almost non-existent, but I’d argue that it’s actually a very good example of storytelling in a game precisely because it’s very hands-off. It tells the player almost nothing; what exposition you get comes through Deckard Cain and the end of Act cutscenes, which themselves are only indirectly to do with you. The events of Diablo 2 take place in medias res; the cutscenes are a series of flashbacks and flashforwards which relate the story of Marius, an unlucky traveller who got caught up in the Dark Wanderer’s wake. This is a very strong method of telling the game’s story because it sets up the scenario for the player’s actions and it shows you some of the consequences without ever involving the player themselves. The player character is left entirely to the player’s imagination to flesh out; they’re a perfect cipher who doesn’t particularly need a backstory, because whatever class they are they’re pretty much just there to punch a successively larger series of monsters right in the face.

The same is true of the villains. In Diablo 3 the villains are constantly phoning the player up to tell them about the next step in their dastardly plans, thus conveniently letting them know exactly where they should be going and what they should be doing to stop them. They are also completely delusional, reacting to the player’s systematic destruction of their armies with a series of increasingly absurd statements along the lines of “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter! LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”, and when facing you themselves they’re utterly convinced they’re going to win despite you slaughtering your way through literally thousands of baddies to get to them. There are several effective ways to write compelling, threatening villains. This is not one of them.

Contrast this with Diablo 2. Would you like to know how many lines Diablo, the primary antagonist of the game, says to the player in the fifteen hours or so the game takes to play to its conclusion? On finally catching up to Diablo in his stronghold in Hell, he says “Not even death can save you from me!” which isn’t particularly imaginative, but which at least leaves plenty of room for him to be threatening rather than absurd, and that is it. That is the sum total of the direct player-villain interaction in the game — aside from the obvious appointment your mace has with his skull –
and while it isn’t necessarily the ideal it’s undeniably effective for the sort of game Diablo is. Diablo is not an enemy who needs to posture or threaten; he probably doesn’t even know the player exists until they wander into his keep. He lets his actions do the talking, and since he’ll probably kill you several times on the first go the lasting impression he makes is that he’s a pretty effective final boss.

It also helps that, right up until the moment when you kill them, Mephisto and Diablo are winning. Mephisto has broken free of his prison and successfully corrupted the Zakarum priesthood charged with keeping him confined, while Diablo has physically taken over the body of the hero who vanquished him in the first game and is literally raising Hell as he makes his way across Sanctuary. Until they encounter the player pretty much everything they have done has gone according to plan, making them seem at least competent enough to be leading the infernal legions in their eternal war against Heaven (or whatever). Diablo 3’s Azmodan on the other hand is all talk and no trousers; throughout Act III you’re constantly told what a super-duper awesome general Azmodan is and how he’s won countless victories on the battlefields of Hell, and yet his modus operandi in game – the stuff you as a player see him do – appears to involve repeatedly tipping the player off as to where exactly he’s going to strike next. These are not the actions of a tactical genius.

Of course you can’t really have effective villains when you need to make the player character out to be a super-special last-scion-of-an-ancient-bloodline Chosen One. This is what I like to refer to as the Sherlock effect, which I observed in the recent BBC adaptation of the same name. Sherlock Holmes is supposed to possess genius-level powers of deductive reasoning which make even intelligent men like Watson look like chumps in comparison. The conclusion we’re supposed to draw from this isn’t “LOL Watson is dumb” but rather “Man, that Sherlock Holmes is pretty amazing!” In Sherlock, though, it’s the other way round: in order for today’s viewer to understand the plots Sherlock is written to be about as smart as the average person, so the only way they can accentuate his supposed superhuman intelligence is by having every other person on the show act like they’ve been given a pre-frontal lobotomy. So it is with Diablo 3: we’re constantly told that the armies of Hell are unstoppable and that the Evils are a big deal who are not to be trifled with, but in the game they’re portrayed as inept, bumbling buffoons both by their actions and by your victory over them coming so easily. In backstory terms, it came easily because you’re so awesome. In game terms, it came easily because Blizzard wrote the baddies to be incompetent morons. Would Moriarty have been threatening if he kept tripping over his shoelaces every time he tried to kill Holmes? Probably not.

The problem with Diablo 3 isn’t too hard to understand when you compare it to its immediate predecessor, then. It’s a game that spends too much time telling you that the world is in peril because these total badass Evils are on the loose, and not enough time showing you the results of said peril. It’s more concerned with backstory and lore than it is tone or atmosphere, and as a result the plot turns out to be a horrible, disjointed, nonsensical mess. The origin of the Nephalem is given far more exposition time than SPOILER’s nefarious scheme and eventual betrayal, which I think is dealt with in about two lines. It’s not that the inherent quality of the story is worse, particularly, it’s that the way it’s told is completely lopsided resulting in a complete tonal shift away from the gothic horror of Diablo 2 and towards an almost Benny Hill-like level of absurdity in the places and characters you meet as you make your way through the game, which is completely wrong for what Diablo is. Or rather, what I think Diablo is supposed to be, and what Diablo has been in the past. I don’t know what it is now. All I know is that I don’t like it.

The post On Diablo 3’s Story, or: Why Less Is More In Videogames appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is going to be complicated.

The problem is, Diablo 3 is very much a Blizzard game. Back in the day this wouldn’t have been an issue. Back in the day “Blizzard game” meant you were going to be in for an experience of unalloyed awesome no matter what the game actually was. Unfortunately Blizzard today is a very different company to what it was a decade ago, and so the term “Blizzard game” — while still guaranteeing top-notch mechanical design — now also carries with it unpleasant connotations of truly awful writing and metagame elements that are either pointless or actively detrimental to the good work done with the gameplay. So while Diablo 3 is undoubtedly a very, very good game, it is unnecessarily handicapped by a huge number of flaws that could have been avoided so easily. I actually find Diablo 3 somewhat depressing in a way, because the thought that someone could take the excellent concept of Diablo and say “I know what this needs: more cutscenes!” is rather indicative of the way mainstream game development is heading these days.

You are one of five heroes – Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, Wizard and Demon Hunter – on a quest to stop a sudden undead infestation by punching said undead right in the face and/or blasting them with magical incendiaries. When you punch a zombie’s head off there is a chance that loot will fountain out of the corpse under high pressure; you then (if it’s better than what you’ve currently got) equip this loot to improve your zombie-punching abilities. Every so often your hero will light up like a Christmas tree to indicate they have levelled up, which gives them access to more varied methods of zombie-punching. This is the basic structural framework that underpins all Diablo games, and the good news is that Diablo 3 pulls it off just as well as – arguably better than, in fact – its predecessors. Rumours that the auto-levelling up and being handed the same skills everyone else gets would dumb down the game are completely unfounded; the skill system is streamlined, building on Blizzard’s eight years of experience with WoW, but it is not shallow.

An example. On my Wizard, I have four hotkey skill slots (1-4) and a skill for each mouse button. Left mouse button is either a chain lightning area attack (for groups) or magic missile (for bosses). Key 1 is bound to Frost Nova, an area-of-effect attack that centres on my character and freezes everything in place for a couple of seconds, allowing me time to get away. Key 2 is where Force Pulse lives, which is similar to Frost Nova except instead of freezing it’s a “GO AWAY” knockback attack. These two skills are activated whenever I see a big group, or whenever my Wizard gets in trouble and needs to escape. 3 activates Hydras, a kind of magical turret that auto-shoots everything around and which I use to soften up/mop up really large groups. 4 sounds boring, but is actually key to the whole build: Diamond Skin gives a limited and temporary damage absorption ability to the Wizard, but I have it runed so that it also reduces the cost of casting spells while it’s active. And this makes the right mouse button ability, Disintegrate, downright obscene. It’s a thermic lance for monsters; a double beam of magic power that cuts through groups and bosses alike as though they weren’t even there which – thanks to Diamond Skin – can be kept up for about 10-12 seconds, and this is enough to reduce anything that isn’t a boss or a named elite monster to a smoking pile of ash on the dungeon floor. On Normal, anyway.

The synergy between Diamond Skin and Disintegrate is representative of the way the skills interact with each other; on its own a particular skill might not be that great, but it’s often the case that if you combine it with another skill it becomes much more powerful. There’s about 15 primary skills for each character, each of which can have a single rune attached to it which specialises the skill further. My Frost Nova can be runed to do more damage, release additional Frost Novas in a chain reaction or create a slowing area of effect rather than a snap freeze, while the double beam of Disintegrate is also the result of an applied rune. Passive skills complicate things even further; these confer some inherent bonus to your character like increased armour or more frequent critical hits, and many of them also synergise well with the active skills. Despite everyone having access to the same skills the way people evolve their characters over time will be different; I’m reasonably sure my Wizard is built completely differently to Josh’s Wizard despite us being roughly the same level. By opening up the range of skills available rather than limiting you to one of a few branches of a skill tree Blizzard have vastly increased the amount of tinkering and experimentation that’s possible, which is the most important thing.

There is one thing I don’t like about the skill system, however, and that’s the glacially slow rate at which your options open up as you progress through the early levels of the game. Those hotkey slots I mentioned earlier? Those are all locked at the start of the game; you – absurdly – have to unlock them one at a time as you level up, meaning you have very little you can do at the start of the game beyond “click on bad guy”. Taking control over skill unlocks out of the player’s hands also means that if you want a certain skill you can’t beeline to it through a skill tree; instead you just have to wait until you get to the level it unlocks at, and considering some of the good ones don’t unlock until levels 25-30 or so this can take a very long time. With most of my characters I wasn’t really having fun with the game until level 15 or so, when I could do three or four things in combat that weren’t throwing purple balls at people.

Still, getting that far only takes an hour or two, and while it’s crap that the game doesn’t do much to grab you from the outset once you’re there Diablo 3 is an awful lot of fun. The mesmerising effect of increasingly better loot drops is present and correct, and the monster punching part is admirably visceral with particularly powerful abilities hurling dozens of baddie corpses across the screen. The game even encourages homicidal rampages by giving you an experience bonus for killing a large number of monsters in one hit, or chaining together kills in an orgy of mass slaughter. The randomised levels and dungeons have also made a welcome return, and this time they’re leavened with a variety of special one-off encounters that have a chance to spawn on a particular runthrough; for example, I went through the start of Act I for the sixth time last night and I found a mini-event that I hadn’t seen before. This ensures that there is something genuinely new to see each time you play, and that’s before taking into account the little extras like the Golden Axe treasure goblins.

So the gameplay is mostly great, except… I kept getting the disconcerting feeling that Normal mode was too easy. Groups of 30+ baddies were dispatched in seconds. Bosses were often killed before they’d had a chance to finish delivering their opening monologue. I think I died exactly once on Normal difficulty to an end of Act boss’s special attack that took me by surprise. This is exacerbated by the auction house, which I’ll talk about in a bit, but I got the distinct impression that Normal mode basically functions as a ten hour long tutorial, and that the real game starts when you finish it for the first time and unlock Nightmare mode. Quite frankly if it wasn’t Diablo I probably would have given it up long before I got to Act III, which is the first part of the game that is even remotely tricky. Nightmare mode plays like the game Diablo should be, where small, isolated groups of enemies are easy prey but champion monsters have to be treated with care and you need to make sure you don’t get cut off and surrounded by a horde. The loot is much better, too, and I’m rather puzzled as to why Blizzard took the decision to lock this off from me until I’d invested ten hours beating the game on Braindead difficulty.

Or rather, I would be puzzled if everything else in the game that wasn’t the punching didn’t belie a complete contempt for the intelligence of the people playing it. The plot is… god, I don’t even have the words to describe how bad the plot is. It’s entirely possible that Diablo 3’s plot is, pound for pound, the single worst videogame plot it’s been my misfortune to encounter, which is astonishing when you consider that it’s Blizzard making this game. They’re possibly the second or third richest developer in the world! Are you telling me they couldn’t afford to hire professional writers rather than getting Chris Metzen to vomit out yet another story that would be rejected by fanfiction writers as being too clichéd and Mary-Sueish? The Chosen One trope rears its ugly head for the umpteenth time in a videogame, the baddies are all completely ineffectual yet continually call you up on the batphone to taunt you like you’re not systematically slaughtering their entire army, everyone else in the game has the mental level of a teenager – the Supreme Commander of Heaven in particular acts like an angsty fourteen year-old – and worst of all this unending barrage of crap is constantly forced down your throat via cutscenes. Diablo 2 did not have cutscenes (aside from the excellent pre-rendered ones that served as a coda to each Act, which is the natural place to put them), and for good reason: they would have gotten in the way of the punching. Here, though, if you want to fight a boss, you have to wait while the game loads a cutscene and then press Escape, and then click “OK! I really want to skip the cutscene!” It got to the point where I actually stooped to hunting through the game options in the hope that there was a button that would turn the awful, awful story off and just let me punch skeletons. There wasn’t.

So Diablo 3 is no longer about the punching and the loot; instead, it’s now riddled with this horrible story-cancer that the game thrusts in your face at every opportunity. It’s all very well to say that this is a Diablo game and that I should just ignore the plot, but that’s the thing: I literally can’t. It’s so obnoxious that it becomes one of a number of things which are actively detrimental to the experience of playing the game, with the other major culprits being the auction house and the requirement to always be signed in to Battle.net even if you just want to dick around in single player for a bit.

The Battle.net thing is simple enough to understand. When you’re signed in, it’s great. It’s fine. The interface is very slick, joining your friends is as simple as pushing a single button and while there are occasional lag issues I have to say I’ve never died as a result of one. I have no beef with Battle.net itself, but insisting that I always play the game via Battle.net is completely insane, and if you want to know why you need look no further than yesterday afternoon. The EU server for Diablo 3 fell over at about 2pm, meaning nobody in Europe could play the game until Blizzard got it back up again just after 7pm. This was a Sunday afternoon, remember; it’s difficult to think of a more inconvenient time for the game to be unavailable, and yet it still happened. Apparently this is the future, though; the benefits always-online connectivity brings to a game are deemed to outweigh not being able to physically play the damn thing whenever the server goes up the spout.

The auction house is a little more uncertain because we’re only a week in and that’s not really enough time to see how it’ll impact the overall gameplay experience in the long-term, but the way I see it there are two problems with the auction house. The first is that – up to level 30, at least – it’s very very easy to find an excellent item for your class for just a few thousand gold, meaning that a couple of minutes’ browsing will ensure your character is just about as good as it can be. This takes the fun out of killing a boss and watching rare loot fountain out of his corpse because you know it’ll probably be worse than the stuff you can find on the auction house. Which brings me to the second problem: I have a sneaking suspicion in-game loot has been gimped to encourage players to use the auction house. Certainly I noticed most of the stuff I picked up was 5-10 levels below the level I was currently at, and I never picked up an item that had a higher level in over forty hours of play. Either way the auction house is just downright better, which I think strikes at the very heart of what Diablo is about. I said a couple of paragraphs ago that Diablo is supposed to be about punching monsters and getting better loot, but the auction house removes the fun of the loot part leaving you with just the monster punching – and while this is an admirably well-judged element of the game, it’s one that starts to visibly stagger under the weight of the rest of the bullshit you have to deal with when you play it.

Like I said, then, it’s complicated. I’ve spent a sickening amount of time playing Diablo 3 over the last week. I have enjoyed nearly all of it. Diablo 3’s flaw isn’t that it’s a bad game, because it most definitely is not. Rather it’s that, as excellent as it is, it’s nowhere near as good as it could have been had Blizzard been a little more focused in their development goals rather than adding in all this extraneous stuff and changing the basic gameplay to compensate. It’s probably one of the best games I’ll play this year, but I’ll always associate it with a vague sense of disappointment that this is the direction Blizzard took it in rather than sticking to what they do best and delivering the premier monster-punching experience of the next decade. It remains to be seen whether it’ll have the insane longevity of its predecessor (which people are still playing 12 years on) but my gut feeling says no. Diablo 3 is a great game. It isn’t a classic.

The post Thoughts: Diablo 3. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It’s also cut my productivity to sod-all, unfortunately. There will be Lagrange post tomorrow, and then nothing till next Monday. Sorry!

The post Diablo III Is Pretty Awesome. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.