Diablo 3 Beta: Initial Impressions

With some shock, I received a beta invite to Diablo 3 in my email earlier this week. Of course, the first thing I had to think was "it's a fake!" and logged in to the Battle.Net site. Surprise, surprise, Diablo 3 Beta is actually in my games list. Sadly, I had to wait a few days to download since I didn't really have the time to play it.

**Important Aside - always, always go to the official site to validate beta invites whenever possible. Sometimes clicking links is the only option emails give you, but you have to be very careful to check where that link is really taking you to.

It has been a very long time since I played a Diablo game. I totally loved the original game and would play it when I could. Diablo 2 on the other hand, not so much. The second game did not catch me with it's story and, as a result, it felt very grindy. Could be my fault for skipping stuff, but to further the story, I had to get to a certain level and going through the same dungeons over and over just became too tedious.

So how is Diablo 3? One word sums it up nicely: fun.

The beta is actually quite small - only 13 levels out of what looks like 30, maybe more. It only shows the very first part of the game, up until the fight with the Skeleton King which only gets you to level 8 or 9. There are no cinematics yet and, partially because of that, the story is quite lacking. It does look like they are testing mostly mechanics, gameplay, and perhaps loot drops and leveling numbers.

What? I still need to kill stuff! And find breakable things!

So what the heck made it fun? I think I have spent hours killing the same kind of mobs over and over again, but it has not grown old. Between 2 characters, i've finished the beta at least 10 times. And yet I still am compelled to log on and play some more.

Part of the fun is that everything you do had some cool effect. The level 1 abilities may seem simple, but they still killed monsters in 1-2 hits. Some even knock away enemies off to the outside of the playable area. There are also so many destructable objects, even those that cannot be directly targetted. There's just so much primal joy from using an ability and watching tables, chairs, even walls smash and break. Yes, these are shallow reasons, but when you can't get enough of finding things to break and kill, it is reason enough.

Take that you fearsome furniture!

Sometimes killing and breaking things do get old, but then there's also the loot. Certainly not ultra powerfull stuff (although some of those drop too), but scrolls, gold, and training pages to improve your crafting drop frequently as well. The training pages actually may end up the more valuable drop as the crafted gear looks pretty strong. Gold drops do seem to scale with the player's level as my level 10 barbarian can get 20g from a level 1 monster. That may be a bug though.

The other part of the fun is the sense of discovery. Like other Diablo games, the map has some randomness to it. Not completely new maps though. Rooms and corridors are liberally copy/pasted in, but the actual layout of the dungeon maps are changed from game to game. You can log out after exploring a dungeon and come back to the same dungeon with a different map layout. This can also be an annoying feature if you get disconnected and need to spend several more minutes finding the entrance to the next dungeon level.

That leads to one of Diablo 3's flaws - the game only works when the servers are online. There is no option to play offline. Then again, a fully offline client can lead to exploits and hacks that can interfere with online play. It would not be hard for some enterprising person to run exploits like duplicating items or gold if the game is available offline. This kind of thing would be very bad especially for the auction house.

Speaking of which, the auction house in beta does not have the real money option enabled yet and works passably when selling and buying gear. I was able to make some decent gold, but since there aren't that many people in the beta, demand drops off pretty quick. I do find it interesting that you can sell items that are stored in the shared stash chest, each character's inventory, and even what each character is wearing. Convenient for sure, but I smell a mobile app on the way.

Since the game is always online, each game session has it's own "instance" which can be joined by other players. By default, your game is set to "invite only" where you can find a friend and invite him/her into your game. Other modes allow others to jump into your game either by finding your Real ID or using the game finder to locate others who are in the same quest as you. Monsters do increase in power when others join so it provides a nice challenge, but the loot is currently a little broken with the end boss giving me only low quality items. Not sure if that is intended or i was victimized by poor RNG.

There is still a lot for me to find out and do in Diablo 3. There are still other classes I haven't played to a higher level and there are certainly more updates to come. Apparently, the game files already include models and maps for later levels, so I really look forward to testing those when they are made available.

SWTOR: The Last Beta

So this is it, the (very likely) last of the weekend beta tests for Star Wars: The Old Republic. And boy this is going to be a whopper. There's no official estimate as to how many people have been invited or have accepted the beta test, but we can probably give a good guess at it. Bioware did indicate that there are around 1.4 million registered accounts on their site, but that number is inflated due to those with multiple accounts, including yours truly. Still, given that there are over 800k retail box pre-orders in the US alone, plus the fact that around 200k+ codes were given away through media partners, that number may indeed be reached. However, given the test is on a US holiday weekend, there is a huge chunk of people who won't be able to play so the number may be closer to 700k, which is still a lot.

Will the game experience problems on day 1? It certainly would not be a stress test if it didn't. However, Stephen Reid did mention that they intended to use this test to determine how they deal with Early Game Access. I would not be surprised if people would be given a set time they are allowed to log on during the day that the beta starts. Doing this gives me high confidence that they are really committed in a smooth release. Not high confidence that release will be smooth? Of course not. You can't plan enough for events like this, especially with the numbers they will be expecting. Can they pull it off? I belive so. But, at the same time, I will not be surprised if things do go wrong.

As long as "things do go wrong" does not include deleting the whole game. *cough*

One thing I did find interesting is how excited I ended up being for the game. Earlier this year, I was lamenting on how long Bioware was taking to even give a release date and that my interest in the game was waning. It was to the point that I was almost ready to give up waiting. But then the large scale betas happened. Getting my hands on the game did so much to alleviate a lot of my concerns about the game and brought back to life that little dying spark of excitement I had. I was happy to send in bugs I found and provided my feedback. Now, I just can't wait to test it again or play it when it goes live.

See ya'll in beta!

DING! Leveling Up and Pacing

With Star Wars: The Old Republic releasing very soon (hopefully I get in on Dec. 15, but I don't mind waiting for release), I have thought quite a bit about how this game, or future games, can keep me playing past that first month. So many aspects of SWTOR is still unknown thanks to the Non-Disclosure Agreement for most people and one of them is the leveling curve. After quite a bit of thought, it is that leveling curve that played a major part of why I still play World of Warcraft.

Now why would the leveling curve be important? Surely one would like to get to max level as soon as possible to be able to "fully enjoy the game". It was certainly a train of thought I had years ago. I remember when The Burning Crusade expansion went live, I hadn't slept much over the course of 4 days to be one of the first to 70. After which I promised myself never to do that ever again and, so far, I've kept to that promise.

World of Warcraft's current pace of leveling is certainly not a good point of reference. With so many expansions since it's release, the game pretty much just wants you to blow through the low levels to get the the relevant content. Even without heirloom gear (+xp) or guild leveling perks (more +xp), you can easily skip several zones you've never seen because you can outlevel them by just completing the current zone you are in.

No, if WoW is going to be a point of reference, we will have to go back to the 1-60 game almost 7 years ago. I had started playing March of 2005 and it took me around 5 months to get my first 60. Granted, I've spent time to try a few classes and server types (the RP servers back then were waaaay out of my league and they still are), but during all that time, I have always enjoyed the game and the pace allowed me to get immersed with the world and my chosen character at the time. It felt that my character was growing and learning and that the world (of warcraft) was alive even without dynamic content.

Azeroth just feels to me now like it is a virtual home.

In contrast, leveling in RIFT was just way too fast. I hit level 50 in just 3 weeks and I wasn't even trying that hard. I had split my time between 2 games and still made it to max level in less time than it took for me to find a character I want to level in WoW. I loved the rich environments, but the pace just would not allow me to stay still long enough to be immersed in it. Heck, even now I don't know what the deal is between the rivalry between the Defiants and Guardians. Their emnity always seemed rather petty and arbitrary to me. The titular rifts did spice things up a bit, but a lot of them made them feel grindy, and the randomness of some events made me miss out on the more interesting invasions when they were relevant (eg: I never saw a werewolf invasion while I was questing in Gloamwood).

In the end, while RIFT may be the better game in many respects, I went back to World of Warcraft. It's not even about the time invested in the game, but RIFT simply did not give me the sense of really knowing my character. A lot of the questing is generic and there is nothing that helps define your niche in the world. It's just "get to 50 and grind for your gear". While that pretty much sums up ALL MMOs, having gone through 1-49 so quickly just made it the whole lot more obvious. Grinds just don't feel like grinds when there is an actual objective to reach that is more than an in-game item. 

Perhaps SWTOR's "story driven" gameplay can drive things up several notches when it comes to pace. Without really knowing how fast levelling is, I can only guess that focusing on the story would slow things down significantly. I can certainly tell from the released videos that a lot of time will be spent just watching what goes on during conversations. If the quality of story is similar to Bioware's single player games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age (or even older games like Baldur's Gate for that matter), and if the game paces itself where I get to care about my character and the game world around him, then WoW will have some serious competetion for my time. Perhaps my new home will be in a galaxy far, far away.

Or maybe I'll be running around as an Asura in Guild Wars 2. Or sharing the skies with panda people on dragons. Only time will tell.

WoW: Item Levels go Squish (maybe)

Ghostcrawler posted a very interesting article and really, it was a topic that was expected to come up eventually. A guildie of mine mentioned that it should have been brought up for Wrath of the Lich King, and I definitely agree. I actually remember commenting about this when fighting Prince Malchezaar back in the Burning Crusade. 


What's also interesting is that, this is not just a problem with WoW. RIFT has some really crazy numbers with bosses that would quickly reach WoW Cataclysm health levels in a very short amount of time. Star Wars: The Old Republic will see this as well unless they figure how to deal with it early. 


MMOs have always been a numbers game at it's core. In PvE, the boss' health determines the length of the fight relative to how much damage the players are expected to output. Average player health determines how much that boss can reasonably do to pose a challenge to healing without overwhelming the healers. The situation is the same in PvP where the health/damage numbers have to be managed properly so combat can be enjoyable without getting frustrating (remember back in classic? 2 Holy Paladins going at each other can take hours). 


The numbers cannot go away, but right now, it's just ridiculously large. Back in WoW Classic, Ragnaros' 1 million health was pretty insurmountable, and bosses required 40 people to even pose a threat to The Firelord. Now the stats have inflated so much, a solo player can take him down is less time than when he was relevant content. 1 million just doesn't go very far these days. Good thing he's no longer a threat ...... oh. 

HA! Try to push me around now you meanies!

Now it generally isn't a bad thing, there has to be some incentive on getting good gear. Like Ghostcrawler mentioned, a +1 stat point upgrade is still an upgrade, but it's not that big a deal in the long run. Many people would like to feel like their characters are getting stronger as time goes by and nothing says that than a tank with +20k more health ... or 180k. But when the numbers get larger exponentially, it becomes just really difficult to manage. 


He goes to present a sample of what could be an item from Mists of Pandaria. He stresses that item levels are not set yet, but if they inflate the way they have been, this will likely happen. 

Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment. I totally want this by the way

So what are the solutions? Ghostcrawler presented 2 ways of how it could go; compressing the numbers or "squishing" item levels. 


Compressing numbers, basically just shortening them so that 1.000 will be presented as 1K looks like a good solution, but it seems more of a band aid than a fix. Not going into the technical limitations of current computing hardware/software, while the numbers will become more managable, inflation is still actually happening at a silly rate and, when we come to it, 1B will still be 1,000,000,000. Also, DPS numbers don't really increment in large numbers. 50k dps can be anywhere between 50,000 and 50,999 and that is a huge difference. It provides a bit more challenge when it comes to theorycrafting.


"Squishing" item levels seems like a better solution. The idea is to go back to previous expansions and reduce the differences between max item levels of those expansions.  An example will be that an item level 70 piece of gear from Burning Crusade won't be as big an upgrade over a level 60 classic item. While current content inflation will happen as normal, the numbers won't be drastically high as the items they are compared to isn't very powerful. 


The effect will be that current gear will have their item levels lowered significantly and damage/health affected appropriately. Yes, it will make it feel like everyone was nerfed if this is implemented. And yes, going down to 20,000 health from almost 200,0000 would be a bit of a shock, but this solution gives a lot more room to grow, and when a new expansion arrives, the items from the previous can go "squish" to make room for it.  I would take the initial shock of a nerf over eventually fighting a boss and chipping away at 1,000,000,000 health. 

So I'm gonna get nerfed again? Screw that!

Are there other solutions? One thing that could allay issues with high numbers would be making encounters more complex. Heroic Shannox is actually a good example. He does not have a lot of health compared to other bosses in The Firelands. Were he a straight up tank/spank fight, he would be dead in 2 minutes. The fact that you don't need to kill his dogs means that his health is all you need to bring down but, in order to do that, the whole raid needs to execute the fight properly. Just standing there and focusing on killing him will lead to a wipe as Rageface takes out people one at a time. 


Of course, fight complexity can only go so far and gets limited as more and more people opt for 10man raiding. Not so much you can put into a fight if there aren't enough people to do it. 


 Perhaps another solution would be some combination of "Squish" and leveling out the stat curve to make it more linear than exponential. There may not be any need to lower the baseline significantly so there would be less of a shock. It would make it harder to solo older content if this happens, but it would make things more manageable in the long run. 


I have no doubt that Blizzard will be addressing this matter and hopefully in time for Mists of Pandaria. However they decide to do so is up in the air at the moment, but the sooner they do it, the better. Other games will also need to pay attention to this as they will encounter this very same problem down the road. Their respective solutions may be different, but at least it would be something they will address. 

Mechwarrior Online: Joy oh Joy!

There is now do doubt that this site is not about breaking news. I only learned about Mechwarrior Online from Massively and even that is a link to the GamebreakerTV webcast. I have heard some mention of it here and there, but I didn't really give it mind...probably because I think it's too good to be true.

But there it is. It's true.

Now this is where the bigger nerds get to beat me up - I did not read a lot of the BattleTech/Mechwarrior novels. Much of my exposure to the BattleTech universe has been through the tabletop RPG, boardgame, technical readouts, and Mechwarrior video games. But the stuff I did do, I had a LOT of fun with. I remember one boardgame skirmish where a player was laughing at a situation where his 100-ton Atlas was being fired upon by a 20-ton Locust's machine gun. Then the Locust scored a critical hit. Which hit the Atlas' reactor. The Locust did die, but the Atlas was crippled for the rest of the skirmish, being unable to move more than 1 hex per turn, and was effectively useless.

These were the kind of situations that made BattleTech so engaging even though luck played a huge factor (much less in the later games). This translated well with the BattleTech computer RPG (The Crescent Hawk's Inception) and the added roleplaying elements of finding a good team just made it more immersive. Many times I ended up shelving a favourite mech until I had the resources or expertise to repair it.

Then there was the concept of customizing mechs. This was always part of the game world, but implemented early on as mech variants (i.e. different weapon configurations). This was kept as set configurations (limited on the availability of the weapons) until the later Mechwarrior games when you can put any type of weapon limited only by weight or allotted space.

But what made the BattleTech world really immersive was the fact that it was easy to relate to. Technology in BattleTech/Mechwarrior was not completely otherworldly. Mechs were lumbering behemoths that was in constant danger of killing it's own pilot through overheating. Projectile weapons like machine guns or missile launchers were the norm and the more powerful laser weapons just exacerbates the heat issue. There were also no alien races. Humans are split into feudal factions that have some cultural resemblance to our own.

In the Mechwarrior games, piloting a mech was anything but graceful. The mechs simply felt huge. There were no instant turns, run/walk toggle, or even automatic targetting. The things can't even jump without jets firing and landing was another matter. Got your leg shot out? Then you can see the mech limping and barely able to move. Heat sinks damaged? Gotta find some water and stay there if you want to use your laser weapons. I remember blowing up my own mech when my ammo exploded due to overheating. Also, nothing can really make you swear in despair more than having your mech shut down and seeing 15 missiles headed right to your cockpit. I can probably go on and on about what I loved about the franchise (and what I hated), but that would just take too much time to do.

Mechwarrior Online will have really high standards to reach. While there hasn't been a Battletech/Mechwarrior game in years, nor has there been anything that matches the experience since then, the developers will need to build up on what's already been made.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Piranha and Infinity Game Publishing can pull it off. In the meantime, all this hype has led me to MekTek and their Mechwarrior 4 distribution. I'm just kicking myself right now for not even knowing they existed until today. So much for resting on the weekend.

WoW: Blizzard is Evil™ Edition

I am so glad for sites like WoW Insider and MMO Champion. They make data gathering for ranty sites like mine so easy.

With that aside out of the way, Blizzard is just totally evil. Not in the megalomaniac villain sort of evil, but the "business evil". The kind of evil where you know it is nothing but a cash grab, but you can't resist it because of one or more compelling reasons. One cannot fault them for it though because, well, they are a business after all. For every company, despite all the repeated "for the players" speech or PR quote they do, they all have to watch their bottom line.

So why is Blizzard "evil" this time? Behold the Annual Pass! You sign up and you get a bunch of free stuff. A new mount for World of Warcraft, a free digital copy of Diablo III, and guaranteed access to the next WoW expansion beta. All the other stuff is great, but that last one really caught my eye. 

I am still on the fence with regards to purchasing the next expansion, even if I have already accepted the pandas invading WoW. My hope was that I would be lucky enough to get a beta invite to try it out before I decide. And this is where the annual pass comes in. If I want to make sure I get beta access, I should get locked into a subscription for a year and there is already speculation that Mists of Pandaria™ can go live sometime Summer 2012. If this is true, then I'm basically paying for the game whether or not I buy the expansion. If this is the case, I would not be able to play any of my max level characters except for fiddling around the new systems. And I certainly would not be able to make a Monk or Pandaren character.

So basically, getting the annual pass makes getting Mists of Pandaria™ pretty much a sure thing. Unless it gets released late Fall or Winter 2012.

How evil. But also incredibly smart.

Will I get the annual pass though even after seeing all this mindbending evil? The magic 8-ball says "most likely". Man, that toy is kinda creepy.