StormShaun said:
Well, that is good news.
I am with you in that first boat you mentioned Jim. Both my best friend and I played Diablo 3, and completed it. For both of us it was some grand fun. Yet we noticed many things missing, a couple of classes and such. Hopefully these things will be sorted out with the included "Reaper of Souls" expansion.
Hopefully, we may buy it, and once again enjoy murdering the hell out of some demons.
I'm going to acquire it on the PS3, sure, our current characters are not on there, but it will be my copy, and we will gain a few pluses. (Apparently, according to the game's information)
Reaper Of Souls just adds one new character class.
Speaking for myself, my opinion of D3 is very mixed. It's one of those cases where I feel people are justified in hating it because there is no reason why it should have been called "Diablo 3" given that they simplified everything greatly from the previous games, removing a lot of the depth from character building and such.
While I know not everyone agrees with me, one of my biggest issues with the games industry is the desire to tack a big series name and a few established IP trappings onto everything, even if they are making something different. Then of course the industry and fanboys go on the warpath when people complain about people comparing the game to previous ones in the series, when they themselves encouraged the comparison by using the name and a sequel number to draw people in. This usually goes along with people claiming that those complaining just hate innovation or whatever, when in reality nobody probably would have cared if they had just started a new franchise to begin with. As a general rule when people by numbered sequels they pretty much do it because they liked the previous ones and wanted more of the same.
I don't think Diablo 3 is bad, but I do not think it feels much like Diablo without the skill trees, and just swapping out the moves and mods periodically. It's shallow, much like what they did when they removed a lot of the customization and building from WoW.
Right now though my current hate target is "Sacred 3" which I think was in part ruined by Diablo 3. Basically Ascalon who made the original "Sacred" games ran into financial problems and had to disband and reform. A new group of devs decided to take the "Sacred" franchise and pretty much turn it into a linear hack and slash game, removing all of the skills, customization, and most importantly the open world, which pretty much gave "Sacred" it's identity in the market by doing things other games didn't have the guts to do. It's pretty much now a sort of D3 knock off, because despite the criticisms D3 apparently sold pretty well.
Of course what makes this one worse is that the original devs are still around, and are actually making a true Sacred sequel, except due to legal garbage they can't even use their own name, and wound up having to call it "Unbended" because they couldn't even call it "Unsacred". If it was more well known I'd have expected Jim to have made some comments about this little mess.
One of the odd things that goes along with this story is a lot of people who bought "Sacred 3" didn't feel they really needed to check it out in detail because hey, it's "Sacred" they know the series. I admit I sort of fell into this myself. As a result a lot of people feel cheated. While on some levels I can understand the whole "do your research" thing there should be some degree of confidence that goes along with someone using a well known series name, at least
in terms of the things that defined that series. It's sort of like say Disney making a movie called "Guardians Of The Galaxy 2" showing a picture of Starlord's helmet on the poster, and then releasing a movie about a bunch of neighborhood watch dweebs who hang out at "The Galaxy Pub" one of whom happens to be a huge Starlord fan and wears a helmet that looks like his while riding his bike. I mean sure, technically you can say the guys should have done research before going to see the movie and not simply taken it on faith that it was going to be a comic-book based space opera just because it's officially being called the sequel to one.
I guess the point is more or less that I'm getting sick of the overuse of franchises, and the deceptive marketing, which are things Jim goes on about all the time. I'm increasingly getting irritated that it seems digging is becoming necessary to buy games, as opposed to something you can do. I shouldn't feel like I need to double and triple check every bloody thing, and then be considered an idiot because I'm say playing games rather than stalking every bit of info about one I might want to buy, and to make sure that a game presenting itself as the continuation of a series is actually doing that... which I've run into a few times, but it seems to be happening more and more where a numbered sequel is nothing like the rest of the series. I sort of blame "Fallout 3" for it honestly, which got away with it by being a kick arse game that pushed the limits for it's time... now it seems a lot of series are doing the same thing, but do it in order to cheapen and dumb down the franchises.
In short D3 and S3 seem to be soul mates, I feel like they did the same thing, and I feel S3 happened pretty much because of D3 doing it and making boatloads of cash even with the AH fiasco.
But enough rambling, I doubt many people care.
