| Title | Diablo III in the Living Room: a tale of two Diablo players |
| Author | Brandon Cackowski-Schnell and Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game diaries |
| When | August 31, 2013 |
Brandon Cackowski-Schnell and Tom Chick will be posting daily updates on Diablo III for the Xbox 360 over the coming week. This is their first entry. Tom: I am a sucker for Diablo III. And I'm not ashamed..
Read the full articleOh man, I am so stoked for this and I'm not entirely sure why. I think unlike Tom that this game is a no-brainer for consoles. It doesn't have serious interface requirements, and Torchlight showed these kinds of games can work just fine. I already played through Diablo III with a barbarian on my pc and ran out of steam starting over with a new character, but I think I'm ready to take a Demon Hunter for a test drive on my 360.
Oh hey, thought of a question at nearly the instant I hit the post button - does the console version require or support Battle.net? Just curious because I have an authenticator tied to my account and I get annoyed keying that in every time I want to play Starcraft 2. I may remove it if I have to do that with a joypad.
I really, really don't recommend doing that. Battle.net accounts get stolen in droves, hence the existence of the authenticator.
You can probably handle 10, to be honest. Normal just isn't hard, even with high MP.
I understand the value of an authenticator, hence my usage of one. I am balancing the risk against the convenience of its use on a console.
Tom and Brandon uniting together is like the five Voltron cats forming together! Or the cars, planes and submarines of the other Voltron forming together!
Go Voltron!
Supporting/giving free publicity to unethical games just leads to more unethical games being produced. Thanks for being part of the problem guys
Who's more evil: Blizzard or Stardock? Please submit your answer in the form of a one-page essay. Single spaced, of course.
Diablo III is unethical? Is the game being programmed by underage Indian children? Or is the game directly supporting an African warlord? I know, Diablo III proceeds are funding terrorists, right?
Between Blizzard and Stardock, it is Stardock that is the most evil. Blizzard has made decisions which shift the balance of power away from consumers and towards larger video game corporations, but they have done so for understandable and arguably justifiable reasons. In particular, consumers were upset by Diablo III''s always-on requirement for play, which makes the gaming experience worse for players without giving anything equivalent in return. The always on requirement makes the game unplayable in some circumstances and causes the game to be laggy and less playable in others. However, Blizzard did not make this change just to be evil, rather it was done in order to avoid piracy and to fully capitalize on the game they had made. In the past, video game companies had to deal with a situation where they would make a certain amount of actual sales, and then there would be another fraction of people who pirated the game and they did not make a sale on. Some of the pirated copies would never have translated into actual sales, and some of the pirated copies led to future sales or word of mouth and then sales, but it does seem likely that Blizzard was not getting the absolute maximum amount of money possible out of consumers. Hence the online requirement, which allows Blizzard to capture a larger percentage of their game''s value, while moderately degrading the actual game they produced. And while you may think the decision was bad (screws over the players!) or good (stops players from stealing!), I think most people will at least admit there was a business rationale behind the decision.
The other flashpoints with Blizzard have been similar. Blizzard has made decisions which constrain player freedom (attacking 3rd party servers, using Warden to scan for hacks), but there are rational business and game-quality reasons behind the decisions. As someone who remembers how the profusion of hacks made Diablo I multiplayer unplayerable, I think Blizzard was right in at least some of the decisions they made to lock down their gaming platform. In short, the evil that Blizzard has introduced is the evil that inevitably comes from imposing Order and top down control on systems. It brings control and regularity to things, but at the price of genius, and at the risk of ossification, geriatrification, and the prioritization of the Core over the Periphery.
Stardock on the other hand is a more primal and chaotic evil, the evil of the Warp, an unstable and unbalanced force that carries with it the seeds of its own dissolution. Notice how Elemental crashes after an hour of play, or how even before that it has weird graphical glitches? Even with computer code, the form dearest to Order and hardest to corrupt, Stardock's vile influence has made headway and begun to corrode and mutate the vital CPU pathways. Consider the case of Brad Wardell Vs Marketing Lady. For years he tried to corrupt her, whispering to her in the dark and on late PR trips about the glories of Slaanesh. This paragon of virtue resisted him though, and in the kindest way possible tried to guide Wardell back to the light. But he could not be redeemed, and when she finally left him, Brad's black heart prompted him to furies of rage and spite. He lashed out at her with a lawsuit, trying to ruin her finances and her career in revenge. The spurious lawsuit claims that by deleting some marketing material, she set Elemental back sooo very far that it took Stardock's entire team 3 years of work to bring the game to a playable state. Blizzard might be a corporate overlord, but at least they are not trying to bring back the right of Prima Noctis like Brad Wardell. His way leads to the complete decimation of women in gaming, as they rightfully flee an industry where they must give in to the sexual advances of creepily boyish-faced figures like Wardell. Even more evil is what Brad has planned for the future. He is collecting champions of the strategy genre, heroes like Derek Paxton Soren Johnson, and trying to convert them into banes like himself. Recently Soren Johnson was staying late at the office, trying to make the Elemental AI more effective so that its units don't need tons of free OP bullshit unit upgrades.
"Hello Soren", Brad said, while stroking his baby-butt smooth dimples with one of his long and delicate fingers.
"Hello Brad", replied Soren, in his achingly calm and intelligent voice, every word dripping deep Scandinavian thought.
"I have a proposal for you Soren" said Brad, slowly tracing one finger across his rosy white mouth dumplings.
"Do tell me your proposal Brad", said Soren, turning away from the monitor, the rock hard planes of his face lit by its dim electronic glow.
"My proposal is this. You will allow me to stroke your soft mohawk of viking hair while you code", proposed Brad.
"That is your proposal?", asked Soren, calmly.
"Yes, that is my proposal", replied Brad.
"Very well, I agree to your proposal", said Soren.
Soren turned back to his computer, and Brad began to slowly, delicately run his fingers through the top of Soren's thick blonde mane. Quiet sounds of delight escaped Brad's mouth, as his dimples edged higher and higher on his face, gradually moving to their final perch far above the white crescent of his teeth.
"You see Soren, things are different here in America. Here we are free." Brad said as his fingers penetrated deeper into Soren's proud hair. "Here, things are not so strait laced as in Norway, where there are lines, and each line has its good and bad side. Here, in this place and in this hour, all the lines connect. They become one. You understand this, Soren?" he asked, as the soft brushing sounds of Soren's hair mixed with the quiet hum of the electronics and fans.
"Yes, I understand this Brad", Soren said, almost trancelike from the slow stroking of Brad's fingers and the cadence Brad's voice.
"Yes Soren, here at Stardock, everything is permitted. Every. Thing."
i fucking hate diablo 3. It was the game I wanted most, the game I was most excited for in all my god damn life, it was supposed to be the epic climax...but despite all this hype, it wasn't that the game sucked, oh the game was good but it was ruined by something called the real money fucking action house.
Now im considering buying a fucking console just so I can play this game, which so dissapointed me. but then what's the point, are all my pc friends going to buy a fucking console too?
Meh
fuck it
fuck diablo 3, I'm not paying blizzard another fucking 60 bucks for the same god damn game just because it was impossible for them to impliment the god damn action house that makes the game sooooo pointless.
I even forgave them for the lack of any real pvp...but the RMAH?
no
no forgiveness
Never buying another blizzard product again
fuck you for betraying the people who fucking supported you since the beggining blizzard
fuck you piece of shit sell out for making a great game then ruining it for the pc and then releasing a fucking console version of the game that is what the PC game should have been and more, and fuck you for not letting us play the console experience on the PC.
fuck
you
blizzard
never again
Friend me on Xbox Live when you pick up your copy and we'll level up!