| Title | Diablo III in the Living Room: lost in translation? |
| Author | Brandon Cackowski-Schnell and Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game diaries |
| When | September 2, 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 third entry..
Read the full articleWhy can't you just decide for me whether or not i should get this on a console? help me out here.
Do you have it for PC? Stick with that.
Don't have a gaming PC? Get one and buy it for that.
I don't see any reason you should get it for console, really, unless you are super-excited at the prospect of thumbstick-grinding as opposed to click-grinding.
And that sounded far dirtier than intended.
Not to cause any wars here, but the console version has no internet requirement. It is entirely offline. A result of that though is no Battle.net. It also has four person couch co-op if that's your thing.
That being said, I do think Tom's comments about targeting are valid. If you want pixel perfect attack control, the console is not for you. It's more of an "attack in that general direction" sort of thing.
Removed due to posting In the wrong Diablo 3 discussion.
Just to echo what Brandon says, I do think it's perfectly viable on a console system. We'll be talking about some of the differences further in upcoming entries, but I don't see it as a simple matter of one being better than the other. I don't think you can overestimate the value of the couch co-op Brandon mentions. It really breathes new life into Diablo for me. But personally, my own greater issue is that I have so much momentum built up playing on the PC.
But if I was just starting to play Diablo III, if I wasn't already invested in three characters on battle.net, I'd have to deal with the same difficult decision as GVille. There's no easy answer.
How does the control scheme work, exactly? I am always on the
lookout for essentially a twin-stick shooter style approach. It seems
obvious to me that if you are replacing a screen relative control
perspective (mouse) with a character relative one (controller moves
character), the aiming should also be character relative.
Aiming in
the direction the character is moving is so restrictive and arbitrary
(forcing you to move toward your target each time!). Whereas the second
stick can give you dynamic feedback on your aiming WHILE you move (or
stand still). Unfortunately that limits your convenient attack options,
since they are often tied to thumb operated buttons. I guess it would
be best paired with finger buttons for each of your other fingers on the
bottom of the controller.
I suppose there could also be a trigger that acts like shift on the keyboard and freezes your motion, while allowing you to aim.
Unfortunately, the right stick is used for the evade roll, which every character gets. The control scheme is single-stick shooter. It can be a PITA, especially for melee fighters.
Never wars, only discussion! :D
The offline factor is certainly a big plus, and the couch co-op is actually the most intriguing thing about this game I've heard so far. Maybe I judged it a bit too quickly and harshly.
Of course, I was one of the few who didn't actually like Diablo 3 -- if I wanted a grind to get to end-game content, I would go play an MMO -- specifically because of the things you talk about in the next article. I play games for story, not gameplay, and Diablo is all the latter and very little of the former. If the gameplay happens to be good, that's just icing on the cake, but it's not the first thing I look for. To that end, I really could not get into Diablo 3 at all. I don't even think I made it halfway through a single playthrough before I was lamenting the purchase. And this is coming from someone for whom local co-op is usually a saving grace: I was able to play LAN co-op with someone sitting next to me at a different computer and still did not enjoy it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that my opinion is obviously biased, but I'm trying to approach with an open mind!
As I mention above, to Brandon, the couch co-op is awesome but isn't a big differentiator to me -- my entire experience with Diablo 3 was inside the confines of a computer café, with friends either side of me at a rank of computers, so the local camaraderie usually exclusive to couch co-op was there from the beginning for me.
That being said, the offline possibilities are a far greater selling point to me and would ultimately be the biggest deciding factor when choosing console versus PC -- and was certainly something I didn't take into account earlier. (All other thoughts are laid out nicely in the reply to Brandon above!)
I'm enjoying these dialogue articles. Very cool.
Correction:
"that is not something [I] was ever going to understand..."