hey all,
So I should probably put this under the Games page, but it doesn't allow me to do individual posts there, so it is here instead.
One of the games I picked up in December was Diablo 3, and since January I've had a chance to sit down and play it quite a bit. Two things have been bugging me about it, though, so I thought I'd get my thoughts about it here. In Diablo 3, you cannot customize the appearance of your character. Your male barbarian will always have the same face, hair, body shape, tattoos, voice, etc as everyone else's male barbarian. So none of those things really affect the gameplay, but they influence your connection to the character. Also, you cannot level your character like you can in Skyrim, Dark Souls, Fallout, Final Fantasy, etc. As you kill monsters and complete quests, your character will level up. But you cannot choose to increase your health or any other stats: those increase by themselves. Further, you cannot decide what abilities you would like to start using, nor which ones to improve. For each character class, these are pre-determined. At level 2, you will receive abilities X,Y, and Z, and at level 3 the abilities W, V, U will be unlocked. If you still want to use X,Y, and Z, fine.
The second thing about Diablo 3 has more to do with the pain I've caused myself by playing the game. In Diablo 3, you can create what they call "Hardcore" characters: these are characters that have the same number of lives as you and me: one. If they die, all the time you spent playing them is all you can have. If they die, their gold is gone. Their equipment is gone. If you want to play as that character again, too bad. You can delete that character and start a new one if you wish, but you won't be able to play as that exact one again. So far, this has happened to me 3 times, and it really sucks. While you are playing, it gives every battle an extra kick because you could permanently die, but when you do, then you're just left thinking: but I liked that character, the one I spent all those hours battling demonspawn with, I don't want to use another character.
The problem seems to be difficulty ramping. You can only level up really quickly if you play monsters that are close to your level, but that means they could kill you. If you want to be safe, you need to go back to old areas of the map and grind by killing the same monsters over and over again so that you can increase your level beyond that of the monsters in the new area. This is really boring and also takes more time, but there is less risk of your character permanently dying.
So for the rest of the game, I'm going to use regular characters that have infinite lives, and if I beat the game, I will come back and use the hardcore characters I've already created.
Anyway, tomorrow is the first day of work in 2014, but there will only be a few special classes, so I want to use the rest of the time to plan and prep the rest of the month.
Cheers,
