Gambling goes to California to see Diablo 3 and lose his feelings
WHAT?
Diablo 3, role -playing game about genocide of horned devils and search for epic kiras.
WHERE?
Irwin, California, USA.
– … and then what happened?
-Well, after the tour of the studio there was Hands-on, you played for four hours in Diablo 3.
– And at least I liked it?
– You – yes, to me – not very ..
It so happened that in the memory of the author of these lines, the presentation of the title game began in the hospital of the city of Irwin, California. Thus, I fell into history as the first journalist who saw Diablo 3 and lost consciousness. Temporarily missing memories had to be restored with the help of two PR managers of Blizzard and one Anton Logvinov. And although the corporation’s employees, smiling slyly, claimed that I called the game “Best for all times”, the picture surfaced in my memory looked a little less rainbow.
Remaining one of the few alive legendary companies from the 90s, today Blizzard looks like as if it were about to start losing position. This is especially noticeable in the contrast between the appearance of the studio and their last game, which they gathered to show reporters, and soon some users.
In the courtyard of the Blizzard-town there is a four-meter statue of the orc on a grinning wolf. Around it is the corporate values of the company: “Gameplay – first of all!"," Learn to accept your inner geek!"And other very sound things. In the museum on the ground floor, the whole rack is occupied by well -deserved awards – the famous studio and its games from the grateful world.
[[Bullet]] The monk should become a character of fighting in five minutes: it is promised to combine attacks in deadly combo.
Presentation in the cinema, lunch on candlelights, a tour of the territory-the first half of the day it takes place with such a pathos, as if we are really about to show us the best game of all time. The internal voltage increases exponentially: soon we will learn new details about the third part of the legendary series. But now it comes to sit down behind the computer-and after several hours of violent violence over the left button of the mouse in my head, an annoying phrase from the dictionary of Internet memes is settled: “Diablo 3 such Diablo”.
Portrait features
Starcraft 2 Critically criticized that he looked and played exactly as the first part. It is difficult to blame the developers in this – in the end, it was Blizzard who set the canons of the genre for many years to come and has every right to operate them. In the case of Diablo, the situation is repeated in the most dramatic way: ten years ago, the second part of this game made a small revolution in the role genre, actually becoming an offline regime. Since then, dozens of developers not only reproduced this concept, but also tried to develop it: in Sacred there were horses and a huge seamless world in Titan Quest – Original setting, in Torchlight -Multifunctional animal companions. All these games were no worse, but in some places and better the ancestor. That Blizzard is preparing in response to this? At first glance, not so much.
[[Bullet]] The final boss Beta was our old acquaintance, crazy king Leorik: from the first part he never accustomed to quietly lying in the coffin. Big mistake.
Perhaps the key feature of Diablo 3 is a recently announced rune system in combination with updated role -playing mechanics. So, the branches of skills from the second part go to a landfill of history – instead, the hero with each new level will receive a new skill. It will not work at once: the player has several slots for active skills with a total of up to six pieces (three separate slots are designed for passive skills) – new ones open as pumping. It seems that the choice of the player is very limited, but here is a spicy detail: each skill can be modified with the help of one of five types of colored stones. Modifications are not limited to a simple change in the numerical characteristics of the skill: the appearance, and sometimes the purpose of each skill, changes.
For example, the wizard has a skill called Arcane Orb – in basic form it is such an ordinary fireball. But in combination with a white stone, the sphere turns into a kind of magic armor, which causes damage to all the enemies that were rolled next to him. And if you insert green or, say, red cobblestone, you get completely different effects. Or, for example, a spell, which in the basic form only slows down enemies – in combination from one of the runes, it transforms into a kind of ice minefield, being on which enemies receive damage.
[[Bullet]] Doctor-Wedun does crushing damage, but practically helpless without companions. The latter includes zombies and explosive toads.
The characters themselves differ from each other much more than before. Mana is no longer a universal resource, now each class has its own source of superhuman abilities. Say, the power of Barbara predictably lies in rage, which he accumulates as he receives damage. The monk, on the contrary, becomes richer in spirit when he painfully pulls demons by the vibrissa. The wizard and Doctor-Wedeen operate with more or less accurate mana analogues, but the hunter for demons of consumables at once at once-separately for attacking and protective techniques.
As a result, the usual battle system upon closer examination has changed a lot. Instead of calculating the optimal scheme for the skills of skills with a pencil and calculator, players need to develop an optimal combination of abilities and types of stones. The number of potential combinations is huge, the specialization of the characters can be changed right on the fly – several clickers of the barbar mouse can be turned from a close -up fighter into a heavily tank, and a fragile sorceress should be taught to sniff angrily at short distances.
The devil will figure it out
All these subtle settings, of course, become especially in demand in multiplayer, working on which Blizzard traditionally pay especially a lot of attention. In general, with all the innovations that developers declare, the third Diablo becomes almost indistinguishable from MMORPG, and, perhaps, the main difference between her and World of Warcraft – The number of players on the server.
[[Bullet]] The tie is as follows: on an abandoned cathedral in the city of New Tristram, either a meteorite, or a star collapsed. As is known from the revelation of John the Theologian, this is a very unkind sign.
The rest is continuous similarities. We have already talked about PVP-arns and a branched crafting system: any item you can do it right on the spot to spare parts (the more valuable the original thing was, the higher the chance to get rare ingredients) and with the help of one of the special NPCs to collect from them something- It is useful. But the online auction is something new: in Diablo 3 you can buy and sell gold, crafting components and game items for real money.
At the moment when the producer Rob Pardo announced this from the stage, some of those present in the hall were nervously twitched. Pardo, however, quickly made a reservation that this system is needed only to facilitate and protect the trading between the players – the Blizzard themselves will not be additionally profitable for users, saving them with epic axes.
[Bullet]] In the current version, some low -level abilities work more efficiently more highly leveling. We hinted about this to the developers, and they promised to improve.
Conditions for entrepreneurship will be as comfortable as possible: complete anonymity, options for automatic bets and purchases of items and, of course, the possibility of trading strictly for game gold, without attracting real means – https://sister-site.org/the-vic/ so as not to annoy the players once again, the developers even prohibit the game in the game characters created in Hardcore Mode, where all things are lost in case of death. Also – separate auctions for each country (to avoid costs when translating from one currency to another) and the principle of “one account – one chest”, thanks to which you can sell things obtained by any of your characters, or simply transfer lutus to your own heroes.
Some commission fees are still planned: at the moment, developers are going to levy a certain amount of money for setting an object at the auction (so that the players do not drag any rubbish there; several times a week, however, it will be possible to post it for free) and for the completed transaction (so that Still, make a little to earn). Pardo, however, immediately clarifies that the bets will be strictly fixed and Blizzard employees will not have the opportunity to influence demand and demand, inflating interest rates on particularly valuable objects.
If now the inner Kisa Vorobyaninov has awakened in you and you still consider such a system of collections unjust, then you can always come to Blizzard yourself. If you managed to sell any item, then the funds can either be left on the account in Battle.NET (to spend them on anything within the network-at least on purchases on Diablo, at least on a subscription fee in WoW), or transfer to some completely convertible currency. In the latter case, however, you will have to pay the third commission that retires to the operator of the external payment system.
[[Bullet]] Blizzard universes is a very recognizable style: for example, you learned ABOMINATION from WARCRAFT?
Speaking about why such a system is possible in Diablo and is impossible in the same World of Warcraft, Pardo explains: the case is in the Luta organization system in the game. According to tradition, in Diablo, the maximum number of parameters is randomly set: the device of dungeons, a set of opponents and, of course, things. That is, if you kill even the devil himself, no one can predict which things will fall out of it this time. So, all rare items will be equally rare and players will have even less opportunity for market manipulations and prices.
What the hell?
But so far all this is just promises and announcements. From Beta, I must admit, there are much more fresh sensations. At the tenth-one century level (it was problematic to give more within the framework of one passage) Diablo 3 is indistinguishable from any similar experience-one of the Western sites even published a preview of the game, in which the actual information was presented in the form of fragmentary phrases between the word “click” hundreds of times repeated hundreds.
We go out into the field, a nightmare zombie, go down to the catacombs, dragon dashings, go deeper, collect loot, sell the loot, go even deeper … If Blizzard wanted to demonstrate the benefits of their new game, then they chose the most inappropriate part for this. Somewhere in the background at that time, the plot looms-by the third part the developers suddenly remembered about it, so now the voiced dialogs and blacksmiths appeared in the game, who tell tearful stories about their wives who have turned into a zombie.
[[Bullet]] from afar this picture can easily be taken as a screenshot from Torchlight. During Beta, this dejaugu happened to us regularly.
But dialogs are still somewhat not what you expect from Diablo 3. We really want to know how different the characters turned out to be, whether a new role system has been balanced enough, how the runes system operate in practice – but they don’t show anything yet, and it is unlikely that Blizzard will give it to experiment with this before the release. It remains only to hope for the professionalism of the California studio.
The fact that Blizzard will not be brought, you can be sure if not one hundred, then by ninety percent – in the end, they are famous for their careful work with a balance and the ability to polish the games before dazzling brilliance. But already now the first signs appear that the company's approach “Making the project is as much as we consider necessary” begins to work against it.
While the developers slowly and degrees every screw in the concept of a new game, their technologies are slowly obsolete (Diablo 3 already looks, let's say, not brilliantly), but less famous and more hungry colleagues experiment and step on each other-lose something to them nothing. Diablo-like games have now divorced so much that even Blizzard needs to try very hard to stand out against this background. So far, the advantage remains on the side of the legendary studio and Diablo 3 remains the best Diablo among all Diablo. But sooner or later, in accordance with the second law of dialectics, such a game may appear from this primitive soup, after which “classics from Blizzard” will simply be boring. Starcraft 2 was already an alarming bell, but he was helped out by magnificent missions. What Diablo 3 will help out – it is not yet fully clear.