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Comments
Which game won the flash sale poll?
Grimrock. It's good.
Aww, I missed my chance to throw money at Carpe Fulgur.
^There's still time, it might come up as a flash sale again. But if you're that intent on buying it, I'd just buy it at the base discount on the last day.
Daily Deals for January 4, 2013:
Flash Sales:
Vote for Giana Sisters if you haven't voted already pl0x. Missed my chance to get it when it was on flash sale.
And it lost.
Damnit, Steam users, where is your appreciation for classic forms of gaming like platforming?
I would suggest it's because of the fact that it was on flash sale before but I'm pretty sure Torchlight has been on flash sale multiple times.
Torchlight's been a bigger deal recently, between it's baseline attention from being a Diablo-like, to its getting a long-awaited sequel recently.
There have been other recent Giana Sisters games, but considering that it's best known for being a Mario clone from the 80s, that series just doesn't have the same pull.
Terraria was a huge thing, but it kinda died off unceremoniously when the devs said they wouldn't support it anymore. Sad...
Torchlight has been a big deal recently because a lot of people were disappointed with Diablo III, and Torchlight is the best alternative, since it was made by the remnants of the old Blizzard North.
They wouldn't support it anymore because of creative differences. Fortunately, the devs are working on a pseudo-sequel that is closer to what they wanted Terraria to be.
Busy appreciating games they actually enjoy, rather than voting on games other people might enjoy, presumably.
:V
Not sure if sad commentary on the state of gaming, or if Diablo III is just worse than I've heard.
hay gaiz
help me convince UE to play Terraria so that he becomes familiar with it and then he might set up an IJBM Terraria server
lol jk (mostly).
Neither because Torchlight is a good game. :V
^^^From what I've heard Diablo III is mainly designed around maximizing profits from the real-money auction house, so...
And I thought I was the one being accused of not having good taste
That's like saying Pokemon is designed around Smogon.
If Smogon were Nintendo's primary source of revenue from Pokemon, it would be.
>mfw Pokemon Online becomes P2P
I'm pretty sure the auction house didn't earn them more than 7 million sales did.
Not yet it hasn't. But it will probably keep generating revenue at a steady pace for 5-8 years.
Not precisely. It earns a little money now, but not anywhere close to huge amounts.
Yeah.
Nevertheless, maximizing its profitability has to have been an overriding goal in the game's design.
Well, yes.
But it's far from the only goal. They also focused on making it as fun as possible in order to keep people coming back.
The kind of messed that up, although I've never been a fan of Diablo's looty style of gameplay so perhaps I'm not the best person to ask. Blizzard haven't been performing as well as they used to, though.
I've expounded upon it before.
The gameplay itself is fine, it just has... nothing else backing it up.
It's well-polished and fun for what it is, though. Much more fun than Torchlight is at it, if only because Diablo includes a lot of stuff from previous Diablo games by necessity, while Torchlight just has its gameplay.
I haven't played Diablo before, but just how is Torchlight fun? I mean, from the bit I played (for about an hour) and from what I've read about it, it seems like an exercise in maximizing loot retrieval and transport.
Some people like that, apparently.
The gameplay of Diablo and Diablo-style games has always been pretty shallow, though. For all the abilities and whatnot they have, the games operate on a kind of Skinner Box principle. Their difficulty and power curves are based around random loot drops, which means that the games can see a sharp drop in difficulty unexpectedly. Note that this isn't about the inclusion of random loot drops, but a reliance on them as a form of engagement.
Let me put it this way: getting more powerful in a game feels good. I'm sure we all agree on this principle. And different games do this in different ways, but the systems with the greatest depth of engagement usually leave the nature of this progression in the hands of the player. For all my dislike of D&D, it's actually a system (or systems, taking into account different editions) that does this really well through a plethora of optional feats and skill progression choices. Demon's/Dark Souls, Mount & Blade, the first Witcher game in particular -- all of these games excel at providing player power progression with meaning. Weapons and armour are important in all these games, but they're not the primary factors driving player power progression as they are in Diablo and its imitators. Furthermore, they're not primarily random, either, and how one equips themselves has more to do with stylistic choice than what is objectively a best weapon or armour set.
Here's a graph of the typical relationship between player power and game difficulty:
You'll see that for the early portion of the game, the difficulty is well under the player's level of power, but as the game progresses, power and difficulty cross one-another. Difficulty tends to increase in "stages" whereas power has a more organic growth. Both the early and late parts of a game tend to exaggerate power power growth with a more linear progression in the middle. The goal of this is to create the impression of progress within a world based on the pleasure of gaining power -- overcoming an obstacle or series of them is pleasurable, so a game usually tries to allow players to grow beyond an obstacle while continuing to experience it as a measure of their progression. Then it ups the ante and the process repeats until the end of the game, where a player is typically above most obstacles -- intentionally.
Here's something closer to how Diablo and games of its ilk work:
You can see that in this graph, the time players spend above the difficulty curve is considerably longer -- at least on a lucky run when good weapons and armour drop. Games that function on random loot are pleasurable to play to many because they experience difficulty and then the random loot drops allow them to rise above it considerably. But it's also a very external victory; one without effort, intention or thought. It's just the game increasing your stats at a random interval. And while random elements are often exciting in games, this style of gameplay works on the basis of the Skinner Box -- you keep trying because you know there are rewards to be had somewhere, even if acquisition of those rewards doesn't follow a knowingly logical pattern. The reward, in this case, is the security of placing one's level of power above the difficulty curve for a longer period of time -- it's game progress "in the bag".
So while all RPGs -- and, for that matter, most games -- are in part pleasurable because of the relationship between player power progression and difficulty, the Diablo school of game design takes a lot of the control between this relationship out of the hands of players and, in a very practical sense, out of the hands of the game designers. They can ensure certain drops only occur in certain areas or against certain enemies, and they can intentionally place some drops in chests and whatnot, but ultimately there will always be the potential for players to violate established power-difficulty relationships. For many, that's the entire point, and I don't think that leads to a fulfilling game experience. It always begs for more.
Uh, yeah. I've gone over all this myself before. Operant conditioning chamber and all. tl;dr and all that.
The thing is, 'shallow' doesn't mean 'not fun'. While Diablo III's combat is shallow, it's also fun, if mindless. Thus, the gameplay is fine; it serves the intended purpose, it's fun, and it allows you to experience the game.
Of course, Diablo III misses out on all the other things that made previous Diablo games good- ignoring what Diablo I/II's click-and-loot system actually did (encouraged you to constantly progress forward through the game, and thus experience what it actually had to offer) in favour of designing the game around that point-and-clicking, which is kinda like designing a movie theatre around having really comfy seats positioned at the perfect angle to see the screen rather than focusing on the movies.
However, none of that actually leads to the gameplay not being fun.
As the gameplay is fun enough for the fans of the game (and there's millions of those), it's fine.
Depends on one's definition of "fun", though. There's a good argument that claims that Diablo-style gameplay works more on the basis of compulsion than engagement.
Engagement isn't synonymous with "fun," though, and thus you could argue that some can have fun without being engaged.