Play 1 for the mood and art; play 2 for the globetrotting; play 3 for the buildcrafting.
3 is essentially broken for the first twenty hours until you beat the game and hit max level, something I’ve realized its fans have forgotten. It’s also a fascinating study in genre bending towards player expectations and abstractions and away from the core fantasy – it’s worth studying what the numbers do and what they represent and whether they are historical elements or modern functional bits.
I’ve only played a bit of 2 to where I got passed the desert area and played at least past the first chapter in D3. D3’s biggest failing is gating the build work. In D2 you start finding some weird equips and buffs so you start theory crafting as you played. I remember having a necro where I had a wand of some kind that added lightning to my ranged spells and a dagger that had mana drain so I had a ranged mode and a recovery mode loop going on beside whatever summons I had around.
3 sucks imho. Play the original for the atmosphere, forget the rest and go straight to Path of Exile if you want a cool loot game. Then come back for the Diablo phone game whenever that comes out because I’m sure none of us want to miss that
vanilla Diablo 3 was a goddamn hot mess and trying to do anything without spending money on pixels was a crapshoot
I much prefer Reaper of Souls’s emphasis just throwing a shit ton of set and unique gear and letting people figure out how to piece it together with builds (though that has its own problems since any given build will rise to the top and create balance issues but that really only matters if you’re a nerd and grinding greater rifts)
I ended up hitting a wall in Torchlight 2 where I was getting murdered instantly all the time and I couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t underlevelled as far as I could tell and it was just, like…2 hit kills from every enemy.
shroud of the avatar starts with you stalking richard garriot on facebook then consulting ancient tomes and secret forums on the dark web and getting sucked into the game through your alienware laptop
You wake up the next morning. Fragmentary images of last night flicker through your mind. Did the ancients really speak to you?
As you turn to look out the window, you feel a tug on your head. It really did happen! You will be a wizard!, you enthuse, stroking your padawan braid.
been playing some more FORZA HORIZON: UK EXCEPT THE ONLY CITY IS EDINBURGH (I think?) FOR SOME REASON edition. there are really only two things I like in this game: road races, and driving around pointlessly in fun cars. there’s some stunt racer story. it sucks. the rally stuff sucks, it doesn’t even work and I do better in street cars than in rally cars. the other gimmicky stuff is, well, gimmicky.
but I really like the stuff I like, it’s fucking fun. I probably have to crank the difficulty, because even on ‘above average’ with no assists and so forth the computer drives at like half speed. this is especially true when you’re driving like B class cars and stuff, which is what I’m having the most fun doing unfortunately. I guess I could turn off rewind, but doing that just seems punishing when most of the time I’m racing in areas I don’t know anything about and races last like 5 minutes tops, giving you no time to get used to anything. the way I’m playing is pleasant enough, though. it’s not a racing game, it’s a drive around AAA box checker. that’s what it’s good at. I could spend a lot of time doing that.
I started feeling that too near the end of the desert zone with my berserker. I started going out of my way for the biggest defense numbers forgoing any interesting effects and still felt like I was made out of paper. But I think the biggest reason I didn’t stick with TL2 was the lack of a pet keeper class. I loved my alchemist in TL1 that had a full zoo build.
: look at you, avatar, a pathetic creature of meat and bone! panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. how can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?