The funny thing is that I can totally see the original Diablo working as a tap on enemies to attack type of mobile game but the actual Diablo mobile game is going to feature a controller overlay to control. That alone seems kind of stupid. It’s like playing the PSX version of Diablo on your phone
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I don’t know how to do twitter threads on sb
Anyway they’re saying that no new VF is in the pipeline 
I would not trust Sega Europe’s word on anything that Not Sega Europe is responsible for.
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I saw a banner ad for this mobile Diablo on Google Play and thought ‘oh that’s neat; makes sense; people will enjoy that,’ but then I saw this thread, and now I’ve read Kotaku’s synopsis of the Internet’s reaction, and 
maybe games are good, but we shouldn’t let anyone play them
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Diablo 3 is a great couch co-op game and also soulless
Diablo 2 is compulsive and icky but I love it
Diablo 1 is the best roguelite
only Diablo 1 is good. We were all tricked into playing Diablo 2 by the Matt Uelman soundtrack
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I also generally like DirectDraw graphics, it was a really brief positive era for PC 2D acceleration after games were starting to recover from 16-bit colour vomit at the end of the DOS era
The grand scope that accompanied the music worked on me as I first played it on a rented machine at a Wizards of the Coast mall store with an 8’ barbarian mannequin in the window.
Context made the world more enjoyably oppressive as I saw the pukey green fields outside the traditional hell-church, the endless desert spooling into an astral plane, and my very very strong memories of that antagonistically tedious swamp, a feeling I’ve only felt again when From pulls it out for their swamp dungeon levels.
It lacks the sharp mood of the first but I think it still barely holds together on that mood. And it’s not like the mechanics of the game were all that sensible in the first, either, stuck in that weird early roguelite territory of scraping out permadeath but unwilling to fix what they broke.
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What are you thinking of here? Generally I regard SVGA, 256-color as looking lush, becoming an issue only when color palettes shifted realistic and you get stuff like magenta and cyan flecks in natural browns and greens in Age of Empires.
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i was tricked to play diablo 2 by weed and satan
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I’m way more into pre-directdraw 2d than post-directdraw 2d
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Every time I see someone say Diablo Immortal is just a reskin of one of the developer’s previous games I can’t help but feel it’s the other way around. A large genre of mobile action games, from Lineage 2: Revolution to HIT to Royal Blood, are all adaptations of Diablo’s design to a mobile form-factor with monetization grafted on top. The reason Diablo Immortal looks like a reskin of that one game is because that one game is a “reskin” of Diablo.
Diablo is a really simple style of action game whose fun lies in the character builds rather than the moment to moment interaction, which makes it a perfect fit for cell phones where touch screens don’t have the dexterous usability of buttons. Give players tons of loot and stats to muck with, give them an overview head of the action with tons of grunts that fill the screen, and let the player just tap through their build’s rotation to see the crowds explode. And honestly, mobile games give players to the option to drop the last part and let them just tap an auto-battle button to let the character go through its rotation automatically. I’m sure that would work just as effectively in 90% of Diablo 3 as is.
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I think there’s value in obfuscating just what the core engagement is; otherwise, I wouldn’t believe Diablo 3 is worse for its naked honesty than Diablo 2’s thin veneer that the axe you picked up is what you cast spells with. Dropping the curtain and building the UI and player facing stats around the high-level DPS and stat manipulation dropped all pretense of fantasy and immediately sends me itching to something pure and direct.
Why an axe, I ask myself? Why is this not a carrot? And these skeletal abominations, are they not merely grunt units flavored, perhaps with their master’s elemental reactive trait?
I don’t want to play a superstructure of a game
Mobile Diablo might be my first ever entry into the series. I’ll play it for an hour and then get sick of it.
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I think there are two reasons why the changes are being standardized across markets
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Some asset changes could theoretically result in in-game imbalances where, for example, an uncensored version of a neon sign might be larger and result in a situation where a player with a censored version may be unaware that they are occluding part of the sign in the uncensored version and be much more visible to players with the uncensored version.
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Companies want to bridge more water with streaming (Overwatch has done a lot to open that up) and they want to be able to broadcast a single stream in all territories.
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There’s something larger at stake here. Like, sure, the skull icons themselves are not a big deal, but this is the latest in a trend of American companies caving to the demands of the Chinese government. The largest capitulation was Google who, for a long time, refused to provide censored results to China, but now does so.
This is an issue with a lot of nuance, and I don’t have a clear idea of how, exactly, American companies should work with China. Like, obviously imperialism is bad, America is bad, etc, but the Chinese government also is bad, and it’s bad in some very pernicious ways that many (probably most?) Chinese people don’t like (based on my Chinese friends and based on the people I talked to when I was in China), that are directly tied to state censorship (like, students still get thrown in jail for holding meetings about feminism). I don’t love that we’re normalizing Chinese-state defined standards.
Again, I’m not implying that American companies should or shouldn’t make changes for China, (and I sure as hell don’t think American companies (/companies in general) ought to be trusted as political actors for freedom etc) but this is a different discussion (somewhat) from Nintendo’s censorship for US audiences.
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it’s the difference between pre-DirectDraw stuff like HOMM2 or Fallout (good), DirectDraw stuff that actually required acceleration and looked really crisp for 2D like Diablo 2 or WA (good), and DirectDraw contemporary stuff that just had too many tones of brown and looked like shit like HOMM3 or AoE.
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Basically once we get into prerendered sprites, in other words. That makes sense.