Game Releases and Updates
Diablo II Resurrected expansion – the big news this week, at least for me, is that Diablo II’s re-release has gotten what is essentially half an expansion, called Reign of the Warlock, almost 25 years after the first and last expansion. This coincides with the whole package getting added to the Steam store, meaning you no longer have to buy it directly from Blizzard, though you still technically are launching it through Blizzard’s launcher. I did not re-buy it on Steam, because I already have it through Bnet, but I did buy the expansion, and while it’s a bit on the expensive side considering the amount of new content and the fact that it’s an update for a game that’s more than old enough to vote and could easily have mostly been free, this is Blizzard we’re talking about. I’m sure they need the money.
Devil Spire Falls winged update – you can now play as either birdmen or fairies. What a bizarre and wonderful inclusion to a bizarre and wonderful game.
Crimson Capes release – I played the demo of this last year, and came out of it mildly piqued but not exactly desperate to get my hands on a full release. That release has finally happened, and the reception has been positive enough to move my needle a bit. That said, I’m currently getting more than my fill of parryslop from Nioh 3, so until I finish or get sick of that, I think I’ll hold off on giving Crimson Capes a go.
The State of Games Played
As you might have guessed, I played a lot of Diablo 2, and have an awful lot to say about it. But I’m going to keep it pretty brief for this article, since I’ll probably end up doing a full write-up of this expansion in the not-too-distant future.
The expansion is basically two totally separate features thrown in together – a new class, and a host of quality of life and balancing additions. The new class, the Warlock, is definitely the flashy draw, and from just completing Normal difficulty and playing around with about a third of his skills, I have to say I’m impressed. Warlock isn’t just a well-designed character, with a broad and interesting skillset that gets the job done – it might be my new second-favorite class after Assassin. The amount of detail and playfulness in his design and the operation of his skills feels exactly like the kind of thing I would have been sketching out in my math notebook during class while daydreaming about things I would put in Diablo 2. All of the skills I’ve used so far, mostly in the summoning and void magic trees, have felt great, and their utility is incredible without feeling totally overpowered. Okay, yes, there might be a bit of power creep, and I don’t know how endgame is, but to be honest I’d rather have a very good new character than a very awkward and mediocre one. And, most importantly, he isn’t a nightmare to get through Maggot Lair.
The second half of the expansion, the one that’s secretly more important, is all the new quality of life stuff. First off, two things that people have been begging Blizzard to put in almost from the start, and certainly very loudly since Resurrected was announced: an in-game loot filter, and ‘currency’ tabs for the stash. If you’re someone who doesn’t play ARPGs all that often, I know these don’t seem like terribly big deals, but if you ever want to do anything beyond roll credits once in a game like this, D2’s rigidly physical storage restrictions are downright smothering, so much so that just having a shared stash in the remake was a breath of fresh air. Reign doesn’t just expand that shared stash by a few tabs, or give you dedicated tabs for items like runes, gems, and all the little knickknacks you’ve gotta collect to summon post-game fights, it lets you auto-dump those items right into their respective slots, where they can stack. Holy shit. Again, doesn’t seem like much, but in a game where you might just give up on doing some of the more nuanced crafting because you can’t be bothered to hold onto some chipped gems, it’s wild.
And, of course, a lot of people will point out that all of this, and more, has been done in mods, and they’re right. Hell, I’ve played some of those mods, and I really enjoy them. There’s two reasons I think this expansion is still worth it, at least for me. One, having played a lot of attempts to ‘remake’ base game classes into more ‘modern,’ well-balanced, fun and effective characters, Warlock is just better than anything any amateur team has been able to come up with. Secondly, while almost every mod goes MUCH further in expanding the stash, adding stacking of certain items, or even giving you infinite storage and massive drop rate boosts, they also all inevitably trap themselves into an accelerated power curve that then outstrips what the base game’s structure can provide, meaning you wind up engaging in even more mindless grinding, just in hacked in and less interesting loops that the mod adds to scale with the fact that you’re almost guaranteed to be wearing full unique and runeword kit with +all-skills spilling out of your cargo pockets.
Anyway, I’ll have more to say about this once I’ve played with the new character and new features a bit more. And I will be playing it more. Sorry, other games.
Before Blizzard blindsighted me with more Terror and Destruction, and, to be fair, a little bit afterwards, I also played more Nioh 3, making my way through the third… time period? I’m already reassessing this game, as it definitely takes a few steps forward from Nioh 2, then a few steps back, and then a bunch of steps in other, confusing and difficult to track directions. I’m still having fun, but the experience is just a bit poorly constructed in general, and I’m not sure it’ll hold up as a game compared to the first two.
Still working my way through Thief Gold – I’m on to the main collection quest of the game, starting with another added level that’s not so great but is at least more interesting than the first one. I’m unbelievably glad I decided not to force myself to play through this on Expert again – the loot requirements even for Hard are bad enough as it is.
I got a surprisingly definitive result from the poll in last week’s quiz, showing a clear preference for having me attempt a randomizer speedrun as my next challenge in Zexion, and only like a day or two later wound up casually succeeding. I’m just that damn good, folks.
I also took the time to try some demos
DEMOS
First, I knew Banquet for Fools was having its full release out of Early Access at the end of the month, and wanted to finally give its demo a shot before that happened. The demo consists of one fairly sized outdoor map, including some underground passages connecting various locations, plenty of different enemy types to fight, and a good variety of party makeups to try out. What the demo does not do is hold your hand particularly well – I launched it, chose a party, and wandered into the wilderness expecting to feel my way through the details, and couldn’t even figure out how to attack properly or what was going on as my party members all ran off chasing frogs or something into a pack of bigger enemies and on and on while I struggled with the controls.
After restarting and resigning myself to actually reading the instructions and paying attention, I got to grips with the combat, which is kind of cool in a very retrojank way. It’s basically real-time-with-pause, but with your actual attack happening in paused time, no interruptions, and the period between attacks happening a bit like an isometric action RPG, with you wandering around, positioning yourself, and rolling to avoid enemy attacks. Formation plays a huge role, with you ordering your AI controlled party members to line up with you, focusing damage on one enemy at a time, kicking enemies between each other like a volleyball, or even grabbing a guy and holding him while your buddies take turns punching him in the face. Even the enemies try to get into formations, improving their defense and resistance to knockdown, but you can opt to disrupt them by charging in and knocking everybody about like bowling pins. It’s kind of fun, it’s very lightly tactical without being super tedious, and I’m not 100% sure it’s really sold me on the game, but it hasn’t put me off it either.
I then saw the slapfights surrounding Relooted, realized it had a demo, and figured I should see for myself if it’s secretly worthwhile. It is not. The game is set up as a heist-platformer, with you going through a sidescrolling stage moving tables and big boxes around to hold switches and block closing doors, setting up a route for you to grab all the necessary artifacts while a timer runs down from the moment you touch the first one. Nothing wrong with the idea, except that, as I realized playing through Teardown, fundamentally these games need consistently clever design to not fall into repetition and frustration. Relooted starts out feeling repetitive and one-note, and I don’t have much hope that it’ll even attempt anything more complicated than ‘pull a table under a door.’
Once you do start the timer, you have to make it to the exit, optionally having secured a route that takes you past every other collectable, each on their own alarm-activating pedestals in arbitrary rooms, and run to the exit, using the incredible parkour skills of wall-jumping off parallel walls and hitting boost as you hop over or slide under a glowing obstacle. It’s not very interesting, it isn’t very fun, and everything, from the graphics to the controls and the mechanics, feels seriously unpolished and basic.
Even the cutscenes are frankly embarrassing in their execution – these are basically machinima, you have full control over the models and animations and camera, it shouldn’t be jumping around and cutting weirdly and it shouldn’t be this ugly. This game looks like it was made for PS2, and it would still be laughably ugly for then. Didn’t this studio make Semblance? Did they lose the members with artistic taste in the meantime? However you feel about the politics and social commentary, this ain’t it. Play Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan instead.
Writing
For all the lovers and losers out there in Gamer World, I hope you enjoyed my essay on love and romance in games. It’s a topic I could go into in more depth at a later time, and very related to my thoughts in my much earlier essay on Conversation, but it was also just fun to throw something together for a holiday again, which… glancing at my calendar, I probably will not be bothering with for some time. Hey, I just don’t have that much to say about Saint Paddy’s.
Other
I stubbed my toe or something and now it’s exactly that incredibly low-level amount of slightly sore that is maximally annoying and distracting so I’m gonna go play Diablo about it.