Been getting pretty big into Diablo III now that Reaper of Souls is out, so here's a couple of quick videos I put together about legendary effects and the Witch Doctor:
Sorry I haven't been updating as much! Be sure to check out all my Escapist news posts!
Hey guys, Patch 1.0.7 recently went live for Diablo III. It brought us PvP in "brawling," as well as a whole bunch of new crafted items. Today, I've made a guide on how to access these new features, enjoy!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey what up guys, Steve here with a quick video on the two major new features introduced in patch 1.07
First, it's brawling, duelling arena, whatever you wanna call it. Talk to this guy, Nek the Brawler. He's located here in act 1, here in act 2, and here in act 3. He'll teleport you to a new zone, the ruined chapel and you can fight up to your of your friends in free for all combat.
That's about all there is to it. There's no rewards or even point tracking, it's just a way for you to beat up your friends for e-peen. There's no penalty if you die, your gear doesn't get damaged, and you can leave whenever you want.
Moving on, 1.07 also introduced a new crafting material and some new crafted items. You can grab the recipe for the chest plate off squirt, in act 2 for one and a half million gold. Just like the hellfire ring there is a different flavour for each primary stat, dexterity, intelligence strength and vitality.
The recipes for the gloves, shoulders, wristgaurds and amulets have a chance to drop off any elite pack, BUT, they have an extra chance to drop off mini bosses if you have five stacks of nephalam valour. What do I mean by mini bosses? I mean any boss in an act that isn't the act's end boss, so the skeleton king, maghda and ghom for example.
You'll also need to collect a 'demonic essence' to craft each item. Demonic essences drop randomly from elite packs, but they have a pretty high drop rate, so you should find plenty of them just farming as you normally do.
Once you've taught the recipes to your blacksmith, he can craft the items using one demonic essence, two tomes of secrets and 150,000 gold. These items have a chance to roll a primary stat higher that on ones you can find 'in the wild', so if you've already got some pretty good gear and are looking for upgrades, it's a great alternative to staring at the auction house all day. This is the chest piece I crafted, as you can see it's pretty bitchin.
Both the crafted items and the demonic essences are bind on account, meaning you can't buy or sell them on the auction house.
Ok that's it for now, please be sure to tell me if I've made a mistake or if you have some more information to add in the comments section.
Look guys. I'm calling it right now. This is 2013's game of the year. No question about it. Join me for five minutes of sheer terror, as I demonstrate to my amazing surgery skills. Now, where did I put that lung again?
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Hey guys. Over the past week, I checked out the first major DLC for Skyrim: Dawnguard. I played the main story content to completion on expert difficulty, and now I offer you a summary of the DLC.
There's no transcript for this video because I tried something new. This time, my recording was completely ad lib and unscripted. What do you guys think? Do you like this style or my old, scripted style? Let me know in the comments.
Hey guys, here's my Death Rally review. As per my review policy, the single player portion of the game was played to completion. There was no difficulty setting.
TRANSCRIPT:
The original Death Rally was released way back in 1996 for
MS-DOS. It was made Remedy (the folks behind the original Duke Nukem games) and
had full LAN support. The premise of the game was essentially a car race with
guns, where you could either be the fastest, or the deadliest. It quickly
became a LAN party favourite, and I remember wasting many hours of my youth
ramming my friends with spiked bumpers and setting up mine traps.
Now it's 2012 and Remedy have got around to giving Death
Rally the HD treatment. Originally being released for smart phones and tablets,
it finally cropped up on steam for $8.50. Being a big fan of the original, I
decided to pick it up and see if it still keeps that Death Rally spirit.
The game's paper thin story is told through comic book
panels. You play as an illegal street racer who is picked up by the cops, but
given a chance to avoid jail time if you infiltrate 'Death Rally' and find it's
king - 'The Adversary'. I don't think the original Death Rally had a story, and
I think it's better that way. This just feels cheesy and stupid, with the final
panel of the story having your character literally drive off into the sunset.
Graphically, it looks very impressive. It's come a long way
from those 1996 graphics. It has some cool touches to the maps like overhead
trains in the city maps or hovering helicopters in snow and jungle maps, and
the car models themselves are very nicely detailed. The sounds and music are
rough and dirty, fitting to the feel of the game. The only problem I had is the
NPC drivers only have one or two lines of dialogue, and that gets old really
fast.
The game itself plays almost exactly like the original,
utilizing a top down view as you race around tracks trying to kill each other.
There are essentially two ways to win a race, finish first or destroy every
other car. The best way to play often includes a combination of both - destroying
a few cars and then trying to pull in front of the others. Destroying boxes in
the map will drop items, these include a nitro boost, extra ammo, extra cash
and a small repair. It's a bit strange to see the nitro bar from the original
replaced with a single use nitro item, but it's not that big a deal. As you
destroy cars and win races, you will receive parts that unlock new maps,
weapons, and vehicles. You'll also get a bunch of cash which you can use to
upgrade your car after the race is over.
This brings us to one of my major gripes with the game. You
have to spend ALL the winnings you receive after winning a race, and you can
only spend it on the car you used to win the race, and the weapon you were
using at the time. It's really frustrating that you can't 'save' money, for
when you unlock a new car or weapon. This has the side effect of making the new
cars feel 'weaker' than your old, fully upgraded cars, as well as making it
difficult to switch weapons, as you would have to use the underleveled weaker
weapon for many races before it got to the same level as your fully leveled
stronger weapon.
The list of unlockables is actually relatively impressive.
The original Death Rally only had 6 cars and a single weapon option (chain
guns), while the remake has 6 weapons and 8 cars - as well as the spiked
bumpers, mines and laser sight. While there are only around 10 maps as compared
to the original's 19, you have to remember that many of the original's maps
were simply recolours of the same map. Obtaining everything should take you a
couple of hours.
New to the game is the 'death match' mode, where you simply
try to destroy the other racers. It's a really obnoxious mode that just has you
wildly circling each other while trying to get a hit in. Without the pretence
of a race it's just kind of boring, and the whole mode feels really tacked on,
especially as there is only a single map for it.
The game's final challenge is 'The Adversary'. I really have
to say, this is by far the most frustrating part of the game. The adversary's
car is faster than any vehicle the player can get, so you need to rely on lucky
drops from boxes during the race to win the game. It got to the point where If
I didn't get a nitro or ammo from the first box at the start of the race, I would
just quit and remake as there would be no way I could catch him. In the end, I
opted to destroy his car rather than trying to beat him in a fair fight. This
is death rally after all.
Beating the Adversary unlocks nothing except an ending cut
scene. It can be done in around 2-3 hours, leaving very little replay value.
The game boasted an online multiplayer mode, which I tried to use several times
yet kept returning to me with a 'matchmaking error'. The fact that there is no
LAN support saddened me a bit, as LAN play is essentially what made the
original game so great in the first place.
Death Rally is essentially what you'd expect in a remake -
the original game given a fresh coat of paint and a couple of new features. I
bought it for $8.50 and it gave me around 3-4 hours of gameplay. I mostly
bought it for nostalgia reasons - if you never played the original you might
not get as much enjoyment out of this. This one is difficult to judge, as it
was an OK little distraction but I can see how people could feel ripped off.
I'm going to give it a new rating 'Buy it when it's on sale.' I'm sure it will
eventually crop up on steam for 50% off, grab it then, unless you are a diehard
Death Rally fan.
Like thousands of other gamers, Diablo III was one of my most highly anticipated titles of all time. Now that it's been floating about for a few months, lets take a look back on why it's not as great as it could be.
TRANSCRIPT:
What's wrong with Diablo III?
Hey guys, Steve here and today i'm going to talk a little
bit about Diablo III. Diablo II was a game that was very near and dear to me,
so I didn't want to rush into any harsh judgements on its sequel, and have
people accuse me of looking back on D2 with 'rose tinted glasses'. Well now, D3
has been out for a good few months, and i've had more than enough time to get a
feel of it, and more importantly, figure out, at least in my opinion, what's
wrong with it.
By the way, what you are seeing in the background is a speed
run of Act I inferno on my wizard. A link to his build is in the description,
I've got pretty average gear at around 40k life and 22k damage. This is what I
have found to be the most efficient way to farm Act I. Please enjoy.
Now I'm going to discuss a few things in this video but it
all pretty much ties back into my one main point: Blizzard are treating Diablo
III like it is World of Warcraft. While WoW certainly borrowed more than a few
assests from Diablo II, it was still at its core a completely different game.
After all, one was an MMO and the other was an action RPG. I want to start by saying that the core game,
the engine behind Diablo III, is fantastic. The skill and rune system is a
thing of genius and it really, really captures the Diablo vibe. The game is fun
to play.
However, once you get past the numbingly easy normal mode
and move into nightmare, hell, and eventually inferno, WoW's influence really
starts to bleed through. First, let's look at items. Items in Diablo III are
boring. While Diablo II certainly had its own share of 'junk' affixes (I'm sure
we all remember light radius) the majority of the really cool affixes in Diablo
III are ignored in favour of the WoW style primary stat + vitality + a stat
unique to that gear slot. Gloves, for example, are almost completely worthless
if they don't have a primary stat, vitality, crit damage and crit chance.
Having 'best' affix combinations is both boring and frustrating. It doesn't
help that items have a chance to roll multiple primary stats, which essentially
just take up an affix slot.
Diablo II had some crazy on hit affixes that had huge proc
rates. In D3 on the other hand, we have 1.5% chance to stun. 1.5%. What the
heck is that? I mean, on WoW boss fights that last up to ten minutes, I'm sure
1.5% is a pretty big rate, but most D3 battles, as you can see from the footage
playing, are lucky to last more than a minute. Legendaries are underwhelming,
with standard blue magic weapons being better than most legendary weapons, and
Legendary item set bonuses being terrible.
The Tal Rasha set in Diablo II gave THIRTEEN additional bonuses to offense,
defence, and utility. In Diablo III? Plus 3% to fire, lightning and cold
damage...
Now let's have a look at the game's post-release support.
Blizzard are famous for offering a tremendous amount of post-release support
for their games with patches containing game balances and additional content.
One of the very first patches to Diablo III nerfed the amount of gold dropped
by pots. Additional patches have systematically nerfed several viable farming
spots, class ability combinations deemed too overpowered, repair costs and item
affixes that they felt people were stacking due to their usefulness. These
sound like reasonable patches... for an MMO. Why, for example, are farming
locations being nerfed? Diablo III is essentially a SINGLE PLAYER GAME as the
current end-game grind actually punishes you for playing in a group. It's
simply much faster and more efficient to farm by yourself. It's not
exceptionally difficult to beat the end boss, so there is no competition to
gear up and beat the hardest challenges. There's also no PvP as of yet, so they
don't have to worry about people getting a leg up by farming particularly good
locations. So, why does it matter if some guy wants to spend the majority of
his play time smashing pots in a crypt? Who cares if someone finds a wizard
skill combination that works really well? Jay Wilson has actually gone back on
two key quotes with this post-patch support. The first one was 'We don't mind
if people find things that feel like they broke the game' and the second is
'you can find the best item in the game out of a pot'. It feels too much like
Blizzard is telling us, 'you can only have fun the way we want you to have fun'
My final gripe brings us back to what I am doing in this
video: farming act 1. My character is progressed well into act III and to be
honest, I could probably finish the game if I really wanted to. So why am I
farming act 1 over and over instead of actually trying to progress? There were
two major post patch changes that brought us here. The first was the insane tripling
of repair costs for level sixty gear. The second was the changing of drop rates
so that the best items have a chance to drop in act 1. Sure, the drop chance in
act 1 is much smaller than it is in act 2 or 3, but i can run through act 1 in
a fraction of the time that act 2 or 3 takes me, with very minimal risk of
dying. When I am playing act 3, if I die more than four or five times, I have
actually lost gold on that run. It costs me gold to just try and progress in
the game. Can you see what is wrong with this?Anyway, all of this ties back into my original argument of
Blizzard trying to balance this game like it's world of warcraft. The reason
for this is obvious: they want players to use the auction house. This is a
no-no. While the auction house is a nice little feature to have, it shouldn't
be so integral to the game. It's completely against the Diablo mythos.
Jerry
Holkins of Penny-arcade summed it up best - Diablo is a piñata. You
can always go to the store and buy candy, but the whole fun of the piñata is
hitting it and getting the candy from inside. My solution? They should
completely reverse their philosophy on nerfs. When an item, or a farming
location, or a stat is deemed too overpowered, don't nerf it, buff something
else. The attack speed nerf could have been easily taken care of by offering
buffs to crit damage and crit chance. Farming jars for gold could have been
fixed by upping the drop rate of gold on monsters. Until Blizzard stop trying
to balance the game around possible abuse of the Auction house, I don't really
see this game ever measuring up to the glory and longevity of Diablo II.
