Castle Magus

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I have to admit that I knew exactly jack and shit about this ProJared guy prior to watching this video, and now I'm glad he's someone that I'd never heard of before.

( All of the non-ProJared related rantage behind cut, because there is far more of that than there is anything about that ProJared asshat in this post[4] )

[4] - And not a single bit of any of that past the first paragraph has anything to do with that ProJared douchenozzle, but whatever. I don't give a flying fuck about that, either. It's my blog. I'll rant about whatever I want. ¬_¬

I started playing Grim Dawn recently, after buying it as part of a Humble Bundle. It's pretty good. If you've played any recent isometric ARPG, you should know what to expect. I'm playing as an Occultist+Shaman=Conjurer and am putting all of my points into the summoned creatures, which has been pretty cool so far.

I'll definitely say this much for Grim Dawn: it is objectively better than both Path of Exile and Diablo III, if only because it does not require always online bullshit.

Well, no, they don't because they clearly don't build games for people who don't want that online-only-even-for-singleplayer bullshit.

I don't care how inclusive their games may be from a sexism/feminism perspective or whatever, and if they are that's great and all, but if I have to be always connected to the Internet to play it, then their game is not for me, thus the claim that they build games for "everybody" is objectively false. Yeah, yeah, I know, that's only tangentially related at best, and I'm beating a long-since skeletonized horse here to keep harping on Diablo III online only crap, but still. ¬_¬

(EDIT) And, as it turns out, they're just huge fucking hypocrites, on top of that. (/EDIT)

Well, their so-called new path is a path that I still will not be traversing, because I still have to be online to do it. Oh well, I guess. *shrug* There are better, more interesting paths to travel upon out there.

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RPS: What if people don’t want to commit to a community? What if they just want to play the game?

Martens: We didn’t make that game. That’s the straight-up answer. We did not make that game, and we’re not going to turn this game into that game. We have the online mode because we learned a lot over the many, many years that Diablo II was in development.

That was the wrong choice to allow people to play offline, and we still stand by that. And we think Internet access is widespread. If someone has no Internet access, then yeah, Diablo III is not the game for them.

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That pretty much sums it up, right there. It really sucks because, like BioWare, Blizzard used to be on my "Day 1 purchase, no-brainer" short-list, but now, more so than even BioWare, they are on my increasingly huge "never buy, under any circumstances" list, precisely because of obnoxious, pompous, hubristic shit like the above.

Looks like Blizzard might finally be starting to come to their senses. Does this mean that they'll be removing the always-online requirement as well? It's unclear. If so, then maybe, just maybe, I might be inclined to finally give Diablo 3 a try after all this time. If not, then oh well, I'll continue to not buy the game, because it's always been the always-online bullshit that was the dealbreaker for me, not the auction house. Aside from just straight up DRM crap, though, they'd have no good reason to keep the always-online stuff after the auction house is gone. On the other hand, they've already said that they won't be removing the online requirement, but then, that was before this announcement about removing the auction house. We'll see, I guess.

RPS version: "Fin(ally): Blizzard Removing Diablo III’s Auction House"
PC Gamer version: "Diablo 3 auction house closing in March 2014"

(EDIT)

Well, there you go. I guess I still won't be buying Diablo 3, after all.

(/EDIT)

In this interview, the lead designer for Diablo and Diablo II talks about how shitty Diablo III is. He tried his best to avoid coming right out and explicitly saying that it's shit, though, even if it seemed like he really wanted to say it.

I didn't much care for his half-assed attempts to justify the auction house, though. "I don't think it's a matter of being greedy. Game developers, we work hard, and we want to be rewarded for what we do. The fact that Diablo II was still on shelves and still being played, in Korea particularly, 10 years after the fact of its release was something that I think Blizzard was kind of like... 'Hey, we got the price of the box and not much else out of that.' That doesn’t respect the amount of gameplay that people were clearly getting from it. So I can definitely see that point of view, where they say, “Hey, we should be rewarded for what we’re giving the audience,” and then think about ways to do that."

So, what he's saying is that they wanted more than what they got for, you know, selling the damn games. They got paid... but that isn't enough. They want more. Um, yeah, that sounds to me exactly like "a matter of being greedy." Only in the goddamn video game industry have I seen this asinine mindset that just selling the fucking game isn't enough anymore. You don't see authors of books getting all whiny about people still reading and rereading their books years later, for one example.[1] Now, game devs/pubs feel justified in milking gamers for every little thing in any way they can get away with. Obviously the majority of gamers let them get away with a whole lot (far too much, in my opinion), because if they hadn't, all of this shit would have been nipped in the bud a decade ago when it all first started becoming a thing. And the ways they're coming up with to get that extra cash are becoming increasingly insidious, like this real money auction house bullshit. It's becoming intolerable, if it hasn't reached that point already. It already has for me, since I still haven't bought and won't be buying Diablo III until and unless the extraneous layer of crap (RMAH, always-online DRM, etc.) is stripped out (and, no, before anyone even asks, I'm not buying the fucking PS3 version of the game which doesn't have that stuff, because if they can take it out of that version, they can damn well sell a version for PC that doesn't have it as well). At this point, that seems highly unlikely to ever happen, and I'm pretty much okay with the idea of never playing Diablo III. There are plenty of other, better games out there that don't do that bullshit in the first place.

[1] - And don't give me that malarkey about how games are totally different because it requires gigantic teams of hundreds of people to make them. No. Plenty of games have been made and are still currently being made by teams of one to three people, and many of those games I've liked a hell of a lot better than most of the developed-by-committee so-called triple-A games that have been shat out lately by the big dogs.

Can I get a "No shit, Sherlock" on this one? *eye roll*

Here's another shocking revelation for you, Blizzard: the always-online requirement also "really hurt the game."

Okay, then. Does that mean you're going to remove the asinine online only requirement, Blizzard?

No?

Well, never mind, because I still don't give a shit about your shitty game.

Things like this are why I like Rock, Paper, Shotgun over all the other gaming blog/news sites I read. For me, as well, the problem isn't about Diablo 3 itself. It's about the extraneous, stupid baggage that has been tied to it, and what that heralds for the future. (Though I am still pissed that this is affecting Diablo 3 in particular, true enough.) So yeah, thanks RPS, I will remain angry about this, and I will likewise refuse to buy any other games that use this, the same as I have refused and will continue to refuse to buy Diablo 3.

Pretty much, yeah. Once again, Cracked.com cuts through the BS and tells it like it is.

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( Profanity-laden copy/paste from Cracked behind cut )

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I could almost have written that whole article myself. In fact, in many ways, I guess I already have. The main difference between me and John Cheese there, however, is that I am not willing to cut the game any slack for all of its shortcomings. We've known the game was going to be drowned in extraneous, unnecessary crap for over nine months now and, yet, people still apparently piled on like it was all going to be sunshine and roses. As for me, as I've said a buttload of times in the past, I simply refuse to buy the game at all while all the additional baggage is in place (and, at this point, I'd have to give it some very serious consideration before buying it even if Blizzard finally did come to their senses and remove all of the useless crap). Does Blizzard care about this, though? Nope. They already got theirs, what with all the other people who have shelled out for this intentionally broken piece of crap.

But the really sad thing is that, in the end, Cheese talks about how good the game is. That's what makes this so irksome for me. I know that, once you finally get past all the extraneous fecal matter that has been piled on top of it, there most likely is a good game lurking somewhere underneath. I just don't feel like it's worth the effort of having to take a shovel to it in order to reach that point. But, given how many other people have bought this game, I guess I'm in the minority here. And if this is indeed representative of gaming's annoying future, I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be able to call myself a "gamer" then.

Oh well, there's still a ton of older, pre-fecal matter games out there that I haven't played yet, as well as indie devs making games similar to these old, non-drowned-in-crap games, so there is that at least.