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| Thread: Doomforge's review corner |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Supreme Hero
I am. Thusly I am.
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posted March 30, 2012 05:35 PM |
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Oh yes, the balance and trivial/common task connundrums. This is something I'v been thinking about actually and it is all about where the balance in a game is. If we look at Diablo II this kind of ends up being obvious. Are the skills in D2 balanced? Not a chance in hell they are! There are a bunch of skills that I have never seen used by an experienced player seriously. Poison dagger, bone wall, defiance, blessed aim are just a few and if you think before they added the synergies there were even more (now you get a bunch of skills just for synergies, and then you may just as well use them during some periods).
Are the enemies balanced? Nope. I often run into creatures with immunity to both physical and magical damage (and an elemental immunity). That's not really balance, is it? And I'm usually more afraid of Lester and the Minions of Destruction than Baal. I'm not sure it's balanced that you feel that you've won when you reach the final boss, because you defeated the toughest enemies right before that.
So where is the balance in D2 and LoD? In the classes, and often in the builds. On the ladder you still see all the classes amongst the top players, and that's commendable. Wether you go for fire, ice or lightning as primary with your sorceress is also a balanced choice.
All in all the balance is on the larger scales while the details are not and the choices you make are not balanced. There are builds that are right out stronger than the other ones, but you will usually have to figure them out (and forcing you to think is a good thing) and the more powerful builds are often harder to micro/control properly than the weaker ones. It is, for example, possible to build a theoretically undefeatable build with sorc by getting warmth, teleport and a damage spell from each element (I went with nova, meteor and blizzard). You can then just teleport around and avoid all damage. It's hard a hell though, since you have to time everything perfectly, get a high APM and keep close track of your mana because if you can't teleport you die.
As for the common/trivial tasks most older games have them, and most new ones as well but we have yet to notice them. A common one is assigning loot in a party. You kill Baal so who gets what? In D2 it was left for the players alone do determine that, so it usually ended with everybody trying to snatch as much as possible. In D3 they "solve" this by individual drops. The boss drops some items for player 1, some for player 2 and some for player 3 and the players can't steal from each other.
A trvial one is attacking. You have to keep on clicking, and clicking, and clicking to actually keep attacking something. A lot of games "solve" this with automatic attacks. You click once and the character keeps attacking.
Now, "solve" is put in quotation marks, because solving is what you do to issues. Are these issues? There are a few of these that I feel have been issues that clearly have been solved, such as queuing production in RTS-games.
Now, if you "solve" to many of these and balance the game on all levels you end up with a game where decisions doesn't matter and a game that plays itself. What ends up being important are the random drops and having a game where the most important feature is rolling random items gets kind of boring. This is how I felt with WoW. To me it's a slower and easier version of D2, with a few added features. What skills I pick doesn't really matter, because they're all equally useful and equally easy to use and combat is mostly automated, apart from you spamming your skills, preferably as close to their cooldowns as possible. What determined if my lvl 20 warlock could beat that other lvl 20 warlock was who happened to have the best randomly distributed equipment.
These two aspects are very important in games, because they determine wether the player feels involved in the game and wether it will have gameplay based enjoyment and wether they feel that the game is fair or not. If only random factors determine the result you'll feel cheated. There are bunches and bunches of games that lacks balance in this way with many repetetive and rather unimportant tasks. Morrowind, HoMM III, D2, Dungeon Crawl, and more.
In D3 I feel like they are aiming for this highly balanced and easy-to-play game and that this will reduce the gravity of my input as a player. Sure, the game can be difficult regardless, but difficulty can not be overcome by just playing well... but we will just have to wait and see if my anticipations of Diablo III are correct and I for one certainly hope that I'm wrong.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted March 30, 2012 06:01 PM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 18:01, 30 Mar 2012.
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Actually Diablo (and the other hack-'n-slash pseudo-RPGs that I've played, which aren't many mind you) has a really bad pace and that's part of the balancing problem. You character starts utterly incompetent, untrained, with the worst possible gear and yet the monsters initially are no more challenging than squashing bugs would be in the real life. Occasionally some semi-challenging creep could appear (The Butcher and the Skeleton King in Diablo 1, the Lightning-enchanted wookie guarding the quest tree in Dark Woods in Diablo 2, etc.) but even then it is more of a nuisance than a real challenge. Diablo 2's Act I on Normal is among the most boring gameplay experiences I've ever had. Like you have to earn the right to have some challenging fight by surviving several hours of utter boredom. I don't know if they intend to fix this in Diablo 3 but I doubt it. In any case though, the pace should be similar throughout the game and the difficulty increase should come from greater variety of enemies requiring greater variety of approaches to defeat.
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Drakon-Deus
Undefeatable Hero
Qapla'
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posted March 30, 2012 06:03 PM |
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You have a point there Zenofex...
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Shares
Supreme Hero
I am. Thusly I am.
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posted March 30, 2012 06:05 PM |
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Right you are... and that actually goes for most games. It starts out nice and easy and gets more and more challenging, even though your character and armies usually have grown in many ways.
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted March 30, 2012 08:52 PM |
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Quote:
On the ladder you still see all the classes amongst the top players, and that's commendable.
It should be noted that around 80% diablo2 characters are Paladins. And around 80% of that Paladin horde are bot hammerdins.
On the other hand, Druids are very rare, except for windy PvP druids.
I wouldn't call a game where 1 class of 7 is the choice for 75% players or so.
Quote:
In D3 I feel like they are aiming for this highly balanced and easy-to-play game and that this will reduce the gravity of my input as a player. Sure, the game can be difficult regardless, but difficulty can not be overcome by just playing well... but we will just have to wait and see if my anticipations of Diablo III are correct and I for one certainly hope that I'm wrong.
Blizzard has stated Normal mode will be trivial so that casuals can beat it, and Nightmare/Hell will be difficult, so it's exactly what Zenofex hates: you will need to pass few hours of boredom to see any challenge.
Quote:
Right you are... and that actually goes for most games. It starts out nice and easy and gets more and more challenging, even though your character and armies usually have grown in many ways.
If you want a game that is hard in the beginning, I'd recommend Dungeon Siege 2 and a melee character.
The games getting harder as the player progresses is pretty much a tradition - I'm afraid there won't be many titles that try a more interesting approach. Dungeon Siege 1&2 was amongst those rare games that can be harder early on than in the end.
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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OmegaDestroyer
Hero of Order
Fox or Chicken?
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posted March 30, 2012 08:55 PM |
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DS2 hard? Anywhere? Ha! Good one!
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The giant has awakened
You drink my blood and drown
Wrath and raving I will not stop
You'll never take me down
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted March 30, 2012 08:56 PM |
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It's very easy in general, but a solo melee character is literally taken to 20% hp by a few hak'u within few seconds early on. And the 1st crossbow miniboss two-shots you and you can't dodge arrows with single melee character.
Your presumption that DS2 is easy probably comes from playing a huge party composed of ranged characters which are extremely strong in that game. Try either solo melee, or a melee party and you'll see what I mean 
I'd also recommend the "Aranna Legacy" mod which fixes nearly all bugs for DS2 and improves difficulty of veteran/elite modes. You can also manually set the difficulty of the world in the .ini file. Try 500% (max) I'm actually trying to beat the game on 500% and trust me it's not easy lol
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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OmegaDestroyer
Hero of Order
Fox or Chicken?
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posted March 30, 2012 09:02 PM |
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First character was a melee warrior. I used the default characters as members, so the half-giant guy, the dryad, and the archer/soldier dude. That was... Hell, I don't even remember how long ago I played that game.
As to reloading it, I have ME3 sucking up my time now.
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The giant has awakened
You drink my blood and drown
Wrath and raving I will not stop
You'll never take me down
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted March 30, 2012 09:39 PM |
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Well, let me tell you then: without using the dryad and the soldier dude, it would be 4x harder or so 
Melee characters suck @ss in DS2
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Shares
Supreme Hero
I am. Thusly I am.
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posted March 30, 2012 10:16 PM |
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Quote:
Quote:
On the ladder you still see all the classes amongst the top players, and that's commendable.
It should be noted that around 80% diablo2 characters are Paladins. And around 80% of that Paladin horde are bot hammerdins.
On the other hand, Druids are very rare, except for windy PvP druids.
I wouldn't call a game where 1 class of 7 is the choice for 75% players or so.
Not sure when you played(no, this is not arrogant sarcasm, it's honest ignorance), but when I played D2 on ladder it was mostly sorceresses (I can't say I've played a lot of ladder though, so my knowledge is quite limited), then the other classes were about even with a bit fewer amazons and druids.
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted March 30, 2012 10:26 PM |
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I started playing battle.net after 1.11 patch I think...
Sorceresses are common pick on early ladder as the starting character. The majority of people either sets up a hammerdin bot, or makes a hammerdin for themselves as they get some wealth to support equipping one.
The game has certain "economical" cycles with certain items becoming most sought-after. It's something like:
1. early on - mf sorceress gear (shakos, vipers, oculuses, tal rashas, etc.)
2. transition to hammerdins - jah, ber, socketed mage plates and archon plates
3. hammerdin improvements - ohm rune (for CTA), spirit pack insanity, torches and annis
4. when people are getting rich - around middle ladder: more exotic items for other builds
5. as the ladder gets near end: crafting components like Ral runes or Perfect Rubies, and skillers - clean and with life
6. near reset: Lo runes (most ladder only high-end runewords contain it), last requests (usually perfect items to finish a build)
And it repeats every ladder. At phase one there are mostly sorceresses on the realms but at phase 3-4 there are almost solely hammerdins (plus the sorceresses of players not wealthy enough to set hammerdins yet).
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Supreme Hero
I am. Thusly I am.
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posted March 30, 2012 11:01 PM |
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Oh, I was playing just a few months after LoD was released, 1.07 I believe, so the ratios ought to have been skewed. Especially since synergies.
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sphere
Supreme Hero
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posted March 31, 2012 12:52 PM |
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Quote:
sets up a hammerdin bot
What is that and how does it work ? ( Just out of curiosity )
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Who is this General Failure, and why is he looking at my disk ?
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted March 31, 2012 07:59 PM |
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Quote:
Quote:
sets up a hammerdin bot
What is that and how does it work ? ( Just out of curiosity )
it's a third party program that makes the game play by itself while you're doing something else. Some players use it to avoid the insanity of doing countless item runs. I think it's a joke in the first place to make the economy based on dead-boring labor of running a boss repeatedly.
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted March 31, 2012 08:29 PM |
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It gives you at least one fresh shako every morning when you wake up and check. Once got even a windforce but very rare items percentage is 1/month. Now imagine how long will take manually (bot ran 12 hours/day)
Blizzard deleted my bots several times, but it took only one day to make a new one, so choice was fast.
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Era II mods and utilities
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Elodin
Promising
Legendary Hero
Free Thinker
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posted March 31, 2012 10:42 PM |
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Quote:
I think it's a joke in the first place to make the economy based on dead-boring labor of running a boss repeatedly.
It is not at all necessary to have all of your equipment "top tier" items. I've never used a bot and for years I also did not use ATMA to mule single player items.
After 1.10 area runs became effective in high level areas so you are not limited to boss runs or the "mini-boss" runs. And after 1.13 while doing those area runs you are much more likely to score a high rune too. While they don't drop like candy they are much more findable than before.
I'm fine with the diablo loot system. Blizzard just did not have the will to perma-ban cheaters and I don't expect it to be much different in D3 after a few years. There are already quite a few hacks in the D3 beta and bots have been used there too.
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted March 31, 2012 11:45 PM |
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Quote:
There are already quite a few hacks in the D3 beta and bots have been used there too.
And here I thought bnet 2.0 will be of any use ...
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted April 16, 2012 04:44 PM |
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I decided to throw in another H&S game.
[TITAN QUEST]
This game is often called the true successor to Diablo 2 and the underdog of H&S genre. It comes with everything H&S are famous for - including the major annoyances and issues.
Since this is a part of my H&S trilogy, I will do it in the same fashion as my Torchlight review: five main points that a H&S must fulfill to be great. In case you forgot already:
a) Atmosphere
b) Interface
c) Content
d) Balance
e) Joy from killing things
so...
Atmoshpere
Great idea turned bad. Greek Mythology is an huge and underused source of inspiration for games. It comes with a massive lore and all the monsters and heroes already done & ready to be used in a game. Titan Quest however utilized maybe 1% of this realm's potential. NPCs have nothing to do with the heroes of Mythology (save a few generic stories about them), the monsters aren't actually that much of mythology-based (crows, zombies, neanderthals, fire beetles, skeletons and such... there's a lot of generic H&S stuff around), and it seems like a totally wasted chance of making a grand game.
The music is bland and unremarkable, except for the beautiful Elysium theme. Sound effects are more often annoying than cool.
In general, thumbs down on this one...
Interface
Titan Quest is definitively better than Torchlight in this at some aspects. The game's camera is actually "far enough" to give you enough sight of the field, no floating numbers clutter your vision, and buffs have a minimal visual effect, making it clear and well-thought. However, the camera is again static and impossible to move, which means whenever you travel south, you see maybe 20% of what you see when you travel north. This means the difficulty jumps drastically whenever the path leads south, and the bad part is that a in good deal of final parts of Act III (which are surprisingly hard) you walk south. Ridiculous but true. We'll get to that in balance section.
However, much like Torchlight, there's no auto collect loot, and what's worse - there's no auto collect gold function. So there's more of painful clicking on text boxes every two seconds or so. It's actually so annoying that I usually skip collecting gold entirely in this game. For a 2006 title, this is unacceptable. HAVE AUTO COLLECT LOOT BUTTON, damnit. At least the text boxes don't hide under each other.
The worst part of TQ's interface - or maybe, game mechanic - is a sort of input lag caused by long casting/attacking animations, and the game's not-very-responsive-at-times controls. In a game where the enemies can charge at you at dazzling speeds from beyond the screen to three-hit-KO you, it's very frustrating, especially at act IV.
All in all, it's average, not nearly as maddening as Torchlight's interface, but not as responsive either.
Content
TQ:IT really shines here. There are hundreds of item types and a big collection of unique items, perhaps rivaling Diablo2 in total amount. What's especially sweet is that for every difficulty (Normal, Epic, Legendary), you don't find the same items with "Epic" and "Legendary" prefix, but entirely different weapons, both in name and appearance. I applaud the creators for not taking an easy route here. It looks great and feels like a real progress. You don't get to wear "epic shirts" after plate mails for greater protection. FINALLY.
There's a lot of skills in each and every of the game's masteries (9 in total). Most are useless however so, like in D2, you will end up using 3-4 skills max.
As for the monsters, there's a few of them, but for a game that literally throws tens of thousands of monsters at you (I believe this is the H&S with most monsters to kill in general... around the middle of epic, my kill count was over 60 000...), they aren't varied enough. Usually resized and/or recolored, but again, when you kill 30-40 per level like in Diablo 1, it's not a big deal - but when you kill 1000 per level - like in this case - it starts to get boring after a while.
The game length is good. It's longer than Diablo 2 and will probably take a good few weeks of playing (assuming you don't play it maniacally) to finish the "Legendary" difficulty.
The game does fall short in the endgame content, however. The numbers of usable items is very low, compared to hundreds of trash uniques and sets lying around. It's actually so low that for most builds, you'll want to resort to rare (green) items. Not something I like in H&S games, but I guess most gamers can live with it.
I guess I can give a "thumbs up" regarding content. The game's long and there's stuff to look for. It's not perfect, but it's okay.
Balance
The usual crap: some masteries are way better than others. So - there's theoretically a lot of builds to choose from, but in practice, not so much, as most stuff doesn't work or works sluggishly in the later difficulties.
As for the game's difficulty... it's mixed. First two acts are very easy, third one is moderate, fourth and final is hard-as-****. Without in-game knowledge, you will die a lot in 4th act, and even when knowing what's out there in your 2nd or 3rd playthrough, you can still get overwhelmed. Yes, I said that. This is a difficult game, at least when you want to keep a zero death count. This mostly comes from the combination of input lag, camera angle and the amount of damage a dogpile of enemies is capable of extorting in a very short time. Some monsters are especially unfair. here's a list of the major butt-kicking monsters in this game for convenience:
- The dragonian scourge mages cast four highly damaging and stunning balls every two seconds and two of them can permastun you, leading to a very swift death;
- the Machae Grandmaster archers pump up a 500damage arrow every second (with average hp of caster: 2000 and warrior: 4-5k) and are surrounded by conuntless regular Machae archers that hit for 300 damage, resulting in 50% hp loss after being exposed to a group of them for a second (and possibly instant death for mages).
- Elder Dragonian Chargers have a direct health reduction attack and charge at ridiculous speeds, so without 80% vitality resistance and/or a strong AoE stun you will be wiped out in less time than it takes to blink an eye.
- Formicid Captains - when they charge up their onslaught skill - are the fastest monsters in the game with ability to do over 1000 damage each hit. On normal mode. Fortunately melee.
- Gigantes Dactyl is capable of throwing waves that do up to 2000 damage per hit - yes, on normal mode - plus an AoE slowing/highly damaging nova attack and a 100% arrow dodge innate ability - those things can kill you instantly if they caught you unprepared, and the fact they are usually surrounded by minions with a charge attack that stuns you... yeah.
The list goes on, actually. As you can see, all of those monsters have an ability to kill you within seconds. If you're playing untwinked and without the knowledge how to beat them, you can get extremely frustrated.
Now, you know me, I usually complain that games are too easy. But in TQ:IT, I actually think the difficulty is kinda overdone. The game taunts you with trivially easy acts I and II just to brutalize you by the end of third act - and sodomize you at act IV. No joke. It's not that those monsters are hard by themselves - it's the combination of camera angle, input lag and overdone special effects of their attacks that's especially murderous. The fact they can actually charge from off-screen (again due to that pathetic fixed camera angle) with speeds extreme enough to leave you half a second to react - and usually kill you with ease if you fail - leads to a gameplay where you have to be extremely focused and know in advance what lies ahead on each location. Without some faster cast speed items (to minimize the impact of input lag), a huge vitality resistance (in order not to die regularly to just about any of 9001 attacks that reduce your HP pool by a fixed %) and at least one crowd control/panic skill, some locations tend to be a real nightmare to get through without dying many times.
I would be satisifed, but the game - especially if modded - takes it really too far with the amount of time left for you to react. If the monsters' activation range was reduced - or the camera could be rotated - it would be challenging, but fun. However, TQ can often get to "frustrating" tier - the need to be able to push buttons with monkey reflexes may seem fun, but it's much less fun if you actually die due to pressing the button 0.01 sec too late.
Another problematic thing is health management. In act IV, most classes will be quaffing potions every few seconds, which quickly grows old. Every wave of enemies, if not managed perfectly, will drain at least 50% of your life, because even the most pathetic monsters are able to score 300 damage per hit.
On the other hand, acts I and II are so ridiculously easy, they are practically boring. If you die there, it's probably because you left your char in the middle of the mob. The monsters are slow, weak, and pose a laughable threat even in massive hordes.
Finally, bosses - act bosses in particular - range from laughably easy (for warriors with maxed battle standard skill and its synergies) to frustratingly hard (mages without top gear). Most bosses' special attacks are able to kill a mage instantly - each and every boss battle turns into "I run around panicked, casting my damage spell every time the cooldown ends, then back to running". it is highly class dependent, yes, but if you ever tried to beat Typhon with an undergeared elementalist you'll know what I mean. I could probably set a bot here that just runs in circle for an hour dropping the spell every time it's available and it would spare many gamers a lot of wasted time for that extremely mechanical battle.
In other words: The difficulty is very uneven. Depending on your gaming choices, it's either too easy, or too frustrating. UL does take it into deeper levels, however it also provides better skills and more powerful items to manage - especially the healing part. Either way, I'm not exactly satisfied - contrary to most H&S, TQ cannot be called an easy game, which is impressive, but it's not the kind of difficulty I like - it's mostly about monkey reflex, seeing that succeding in hitting the button before the opponent hits you usually ends up with you decimating the opponents without a scratch. It feels too much like a FPS game, at times, if you ask me.
To sum up: mixed blessing.
Finally, Joy coming from carnage - it highly depends. If you activate super flying bodies, it's actually one of the most awesome experiences you'll ever see: skeletons being dismembered and flying in massive arcs around the screen, Satyrs landing on trees & falling in water after critical hits, animated statues' arms and legs flying around rotating madly, it's a feast for the eyes. Without it, it's much less impressive & less fun, so I highly advise you to install TQdefiler and turn that option on.
However... even with super flying bodies, it's gets old after a good while. My attention span is very long, but after like 50 000 killed monsters (the game keeps track of fragcount), I started to feel bored, and around 70 000 I was already bored to tears. The fact I had to remain extremely vigilant to avoid deaths and sometimes escaped barely due to a key pressed 0.01 secs too late wasn't helping.
Also, melee animations are somehow lackluster. the regular rightclick attack for some reason looks weird: it's as if the character was trying to swat a fly with newspaper. I don't know how to describe it, but it looks underwhelming and kind of boring - fortunately Warfare & Defense have chance-to-occur attacks that look and feel a lot more fun. Still, the generic one that occurs from time to time even when you max the "% to be used" attack skill tree SUCKS.
So, I can sum it up with a simple comment: TQ is a game that is most fun when it's easy. Yes, I don't say it often, but in this case, it's true. You'll probably have most fun killing the uber-easy groups of skeletons and watching bones scatter around the screen. When on the other hand you get to Dactyls, Machaes and Formicids, you will find yourself both yawning at the game's insane repetitiveness and almost mechanical style of gameplay&actions and cursing because of the ridiculous instant-deaths (or near-instant deaths if you're a maniac power gamer like me. Still enough to piss me off )
In conclusion : TQ is a very uneven game. Great to beat on Normal, but not a game you'd want to play through for years. Definitively not Diablo2-tier of joy: this is mostly to the fact the game quickly gets too hard, and in the same time, too repetitive even for a hack and slash. Due to the same kind of hazard (being jumped from off-screen and stunned/instagibbed), you will be quickly using the same method against every group you encounter (using CC skill at the very sight of enemies then finishing them up with melee attacks/damage spell), and somehow, it quickly becomes to bore every player I talked with about this game to tears.
Why is D2 fun, and TQ boring when both are basically the same use-the-same-skill-endlessly games? I'm not exactly sure, despite me thinking hard about it.
I guess it's a kind of magic.
Rating: 5/10
UNDERLORD
Sphere asked me to review Underlord mod in addition to Vanilla TQ, so... no prob!  The mod is considered an unnoficial expansion for this game, and rightfully so: it does fix a lot of problems, even though it's not without faults.
First things first, UL fixes up endgame armory. There are delicious, well thought and extremely hard to get items around in a whole new item tier, the "Mythic" tier. They take extreme dedication to make, but their stats are more than enough of a reward. Something for powergamers to enjoy, no doubt.
Another thing UL fixes is the class balance. With expanded skill trees & fixed/rebalanced skills, the number of viable builds increases a LOT. Don't expect it to go too far, however - some trees (i.e. Nature) are overpowered, and some (Occult) are underpowered. Well, I guess that's kinda impossible to avoid.
As far as the difficulty goes... in Underlord mod, Dream mastery has "mind breaker" skill that allows you to prevent creatures from using their skills for a good while, which obviously counters jokes like Dactyls. Other masteries aren't so lucky however. Unfortunately, UL also expands the "BS monsters" list by adding Empusa Boss, Vitality variant - they are like "I lose" button for melee non-Dream based builds. Their ability to swap places with you and stun you while doing so means that sooner or later you get transported in the middle of an angry monster mob and stunned for good few seconds there. yes, this is unavoidable death if you can't kill that thing before it does that swap attack (or quit the game before you get killed after swap, but that's about the same as getting killed to be honest )
UL also pushes the diffulty even further - more monsters, bigger damage, improved bosses. It's even more frustrating because the chance of being instagibbed is even higher. I guess that's the price you pay for rebalanced skill set - it's quite high, if you ask me, as this greatly increases the TEDIOUSNESS factor of this game.
Still, a good mod, if you weren't repulsed by the nature of this game and the fact that it requires you to be constantly vigilant - or constantly dead.
Yes, I did manage to beat UL untwinked without dying on two difficulty settings (normal and epic). I did not start Legendary because the game bored me at this point. That's just to illustrate I'm able to manage the game's (and the mod's) difficulty well - I just find it a bit too excessive in the reaction time requirements.
A small bonus is that most skillsets have been expanded with healing skills, and regeneration prefixes/suffixes were added, hence in UL healing isn't as tedious as it was in vanilla.
I'd rate TQ with UL mod installed at 6/10.
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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JoonasTo
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
What if Elvin was female?
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posted April 16, 2012 09:06 PM |
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I have to say I don't approve of your review this time.
Just in the last one you talked about not including mods in the reviews and now you're including underlord? Consistency is the first requirement for comparable reviews.
As to what comes of the actual game review. You're sorely lacking in describing the utter boredom that comes with the egypt and especially the greek playthrough the second time. It's just plain torture to run through the exact same areas filles with satyrs all over again.
That's another point where the game fail very, very badly. The monsters are very repetetive and lack imagination. You'll see almost all monster types in the first chapter, they'll just be reskinned later. Compared to say, Diablo, this is highly annoying and makes exploring and killing dreadfully boring. You'll end up running through the stages because you know you will just find thousands of similar monsters and nothing interesting.
Would not quite agree with the difficulty in vanilla. It is rather easy all the way through normal mode. Just don't make suicide runs.
The way the game handles damage annoys me though. If you look away to, say, check the time, regular enemies can off you through a few lucky strikes.
On the comparison, if just use potions(or have a decent regen), you're pretty much set for runing around pretty much forever.
The deaths in the game come more as a result of not looking at the screen, not noticing you're in some spell area or simply forgetting to use a potion(because your health bar isn't exactly the best illustrated, you end up looking at your health bar rather than the game itself) than from actually challenging situations. This makes the game feel cheap and you feel more often that you were cheated out of a life or snowed up rather than that the game was actually providing you with an actual challenge.
You will end up flying through the "harder" battles with ease and dying off at the boring "kill five thousand minions" battles. This is not a good sign.
One should mention the transfer box though. It's definitely the best part of the game. Being able to transfer items between your characters with ease was and still is an excellent idea in H&S. How many times did you curse for finding that perfect item for the other class you're playing?
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted April 16, 2012 09:26 PM |
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Well, I think one may indeed consider this review as lack of consistency, but I partially followed Sphere's request to incorporate Underlord into it. However, I did mention the parts where UL is different so you can freely ignore them and I gave two different marks depending on whether you play UL or not, so... I think it's a redeeming factor
Honestly? Killing Satyrs and Jackals again after act IV was personally like heaven after the dreadfully boring Act IV to me. Don't forget that I'm not objective and I don't try to be when it comes to boring/interesting parts. Obviously, I consider objectivity of gaming reviews mostly an utter failure, because the review lacks that certain personal touch to it, becoming a bland "graphics good, sounds's fine, levels fun, play it, 10/10" type of reviews IGN provide. I think that killing easy enemies en masse and watching them fly 40 feet in the air is funny. Funny enough to justify a second run.
Your point in difficulty is more or less similar to mine. The game isn't "challenging", it's "annoying" to the point of making it hard. Indeed, the deaths you describe are the prime way of getting killed - not looking, not using a stun spell fast enough, or just forgetting about healing - and if you add the ridiculous camera angle, you can get gibbed fast when your attention drops. And it's going to drop fast because of how fast the attention drops in general in this extremely repetitive game.
But of course, you have a very valid point: Especially for someone not using "Super flying bodies", which makes it devoid of its humoristic fragment. Yes, replaying normal act I+II can bore one to tears.
I have not mentioned shared stash because it's more or less a standard in any modern H&S. if the game was missing one, I would complain.
Thanks for your points, by the way. I really like all kinds of criticism, and feedback in general - mostly people just ignore my reviews or give me a virtual pat on the back without commenting 
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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