Quote from: The Butcher;794844So, if anyone knows of a Diablo-like game that does the above, I'm taking recommendations. I entertained the idea of trying Torchlight 2 but it looks a tad more cartoonish than I'd like. Is the Sacred series any good? Sacred 3 gets dismal reviews over at Steam and Metacritic.

Torchlight is pretty fun and has a lot of variety in the combat and options, but I can understand if you don't like the aesthetics.

You may like Path of Exile.  It's a free to play game, which means its always online even in single player, but it's constantly updated, has the aesthetics and variety you appear to be looking for, and is truly "ethical micro-transactions", with no combat and skill enhancement stuff, just utility items (holding more loot, customized pets (not the same as summonable combatants) and special graphic effects).  If anything, giving it a try will cost you nothing.  WP has the quickest primer on it with links to the PoE wiki and official web site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_Exile

I really ought to try out GW2 one of these days. Just as soon as I'm not-poor enough to afford a new gaming rig. So, y'know, Soon™.

Same goes for Torchlight 2. I'm not particularly bothered about cartoony graphics as long as the art direction's good (which is one of the few areas in which Blizzard still shines). Does it have something akin to the necromancer from Diablo 2? Not the hordes of undead pets stuff so much, I'm more looking for something creative and non-elemental like bone magic was. And also curses. Gods, but I loved playing with curses. Debuffing in general, really. Most CRPGs (and MMOs in particular) seem to have moved away from heavy/substantial debuffs as a PC skill, which has a lot to do with why I don't play terribly much of them anymore.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;794747Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought Guild Wars 2.

I still watch the graphics and think that I'm hanging out with the beautiful people, because who the hell in a village looks that flawless on an average day?  That said, I think I can appreciate the game more since I've tinkered around with several more MMOs than when I first tested it out.

It's Guild Wars, man. Everybody's fucking gorgeous. American developers, korean publishers.

(And as someone who rolls my eyes whenever chainmail bikinis or similar come up, because they're retarded, GW's outfits never made me think "these characters are wearing their nightclub outfits to a fight", even Elementarts or Mesmers.)

Quote from: The Butcher;794844What still bugs me about D3 is:

• The lack of variety in player character options (a minimum of appearance customization would've been nice)
• The lack of variety in foes, both thematic (it's all demons and undead. Sorry, I'm a D&D kid, I've been spoiled for choice) and tactical (there's maybe half a dozen types of mobs and they repeat over and over again).
• The lack of side-quests and non-hack-and-slash CRPG elements. Which wouldn't be so bad it not for...
• The bad, horrible, awful, no-good writing. Seriously. Any 7-year-old can come up with a better, more exciting and more consistent plot than the game's. This may be the first game I actually skip the dialogues in my second playthrough. So much potential, all wasted.
• It'd be nice to have an open world but I wouldn't even mind the railroad if it was a little better written.
• Very minor nitpick: lack of a pet class. I'm a sucker for WoW Hunters and Warlocks and I'd love to see a similar mechanic implemented. I kind of hoped the Witch Doctor would cover this base but his zombies and bats are effectively homing missiles.

So, if anyone knows of a Diablo-like game that does the above, I'm taking recommendations. I entertained the idea of trying Torchlight 2 but it looks a tad more cartoonish than I'd like. Is the Sacred series any good? Sacred 3 gets dismal reviews over at Steam and Metacritic.

The expansion fixes a lot of these - you can reskin items, you can play Adventure Mode and just endlessly kill monsters without bothering with the storyline (Although Act 5's writing is better than the main game, and you need to play it once), bounties are kinda sidequest-y - but the monster choice doesn't really expand (That said, lore-wise, it's basically all demons, undead, and corrupted critters anyway. Sanctuary isn't a varied place). There's no pet class, and it doesn't even pretend to be anything other than a stress test for your LMB, but it's now the game it should have been at launch. I reviewed the base game quite harshly, on this site; but with the expansion, it's worth buying.

Others... Sacred 2 is a bit more like an MMO in terms of sprawlyness and having a relatively open-ish world, and it has a lot of depth in character development, but I can't pretend I understood it very well. I dunno. I think I enjoyed what I played of it. If I had to give it a score out of ten, I'd say "mango".

Torchlight 2... I tried to write a review of it, but I couldn't get past "The developers have been remaking Diablo for the last two decades" (Diablo, Diablo 2, the-first-version-of-Diablo-3-that-was-basically-finished-but-scrapped, Mythic, Torchlight, Torchlight 2...). And it's true, they're pretty good at it now. It's like a cuter, less sprawling, Diablo 2. It's good! There's four classes, each of which have a few very viable character builds, but it's easy enough you can bumble through a playthrough without optimising (I had a really neat Engineer who did a combat stomp into packs, followed by area-of-effect sword swipes to clear most of them out, and was followed around by a team of shooty little drones). And there's all sorts of mods with new classes, monsters, gear, environments... it's cheap, it's fun. It's a good purchase.

Path of Exile is... well, a bit shit, I think. It's very much made for people who looked at hardcore Diablo 2 play, and thought "you know, this isn't hardcore enough", so they just added MORE OF EVERYTHING. There's the massive web of passive skills (And if you make a mistake, fuck you noob, restart your character and do the newbie content again or grind for the rare respec-the-last-point-spent items). There's build-defining uniques. All your skills are on gems (Think Materia), so rather than just grinding your character's level, you now have to grind your skill levels as well. There's no gold, you trade in magical currency... which you can also use to gamble in an attempt to make your items better. I suspect I'd love it if I were a teenager again with all the time in the world to play (There's a lot to like, really), but as it is, it's just too much for me. But it's free to play, it's very generous in what it gives you - 24 character slots, a lot of stash space, all gameplay-related content, you can only buy stash space or cosmetics - and there's lots of hacking and slashing (And bashing, and firing homing skulls that BITE PEOPLE while being ON FIRE), so there's no harm in trying it.

My biggest complaint about GW2 is the personal story. It's a very fine horse paste on the ground at this point, but what the heck, here's a few more whacks:

The design is backwards. It starts off highly personal and differentiated. Each character option leads to VERY different stories.

Then you winnow down to one of three major groups, with a few subchoices (allied races). Well, ok.

And then it narrows down to one plot, with a few choices that turn into 0 choices as time goes on.

The focus of writing is, IMO, utterly backward. IMO, choices should open up, not winnow down. And I'd love having multiple endgames to choose from.


Then, of course, it doesn't help that the entire final arc is about being the sidekick to cabbagehead, with a magic McGuffin you don't get to use.

That's fucking stupid and the GW2 writers deserve a big slap.

Also, I find it ... bizarre that ANet hasn't done much of anything with your 'home district.' I would have assumed it'd be an easy venue for selling cosmetic junk or tacking on small subplots.

One other thing about PoE is that they keep making major updates...they've released 3 so far that help enhance how the game plays.

If you're looking for another Diablo style game, you may want to try Grim Dawn.  It is "Early Access" but this is one of the most polished Early Access ever...it's basically a late beta with a long development cycle.  These are the guys who created Titan Quest.  I've had a lot of fun just with the way it is now--no crashes, etc.

The game is sort of--well, take an era somewhere between the Renaissance and the Industrial Age mixed with Steam-punk, then have an gamma-world style apocalypse (except it's magic instead of nukes).  The world was invaded by two forces--one was called the Aethereals and they basically possess and reanimate corpses, while the Cthonics are akin to Devils/Demons and wish to destroy the world.  The forces of the invasion also added a lot of creatures such as Snake Men, Werebeasts, Golems, Giant Mosquitos.  

There are five classes, but you can also dual class and you get a split class name when you do that.  There's a lot of loot, a good quest system, and multiplayer.  One little feature that I like is you can rotate the camera 360 degrees so you're not at a fixed angle.

Here's a guide to it.

http://www.grimdawn.com/game.php

Quote from: Ladybird;794987It's Guild Wars, man. Everybody's fucking gorgeous. American developers, korean publishers.

(And as someone who rolls my eyes whenever chainmail bikinis or similar come up, because they're retarded, GW's outfits never made me think "these characters are wearing their nightclub outfits to a fight", even Elementarts or Mesmers.)

Yeah, you can tell it's NCSoft publishing, as they're the same people who put out Aion.

At least in GW2 you don't have the capability to create a Mushroom Head avatar, unlike Aion.

One thing that does boggle my mind is that both GW2 and Neverwinter came out AFTER SWTOR, but both of them botch the lip synching in the cutscenes, often quite badly.

Quote from: Will;794991My biggest complaint about GW2 is the personal story. It's a very fine horse paste on the ground at this point, but what the heck, here's a few more whacks:

The design is backwards. It starts off highly personal and differentiated. Each character option leads to VERY different stories.

Then you winnow down to one of three major groups, with a few subchoices (allied races). Well, ok.

And then it narrows down to one plot, with a few choices that turn into 0 choices as time goes on.

The focus of writing is, IMO, utterly backward. IMO, choices should open up, not winnow down. And I'd love having multiple endgames to choose from.


Then, of course, it doesn't help that the entire final arc is about being the sidekick to cabbagehead, with a magic McGuffin you don't get to use.

That's fucking stupid and the GW2 writers deserve a big slap.

Also, I find it ... bizarre that ANet hasn't done much of anything with your 'home district.' I would have assumed it'd be an easy venue for selling cosmetic junk or tacking on small subplots.

I can't understand why they haven't worked on, you know, the guild aspect of Guild Wars 2.  Or the lack of effort in private housing.  I mean, even WoW is going to get housing (of a sort), and they were the last major holdout.

WoW took a very long time to do weather, and then the weather was pretty basic.

And I'm sitting there going 'christ, Asheron's Call came out in 1999, and it had seasons, shifting weather patterns, all sorts of stuff. Why is it a decade later and people are thinking of MAYBE having weather that doesn't do much of anything?'

Quote from: Will;795021WoW took a very long time to do weather, and then the weather was pretty basic.

And I'm sitting there going 'christ, Asheron's Call came out in 1999, and it had seasons, shifting weather patterns, all sorts of stuff. Why is it a decade later and people are thinking of MAYBE having weather that doesn't do much of anything?'

The MUD I used to play on, with a mid-90's codebase, had weather that had in-game effects, including death by exposure (Both of the thermias), and I'm sure it wasn't the first. It's basic stuff, but it's not a pretty, fun thing to put on the box. Kill space demon gods! Collect epic loot! Lose a leg to frostbite... wait, what? I don't want that one.

Metroid Prime had good weather effects, with the rain on Samus' visor.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;794842What server are you on? I see that one of the ways that GW2 makes their money is that you're locked into a specific server unless you want to pay to move.

I'm on Tarnished Coast with the RPGnet guild, but I think they've merged the servers in all but name with the whole "mega server" thing.

Quote from: JRT;794882You may like Path of Exile.

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it. It does look like what I want!

Quote from: flyerfan1991;795019At least in GW2 you don't have the capability to create a Mushroom Head avatar, unlike Aion..

You do if you're playing a Sylvari. :eek:

Quote from: Will;794991Then, of course, it doesn't help that the entire final arc is about being the sidekick to cabbagehead, with a magic McGuffin you don't get to use.

That's fucking stupid and the GW2 writers deserve a big slap.

This is a huge turn-off in WoW too; you sometimes had the impression you were just the wingman to the badass NPCs. The Lich King fight was a particularly egregious example.

Quote from: The Butcher;795050I'm on Tarnished Coast with the RPGnet guild, but I think they've merged the servers in all but name with the whole "mega server" thing.



Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it. It does look like what I want!



You do if you're playing a Sylvari. :eek:

I was thisclose to trying out a Sylvari, and now I'm glad I didn't.  Ugh.

QuoteThis is a huge turn-off in WoW too; you sometimes had the impression you were just the wingman to the badass NPCs. The Lich King fight was a particularly egregious example.

Well, most of Cataclysm was that way too; you were just toadies to Thrall's Green Jesus impression.

To be fair, Sylvari have a lot of options, mushroom is just one of them.

I am currently playing Destiny. I have reached level 26 with my Titan. I plan to play Tales of Xillia 2 and Lightning Returns as soon I am growing bored with Destiny.

Okay, I've gotten fed up with my old Netgear WNDR 3400.  It needs a reboot at least once a week and the kids have started complaining about connection drops and lag when gaming and doing their homework.

I've got a 10:1 internet connection, so unless someone is uploading a lot of files I don't expect there to be much in the way of lag.  Nevertheless, I did look into the QoS settings for this router, only to become discouraged at the lack of detail for this part of the firmware.

I've used Netgear equipment for ages without issue, but this router is making me look elsewhere for a replacement.  Has anyone tried the newer AC-1900 routers, such as the ASUS RT-AC68 and the Linksys WRT1900AC?

Yeah, there's the Netgear Nighthawk 7000 too, but like I said I've been disappointed by the recent (lack of) build quality among Netgear equipment.

Now that the initial crush is past, Overwatch, Blizzard's new IP, has its official site up and running.

One part MOBA (heroes, not classes), one part FPS (in the TF2 vein; team-based objective-focused PVP), and clearly superheroic in its character. Both cinematic and gameplay trailers are up, as is Beta opt-in. If I get flagged, I am so in; everyone I know at BlizzCon that's played the game love it. Looks like it will be Free To Play.