S to the T to the F to the U

Too much work and no play is making this place a dull blog. I finally have a few moments to bitch about all the bullshit I'm reading on the 'net lately. Let's start with South Park: The Stick of Truth.

Easily one of the best RPGs I have played in years. And what do I have to read in one of the many reviews out there? "It lacks depth."

Let me get this straight: The game features perks, fart magic, class abilities, various party members with unique abilities and skills and tons of gear with different strengths and weaknesses and it "lacks depth"? There is armor, which allows you to generate PP (read: mana) faster but lacks defense as well as the polar opposite. There is gear which provides bonuses against certain baddies. There are weapons, which deal high single target DPS as opposed to weapons, which harm entire groups of baddies with moderate damage, attack an entire row of enemies or debuff them with various negative effects. Many enemies are shielded or buffed in some way, making them vulnerable to only the right kind of attack. "It lacks depth."
"It is usually enough to simply equip your strongest weapon and armor." Oh yeah. You mean, as opposed to every other RPG in existence, right?

Then there is this:

While I genuinely think it's an interesting watch, I can't get over how some people lose their shit over this. Oh god, the outrage, E3 presentation footage looked better than the actual game, we're all being lied to, nooooo! Why is this news? Visuals on our $500 "next-generation" consoles are still shit compared to any mid-range gaming PC, nooooo! What's the fucking news here? Still, fun video. I like it.

What else? Oh yeah, something something something Warcraft:

And what's the #1 comment this kind of thing has generated, aside from the usual flaming, hating and trolling? Oh yeah: WoW is dead, RIP WoW, you get the idea.

Let's see here. WoW's subscriber numbers have actually gone up a bit and are close to 8 million paying customers right now. At its peak, WoW had something around 12 million subscribers, meaning it has lost 4 million players along the way. When was it that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Hellgate: London or Age of Conan had 4 million paying subscribers again? Oh, that's right - fucking NEVER! WoW has lost more subscribers than any of its alleged "killers" ever had and is still the single-most successful subscription-based MMORPG to date. I haven't touched the game for years. Didn't like where they were going with it. But I'm not talking about how "it's dead", because I no longer enjoy playing it.

Is WoW past its prime? Of course it fucking is, nobody denies that. But stop making a complete idiot out of yourself by claiming it's "dead". As for the instant level 90 boost, however... look, if you can't make it to level 90 in an MMO as easy and casual as WoW or if you've played it so much that you just can't be bothered to level up yet another toon, well... makes me wonder if WoW is still the right game for you. That said, instant level 90 characters are gonna be another paid service and I think it's fine. Nobody is forcing you to use that service and everyone should be allowed to play the way they want. I mean, sure, back in my day leveling up a character was part of the experience, but after the fifth or so alt, things might get a little stale.
"But starting right at level 90 means you'll never learn how to play your class!" Right. Because playing dull kill and fetch quests for a week or two totally teaches you how to function in a raid.

Oh hey, speaking of Blizzard - could you tell me why you're all so hyped up about this?

It's the flashy trailers and brilliant marketing, isn't it? I mean, you all still remember that Diablo 3 was okay for a week or so and then turned out to be just that? Okay?
My friends are going crazy about this shit right now. Patch 2.0.2 (or something?) came out the other day and I read comments like, "This is what Diablo 3 should have been like all along! Finally, this game is good!" Wait, what?
Look, the game isn't horrible. Far from it. But it isn't great, either, and I fail to understand how the recent changes make it so.

So they have revamped the various difficulty levels, because there were too many of them and they were confusing, right? We had normal, nightmare, hell, inferno and an extra setting for "monster power". But now, everything is all nice and easy and not fucking stupid or anything.

Well...

Instead of the many confusing difficulty levels we now only have normal, hard, expert, master and "Torment" tier one through six. Ten fucking difficulty levels. Which really just scale monster damage and hit points, meaning that once you go high enough in difficulty, it may well take 50something hits to kill a baddie. At the promise of even more loot and experience. Oh the user-friendliness!

But that's not the real cool new feature. Everyone is hyped about about glorious "Loot 2.0". Basically, Loot 2.0 will make sure that, every so often, you will get a legendary drop. In fact, it doesn't even matter where you search for your fucking loot anymore. You could kill a boss monster, an elite pack or smash a clay pot. Just destroy everything and BAM - guaranteed legendary. And that legendary will be useful to your class 90% of the time, so you won't have to deal with the frustration of finding a magic wand whilst playing a barbarian. Still happens, but rarely so.

Alright, here's my problem with this: THERE IS NO FUCKING SENSE OF ACHIEVEMENT! If I pull a legendary sword out of a FUCKING CLAY POT, it's not exactly a heroic experience and after the fifth fucking legendary that same fucking day, I can't help but notice that I'm simply rewarded for BEING THERE. All I have to do is spread those butt cheeks and the legendary gear will come flying.
And that's what I see when I look at my goddam friends list on there: EVERYBODY IS FUCKING LEGENDARY!

Everyone suddenly sports gear, which would have sold for hundreds of millions of gold coins on the auction house. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the AH is gone, but there is no more reward for skillful play, there is no way to stand out, everybody is awesome. It doesn't matter if you kill or skip the elite baddies, if you go farm bosses or smash pots all day - repeat it until the game is satisfied and there's your legendary. How is this fun? How is getting "rewarded" simply for being online fun?

I've played through the campaign again over the weekend. Grabbed Claire, started a Torment II run from Act I and breezed through. And more often than not, the dull 3-button gameplay literally put me to sleep. I could feel my eyes shutting time and again and by the end of the playthrough, I had died exactly three times - always to an elite pack with "jailer" and "frost shit that gets you stuck and kills you" abilities. You don't die to those baddies because they're so clever or so great to fight. You die, because they use annoying, cheap abilities. Jailers hold you in place, then some little frost bomb explodes near you and you get raped by a dozen monsters while you can't move or use potions or fight back. Torment, indeed!

Didn't matter, though. "Respawn at corpse" is the magic button here. You get to revive EXACTLY WHERE YOU DIED, right by the monsters who fucking killed you, so you can just keep on respawning and hitting them until they eventually die. Sure, if you die three or so times in a row, the game will force you to respawn a little further away, but come on now. Really? Respawn on corpse? Maybe we should remove dying completely. You know, make Diablo 3 a little more casual-friendly.

Those cheap deaths aside, I didn't come close to dying. Not once. Not during any of the ridiculously pathetic boss battles. What put me to sleep wasn't just the fact that it was so incredibly easy, though. It was the kill speed. Or lack thereof. My barbarian is specced into a self-sustaining whirlwind and even with his 150k unbuffed attack power, fighting a horde of monsters meant pressing and holding the right mouse button and moving around said monsters for a full minute until they finally died. Every. Single. Time. Add 2-5 minutes per elite monster.

That's a minute of holding my right mouse button, a minute where I can't possibly die, a minute where I don't have to use my brain, a minute where I just keep my eyes peeled for the next legendary item to drop. And hey - we went from Paragon nothing to Paragon 50+ and full legendary in every slot in one playthrough. Now what? Torment III? Do the same shit again and waste even more time to kill harmless monsters with stupidly large amounts of health?

And how exactly is Reaper of Souls supposed to make this any better? The one thing that really appeals to me is the idea of Nephalem Rifts. Completely random dungeons. Random monsters, tilesets, bosses, everything is random. And that shit has so many strings attached, I may as well not bother. First you need a rift key, which can drop anywhere in the game, but it's easiest to just play a bounty mission, which is really just more of the same old shit. Kill a certain boss baddie or play a specific dungeon. You know, from the regular game, the kind of shit we all grew tired of after a week with the original game. Then and only then can you play a single Nephalem Rift. Want more? Restart your game,  get a new key or get fucked.

WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? Why can't I just fucking start "Rift mode" or some shit, play non-stop Nephalem Rifts for as long as I want, one random dungeon after another, chain them up and only stop when I've had enough? Why do the game designers hate that idea so much? Why am I forced to replay the same old crap over and over again to get the one tiny bit of really "new" content? Oh right, there's also a 5th act being added to the 4 existing ones, but COME ON! You play that shit once, maybe twice, then you've seen it, move along. I don't wanna repeat that crap ad nauseam only to gain access to the one thing I really wanna do.

Her. I wanna do her.

RoS isn't gonna fail. It's not gonna suck, not completely anyway. But I doubt anyone but the most dedicated, the most hardcore of D3 devouts will stay around for more than a week. Somehow I don't think this expansion will appeal to people any longer than the original Diablo 3 did. Guaranteed legendary loot may be fun for a while, especially if you usually suck too hard to actually earn that shit, but ideally, a game offers a little more than just loot. There should be substance. And I don't see it here.

-Cat