ah shamb if you've got time to research all these upcoming games and remember them (the only one in that list I know anything about is d4) then you may be missing out on some good current games.

for instance, my next play is going to be Ride to Hell: Retribution, scored an impressive 16% on metacritic. screenshots look good so it can't be missed :D

I quite like playing some of the shitty budget action games because they're all short. the longer 20+hr RPG AAA's just take a bit too much out of your everyday life to get through. 

Amount of research varies between zero and not very much.

Part of the reason for posting on here is to get others to research for me ;) 

My most played during the last few years were DX:HR, Dishonored, Tomb Raider 2013, and XCom.

The sequels to those will be what I'm waiting for.

I did play Fallout 3 and New Vegas a lot also. 

I wonder if it has a first person view (other pic tends to suggest 3rd person.) Pics look great and compelling. I've buried a lot of time into Fallout 3 so Shambler's link really interested me. 

All of their other games were 3rd person, so this one is most likely going to be the same. IMO better than 1st person for games like this. 

So anyway it's the Christmas season which means I can usually find some time to play a game or two that I've been meaning to for a while. Next on the list was Diablo 3 (PC). I dabbled in Diablo 2 a few years back and liked it, although I only played a little into Act 2, so I'm nowhere near being one of these min-maxing poopsockers that the game seems designed to cater for.

Anyway, so playing Diablo 3, I'm sort of most of the way through Act 1 thinking "this is a bit easy" as I'm basically just walking through one-shotting pretty much everything. I don't need to use any attack or ability other than my secondary attack and the mana bar seems to refill itself faster than I can actually deplete it. A quick google assures me that this is actually quite normal and at some point during Act 2 I should expect to start to take damage. Okaaaayyyy.... So I keep playing and start ploughing through Act 2 in much the same way. The game is not getting harder, but actually easier and easier, so I google again and learn that I can increase the difficulty level. I increase the difficulty to the highest it will allow me to ("expert" apparently) and continue playing. No difference. Still instagibbing virtually every enemy that appears, even those yellow-aura boss-type chaps that show up even now and then.

So I'm starting to think that early on I stumbled into a brutal positive feedback loop where I picked up some decent gear which allowed me to kill stuff better, which levelled me up faster, which allowed me to kill even faster, which levelled me up even faster etc etc, so my player's power trajectory is on a much steeper gradient than the game's, if you get what I'm saying.

For a moment I considered purposely gimping myself by wearing shit gear, using crap skills and whatnot but then realised that would pretty much make the entire game pointless (i.e. without the mechanics of getting constantly better gear, there isn't really much of a game).

I'm not sure when it occured to me, but I realised at some point that every boss, even the act end bosses, were instagibbing as soon as they appeared, without me actually attacking them. Before, I was under the impression that my player was doing insane damage with the secondary attack - and that was true; the damage was insane - but there also seemed to be something else at work here. Sure enough, every boss would instantly explode the second it became vulnerable to damage, without me even needing to touch it or attack in in any way.

Narrowing down what was doing this, I found that the culprit was a ring that dropped somewhere in Act 1 called the Nagelring. This ring caused up to four little goblin creatures to follow you around and act as little suicide bombers, running up to enemies and exploding. I had to go into the Diablo Wiki to even figure out what damage they were doing and it turns out that each goblin (and there are up to four of these at any one time remember) - I shit you not - explodes dealing 10,000% the damage that your character does. So that's why I finished the game in a few short hours instagibbing every boss including fucking Diablo himself. Also my character was doing mad damage even without those suicide bombers, but whatever.

I guess what I'm saying is: why the fuck does a ring like that even exist and why does it drop in Act 1? Even if you chopped a zero off the end of the damage amount it would still probably be an instant "win the game" button, except it's not even a button because you don't even have to consciously press it, it's just active all the time. This game is stupid as shit. 

This game has truly come a long way from being unplayably hard at release. 

 

diablo 3 lives in adventure mode: nephalem rifts, greater rifts, bounties, etc. all in torment x and higher difficulties. store mode is boring ;)
we can rift together if you will, my id is vondur#2148. 

i guess you'll need reaper of souls addon for that. 

hahaha, the fucking nagelring is crazy. the fact that it dropped for you so early, well, you're supposed to feel lucky.

the difficulty curves in D3 are aaaaall over the place, so I acknowledge that what I'm saying is daft, but like vondur said, the 'torment' levels of difficulty really just don't give a shit if they're even possible for you, so it becomes a matter of using seemingly broken things like the nagelring to even be able to survive. I had a monk where I found some special combination of items that buffed a certain power (exploding palm) in a particular way that if I use it just right everything on screen just explodes, and I still hit a nearly impossible wall on torment 6.

that's where that ring belongs. there's so much distance between the lowest and the max difficulty that if you happen to get that lucky 0.000001% drop early enough it has the potential to have come from some crazy other dimension where the monsters have literally millions of times more hitpoints.

not the most optimal thing to occur when you're getting a first impression of the game, though. 

So that's why Vondur is asking me to play with him - he wants the precious.

So anyway turns out I can't enter the Torment difficulties until I level my character up to 60 (I'm level 43 right now).

Ironically, the chance of me bothering to go back to the game to grind that shit out is probably about the same as the drop chance of the Nagelring. 

Just had another go and levelling is pretty quick so probably won't take too long. 

D3 has a shit story, dialog, and is horribly generic... but I always felt it kinda of got worse as they 'balanced' it and made it so you always get class specific goodies and often they are tailored to your stats, and difficulty is simply a setting you can change at will rather than anew replay through the game...

The old giantic spike of difficulty that was inferno difficulty on release was the first time the game seriously made you care about all the horseshit they put on rare and elite monsters, and made you actually care about making trade offs from your damage abilities to defensive ones so you could actually survive, and you had to grind up gold and do runs to try and get good items to progress... that first month of Diablo3 was the most memorable to me precisely because it was so goddamn hard to make any progress. 

lol no, asking just to have company, that nagelring is good of course but there are better items ;) i've reached greater rift 60 on two toons this last season. so, bastically i can boost u and u can enter the adventure mode world of legenary farm to build perfect build.
d3 currently is to make seasonal progress (season lasts about 4 months), complete all season journey tasks and gather top build, this is what i'm doing right now and enjoying it. since if you wanna achieve higher greater rifts you have to max every stat possible.

@scampie, yea old d3 was totally unfriendly, i'm glad they fixed it. better late than never. 

old d3 was a machine designed to make you exchange money in the auction house 

Diablo3 started as a massive turd, and they've done a 180 on so many of their big decisions that it has turned into a solid hack'n'slash, and it seems much of this was in timing with the departure of Jay "Fuck That Loser/I Should've Stayed As a Mapper At Monolith" Wilson.

It's not a brilliant game, but I find it enjoyable now to just thrash some things from time to time, and appreciate that they've done one paid expansion, one free small expansion, and are working on another free small expansion, and have quietly added dozens of new micro-quests that you can bump into, so there are still new experiences.

Normal is Easy, as in, the bottom of the difficulty choices. I have a character I played entirely one handed on Easy when my daughter was born, because I could hold her while playing (pet oriented Witch Doctor). I currently play on Torment 2, though I do just fine in 3 but my damage is low enough that some fights feel like a chore at times, so that is still a bit of a grind. Yeah earlier versions of the game were brutal, but this one can be as well, they just expanded their spectrum to offer a truly casual experience as well.

I like it now, even if the story is completely dumb. 

Aye, I was jesting of course. I'll give you a shout if/when I can be arsed to reach the required character level / expansion pack purchases that qualify me to follow you into battle. 

 

Is Diablo3 worth playing for the graphics and design? Or is it like many top down games, just a game where you look at a bunch of cobblestones and transparent walls?

Just finished playing borderlands2 which was fantastic, that has a very unique art style and just generally fantastic design everywhere. Plus it has just about every setting you could think of, even fantasy with dragons and dwarves in the last dlc.

I imagine the skills and looting is similar to B2 though, just with hack n slash combat. 

I enjoyed Diablo for the first few runs. I bought the game at launch too. 

I think D3 is gorgeous ... if you're into 3D graphics, it's worth checking out. I wish it was on Steam because I would probably rack up a few hundred reference screenshots playing it.