Posts by Taylor

Quote from dux

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This is my inital reaction as well. The skill potential in Diablo caps out pretty fast – there are basically zones you shouldn’t stand in and that's it. If you’re melee things are a bit tricker because you have to navigate through these zones or coax enemies out of them, but after 60 hours you're pretty good at "don't stand in green cloud." As you go forwards what really gets harder is the numbers (except, again, for abilities like Monk heals).

I was going to write that the game “turns into Disgaea” which is all about just making insanely powerful characters with rather limited strategy. But it’s not really like Disgaea because that game has an insane number of ways to boost your statitics. Diablo has two: random drops and - dun dun duuuuun - the Auction House.

Not suprised they nerfed Force Armour or Smoke Screen, nor that they fixed the infinite Spirit glitch.

Very suprised they nerfed Boon of Protection since without infinite spirit it wasn't actually that strong (and even with infinite Spirit it's not like Monks were OP). Apparently it's "ten-times over budget" but I've no idea how they would calculate that, though the Monks heals all having no scaling and being dead on arrival at level 60 may offer some clues.

Well, I wasn’t expecting the Wizard or Demon Hunter to be anything but face-roll. But it strikes me that melee are completely unequipped to deal with what goes on in late Hell and beyond. Basically at this point everyone is a ranged class. The monster damage output is so deadly melee can no longer wade through monster packs and need to do hit-and-run tactics. This means navigating through instant-kill minefields of poison, fire and laser beams to get close, trading a few low-damage blows, because they need to be decked out for survival, and then try to escape back through the shit. They are also much more likely to be dealt a bad hand with elite packs.

One thing that I find rather disconcerting about the Monk is many of the healing abilities do not scale at all. Breath of Heaven, Mantra of Healing, Transcendence, and many runes just offer flat amounts of healing which is already borderline negligible when you first hit 60. It’s vanilla WoW casters all over again.

Ranged have it so easy.

Before this game came out Blizzard were saying how hard it was going to be and I shrugged it off entirely, but I'm currently playing Hell in a party of 3 and some of the elite packs are absolutely ridiculous. In fact if I couldn’t change my skills over to a “tanking” build (invincibility, stuns, dodge) we’re be absolutely screwed because I’d just be scattering enemies everywhere with Lashing Tail Kick like a nonce, and trying ineffectively to burn then down before they killed me.

I do find most of the bosses are cake; certainly the minor ones are almost pointless now as they are all basically normal enemies with lots of health. In Nightmare the WoW major bosses were also kind of weak, but we just killed the Skeleton King in Hell and he was fairly difficult. It wasn’t quite as manic as coming across two sets of elites, but you had to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid (i.e. get hit by his triple swing) for a big chunk of time.

Quote from Sentura

i doubt you'd both have the same opinion if any other studio did this

i doubt you'd both have the same opinion if any other studio did this

The final nail in Diablo's coffin is that people won't all be locked into the same build in a month?

Explain how making a new character each time you want to change something promotes experimentation.

Quote from Erratic

I've probably mentioned this stupid shit before but the ability to tweak minor attributes for your character goes a long way. It's a large part of the fun I had with these games because otherwise they aren't really skill or knowledge based and they aren't really strategic or even reaction or timing based at all, not in any meaningful way anyhow.

But the vast majority of the player base will go for cookie cutter builds, and those that don’t are mainly going to be newbies who ruin their character for thinking their caster should invest in energy. Even oddball builds like Poisonmancer were pretty defined if you wanted to do any real business with them. And then Blizzard have the dilemma that, because everyone has locked themselves into a strong build, they have limited scope for actually changing what’s strong without pissing everyone off (something Blizzard seems to traditionally solve with insane exponential power increases).

The new system allows for a lot more creativity; much more than attributes and skill trees and I mean that sincerely. You can experiment without writing-off a character, all players are encouraged to play with all their characters skills even if they got some cookie-cutter guide, and it allows Blizzard to balance things without the risk of destroying characters. My only worry about this system is the ease of changing skills will mean there will be an ‘expected’ build in public games, where randoms demand you rock a FotM build because it’s so easy to switch into it, especially if it’s party-boosting.

The interface for the new skill system is undeniably very bad, though; I don’t need an almost full-screen panel for binding six abilities, which is easily evidenced by the vastly superior interface used for most of beta. And the fact you can’t even mix skills of the same type without unlocking it in a menu seems to rather... insulting? I don’t know if that’s the right word.

Quote from Skjalg

http://kotaku.com/5910302/blizza…dium=socialflow

I like their other article which is basically a live commentary as the guy fails to log in. News.

Taylor#2599 (EU)

You have to hit espace.

I really love the Infinite Protection System. Existing systems like hit-deterioration, juggle limits or gravity scaling always result in your combo arbitrarily ending and sometimes

I’ve been playing Valentine (Savage Bypass H) and Cerebella (Excellebella), though I only made this for the gimmick that Valentine can launch people into Cerebella’s grab and a poison vial mid-combo, I don't think it's particularly scary.

I will be getting a replacement Playstation tomorrow and will double-dip, mainly because most of the UK air-dasher players tend to be on PS3 anyway.

Skullgirls, why are you so good? Why do you do everything right? Why do you make so much sense? This is hands-down the most fun I’ve had with a fighting game since GGXXAC.

I like it when this game crashes and you think it's just pretending so leave it 5 minutes.

So I'm trying to not go all fanboy here, but Skullgirls just released last night (except for EU PSN) which I’ve been following for an extremely long time and actually lived up to my hype and beyond.

It’s an indie downloadable title and noticeably rushed out so don’t expect too much in terms of modes, features and

Quote

in-game movelists

. But the gameplay and art are there in full, even if the latter is a little polarizing. The tutorial mode is also the best I’ve seen in a fighter – it actually teaches you how to block properly and do mix-ups rather than praise you for throwing a fireball.

I’m going to a SFxT tournament this Sunday because a friend asked me to go with him, but I honestly can’t see myself training at all with this in my hands.

Oh yeah, and after years of “I played DotA before it was cool” my friends finally convinced me to install League of Legends.

Oh right, I think officially it's: Alexander Taylor - Level Scripter

Thanks?

Start at Lionhead tomorrow

I think they avoided the journal with stages because, outside of the main quest and ~7 others, they are all "overheard something" -> "scanned planet"/"found item"/"missed item and brought it" -> "talked to someone."

http://sonichurricane.com/articles/sfnotation.html

I prefer numpad notation because it adds readability, especially to long combs, but it's not really used for Capcom games.