So Diablo 3 finally has a release date, May 15th.  In exactly 2 months we get to experience Blizzard’s re-take of the dungeon crawler.  For those keeping track, it’s been 12 years (!!!) since Diablo 2 and in that time we’ve had 3 Dungeon Sieges.  Thousands of clones and re-takes with probably Torchlight being the best single player version, mechanically and I would say Sacred as the best multiplayer game thematically.

Price is 60$ US (or what, 45$ Canadian by that point?) but if you sign up for a year of WoW you get D3 for free and a guaranteed entry to the Mists of Pandaria expansion.  That’ll set you back about 120$, so you’re basically paying for 5 months of WoW, D3 and getting a free beta – which I’ve gotten into every single time anyhow.  The kicker is that MoP is coming out in less than a year – which you will have to buy – and are you going to play 6 months of that?  I don’t think I hit 2 months of Cataclysm.  Not really a deal for me.

The game looks good, the tweaked mechanics are better and Blizzard’s goal seems to be simpler this time around.  There are still some odd decisions and we live in a completely different world than 12 years ago.  At the time D2 was an MMO .  Now we have competition all over the place.  Time will tell if a loot pinata game will have longevity.

So apparently D3 will ship without any PvP.  I am a pessimist here, certainly, but after Starcraft got split into 3 games as a huge money grab, it makes you wonder why after 5 years of development they can’t put this system in – especially since it was one of their key selling points when they announced the game.

I guess the entire system re-write that happened a month or so ago was enough to tell them their game isn’t ready.  We’ll find out next week what the exact launch date is (once the media NDA lifts) and what systems are going to be included.

The good news is that Blizzard had a solid iterative development process.  They aren’t afraid to dump entire mechanics that aren’t working.  The bad news is that it took nearly 6 months of beta to figure that out – making any testing from this point forward seem rushed.

First off the bat, I am not a fan of IGN.  For a time Gamespot and IGN were my 2 gaming sites.  Then the whole Kane and Lynch issue hit Gamespot and I stopped visiting them and moved to GiantBomb.  IGN used to have quality articles but around the same time I stopped with Gamespot, IGN started putting out the oddest reviews.  Games with major flaws were scoring 9s.  Recently, they’ve been doing “reviews in progress” where the play a pre-release game and put up a 5-8 page review before their official review.  You know, the same content you can find from any beta player.  I remember the TOR pre-review and how the final review score really didn’t match what his experience was.  Oddly enough, their movie section I like.  Go figure.

Back on topic!  This is an op-ed piece from one of the more controversial IGNers on the whole Mass Effect 3 social issue.  First, that the ending sucked and players are petitioning and second that the day 1 DLC (on disk no less) are akin to robbery.

While I agree in principle that the ending is the ownership of the game company, the whole premise of the Mass Effect games was that your decisions mattered.  The ending has next to no reflection of that.  It’s sort of like selling a Star Wars game without Lightsabers (hello Star Wars Galaxies!) or a Call of Duty game without guns.  You’re going to piss people off.  Aside from that, the “link” novel Deception, that put Mass Effect 2 into 3, was so poorly written and flawed that readers actually built a codex of errors.  So bad in fact that BioWare is going to fix the book and re-release it.  But really, you don’t build up a space opera (it is) and then kill everyone off.

Second and this is more endemic to the gaming situation than the actual game, is day 1 DLC that is on the game.  Games are cheaper today than they were a year ago due to inflation.  I get that.  I payed 100$ in 1991 for Final Fantasy 4 – that’s about 170$ today.  Point – game devs.  Second step, day 1 DLC makes people buy new games.  True, if the DLC is actually included in the new game.  It wasn’t here and wasn’t in quite a few other EA games.  Point – players.  Third, if you don’t like it, vote with your wallet.  I certainly am waiting until everything goes on sale later on and I can get the game from something other than the EA store.  Point – me.

I wouldn’t say the Mass Effect universe is dead now but it’s certainly left a sour taste in people’s mouths.  BW had planned on releasing more games in that universe and I’d be willing to bet that those efforts are on the backburner now.  This isn’t Halo where the game mechanics are more important than the story.  Mass Effect is all about the story and people are feeling cheated.

It just feels odd that a company like BioWare, who espouses the value of story to a near sickening degree, would let something like this go by.  There’s something rotten in Denmark.