Diablo Immortal gameplay is pretty good

Diablo Immortal is a game that everyone can enjoy. It’s fun to play, easy to pick up and play, and easy to understand and learn. There are no complicated rules or mechanics; all you need is some free time and an internet connection, and you can be playing Diablo Immortal right now!

The game itself isn’t bad either. The art style is great, with fantastic use of color palettes (especially during cutscenes). The music has a nice beat that makes it fun to just stand around listening. And the controls are intuitive—if there were any issues here at all it would be that they sometimes don't respond as quickly as you'd like them too.

Microtransaction prices are insane.

First of all, the game is essentially just a cash grab. In order to get the best equipment in Diablo Immortal, you’ll need gems. There are two ways to get gems: either you pay for them with real money or wait days upon days of repetitive gameplay. As we all know, if you don’t have enough money then you might as well just kill yourself and spare yourself the agony of a life that doesn't end in riches and glory.

At this point it's worth mentioning that microtransactions are nothing new for Blizzard games. The company has been milking its fans for years now, but Diablo Immortal takes things to an entirely new level by requiring players to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on their characters in order to progress through the game at a reasonable pace—and those are only some examples!

Diablo Immortal will have gambling type loot crates

Loot crates are a real problem in games.

Loot boxes, for those who don't know, are digital random drops that can be purchased for real money and opened to reveal the content within. The contents range from cosmetics to weapons and armor, but sometimes they contain items that give players an unfair advantage over others in multiplayer matches—and even then they're still harmful.

Some games have tried implementing a system where you get something every time you open your loot box: say, three cards out of five packs of cards or one skin out of four different skins. But this system doesn't really solve the problem because it makes opening each box feel less exciting than opening just one would be if there was no guarantee that anything would come out at all (or maybe some other item). While this may seem like a small detail on its own, it actually has huge implications on how players interact with these systems overall; when there's no immediate gratification from opening them, people will stop buying them altogether rather than spend their hard-earned money on something with such little chance of success.

It's all a huge cash grab

After a year of waiting for a new Diablo game, we were finally given some information about the next installment. The company has decided to create a mobile game called Diablo Immortal. This move was completely unexpected and it seems as though Blizzard is more concerned with getting money than satisfying their fan base's demands.

Here are some reasons why this decision is disgusting:

Diablo Immortal will not be free-to-play but rather have microtransactions that make the game pay-to-win. Many players do not want to pay real money in order to win games, so they'd rather play something else entirely than participate in what could be considered an unfair system like this one where you pay for power instead of earning it through skill or time investment alone.*

This game is disgusting!

Diablo Immortal is disgusting. It's a scam, a disappointment, and a disappointment to fans. This game is not what gamers want or need. We don't need this in our lives!

Diablo Immortal is just another example of how gaming has become increasingly focused on monetization rather than quality content creation. This game could have been so much more if its developers had put their efforts into something actually worthwhile instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator with cash grab mechanics designed solely around generating revenue from unsuspecting players who thought they were getting something special from a beloved franchise like Diablo. It's just depressing that we live in an era where this garbage gets released while games like Cuphead are still struggling through development hell because they've decided to avoid anything even remotely resembling pay-to-win schemes by offering content which will never cost players anything beyond the initial purchase price (admittedly, Cuphead did offer some free DLC but that was due primarily because they wanted people playing before release).

We demand better!

Conclusion

This game is disgusting. But hey, they’re sure to make millions on it, so that’s something at least!

The world was almost a canvas

The world was huge. It took hours to drive across the map. You could explore it on foot, but you'd die of boredom before you got anywhere interesting.

The world was beautiful. The graphics were gorgeous, and the art direction was perfect for the game's tone.

The world was open - in theory, anyway; there were no boundaries or barriers to keep players from exploring where they wanted to go (except maybe some mountains).

The world was empty - there wasn't much going on outside of what was necessary to advance the plotline and get your next objective completed; mostly just monsters roaming around with nothing else worth looking at nearby them except maybe some plants here or there (but even then those weren't always worth paying attention too).

The final result? A beautiful but boring game world that felt like more work than fun

Final Fantasy XV wasn't interested in its own universe.

It's not that Final Fantasy XV wasn't interested in its own universe. It's just not interested in you, the player.

It's a game with a universe that isn't explored or considered beyond the narrow confines of its main story. The characters don't care about their world and don't seem to want to be there; they're just along for the ride because it makes sense for them to be there. And as far as any narrative goes, it was pretty much all over after chapter 8 during which one character is separated from her friends for most of the game and yet struggles not at all with being alone for 10 hours (although she does fuss about having no money).

The plot was nonsensical and disjointed

The story was nonsensical, disjointed and boring. It's hard to get invested in it when you have no idea what's going on half the time. Why does Noctis' father want war? Who is Ardyn? What's the deal with this four-armed lady? What even happened to my car? The game never answers these questions or tells us anything about its characters that isn't superficial at best.

The story is not engaging; there are no stakes because nothing really happens until the last 10 minutes of the game. Even then it doesn't make much sense or feel like it matters; you're just doing stuff for no apparent reason other than "this is what games with good stories do." All this builds up to a climax where literally all that happens is someone dies and another person gives birth--and yes, they're related in some way (you can probably guess how).

The characters were flat and boring

The characters in Final Fantasy XV were not likeable. They were not relatable, and they are not fun to watch. I could go on, but this is my last chance to rant about this game before I'm out of space, so let's just say: The characters were flat and boring!

This game will be on a list of bad RPGs.

Final Fantasy XV is a bad RPG. It's not just a bad Final Fantasy game, though; it's also a bad RPG overall.

It lacks the depth and complexity of other games in the series.

Conclusion

The whole game felt like a tease. It left me hanging on the edge of my seat, waiting for something to happen—but in the end, it was just more disappointment. Not to say that it wasn’t pretty, or that there weren’t some fun parts (“Let’s turn into a flying motorcycle and explore!”), but I was hoping for so much more from such a long-awaited title.

How about at the beginning, idiot.

This generation of video games has been an unending AAA garbage fire of half-assed remastered rehash and microtransaction-rich, but feature-poor, releases.

2017 has arrived to change all of that!

The first quarter of 2017 is just insane. After a generation literally flooded in garbage hardware and software releases, Q1 2017 is almost enough to redeem all of it, whether it was the PS4's complete and total lack of games until 2015 (ERMAHGERD BLERDBERNE) or the Xbone's hilariously tragic launch (followed up in 2017 by its slow slide into complete irrelevance).

In the space of like 4-5 weeks we had the following releases

• Yakuza 0
• Nioh
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• The Nintendo Switch
• Nier: Automata
• Halo Wars 2

Haha just kidding, nobody gives a crap about Halo Wars.

2017 didn't stop there... ho boy get ready for Q2!

• Persona 5
• Prey
• Tekken 7
• Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

Incredible! And despite attempts from EA to ruin everything with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Star Wars: Battlefront II, there have been just way too many good games this year!

Even Ubisoft made some key contributions. Assassin's Creed: Origins is one of the most playable and interesting offerings in the series, at least since IV, and it turns out that Ghost Recon Wildlands, while not ushering in a golden age of open world military shooters, turned out to be a decently fun romp through the War on Drugs.

Ubisoft also released one of the breakout successes on Nintendo's new platform, Mario + Rabbids, which is probably a better designed game than Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

I was going to write about how great the new Zelda was, but my keyboard broke for no good reason. Here, I'll just use this one--oops broken again. I was just getting to like that one! Well, here, I'll use this rusty keyboard I picked up off some moblin...

Despite Breath of the Wild's problems, the Switch has had a good run, so far. I could grumble extensively about the poor build quality, but despite that, the games have been ridiculously good. Except for Arms and Splatoon 2, which, turns out are actually overpriced garbage.

There have been a lot of other good titles but too many to name all of them in one low-effort blog post.

Yeah, what a great year. I was really optimistic about how good video games were getting.

Nothing like a harsh dose of reality to quell any hope or positivity. Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Star Wars Battlefront II. Destiny 2. Call of Duty: WWII. And so on... the trash-alanche from AAA publishers continues, but with a special bonus layer of offal in the form of loot boxes.

I won't rehash the whole loot box drama here, but it's gotten really bad, and people exceeded my extremely low expectations by actually gathering up enough gumption to get mad about this. Good job, people!

Well, this post has made me tired. See ya next year! (maybe)

We know more than ever about Microsoft's new hardware, but the warning still stands.

As E3 is winding down we still haven't heard much about the next PS4, rumored to be code-named "Neo", but we now know much more about Microsoft's future hardware... or do we?

EuroGamer does a much better job than I at laying out the pitfalls in Microsoft's upcoming hardware strategy (if it can be called that). The problem, as I see it, starts to feel like a serious lack of vision. Not just the sort of corporate institutional blindness common to companies of Microsoft's size, but also the lack of a coherent direction. This has been Microsoft's problem since before the Age of Ballmer Ascendant, it's true, but the Xbox future is one of confusion and head-scratching bafflement.

My warning to friends was, hold off on buying more consoles until this all gets sorted out. Now that the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio have been revealed, I can definitively say: it's best to hold off on buying more console until this all gets sorted out.

A few months ago, the question had to be, why would you buy an Xbox One when an Xbox Two was right around the corner? Even after Microsoft has revealed the Xbox One S, an Xbox One console with 4k video capabilities, the question now is, why would you buy an Xbox One S when Project Scorpio is right around the corner?

What's worse is that it seems that Microsoft is less sure about what Project Scorpio will be than we are. Oh sure, 6 teraflops is being bandied about, and something about memory bandwidth (it has the right RAM, this time), but we also know that every Xbox "Exclusive" title will be day and date released on PC to Windows 10 users. Project Scorpio is going to end up being the Microsoft version of a Steam Machine. A PC-lite that plays all those cool Microsoft games... that you buy and play on PC.

And with cross-network play, why even get an Xbox at all? I can see a need for those that don't want to pay out the nose for a PC gaming rig, I guess, but otherwise, Microsoft's strategy is just baffling.

I'm very curious what is happening in the corporate strategy meetings over at Sony Interactive Entertainment. Sony has been uncharacteristically adroit in navigating the turgid waters of this current generation of video gaming. At first, I was a bit surprised to hear that Sony would announce NOTHING about Neo at this E3. "Surely, they must provide answers," I thought to myself.

Microsoft's somewhat confused strategy leads me to believe that Sony is once again making the superior play, here. Why make announcements when there is so much left to determine?

So, to you, console gamer, I only say: just wait and see what happens. It may be 2017 before it really makes sense to buy another console.

Wait, what's wrong with Halo 5? Latest reports are that Halo 5 has racked up $1.5m in microtransactions. Well, ok, that's maybe not a lot, especially when compared with Grand Theft Auto Online which has raked in over $500m in microtransactions. Clearly, people are willing to spend a LOT of money on video game microtransactions. So what is Microsoft doing wrong?

Stop trying to make CCG's a thing.

Video games are at the same point tabletop games were back in like '97-'99. Everyone thought CCG was the best model ever because holy balls MTG is crazy popular! Thing is, your base game really needs some solid gameplay that synergizes with the CCG aspect of chasing rare cards. Many good games were released, like Netrunner, Legend of the Five Rings (which just recently went under and was sold to FFG to become a LCG), Battletech, Decipher's Star Wars CCG, and others. I would argue that these games (except for Magic: The Gathering) really made poor use of the CCG business model, and in some ways are hurt by it.

Legend of the Five Rings is a very solid game that has a lot of strategic depth and interaction, and is probably near the top for card games, at least in my opinion. But I think the CCG aspect ends up hurting a game like that in the long run because of how deep the game is.

Magic: The Gathering is, on its face, a rather simplistic game, truth be told. This simplicity mitigates with gameplay some of the pay2win aspects that are inherent to a CCG model. An even better example of this is Hearthstone. It is even simpler than Magic, but by all measures is very successful as a CCG.

The CCG (Collectible Card Game) business model is absolutely the worst part of the traditional games industry, i.e. tabletop games, etc. Now that every CCG has died out except for MTG, much better models are gaining popularity, like LCG (Living Card Game) and minis games like X-wing.

Right now, the video games industry is still in the phase of trying to copycat the success of Candy Crush and other mobile microtransaction games.

Here, Rod Fergusson head of the Gears of War sweatshop, er studio The Coalition, displays an amazing misunderstanding of how CCG's work.

"I feel like that paradigm of cards is really clear to understand for collectibles, like the ability to collect things. We had weapon skins and character skins, so that idea of collecting cards is just easily understood. It felt like it added some engagement in terms of its not the, 'Oh, I like Tiger Stripe. I bought Tiger Stripe. I'm done. I don't need to engage with that system anymore. There's no need for me to hang around.'"

"I like the idea of why you buy Magic: The Gathering booster pack," he added. "If I could just buy the one card I want then I'm out, then you lose it, right?"

He thinks people come back to CCG's for the "collectible" aspect alone. And yeah, as far as MTG is concerned, you can just buy the one card. The internet and game shops are full of vendors that willing to sell you MTG singles. The second-hand market has always been a huge part of collectible cards.

However, Hearthstone and MTG work precisely because they are more than card collection, but just barely so. I could get into how CCGs create pay2win scnearios and how Hearthstone/MTG sort of nullify those concerns, but suffice it to say that none of those things are in play with Gears of War 4.

Nah, it was bad all along, it just took me a while to figure it out because I spent so much time just walking and wandering around.

But hey, how about that Firewatch?

Meanwhile, everything else sucks. Take The Division, for example. Something like 6 million people played the beta and then the game itself still somehow managed to sell 4-6 million copies. If I'm wrong about The Division being a bad game, just let me know in the comments, but I don't understand how that many people can buy garbage like that. I guess they are having fun, though.

The Division. Oh just kidding, I did the one story mission available in the beta, then it suddenly became very very boring. I already played Destiny, thanks.

For me, this mostly boils down to playing a few days after a new season starts, get a couple characters to level 70 and then moving on to other things. I thought this season would be more of the same, but it's starting to look like that assumption could be proven very wrong with the start of Season 5.

This season started out like the others, an initial flurry of power-leveling and grift-running while building a decent outfit of legendary and set items. Then, optimizing and re-optimizing to get through tougher and tougher grifts... in order to get more legendary and set items. Hopefully, during all this, one manages to nab those all-important season-specific legendaries.

Now, things are different. At first, it was a bit of a let-down. They're just giving away these set items? What's the point of that? As I ticked through season challenges, I eagerly awaited those Haedrig loot mails. Once I possessed all seven pieces of Firebird's Finery (pronounced Fire-bert) I had but one season challenge remaining: Finish your class set dungeon.

I rolled into Leoric's manor with my 6-set bonus, bringing down the denizens with my usual aplomb. I peeled open the Tome of Set Dungeons and grasped firmly the newly acquired Page 112. "Go to the one place and do a thing." Huh?

"Go look up the location on a wiki or something." Oh, right. Got it. Away I went. So, I sauntered up to the set dungeon entrance (after an appropriate time wandering lost through the Desolate Sands). Up popped my first set of objectives. Something something burn 20 things 6 times blah blah whatever.

Whatever. The point of this meandering diatribe is that the set dungeon is frigging hard. "Harden the eff up" levels of hard. "Git gud" levels of hard. I thought I would've been done and tired of this season in a few days here, but now I gotta go back to grifting and craft the perfect combination of artifacts and skills that will let me defeat this thing and get the highly sought after season awards of a rinky dink portrait decoration and maybe something else, a pet? I don't even know? doesn't matter anyway gotta go.

This has been a banner year for disappointment in video games. When the games aren't devoid of interesting story or gameplay, they're riddled with debilitating bugs, graphical glitches, multi-gigabyte day one patches, all seemingly made worse when games are ported to PC.

Console-itis used to mean at worst wretched UI and horrible controls, now you're lucky if all it means is dreadful FPS and rampant crashes to desktop. If you're unlucky, it might mean the game is pulled from PC completely leaving you wondering "Why on earth did I spend $3000 on this gaming PC?"

It's hard to say exactly when things started going so badly for video game consumers. Certainly, bugs and day one patches are nothing new. We find ourselves, however, at the center of a whirling dervish of mediocrity. A perfect storm, if you will, of several conspiring factors.

Everything Counts in Large Amounts

Microtransactions and ridiculous DLC are worth mentioning first in this cavalcade of broken dreams. When we aren't losing huge swaths of gameplay to the reaper's scythe of Season Passes, we're inundated with "micro"transaction schemes that would put the most devious of Ferengi to shame.

It's easy to point to games like Star Wars Battlefront and complain about lack of content, but what about Double Fine's Broken Age controversy? What about Double Fine's Spacebase DF-9 controversy? Oh hey, have you heard that Tim Schaefer wants to crowdfund more things? -__-

DLC and downsized crowdfunding are really just the other side of the microtransaction plug nickel. Developers and publishers are quick to defend schemes like Halo 5's REQ Packs by stating emphatically that everything can be earned "whether you spend money or not."

Oh, great! How did that work out?

...Oh.

And don't get me started on MGS V. Konami doubled down on the already frustrating FOB system by increasing the amount of resources that could be stolen by other players through online FOB raiding missions. But after the game had been out a few weeks, Konami released an update that added FOB insurance. As they describe it, "Your FOBs are always at risk of coming under attack. Now, you can rest easy with FOB insurance (paid service). If you sign up for insurance, then during the insurance period you will be compensated for any materials and staff lost due to rival infiltrations."

Oh, and then they increased the amount of resources that would be vulnerable to online FOB missions. That was when I stopped playing. The ostensibly multiplayer features were now directly impacting my experience in single-player. I said don't get me started.

Technical Difficulties

Idiotic cash grabs notwithstanding, this generation of gaming has been a huge disappointment, technically speaking. We can look back on the Xbox 360/PS3 era with some fondness as we remember features that we used to take for granted turned into quivering shells of their former selves on Xbox One/PS4.

Gone are the halcyon days of functional and user-friendly party and group chat features, built-in media players (without downloading an app), and fast, snappy UI menus that give you quick and simple access to the features you want to use most like friends' lists.

The PS4 has somewhat improved in terms of UI, especially when it comes to sharing screenshots or video, but the social aspects are still severely lacking in usability.

Then there's the Xbox One. The NXOE is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Supposedly, the goal of this whole ordeal was to speed up the response time of the UI, improve usability and user experience, and lay the groundwork for Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (i.e. running Windows 10 apps on the Xbone).

What it actually did is take an already slow platform and make it downright retarded. They actually ended up making things harder to find and there is just as much delay in loading features as there was on the old dashboard.

And then there's the Wii U but who cares.

Lipstick on a Pig

It's one thing to release remakes and HD remasters, but to add insult to injury, for the most part these have been pretty terrible. Halo Master Chief Collection and Gears of War Ultimate Edition stand out as being especially egregious, with Halo MCC being horribly broken for several months after release, and Gears of War somehow looking worse, and performing worse than the original did on Xbox 360. :slowclap: Great job on those, idiots.

Sony's platform has no shortage of horrible remakes coming down the pipe. Everyone begged and pleaded Square Enix to release a Final Fantasy VII remake, and what did you expect? That Square Enix would somehow spare FF7 from the horrible linear snoozefests that have dogged the series since it's PS2 days? To paraphrase Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of St. Neots, you're an idiot if you thought that.

2015 was an awful year for video games, there's no way around it. Whether you were disappointed by Star Wars Battlefront, Halo 5, or Fallout 4, may your 2016 be a happy joyful one spent playing outside in subzero temperatures freezing your balls off because that will be preferable to playing whatever hot garbage the game industry poops out of its distended collective anus this year.

The slam dunk move by Sony would've been funding Star Wars Battlefront as a PS+ title. It's goofy casual multiplayer-lite that looks amazing, and Sony could've run a huge promotion: "Subscribe now and play Star Wars online for no additional cost!"

EA would've gotten a fair amount of [s]idiots[/s] consumers that would be willing to plonk down some cash for DLC on a free title like that (see Rocket League), but nope... GOTTA HAVE MAH $110!

This is so easy to do, why are these industry execs so damn stupid? Put me in charge of Sony and no one will even remember that there were other consoles.