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Top 5 Best Diablo Clones
September 1st, 2008As many of us awaits more Diablo III goodness to be trickle down Blizzard’s milky teat, there are more than a few games out there to provide us with our Diablo “fix”, as I like to call it. I’ve written up a list of 5 of what I think are the best Diablo clones.
Here’s a tiny snippet from the full article:
Dungeon Siege II
Let me say right off the bat that I hated Dungeon Siege. It wasn’t a bad game by any means, but nonetheless, I did not enjoy it. It played itself and all you had to do was click to move and spam the heal potion button every once in awhile. In stark contrast, Dungeon Siege 2 does not in fact play itself. In fact, I’d say that Dungeon Siege 2 is a lot of fun.
It’s set in a fantasy-steampunk world with clockwork devices, Uruk Hai-like legions of bad guys, crossbows, dryads who live in trees and elves. The story’s pretty run of the mill, but the locations are varied enough and the NPCs are somewhat interesting, though they are nowhere close to reaching Bioware-levels of character depth.
Titan Quest
Titan Quest is arguably the one Diablo clone that manages to capture the visceral feel of Diablo’s combat and take it to a whole new level. **** goes flying when you hit it with a bat. The only problem with all this hilarious brutality is that there’s no blood or dismemberment, so they feel like little more than indestructible ragdolls.
On the one hand, it’s very satisfying to see a monster go flying after you swat it with a maul, but on the other hand it’s very disappointing when they don’t explode into a fine bloody mist or have body parts flying away when you throw a fireball at them. It’s simply not vicious enough.
The rest of the article can be read at Hellforge @ Gameriot.
Diablo 3 to not feature Lan
August 26th, 2008There was a MASSIVE topic here on Lan at one stage when it was announced that it wouldn’t be in HGL…
So thought some people might like to discuss what repurcussions if any would exist in Diablo 3 for not having it as per the latest announcement by Jay Wilson.
This is from a translated interview by diablo3.4gamer.de
Diablo Source: Will there be an open Battle.net mode and a mode Lan?
Jay Wilson: Currently we plan to allow players, even offline. What we have done, however, the menu a little change. We want to encourage players in Battle.net to play. In Diablo 2 was the first option single player, you click it, playing the game in normal difficulty, and thinks: “Hey, I would now prefer to play with my friends.”, But could not, because if you look at the Battle . net connected, one could not take the character.We could not allow that, because we were the safety of characters not guarantee offline. There is still a separation between single player and Battle.net characters. We want all to know that it is better to play Battle.net. You can play with other players and if they want it they can close off their game alone games. If you decide it should, offline to play, then we will also be the player know that he is not in a position to be the character to play online. We currently have no intentions to LAN games, we focus fully on the Battle.net, where we not only have the ability to quickly contact with other players record, but also to Blizzard community and thus also to support , As in the community.
Hellforge Opens Its Doors
August 22nd, 2008With the ‘death’ of Hellgate: London and Mythos, the collective staff of Hellgate Guru have shifted our focus to the one game that holds the most promise in all of our hearts and minds: Diablo III.
With that in mind, we’ve created Hellforge — It is not your average Diablo III fansite. To us it’s all about the community. At Hellforge, you tell us what you want to say and share your views with our innovative blogging system. It’s easier than posting on a forum, and we have those, too!
You can also share your own videos and images by uploading them for all to see. Writing your own blog, responding to one, or simply posting on a traditional forum? It’s all up to you.
Be a part of something special and join the Hellforge community.
G4TV’s Adam Sessler Tackles Diablo 3 Haters
August 22nd, 2008
The video can be watched at Hellforge.
His vitriolic words are aimed towards those with ‘unreasonable’ complaints against Diablo 3’s art direction, and each of the player complaints are addressed one by one in the video.
EA Says: “We thought (Hellgate) would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be”
August 22nd, 2008Electronic Arts’ David DeMartini has granted an interview to GamaSutra about his plans with EA Partners, and he also touches upon the subject of the failure of Hellgate: London, a game that EA heavily invested in.
“We’re certainly sad with the results for Flagship and what’s happened with Hellgate, because at the time we signed it, we were trying to get involved in a very complicated relationship between Namco and Flagship.
We were coming late to the party, and trying to do whatever we could to sprinkle the game magic on the project and get it headed in the right direction.
I think that’s an example where all three parties had the best interest of the game in mind, and sometimes the game doesn’t work out. Hellgate is still an incredible concept.”
EA certainly performed its due diligence with the game, but DeMartini believes that at that point it was already too late for the damage to be undone, as most of the game’s fanbase had simply left. DeMartini elaborates:
“We were co-publishing with Namco. I’m not going to dodge a bullet — we had people who were actively working with them on the title.
We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we’d lost the fanbase.
It was strictly an issue of the gameplay and game quality needing to be higher at the start. Unfortunately, Flagship was in a situation where they weren’t in a position to hold the game any longer, and the situation kind of took over.”
So there you have it.
Hellforge Interviews Travis Baldree
August 19th, 2008A new studio called Runic Games has arisen from the ashes of Flagship Studios’ demise. I managed to get a hold of Travis Baldree, founder and president of Runic Games and formerly the creator of Mythos, to ask him a few things about his new studio and the plans he has in store for it.
Check it out here.
BlizzardGuru Becomes Hellforge
August 19th, 2008What was once Blizzard Guru is now Hellforge.
Hellforge is not your average Diablo III fansite.
We offer a more fully featured way for you to discuss Diablo III. Look, to us it’s all about the community. Any old fan site can post news, content… the typical stuff. But there are not a lot of sites out there that accommodate your opinions. None, in fact. To most sites, it’s all about listening to the staff and what they think.
With us, it’s about you. You tell us what you want to say. Just create a blog, and write a post. Put your opinions out there and be heard. It’s as simple as posting on a forum.
You can upload your own videos as well as images for all to see. Writing your own blog, responding to one, or simply posting on a traditional forum?
It’s all up to you.
Shipment of Fail: Bill Roper Talks About Flagship
August 18th, 2008
Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper has finally come out of hiding to grant an interview to 1up.com regarding the immenent closure of the aforementioned company, and a breakdown of the events that transpired during all these recent months, from the rumors that the company was in trouble, the fiasco over the Hellgate: London IP, and to the mass layoffs that took place most recently.
Roper was up-front about the problems with Hellgate: London, beginning with their failed revenue model:
“…when we originally came up with the concept of doing the game, the whole idea of continuing content was pretty amorphous. How that was going to happen, who pays for that — we all kind of assumed that would come out of the revenue. The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn’t a good contemplation early on of how that would work.”
Roper goes on to blame the ‘PC market’, among other things, for the failure of Hellgate: London, despite repeated press releases about the game’s supposed success in Korea. Never mind the fact that Blizzard and Valve managed to move several million in sales of their respective titles through traditional boxes as well as digital distribution (like Steam and Direct2Drive) in that year alone.
“Some of them were just bad timing in the PC market. The PC market was lousy last year. Some of it was the fact that we were an independent studio. We didn’t have unlimited money, and we had to ship when we had to ship. Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all….”
It’s true Hellgate: London saw over a million sign ups for its open beta in South Korea, but it’s readily apparent that only a small margin of these sign ups ever subscribed to the game, most of whom stopped playing the game. Hellgate sits at an abysmal 69th place with a less than 0.1% market share, according to the Korean game chart tracker.
Bill goes further in depth about the company’s failings as well as his personal reaction to the entire fiasco.
“I think that’s a thing that the general world never sees. They just assume, “These guys make games. They have this business. They did it. It didn’t work out. They move on.” It’s amazingly difficult from an emotional standpoint. You don’t start a company, two companies, and pour five years into doing something and not become emotionally attached. It’s impossible. For me, personally, it’s been incredibly difficult, because this is the first company I’ve ever started, you know, and been a part of. I kind of always lived and died by the games. As anybody could tell you, during the last days of Flagship, I was pretty much a wreck.”
“It’s pretty disappointing. I understand that, unfortunately, the Internet seems to be a haven for people who like to just get out there and throw out the most vitriolic and aggressive stance they can. But there’re no secret piles of money that the company’s somehow magically making. I haven’t been paid in almost two months, and I’ve been putting money out to try and get people taken care of. That’s the flip side. When people think, “Oh, wow, these guys are starting their own company. They’re gonna sell it. They’re multibillionaires!” They don’t really see the other side of it, that when that doesn’t happen, you continue to invest your lifeblood into it because that’s why you started it in the first place. When we started Flagship and the first nine of us were there working at Tyler [Thompson]’s house, we had to pay the guys minimum wage so they could legally be employees. None of us were sitting on tons of cash. We were burning through savings to get the company started up. The unfortunate ending on the other side is not that we made a good-but-not-great amount of money, so we let everybody go and kept that good amount of money. I think that we, again, were probably thinking more with our hearts than our heads, and any money that came into the company at all was turned around into chasing Hellgate — trying to make it better, doing the patches. We didn’t get a lot of support financially. We poured pretty much every penny the company had into doing that.”
In the great words of TF2’s Heavy:
Much, much more of the debacle can be read here for those with interest. It’s an eight page interview, so brace yourself!
Runic Games’ Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree
August 15th, 2008While not strictly related to Blizzard, we’ve been following the progress of the former Flagship Studios’ developers, so this is relevant.
GameCyte has a new interview up with two of them who have started a new studio, Runic Games, who are Max Schaeferand Travis Baldree. The interview delves deep into why the company moved, why they think FSS failed like it did. It specifically mentions the current state of FSS right now as well. Specifically Max makes an emphasis on the fact that for all intents and purposes Flagship Studios is closed down, and Bill is just there to finish off the closure.
Max then goes on to talk about his brother and his involvement with the team. It then goes on to talk about if FSS had any chance of staying open. They then talk of the sorts of games they want to make with the new studios.
Next they talk about the game’s (Mythos) differentiation with Diablo 3 and Sacred 2, as well as the whole colour issue in Diablo 3. Lastly they mention that Namco at the moment is just handling the box sales of Hellgate London, but there is no current knowledge of what they plan to do with the game later.
GameCyte: And you say Flagship Studios did close?
TB: Max, are they still kind of open?
MS: It’s barely open. It’s just open enough to take care of the final affairs, but for all intents and purposes it’s closed down.
GameCyte: We’d figured as much, but all we’d had was a press release saying “We’re still open!” “We still have our IP!” It’s hard to tell what’s actually going on.
TB: It’s a little bit of a new experience for all of us. (chuckles) We don’t exactly know the ‘proper’ way to close down a company. First and foremost, we’re just trying to take care of the debts and the employees in an orderly fashion, so Bill [Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios] and one or two other people have stuck around and are doing their best to get that done before we move on in different directions.
GameCyte: (to Max) What happened to your brother, Erich Schaefer? We noticed he’s no longer with Flagship.
MS: Well, for one thing he’s here in Michigan with me… and for another, he is one of the initial investors in Runic Games. He will be onboard with the company in one way or another from here on out. He is also a big fan of Travis and the Seattle guys and was more than happy to be able to contribute.
[...]
MS: We knew there was a possibility, but we were in very advanced negotiations with a couple of people for deals that would have kept Flagship open and would have kept everything running. And in fact, for a good while it was looking like a near-certainty that one of those would have come to fruition.
When they didn’t, we were far enough along that we were kind of even going past the point where we should have closed down the company, because it looked like such a surety that something was going to be closed, but there were a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiations occurring with multiple partners around the globe, some of whom were less than… ethical or honest, and it was just a very complicated mess. In the end, it was just too entangled to get a good deal in place, and so we had to close down. It was really kind of a wrenching, horrible period actually, and we learned a lot from it. We’d do things differently next time for sure.
We all were up all night, every night, not getting any sleep, working every day trying to get it to work out for everyone, and in the end it just didn’t.
[...]
GameCyte: I’m curious what kind of cues you might be taking from Blizzard on your next titles. Bill Roper once said Mythos was the most genuine Diablo title; but as Blizzard North becomes further fragmented, will you be able to make that kind of claim again?
TB: I think we’re kind of moving toward making a slightly different kind of title at this point. Diablo III is coming down the tracks, and I’d rather be on the tracks alongside them rather than directly in front of them when they come rolling through. What we really started to do with Mythos was make it more of a social action-MMO, where there was a shared overworld where people spent a lot of time interacting, and I think it’s important for the free-to-play microtransaction market for people to be able to spend time interacting face to face in larger groups, rather than “I only see you in the lobby and then I’m off with my party for the remainder of the time.”
TB: We still want the random, fast play experience that we had, but it’s important for us to differentiate ourselves from Diablo III and Sacred 2 as they come down the line by having that sort of shared community feel to the game. Auction houses, crafting, more traditional MMO trapping within the context of a game that’s much faster paced and doesn’t require the same sort of time commitment.
MS: Diablo III is not shaping up to be an MMO at all; Diablo III is in the vein of extending what Diablo II did. What we’re doing is taking the Diablo-style action and moving it into the MMO space, and not into the casual games space. The missions are different, and we’re really excited about Diablo III. We can’t wait for it to come out, just so we can play it, and we have nothing but respect for the Blizzard guys. They’re incredibly talented, and I know that Diablo III’s going to be a top-notch game. But, fortunately for us, we’re going in a slightly different direction.
GameCyte: I wanted to ask about the use of color in Diablo III. I know you’ve both spoken to interviewers about the art direction, and praised it for what it does, and since you’ve said you want to be on the tracks aside Diablo III instead of risking being… in front of it…
TB: (laughs)
GameCyte: Is there pressure to move in the same direction, and go for that bold, colorful style, or do you perhaps think that there might be an unserved market for dark action-RPG titles like the ones zealous Photoshop enthusiasts were making ’screenshots’ of?
MS: I’m loving this controversy, by the way. The same thing happened when we were making Diablo and Diablo II — there was a lot of criticism that it was just too gray and too dark, and that people wanted brighter colors. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t with these sorts of games. I think that the team that’s making the game should set the tone of the game, and shouldn’t try to make it something that someone else did… really, they have to create their own vision for the game, and be true to that vision.
Now, I love the really super-gritty, super-dark look of the original Diablos, but I also like what I’ve seen of Diablo III so far. I think both can be wonderful games. What we were doing with Mythos was even more bright and colorful than what Diablo III is shaping up to be, just because we were aiming at a little bit different market; it was going to be a global game, and in Asia they’re very much into the brighter colors and lighter atmosphere. I think also, since Mythos was a social game, something that you’re going to be spending a lot of time not playing, it’s something that you probably want a little bit more inviting atmosphere for.
TB: It also allows us a little more latitude in item sales; if people want to be heavily customizing their characters, there’s someone who always wants to walk around carrying a fish in a floppy hat.
MS: In Diablo I we had naked corpses stuck on stakes and it was really kind of gruesome… not where you’d want to meet your girlfriend and get married.
[...]
GameCyte: Regarding Namco, do you know what’s going on currently with the Hellgate: London forums and servers? It seems that Namco Bandai has taken over the forums, and may be moving towards the servers as well.
MS: They are continuing to operate it, and they are still participating in the boxed sales portion of Hellgate and obviously have an interest in keeping it going. So they are taking it for now, but I really don’t have much visibility into what their plans are.
Enjoy 
Google Ads Appear on Hellgate Forums
August 15th, 2008With Hellgate’s subscriptions in flux and darkness looming on Flagship Studios’ horizon, new interspatial Google ads have appeared on the official Hellgate: London forums.
Tigole has weighed in on the issue, with the following statement:
Heya Folks,
My guess is it is a test to see how things go. I put a call in to find out more information.
Uh-huh.
