Tag Archives: world of warcraft

Blizzard stuff

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For some reason I didn’t get a lot of positive feedback on my cool Frampt fan art.  What is wrong with you people!

Blizzard is going to be giving Diablo III away to those who have an annual subscription to World of Warcraft.  They’re also making a new, “Oh shit we screwed up” expansion to WoW in order to recover from the poor impact of Cataclysm.  There’s also a new trailer showing off the “monk” class, and the new Panda race, which looks the same as every World of Warcraft trailer: only good if you forget what the actual game is like.  I’m not going to link to it, because who cares.

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm has a trailer showing off the new units and campaign.  I was planning on getting all the expansions, but thanks to the Activision Effect™, I no longer care at all.  It will have to really win me over and prove itself before I put down the money.

Specifics on Diablo III’s online-only DRM problems

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RockPaperShotgun has detailed the ways in which Diablo III‘s online-only system will affect players, including being logged out in the middle of a game due to server problems or connections, a cooldown period, and no ability to pause the game.

According to John Walker:

You can’t pause. In fact, in most ways, the game acts like an MMO. For instance, quit it, and you’re given the optional cooldown to have your player clear the server properly. But it’s not an MMO. It’s not even close to an MMO. So when I’m playing the single-player game, and I’m in the middle of a frenzied mob, and there’s a knock at the front door, there’s nothing I can do. As happened to me yesterday. Twice. On another occasion I was surprised by a phone call that led to my having to do some other things. I’d safely left my character in a cleared area, but long between checkpoints. When I came back to the PC, I’d been idle for too long and the game had logged me out.

Being idle logs you out?  No pausing the game?  Dropped connections?  This is Diablo, not World of Warcraft.  No matter what the justifications for including an online-only Digital Rights Management system, or how many great “features” come with this connectivity, this is disappointing and unnecessary.  This wouldn’t bother me so much if Blizzard wasn’t a leader in the PC gaming field, being copied by dozens of other companies; they set the standard for what games should be doing.

Of course, the real blame still goes to Activision.

I suggest you read the full post, as it explains even more annoyances with the system.

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