Tag: dungeon crawl

2086: Souls: Reaped

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I finally got around to beating the Diablo III: Reaper of Souls campaign today. I originally wasn’t going to bother, as I was primarily interested in playing the new(ish) Adventure Mode rather than grinding through the campaign again, but I found myself enjoying the experience more than I expected, particularly in Act V.

I often think of Blizzard games as being rather weak on the story front. There are exceptions, of course — Warcraft III was particularly strong, for example — but on the whole, I’ve never really come to Blizzard games for the story. They are masters of their art when it comes to gameplay, but when it comes to storytelling, there are people out there who do it a whole lot better.

Or at least, that’s what I’d been thinking. But replaying the Diablo III campaign and having my first run through the Reaper of Souls Act, I was actually quite surprised to see some reasonably decent writing along the way. I mean, the overall plot is still the sort of thing an angsty teenager would come up with if they wanted to write something dramatic (Angels! Demons! Eternal Conflict! Killing death itself!) but the individual moments that you encounter along the way are actually pretty good, even if some of the more supposedly “shocking” moments — the death of Cain, for example — were underwhelming due to their presentation.

I played through the campaign as the female Wizard, who has an endearingly posh voice and a penchant for sarcasm. Consequently, I found myself liking her a whole lot, which is not something you can usually say about the mostly-mute protagonists of loot-whoring dungeon-crawling action RPGs. Her interactions with some of the more tiresome characters — such as the perpetually grumpy head of the angels — were particular highlights for me. “Know this, nephalem,” he said. “You may defeat Malthael, but I will not thank you for it.” “No,” replied my character, sighing. “Of course you won’t. And that’s part of your charm.”

Since I’d already levelled my Wizard a fair bit in Adventure Mode before running through the campaign, I hit the level cap well before the end and started earning Paragon experience. The last time I played Diablo III, this system wasn’t in place, so I was interested to see how it worked. Turns out it makes for an enjoyable endgame experience that doesn’t rely on long-winded grinding for currency or large amounts of effort for relatively small, incremental amounts of progress. It would be completely inappropriate for a full-on MMO, mind you, given that it has the potential to totally unbalance your character if you put the time into it, but for Diablo, which has always been a series about seeing how big you can make the numbers that pop out of monsters when you smack them in the face, it’s perfect.

If you’ve never capped a character in Diablo III and are curious, the Paragon system works like this: once you hit the current cap (level 70) your experience bar turns blue from its original orange, but you continue to earn experience as you did before. Early Paragon levels cost considerably less experience than the top end of the regular levels (7 million XP to go from regular Level 70 to Paragon Level 1 vs 83 million XP to go from regular Level 69 to 70) but the amount required increases gradually as you gain levels.

Gaining a Paragon level gives you a point to spend in one of four categories in turn. Your first point is in the Core Stats category, which includes your class’ primary stat, which affects damage; Vitality, which affects your maximum HP and defence; Movement Speed, which is self-explanatory; and Maximum Resource, which is the thing your character spends to use skills or cast spells. Your next point is in the Offense category, which includes attack speed, critical hit rate, critical hit damage increase and cooldown reduction. Then there’s the Defense category, which includes maximum life, armour rating, your natural regeneration rate and bonuses to your resistances. Then your fourth point goes in the Utility category, which includes area damage, the amount of life you get back per successful hit on an enemy, the amount of bonus gold you find and a reduction to the costs of your skills. Once you’ve spent a point in each of the four categories, your fifth goes into Core Stats, your sixth into Offense and so on.

The interesting thing about the Paragon system is that it’s account-wide — in other words, your Paragon level applies to all your characters, even the ones that aren’t yet at the level cap. This means that you can make levelling subsequent characters much easier if you have a decent Paragon level, because they’ll be operating at a considerably stronger level than they would normally be otherwise. What’s also quite nice is the fact that you can redistribute the Paragon points whenever you like (so long as you’re not in combat) and each character can have a different setup as you see fit; the “shared” part is just how many points you have available.

Now I’ve beaten the campaign properly, I can focus on Adventure Mode, and now I’m at level 70 I can investigate some of the really interesting stuff like Greater Rifts and tracking down the Keymaster monsters. Endgame Diablo III certainly sounds like an intriguing time, and certainly a far cry from the completely non-existent endgame that it launched with. I’m glad I’m coming to it now, though; having experienced MMO endgame play in Final Fantasy XIV, I now understand the appeal of an endgame and why Diablo III needed one, whereas when I originally played the game I didn’t really get why people seemed to be so annoyed that it was lacking in level-cap content.

Anyway. Time for bed before I get tempted to try and reach Paragon Level 30 this evening…

1551: Late-Night Dungeon

I’ve been dipping in and out of Demon Gaze since I wrote about it a few days ago, and while it has a few issues here and there — the discussion of which I’ll save until my review on USgamer, coming next week — I’ve been really rather impressed with this game.

In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement; on more than one occasion now the game has kept me up until well past 3 in the morning after I thought I’d just flip the Vita on for a “quick” game in bed before I went to sleep. (Granted, the last occasion this happened — last night — I had had far too much caffeine throughout the course of the day and was consequently finding it very difficult to sleep, but I could have done anything else with that time, and I chose to spend it lying in bed playing Demon Gaze.)

I’ve been trying to pin down what’s so enjoyable about it and it’s honestly quite difficult. It’s not that there’s no obvious good features about it; it’s that they blend together somewhat, and different aspects of the game appeal in different ways according to the conditions under which you’re playing.

Playing late at night, as I was, I was particularly enjoying the dungeon-crawling aspect of it. It’s not quite as hardcore as the 3DS series it’s taking pot-shots at, Etrian Odyssey in that you don’t have to map the damn thing by hand, but it’s still a game that, from the very outset, doesn’t hold you by the hand and expects you not only to work things out for yourself but also to experiment with the mechanics just to see what happens.

The core game structure is based around capturing demons. In order to do this, you must explore the dungeon that is the demon’s domain and capture all of the “circles” throughout by tossing a gem into them and then fighting the slobbering monsters that come out. Win, and you’ll capture the circle as well as receive an item according to the gem you tossed. Lose, and, well, you’re dead and better hope you had a recent save.

For the most part, this isn’t an issue. The monsters that come out of the cirlces are usually the same monsters you get in the rest of the dungeon, though sometimes in considerably larger numbers. As such, if your party is well-equipped to batter its way through the monsters in the dungeon, they can probably deal with the groups that come out of the circles.

Until the demon master of the dungeon shows their face unexpectedly, that is. You’re set up to believe they won’t turn up until you’ve captured all the circles and found the boss fight location, but in actuality what happens is some time around when you capture about half of the circles in the dungeon, the next one you try for will summon the demon. And it’s entirely possible they will smash your face in and then wear your buttocks as a hat, particularly in the first dungeon where your characters likely still aren’t all that powerful or well-geared.

The first time this happened, I thought I’d done something horribly wrong. Surely the game balance couldn’t be that broken? I experimented a bit; did the demon only come out of one circle, or all of them? (All of them.) Was it every time? (No, but seemingly most of the time.) Did using special abilities help? (A little.) Did levelling up help? (A lot.) Did better equipment help? (Also a lot.) By the time I’d reached my own conclusions — I should have just run away the first time I encountered Mars, then come back better-equipped and better-trained a little later, and probably with a healer in tow — it felt enormously satisfying to take the demon down and effectively clear the dungeon.

There are more subtle things, too. Occasionally you’ll find “Loot Maps” as random treasures in battle, for example, and these will give an area name, an X and Y map reference and the name of the “power” you need to reveal the hidden treasure at that location. Trouble is, the area name never matches the actual area names — “Garden of Thorns” becomes “The Vine-y Land” — so you have to use a bit of your own brainpower and deduction to figure out what it’s referring to. (Pro-tip: if the grid reference the map is pointing to appears to be a solid wall miles away from anything, you’re probably looking at the wrong area.) You also have to figure out which of the demons the “power” names refer to — rather than saying “you need Comet, Mars or Chronos” it’ll say something like “requires Dragon power” or the like. Again, there’s a wonderful feeling of smug satisfaction when you successfully decipher a map and uncover the treasure hidden in the location — particularly when the treasure in question is something that you’ve been searching for for hours for a quest.

Demon Gaze doesn’t give up its secrets easily, then, but for me, this is proving to be one of the best things about it as it makes your victories feel like genuine accomplishments. I’m looking forward to working my way through the rest of the game not only to see how the interesting story proceeds, but also for more sweet old-school grid-based exploration and treasure-hunting.

It’s bringing back fond memories of old titles like Lands of Lore, it of the Patrick Stewart-voiced intro fame, and will be a solid investment for any Vita-toting players who have a penchant for traditional dungeon-crawling. Watch out for it — and my full review — this week.