Blizzard apparently still tinkering on Diablo 3

While we did not get a chance to play Diablo 3 in time for the 2011 Holidays there was a wide spread hope/belief that Blizzard was onto the last little bit of tweaking and that the game would be out in early 2012.

Now this post on the official Diablo 3 website makes this seems like a very unlikely prospect indeed.
Apparently Blizzard still have their hands deep down the proverbial bowels of the game and are currently changing and cutting several significant game mechanics.

"Actually, could we make it a FPS instead? Or maybe try a Sci-Fi setting!"

For example, the post details that Blizzard is currently reviewing the core stats and the benefits that they provide to player characters, which seems like something you would/should not be doing if you are planning to ship your game within the next few months.

Additionally this quote from Jay Wilson, Game Director for Diablo 3 does not exactly inspire much hope that we'll be clicking our ways through hellish hordes any time soon:

"There’s a lot of work left to be done, though. We’re constantly tuning and making balance changes; it’s a massive task. Some of these changes can be seen in the beta, like changes to item rarity, the levels at which we introduce affixes, and how many affixes enemies can roll up. Some you can’t see in the beta, like balancing the difficulty of the entire game for four different difficulty levels, adding tons of new affixes, creating legendary items, filling out crafting recipes and itemization, working on achievements, and implementing Battle.net features. We’re also working on a number of other large systems changes -- specifically with the skill and rune systems. We're not quite ready to share what those are just yet, but we look forward to being able to do so in the near future."


Oh dear... I don't want you to "share changes" with us in the near future. I want to *play the goddamn game in the near future!*

Oh well, I guess Blizzard will be Blizzard but I guess this means that we should probably not expect Diablo 3 any sooner than Q4 2012. I'll be happy if it just doesn't slip into 2013.



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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Demo Impressions

The Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo was just released yesterday on both Xbox, PS3 and PC (Available through Origin).
I've just finished playing through the demo on Xbox and I wanted to share with you my impressions of the demo. So read on and find out whether this is a reckoning that is going to reverberate with awesome delight through your spine or if it will go meekly into the cold darkness of the night.

"I really..really have to pee"

Let me preface my impressions by saying that I was initially not very interested at all in Reckoning. From the first footage I saw of the game it seemed like a rather generic fantasy RPG with some slightly interesting combat. But I gradually came around to Reckoning to the point that it ended up being one of the games I was most excited to play in 2012.

So when I was finally ready to fire up the demo and have a chance to poke around in the kingdoms of Amalur I was genuinely excited.Perhaps it is this level of excitement that resulted in the following disappointment.

*UPDATE* I just had the chance to play the PC version of the demo and I have to say that it was a much improved experience from the Xbox version. In particularly the combat feels smoother and faster and I found myself more easily being able to dodge enemy strikes.
I am still not impressed by the demo but at least the PC version made me feel much better about Reckoning.

Yep, the TL;DR version of my impressions can pretty much be summed up with "Meh, is that really it?".

For those looking for something a bit more in depth allow me to elaborate.

The Sith Journals - Part 2

My continued ramblings about my adventures in Star Wars: The Old Republic are now up over on MMOCrunch.com,

In this installment of "The Sith Journals" I get my hands on my very own starship

"The Sith Journals" are thoughts and musings that I have made about my experience of playing through SWTOR and are a little part review and opinions on the game and a very large part completely uninformative observations made by me.

In case you didn't catch the first part then you can also find that on MMOCrunch.com here.



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From ”Coming up next week” to ”What went down this week”

Also, I totally got a new Twitter and Facebook logo!

Dear people and peepettes, I want to take a minute of your time and make you aware of a small change that I'm making to Light Speed Gaming.

If you're one of my regular readers (I'm talking to both of you now, so pay attention), then you are probably familiar with the weekly “What's coming up on Light Speed Gaming” post that I do every Sunday.
In these posts I round up what I've had on the site during the week and also give a sneak preview on what I will be posting in the week to come.

I've been using these posts for a few different reasons:

1) It gives me a chance to sum up on all the content that I've made during the week and gives readers a chance to quickly look at the highlights and go straight to the posts without mucking about in my archives

2) It provides an appetizer for what I'll be posting on the site over the next week and hopefully provides you guys with some incentive for checking back during the week to see the advertised piece of content.

3) It acts as a roadmap for myself to follow when writing posts. Basically when I've done my “Coming up” post on Sunday I have a pretty good idea about the stuff that I will be writing about during the week.

Impressions of Heroes of Might and Magic VI - Old in all the right ways

I was 17 years old when the first ”Heroes of Might & Magic” came out in 1999. I immediately fell in love with the turn based fantasy game that mixed running your little kingdom and managing your castles with very entertaining and tactical turn based combat.

This week I've been playing the latest installment in the “Heroes” series, “Heroes of Might & Magic VI”, and I'm ready to give you my initial opinion on whether this latest in turn based fantasy kingdom management is still able to entertain.

Now, I stopped playing games in this series after the third game, which I felt was perhaps the best of them all. I played a little bit of Heroes IV and enough of Heroes V to know that I didn't care for that at all. So I was not completely thrilled about the prospect of jumping into Heroes VI.

The basic formula of Heroes VI is exactly like the five games that have come before it. You control one or several heroes traveling across a world map finding treasure, capturing resource nodes and visiting magical shrines.
The world is crammed full of stuff to find, so it's impossible to swing a dead Orc without hitting an ancient magical monolith or a gold mine.

A world of treasure and trinkets await!

Of course, most of these things are protected by some form of hideous monster or another, meaning you'll have to do a bit of wholesale slaughter before you can lay your grubby hands on your chosen prize.
Combat is again following the classic Heroes formula of taking you into a grid based field where your army is lined up on one side and the enemy army on the other. Your units then take turns trying to brutally murder each other until only one army is left standing.
Additional spice is added by your hero, who is not directly available on the board, but can cast spells from the sidelines which acts as buffs to your units, heals or just throwing large flaming balls of destruction down onto the heads of your foes.

As you roam through the countryside, butchering enemies and grabbing phat loot, you'll also come across enemy castles that you can attack and add to your kingdom.
Managing your castles is its own little game where you have to figure out what buildings you want to build and making a nice little bastion of doom. You'll have to build buildings that produce units as well as think of creating fortifications to repel enemy heroes trying to take over your castle, so it becomes a balancing act of focusing on the right type of buildings at the right time.

Like chess, only with demons, crossbows and magic

So far it's all sounding like any other Heroes game. Where Heroes VI differs just a little from the previous games is the increased focus on storytelling during the missions, which is conveyed partly through voiced over dialogue that pops up as you play through a mission, and partly through cut scenes.
This may sound like a not so great thing, especially considering that this exact increased weight on storytelling is why I disliked ANNO 2070, which is another strategy game that I have enjoyed immensely in the past.
But I think that the story parts are actually pretty well done in Heroes VI. That's not to say that the story is good, but it's certainly presented in a manner that makes it not an affront to humanity and does not immediately make you want to Alt+F4 out of the game.

So it's a Heroes game that follows closely all the traditions of the series with an extra helping of story? But is it any fun to play?

For me the answer to that is a definite “Yes”. There's something about the way that Heroes VI plays that made it immediately click with me in a way that I haven't clicked with a Heroes game since Heroes III.

"Open wide and I'll use my giant toothpick to get that piece of chicken for you"

Controlling your heroes on the world map feels snappy, as does controlling your army in combat.
There's also a lot of side quests to do during your missions and that helps to encourage you to explore every nook and cranny of the map and not just burn out on fighting monster armies for some random loot.

I'm also very pleased with the graphical design of the game, which is more simple and “flat” than what was in Heroes V and I think that the simplicity works very well for the game. There's a very clean aesthetic to the game that makes it really enjoyable to look at, though it certainly won't impress you with its graphical prowess in any way.

So far I've only played through the initial tutorial campaign and the first mission of the first proper campaign, so there's still a very long way for me to go before I can definitely say that this is a great Heroes game, but so far it's been pushing all the right buttons for me and I'm looking forward to getting back into the game and plowing through more of the game, and that's always a good sign!




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