Diablo 3 Follower Preview

Blizzard has recently talked a bit about how followers will work in Diablo 3 and I thought I should say a little something about it. Based on a particular blue post on the subject, the point of followers is to give people playing through on single player a bit of the feel of having a friend with them. The balance of the followers is such that they will be useful on the first playthrough, but will have a severe dropoff in usefulness on the harder difficulties, making multiplayer the much better way to play in the long run. Also, they can provide an introductory feel to multiplayer.

Followers also stop following you when you play with a friend. I personally plan to play the game with friends as often as I possibly can because I really enjoy the social interactions that come along with most of the games I play. To hopefully give you a feel for how followers work in game, here is the video Blizzard released showing follower gameplay.

Trying out Terraria

I decided to pick up a game I saw on Steam today called Terraria. It looked quite interesting being a side scrolling platform type game, but with elements of construction and harvesting. In a way it's very similar to Minecraft, but in only 2 dimensions. You can still build enclosures through the use of wall blocks and they feel a lot like a home you might find in an NES platformer. You can even place tables, and ledges and other things to decorate your homes.

Another good thing about the game is that there seems to be a large variety of enemies to fight in the world. The first thing I found was a green slime, and I hit it a few times to kill it, granting me some coins. Terraria also has some sort of economy built in. I've heard rumors that you can somehow create rooms and have NPCs appear in them that will buy and sell things with you by exchanging currency you get from killing things.

Another feature I enjoy is the large variety of weapons available to use. I logged into my friend's server shortly after installing the game to find people running around with tons of different weapons that I didn't expect. I felt overwhelmed in that world however and left shortly after to explore things a bit on my own single player world. There is a helper guy that starts with you that gives you some idea of how to get started. He recommends you chop down some trees and set up a workbench to craft more complicated designs on. I only had a short time in which I could play the game, so I barely scratched the surface of the many many items there are to craft. This is definitely a game I'll be playing more in the future.

For your information, this is the trailer for the game:

Darkspore Beta

So I got into the Darkspore Beta by using the "click here" link on the steam page and I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts on the gameplay. The first thing I noticed was that the game was actually and action RPG, which I didn't really expect. I saw that it was from Maxis (known for simulation games) and I expected something kinda like Spore. It was a very pleasant surprise to find that the core gameplay is essentially a hack and slash class-based RPG much like Diablo, or Torchlight. Without going into too much detail on other games, Darkspore stands out in the genre by having 100 different classes to choose from. That is actually a slight exaggeration I believe because they reuse a lot of the same types of skills but mix them up differently for the different classes.

A feature that Darkspore borrows from the original Spore game is the character editor, although it is much more restricted in Darkspore. Each class has a preset structure to it, but the player can customize many of the features in the same way that creatures in Spore could be modified. The textures on each monster that you control can also be varied, making it possible for each player to use a set of avatars that are entirely unique to that player. The one downside to this huge level of customization is that, with 100 classes, the player can quickly feel overwhelmed with the huge number of things that must be done to play all of the classes.

Another interesting thing about Darkspore comes in the way you choose which classes to use in a given level. Each player chooses 3 classes, and those classes can be switched to from whichever is the active one on a relatively short cooldown. That means that there are 100 choose 3 possible class combinations for a player to pick from on a given level. It also means that for a player playing the game alone, he can bring a healer, and tank, and a damage dealer class all together and switch between them as needed.

Probably the best thing about Darkspore is the automatic matchmaking system. If you want to play a game, you can choose to have the game pick people for you to play with, and the game quickly forms and starts. That also means that you don't have to dig through pages of password protected games just to find one that you can get into. I believe that automated matchmaking is a must for a title to be a quality multiplayer experience these days. Maybe I'm just spoiled because of how easy it is to get a good matchup quickly in other recent online games.