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Diablo 2 Goes Gold
A number of people wrote with the press release from Blizzard that Diablo II has gone gold. I've been playing CowboyNeal's stress copy (Barbarian only) and it's really cool. (CT:Slashdot may be down the week those things hit the shelves ;)
That's pretty cool that you'll go ahead and take a week off from telling everyone how cool linux is, how cool people who use linux are, and making money off of a lot of people who use linux - to play a fucking game that's only being released on windows/mac. I appreciate your support, Taco. Thanks, man.
Attention Blue Lang: this is internal support. We have detected a malfunction in your Humor Module: stand by for repairs.
We have also determined that you require updated versions of "Lighten the Hell Up" and "Don't be a Zealot". We recommend you download these into your Soul Kernel at your earliest convienience.
Us lucky Stress Testers get to play pretty much right up until we have the retail version. I must go play Diablo II Stress Test now...
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Dear Battle.net Stress Testers,
We wanted to personally notify you that Diablo II has gone gold and the master CDs have been released to manufacturing. We
expect the game to begin shipping to stores worldwide as early as the end of June.
Even though the game has gone gold, the stress test will continue throughout the next couple of weeks. The optimization of
servers is completely independent from the game going gold, so you will continue to see network improvement up until
launch. We also will be sending out access keys to European and Asian gamers shortly, so we can fully test those local
servers prior to the game hitting stores as well.
We encourage you to continue playing over the next few weeks to help us test the servers as much as possible before the
game ships. We will email you prior to the stress test ending.
Thank you for the hours you have committed to playing Diablo II on Battle.net. We hope that you will enjoy the game.
Blizzard Entertainment
While I thought it was cool to get to be a tester, the game didn't impress me much. The servers were down a bunch and even now it's not uncommon to get booted off a game.
:)
:(
The lag is terrible (even with dual-channel isdn), although funny to watch. The thing that might change my mind is if they make it so "going hostile" has to be done by both parties. Once you hit level 9, you can go out in a group only to have some level 14 person come in and go hostile and you have to decide whether you want to back to town and turn off hostile or hope they don't find you
(And lag really hurts here, I once got killed and never even saw the guy who killed me, he was off the screen one second, and I was dead the next, never saw a single swing...
Absolutely, I was one of the closed testers also (look for Seth Bokelman in the game credits :) ) and it was a much more enjoyable experience than the stress test. I've been telling all of my friends that the game is easily worth buying the day it comes out, I wasted numerous hours just playing as the Paladin character class, I never even had time to get into the other four!
There's much more that varies between the character classes than there were in the first game. The skill trees have some really unique stuff to them, I can't wait to see the really high-powered spells that the sorceress and necromancer classes have.
This is a sequel, much like Microsoft's Age of Kings, which is truly much better than it's forebearer, it's not simply a glorified expansion pack, or a couple new features, but a completely new experience, using all of the elements that made the first game a giant success, yet improving every aspect of the gameplay in a logical and much-appreciated manner.
Go Blizzard, I've gotta order my copy now, it's too bad we closed beta folks didn't get a free copy, but TANSTAAFL...
I do wish they hadn't made the closed list public, I got e-mail from people I didn't know asking me if they could get my CD Key, etc.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Actually, no, not 4, 3. Originally it might have been 4 CDs.. But take a look at this post by Blizzard employee Geoff Frazier.
...when Diablo II comes out, how many of us would even notice for at least a week? :-)
Far too often, outrageous system requirements are a result of the programmers being [too lazy | under too much pressure from Marketing] to take the time to write good, clean code. Hell, if I didn't care about optimisation, I could write my own version of Pong that would need a PIII to get more than 1 fps. (For that matter, the later versions of ZAngband don't run too well on my P200...)
And if length of development were the only thing contributing to system requirements staying low, then Daikatana should be able to run on ENIAC. Blizzard used that time for (among other things) making sure that the engine didn't get out of hand and force the system requirements up too much. The only change from the projected requirements was from a P166 to a P233, and I've heard more than one stress tester report that it runs decently on a P200 (64 meg RAM), and one on a P166 (32 meg). How many games these days can be played reasonably well on less than the "minimum" system? (How many can be played reasonably well on the "recommended" system, for that matter?)
Aero
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
Blizzard has said they will have the game ported to Linux as soon as there are sales figures to support it. Considering they're a small company and don't have free sources of income (ala Ion Storm), they probably can't afford to port the game if they won't make any money off the port.
How can you argue with that? Once there's enough Linux users who don't just go out and buy the Windows version but instead hold out for a Linux version to make the port profitiable, there will be a port.
Asking a Corporation to deliberately loose money to support an Operating System is pretty silly, you certainly can't expect them to do that unless they think there is PR to be gained from it that will outweigh the cost.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Now, all of my loser friends are going to be playing this game. And, you're telling me that I won't even have Slashdot?!?!?
What kind of a cruel world is this?
I'm going to have to sit around and READ BOOKS while you guys play this damn game.
I will go cry now.
No comment at this time
Yes, the servers went down often. Yes, it may be laggy at times, but what exactly is a stress test?
It's made to stress, even CRASH the servers. With the stress test, Blizzard makes sure it handles a proper load, and this is accomplished through coding and modification of their servers. They WILL take it down in order to do this. People think this will happen in the final version of the game, and believe me, IT WILL NOT happen as often, if at all!
I was a CLOSED beta tester and it wasn't down as much as the stress test! In fact, the closed beta test was awesome! Tons and tons of gameplay (much more expansive than the stress test) and only on about 1/3'rd the game!
IMHO Diablo 2 will be one of the most polished games to ever reach shelves! Don't believe disgruntled stress testers, they just don't interpret what 'stress test' really means!
BTW: for the curious: it seems Blizzard is using SunOS (Solaris?) for their servers. Go Unix..
Wait, I think I have that backwords. How and I supposed to get any quality time with my new game when I have this wife to be playing?
Hmmm ... that doesn't seem right either.
Ah yes ... multitasking. That's the answer. Can I run my wife in a window while the game is running?
Everyone gets down on Blizzard because their release date has slipped on Diablo II. They may not make ship dates, but they have been very persistient in trying to release quality games. They have also gone a long way to fix battle.net code to eliminate cheating, all the while keeping battle.net a free service. I think in the end they have given their fans and users great games that have become instant classics.
There might be some trainers, but nothing like what was seen on the first Diablo. That game pretty much worked by hooking four computers together, and with complete trust. If one computer told another, "I just tapped your character witha broken dagger, and I did 999999999999 points of damage!" The second computer would reply, "Oh, okay!" and precede to kill the character. Diablo II works on a completely different way. Closed Characters will live on Blizzard's computers. Calculations are done there. The only way someone could really cheat is to figure out how to hack into Blizzard's computers and control them. That's a ton harder than figuring out how to just talk to another computer. I suppose there could be some trainers, but they won't do much more than things like auto-attack, or display the map, or some small things like that.
With the mulitple character classes, the quest based episodes, and the addition of skills, I certainly think it earns the 2.0 distinction.
The minute to minute gameplay is virtually identical thought (walk around, click on the bad guys, look for loot).
How many people complained that Doom 2 wasn't different enough from Doom 1?
"It's just the same old Malibu Stacy with a new hat."
"But she has a new hat!"
-B
Simple. Install her as a server and let other people run her while you.... Uh, never mind.
In Diablo II, players return to a dark world plagued by evil forces. After possessing the body of the hero who defeated him, Diablo resumes his nefarious scheme to shackle humanity into unholy slavery by joining forces with the other Prime Evils, Mephisto and Baal.
-For a minute there I thought that was "Doubleclick" not "Diablo".
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Starsucks
At least one good thing came from the long length of time it took to create this new addiction : very reasonable system requirements. This goes to prove that you don't need bleeding edge (and expensive) hardware to play a great game.