Diablo III

[Cider_Steve]

Originally Posted by Shadout

Cider, I stumbled upon the answer to the question you earlier about others joining your games.
It turns out that you can indeed prevent friends from joining (against your will) as well.

By turning this option off:
http://i49.tinypic.com/23vg7pc.jpg

Thankyou, though that wasn't quite what I meant. My fault for not explaining myself fully.

As I have never joined Battle.net before and have only ever played Diablo games as stand alone, I was unsure of what happens when you want to log on and play.

Whether you have a limited number of rooms, a bit like Sacred had & if you would have to jump in a room that was already full of other gamers & if so whether you can just play at any point in that game or whether other gamers will have already killed everything and done the quests ?

If I am first in a room, then I will not be trying to block others out. I am more worried about me getting on in the first place.

[Shadout]

Ah. I certainly misunderstood then.
There are no rooms in the Sacred 2-sense. Every single player, no matter if it is millions, can have their own gameworld running at the same time.

Technically I dont think its is any different from Sacred 2 tbh. Since Asceron started to have problems the server cap simply got drastically reduced. If they had millions of players they would probably also have had millions of "rooms" available.

[Xrystal]

Sounds like it is similar to Diablo III. You play it like a single player game but you can invite friends to join you and you can play together... so kind of multiplayer but not totally like WoW etc.

edit: OOps, forgot it was DIII that was coming out and DII the one I used to play ...

[Shadout]

Regarding quest progression, and "what is already killed in the game world", I know you aren't asking about it Cider, but it works in a rather weird way, so Ill explain it anyway, sorry :P It has confused a lot of people (me included).

In Diablo 3 you essentially pick which quest to start from, whenever you start the game. As standard it will start from the same quest as you left from last time you played.
You obviously cant pick a quest further ahead in the story than you have already progressed. But you can go back and restart an earlier quest again, doing it over and over - and still get XP and gold bonus for completing it (Not unlike Free mode in Sacred 2).
If you go back and redo a quest,the game still remembers how far you have got earlier, so you can always jump back ahead again, to progress further. However, it requires you to start up a new game (or room in the S2-sense) every time you want to switch quest backward. Forward you can of course just progress through the quests, but if you want to skip fast forward, it requires a new game/room as well.
As such the quests are 100% linear - one after another - however only the main-story quests are called quests here, and everything I've written here is only im terms of these main quests. Side-quests a la Sacred are called events instead. Which btw are randomly spawned each time you start a new game/room. You will not find the same "event-quests" in the same areas (or at all) in every game-session.

The whole quest-selection thing is simple enough, but its effect on the game world (and what has been killed) is where it matters, and deviates a lot from earlier Diablo games.
If you for example decides to start your game from a quest in Act 2, then ALL bosses (as in main story bosses) and quests before that point in time will already be dead/done. You can't go back to those areas and kill the bosses again or do the quests again in this specific game session.
Likewise you cant start from the first quest in Act 2 and jump forward to kill all the bosses in Act 2, you will have to do all the main quests in-between to get there.

So, if you join a friends game and they are in act 2, all bosses and quests in act 1 will be inaccessible - even though they didnt kill these bosses in the particular game-session.
You probably wont be allowed to join them in act2 if you haven't completed act 1 - but since only a small portion of act 1 was in the beta, nobody could test that.

All this basically means that you cant have a game running where you intend to jump from boss to boss to kill them - or pick up quests in a non-linear way. Even when you complete the whole main story, you will still have to go pick a previous quest to start your next game from (at least if you ever want to kill another boss again).

Not that the jumping from boss to boss matters much here, as the bosses aren't dropping better or more loot than random elite enemies (which very different from Diablo 2), but even if you wanted to do this, it wouldn't be possible.

[Cider_Steve]

Many thanks indeed for posting all that info Shadout. Much appreciated.

I'm certainly looking forward to playing the game, though I always worry about being judged in mp. I don't rush through games like some do and I like to take my time and enjoy doing everything I can rather than rushing from boss to boss. I respect each person's gameplay, as we have all payed for the game and should be able to play in our own style. I'll just have to try to find folk with a similar style/patience as me, or play solo...........if that is even possible.

Steve.

[Shadout]

Personally I'm going to solo the game 99% of the time (that is, if I end up liking it at all...). I kinda hate playing with random people, where I can't control the speed of the game, or can't taken a sudden break, just because I feel like it.

Had it the same way with Sacred.

[Spock]

Originally Posted by Cider_Steve

... I'll just have to try to find folk with a similar style/patience as me, or play solo...........if that is even possible. ...

ME! ME! Pick ME! (Shades of High School tryouts ...)

I feel the same way. I would like to suggest we get together a group who are likely to be able to play at about the same time each week. Once we have our group formed, we could then create a special character to be used only when playing in and with the rest of the group.

Only if a group member missed a game session would they then be expected to use their special character in a SP session in order to bring its level to par with the rest of the group?

Obviously, the 'group' may not even survive its first game session but at least it's something we can be doing while waiting for the game to become available.

[DaGirl]

Originally Posted by Cider_Steve

I'll just have to try to find folk with a similar style/patience as me, or play solo...........if that is even possible.

I'm soloing right now so it's possible, but if you ever get lonely (not sure how to cross region servers yet, but I read that it was possible) from what I gather (I too was never big on MP, especially in Diablo) it looks like battletags are how you find folks. If that's correct, you can find me with DaGirl#1642

Now I'm off to kill (lol, got it all installed and ready to go and login - 8 minutes after they took the servers down They seem to be back though, so wheeeeeeee, let the carnage begin!

[Xrystal]

Just finished installing my freebie copy from them and I'm on there as .... grr Xrystal#1392 but where I'm connecting via US servers for my WoW friends you may not see me ... of course thats assuming that I can't switch and the non US servers aren't down too.

Well US Servers are having problems but it looks like you can choose which servers to connect via so have a couple of characters set aside for Europe access.

[Spock]

I've been playing it off and on all day. The problem is my daughter loaned me a new PS3 game that I've been playing as well as a couple of others and I'm also helping to test out yet another game ...

What's that old saying, "When it rains, it pours!"

[Cider_Steve]

*Waves to Xrystal & DaGirl* Hope you bad girls are well ?

Originally Posted by Spock

I've been playing it off and on all day. The problem is my daughter loaned me a new PS3 game that I've been playing as well as a couple of others and I'm also helping to test out yet another game ...

What's that old saying, "When it rains, it pours!"

Spock mate, get onto FDM and there is a thread where everyone puts thier Battle tags. If you post it there we can keep an eye out for eachother ingame and play or chat. Lots of nice folk on there last night.

Bye for now,

Steve.

Oh, btw.................D3 rocks !!!

[ThorinOakshield]

Well, I got the game and there are only 2 disapointments for me (so far).

1st is the linear map. For a game develloped in these times, an open map should be a better idea. No matter if you can jump between portals or re-do missions or not.

2nd are game controls.
The fact that you can't use the WASD-keys, and only can assign one key to movement, no turning of the map is really killing my wrist. Right now I've assigned a key to movement, meaning you move where the mouse is pointing.

Both things make me wonder if an develloper of Dungeon Siege was involved.

The good - correction: excelent! - storyline, nice graphics and gameplay make up for that though.

In any case, I'm on the European side of the big pond. It's very likely I'm going to hook up with an old S1 buddy soon. Anyone who'd like to know my battletag can send me a PM.


Thorin

[Xrystal]

Yeah, I was having similar problems. Kept trying to turn around with the mouse like I did in WoW. Then my friends reminded me the controls are the same as in the old diablo 2 game, isometric. Kinda glad it was a free game for me as I would have been sorely disappointed it wasn't proper 3D considering it was a new game.

Also it seems those that got it free from blizzard got a region free version so I can play on both EU and US servers just by toggling which to connect to before logging in.

[Cider_Steve]

I haven't been bothered by the map tbh. More than happy to press tab and suss out the area. Like you say, just like D2.

IMHO, the game is fantastic. I wasn't sure what it would be like considering that it is a different team and the length of time to make, but I'm very happy indeed.

[Llama8]

Originally Posted by Xrystal

Also it seems those that got it free from blizzard got a region free version so I can play on both EU and US servers just by toggling which to connect to before logging in.

Everyone can Xrystal. In fact, IIRC, you could in D2 as well.