Diablo III is a hellish disappointment

20 May

Growing up I loved the Diablo series. Diablo II is actually where my name “Godless Paladin” Comes from. The paladin in Diablo II was holy warrior-super knight, clad in heavy armor, that waded into combat laying waste to hordes of minions.

I had an affinity for tank like characters, and so I picked him. Years later when I became an atheist and started this blog, I still was into medieval stuff, had a suit of armor of my own, and still loved the paladin, yet was now godless. The image of a righteous paladin without gods and masters came to mind. It was the best thing I could think of at the time, and so I ran with it.

But back to the game.

Diablo III was a game 11 years in the making. Production started in 2001, while Diablo II was still in the market. I have a theory that after a game’s development time passes around the 3-4 year mark, it’s going to be a really shitty game. Why? Well because it’s at that point that I imagine most of the delays to be originating from too much producer and executive input.

Creative people and programmers can come up with an idea and put it together. The speed at which they do that depends heavily on how much resources the company can allocate to the project. Blizzard is a massive company with almost no end in funds, with an extremely solid production history, so why the hell did it take 11 years?

I can only imagine that the producers kept trying to control how the game turned out, instead of giving the creative people room to be creative. That’s at least how the game feels.

The first thing that sticks out are the graphics. To some people, graphics don’t matter, they let their imagination do the work, but to people like me, they matter a lot. A beautiful game is really important to creating a feeling of immersion, the sensation that you’re there, and after all, that’s what gaming is all about.

At the time of writing this, Battlefield III is one of the PC gaming industry’s graphical benchmarks for excellent graphics.

Diablo III’s graphics look like they’re stuck in 2006. I know that Battlefield III and Diablo III are fundamentally different games, being played from different view points, but the issue that I’m trying to get at here is that the technology exists for Diablo III to make use of much better lighting, shading, shadows, textures, and particle affects. Instead we get something that looks cartoonish and borrows heavily from Blizzard’s other flagship series, World of Warcraft.

In the process of doing so, Diablo III loses a lot of the gritty, gory, hellish feel to it that Diablo II had. That loss really cuts at the essence of what this game is supposed to embody. Further example, examine these two screenshots. First from Diablo II, then Diablo III.

The next thing that struck me as a let down in Diablo III occured to me after I realized I had just played the first three hours of the game single handed. That’s right. The entire time I was playing, I was playing and winning with only my mouse hand, and winning easily. I feel Diablo III lost a lot of the challenge and strategy that was in Diablo II, that the game had been dumbed down. As I’ve been playing more, I’ve started to use the hotkeys on the keyboard, but only sparingly.

The game feels like I’m just clicking on things until they die, and they always do because as a witch doctor with a rapid fire long range blowgun, I mow enemies down before me with a few rapid clicks.

On the bright side, at least I can hold my drink in my other hand while playing.

Over the past few years, voice acting has taken on a much greater prominence in gaming. Games tell a story after all, and it is important that they tell that story well. Bethesda Studios is famous for their voice acting, and so is Bioware. Both studios put a lot of effort into crafting a good story, and then having good actors give voice to those characters.

Blizzard fell short with Diablo III. The voice acting is cheesy and the lines are cheesy. I feel like the characters have the minds of 13 year old kids. Their attitudes towards fighting, glory, valor, evil, and fear are all very naive and innocent. To make matters worse, it is as if they recorded six lines of dialogue for each character, and I keep hearing them over and over again. The attack noises are pretty annoying as well. One attack, for the witch doctor, involves flinging frogs at the enemy. The frogs so far have proved useless, but the thing that is most annoying is the sound the witch doctor makes when you fling them. It’s like shocking a cat with a taser. When you’re rapid clicking in order to spam frogs, it’s extremely annoying.

I ended up just muting the game and listening to my audio book while clicking through one handed. Not a good sign.

The next major issue I wanted to discuss was character customization.

Diablo III is supposed to be a Role Playing Game (RPG). In a RPG, you create a character and then customize and improve them throughout the game. The majority of the excitement comes from getting new items to improve your character how you want, trying new strategies, and altering the look of your character.

Blizzard takes all of this away in Diablo III, and it’s a deal breaker.

When you “level up” in Diablo III, the game unlocks new abilities, but you have no say in what abilities it unlocks. Blizzard decides for you. This leaves every character more or less the same in spell abilities. A level 10 witch doctor is going to have X spells. A level 15, X, Y spells. A level 20, X, Y, Z spells. The only possible difference is the equipment, but even that has flaws which I’ll get to later.

Your character is no longer your character. You have no say in how they evolve, what areas they focus on. It’s all decided for you and it destroys the fun.

I mention that equipment differed slightly, but not really. While equipment might have certain small affects on your abilities here and there, you have no way of customizing the look of your character. You will inevitably go for whatever equipment gives you the better boost, regardless of how it looks. The end result is something akin to a color blind toddler trying to dress themselves from a random barrel of clothes. You look disjointed and like an idiot.

This is further compounded by the “Pay to win” system Blizzard has implemented in the “Real money auction house.”

Blizzard legalized a system for using real money to buy better equipment in game. This means that those who spend more than the original $60 will have an easier time beating the game, and will have an even easier time killing other players who can’t afford to shell out more money for better items.

The other fun part of the fun of an RPG besides customizing your character is finding cool equipment to customize your character with. What’s the point if I can just buy the best equipment and walk straight through the game, ignoring every chest and dead enemy, knowing I already have the best equipment? This further hollows out the game.

The final issue I want to address is the copy right protection on Diablo III. Instead of making a better product and hoping people buy it, and instead of crying over “lost sales” from people who pirate because they don’t have the money to buy in the first place, game developers are more and more moving to make paying customers jump through ever increasing hoops to play the game they bought.

This only serves to increase player frustration and spur on piracy. It’s bad enough that the game you own isn’t really “yours” to do with as you like (ex: some games can only be installed on certain computers, and only a certain number of times), but now Blizzard has set the precedent of requiring constantly on internet connection. The idea is, while it’s easy to crack the protection on a game that doesn’t require internet, it’s not easy to hack Blizzard’s servers and play an illegal copy of the game.

Yes, just about everybody has internet now, but at different speeds, and at different prices. I have discovered that lag is a significant issue. If your internet connection is slow, the game will often lag, causing your character and the enemies to jump all over the map, or for you to suddenly die because you were being attacked and couldn’t move. Whenever this happens it makes the game uplayable and I end up just quitting till the internet improves.

The launch of Diablo III exposed another major flaw in “always online” gaming: it relies on servers.

Diablo III was supposed to go live at 3am EST on May 15. I, along with thousands of other loyal fans who had grown up with the series, stayed up late to play.

But the servers crashed.

It would be one thing if this was some other company, but Blizzard is the company behind World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online RPG. Servers should be their bread and butter.

People couldn’t log into their games. People who did were kicked off the servers. It was a grade A clusterfuck. When the servers finally did slowly come one line, others were forced to wait in queues in order to play the game they bought. I ended up just going to bed. 14 hours later and the game was still having issues letting people on.

The whole launch night experience is summed up very nicely in this short video:

I’ve been able to get on since, but the precedent is unnerving. There has been a trend in the technology and gaming industry over the past several years, a trend towards not allowing customers ownership and control over the things they buy. You’re not so much buying a product like you would buy a house, you’re buying a license to use a controlled product, one not controlled by you.

Diablo III reeks of this loss of control.

The creative people lost control of the product to producers and executives seeking to cash in on a beloved franchise after 11 years.

The player lost control over the development of their character, how they play, and when they play.

The game lost its soul of dark demonic combat and the thrill of exploration.

The whole thing is just a sad let down.

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Religion flash cards!

26 Apr

So I came up with another business idea last week. Religion flash cards! I don’t debate with theists anymore about religion, for the same reason I don’t debate with children about the existence of Santa, but there are still plenty of people out there that enjoy debates.

Atheists as a whole tend to be much more knowledgeable of the various religions. This is due to several different factors, but mostly because the average person who deconverts to atheism did so after having taken the time and effort to fully explore the realm of religion and to educate themselves on what the various faiths say.

But for all the atheists out there that might only have a cursory knowledge of other religions, I’m developing these flash cards to help them study and improve their knowledge for debates.

The problem I’ve run into is that this sounds simple on the outside, but once you get started trying to write flash cards, it’s a giant tsunami of information. It took me several days just to get through Judaism. I wanted to cover the main aspects of a religion, but also wanted to cover important details that people could use in debates. I quickly found myself bogged down in making flash cards aimed at precise biblical stories, rather than overarching themes of a religions.

I’ve tried to restructure, but it’s still difficult. Christianity alone has so many denominations, it’s ridiculous. I could make an entire deck of flash cards just on Catholicism alone!

I figure I’ll cover the major themes of each of the major religions, and then I’ll create a separate section on debate material. This whole thing is painstakingly slow…

One of the things that really stood out to me while writing down these flash cards was just how absurd some of the views are. I knew they were there, that’s partly what led me to be an atheist, but doing this is letting me rediscover them. I find myself pausing to ask “Do people really believe this stuff?!? That’s sick!”

Hopefully the cards and the knowledge they’re attempting to imbue will have the same affect on any readers.

I started a business

20 Apr

My goal is to travel around the world, but to do that, you need money. How much money depends on what kind of a life you’re going to lead and how you’re going to travel.

If you want to stay in a proper hotel every night, eat at fancy restaurants, and go on guided tours, all while maintaining a big house in suburbia back home, then traveling requires a LOT of money.

However, if you’re going to travel with just what you can fit in a backpack, you don’t mind using couch surfing or hostels, and you don’t have an obligations back home, then traveling can be very affordable.

The quest that as always bugged me though was “how do people who travel affordably still have enough money to eat? I mean, you’re going to run out of money sometime. It’s a mathematical fact.”

This is true, you do need some way to replenish your funds. This can be done either by working odd jobs while traveling, or by having passive income.

Passive income is any income that doesn’t require your direct interaction to make you money. The entire business is automated and you don’t have to worry about it, except to check in from time to time.

As such, I’ve started a flash cards company. Over the course of a week I digitized 500+ flash cards and put them in a printable format. I developed a website in an afternoon using a hosting company with drag and drop website creation, and I setup an account with e-junkie that handles the transactions.

Earlier this afternoon while I was walking my dogs, I made my first sale. I didn’t have to do a thing and I made $10. It’s a start, but I’m hoping the website will really start to pickup. I need to sell about 15 sets of flash cards to pay for the project, then I need to make 4 sales a month to cover operating costs of the website. Anything after that’s profit.

I have a few other business ideas in mind, I might execute those when I get them worked out a bit more.

Here’s my business if you’d like to check it out!

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Trayvon Martin’s death has nothing to do with “Stand Your Ground” laws.

6 Apr

The murder of Trayvon Martin has nothing to do with the doctrine of “stand your ground.”

For anyone who doesn’t know what “stand your ground” is: it is a legal doctrine stating that someone who has a legal permit to carry a concealed weapon has no obligation to run away if they are attacked in a location they are legally permitted to be in. This doctrine is not universal across all 50 states. It is, thankfully, the law in South Carolina, where I legally hold a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Unfortunately, the media, and many of my fellow liberals, seem to be targeting the “stand your ground” law as if it was somehow responsible for Trayvon’s murder. It wasn’t.

What George Zimmerman did was not “stand your ground.” He chased a child down and shot him in the chest. It was fucking murder and it disgusts me that we’re still talking about this and he still hasn’t been arrested.

There’s nothing to debate about. It’s a clear as night and day as to what happened:

Zimmerman, a self appointed captain of neighborhood watch (who intimidated and scared his neighbors) saw a “suspicious” looking person in his gated community. By “suspicious” he means black. (Because clearly, all black people are criminals and none of them can afford to live in his private community, so obviously the kid was suspicious.) Zimmerman then called the police to report him. Meanwhile he was  following Trayvon.

Rule # 1 of carrying a concealed handgun: AVOID BAD SITUATIONS.


Zimmerman went looking for trouble. His motivation was clearly racial as he was heard using slurs like “coon” on the phone to 9-11! In the 9-11 calls made by neighbors after Zimmerman approached Trayvon with his gun, you can hear Trayvon screaming for help in the background. The screaming suddenly stops after the sound of a gunshot.

The police department, that has a history of racism, sends a narcotics detective out to the scene first, instead of a homicide detective. When Zimmerman tells them that Trayvon attacked him and broke his nose, they took his word for it, because hey, he’s white a great guy! Nevermind the fact that Zimmerman showed no signs of being hurt, and when you break your nose, there’s blood EVERYWHERE.  Nevermind the fact that a 17 year old kid was dead on the ground with a can of ice tea and a bag of skittles. The fucking racist police officers let him go. To make matters worse, they then  intimidated the witnesses. The people who heard Trayvon screaming for his life came forward to say so. The police said “No, you heard Zimmerman screaming for help.” What. The. Fuck.

As I’m writing this, the murderer is still free, and a child is still dead, and hopefully people are waking up to the reality that justice is America is a joke.

The moment Zimmerman went after Trayvon was the moment he crossed the line. People who don’t carry weapons with them, who haven’t taken the required safety classes, don’t understand the mindset those classes are supposed to instill in you.

Having a license to carry a gun is not a license to kill.

Your use of force needs to be proportional to the force being used against you. If someone punches you, you can’t pull out your gun and kill them. You need to be in immediate threat of death for you to reasonable be able to pull your weapon.

You need to avoid dangerous situations at all cost, but should you find yourself in one, you have the inalienable right to defend yourself.

Zimmerman disregarded all of this when he went after Trayvon and murdered him because he was black. Attempting to use this tragedy as a vehicle to advance anti-self defense causes is inappropriate, especially when the doctrine you’re attacking has nothing to do with the tragedy.

Look, carrying a gun can be equated to wearing a seat belt. You don’t wear the seat belt because you hope or want to get into a crash, you’d like to avoid that at all costs; you wear it in case. That’s the same mindset behind carrying a concealed weapon.

Unfortunately people like Zimmerman exist. They always have and always will. The best we can do is prosecute them to the full extent of the law; however, attempting to reduce us all to unarmed and helpless bunny rabbits, crying into the phone to 9-11 while people are dying, hoping that the police (who are several minutes away at best) get there in time is not the answer.

Travel blog?

4 Apr

I would like to eventually turn this blog into more of a travel blog. This blog has always been a digital representation of myself and the things I’m interested in, and for the past few years those interests have primarily revolved around religion and politics. Thrown into the mix were posts on gaming, feminism, and medieval living history. While I’m still interested in those things, I’m slowly starting to see a new interest emerge, which is great! I’ve been starving to discover a new passion for almost three years now.

I really want to travel. I don’t want the 9-5 job. I don’t want the house in the suburb with the white picket fence, I don’t want the cars, the mortgage, the bills, and all the other material “stuff” that shackles people to one location or another. I want to have nothing and everything at the same time. I want to be free, and I mean really free. The kind of free that others might label nomadic and poor.

I want to travel around the world, staying in exotic locations, working odd jobs to afford enough to eat for the day. I want to have amazing life experiences. The odds of me being here, given everything that could of happened differently from the beginning of time to now, are unfathomably stacked against me. Therefore it is my moral obligation to live as amazing life as possible. It would a crime against life itself if I squandered this gift in an office so I could afford credit card payments for more useless crap.

Setting that goal was easy. The hard part is figuring out how to make it happen.

I’ve started listening to travel podcasts for precisely this reason. One such podcast is The Indie Podcast. On one particular episode they had on Adam Barker, the guy behind Man vs Debt. Barker made a really interesting point (and I’m paraphrasing):

When people think about traveling, they think it’s terribly expensive, and it can be, but it can also be extremely affordable. The problem is that many of them want to live two lives. They want to travel the world, but at the same time, they want a steady job, a nice house in a safe neighborhood, a two car garage, a mortgage, PTA meetings, etc… If you want to maintain all of that AND travel the world, then yes, it is terribly expensive.

However, if you’re willing to sell all of your stuff, if you’re willing to be nomadic, then traveling can be a really cheap thing to do. It looks like the most expensive things are plane tickets. Once you’re on the right continent, you can usually take a train, a bus, or a boat.

But what do you do when you run out of money? How do you eat?

This has been the biggest and most frustrating question for me. Everywhere I look, people just seem to give the answer “Just do it. Make things happen.” Which is no answer at all. Look, seriously. The Beatles were wrong. Love isn’t all you need. Love won’t put food on the table, love won’t pay the bills. Similarly you need to have some type of income to sustain you while traveling.

The ideal situation would be to make money while traveling. That’s where passive income comes into play. The people who travel for a living seem to have some type of small income stream trickling in. It might not be much, but they don’t need to really put any energy into maintaining it, and it’s enough to pay for food.

From what I’ve gathered, it seems that this usually takes the form of some kind of web business, or investing.

Another great way to make money while abroad is to have a job that doesn’t require you to stay in one location, a job like a programmer or website developer.

This is what I’d ideally like to be doing. Although it requires effort, you can make more money that with passive income.

To that end I’d like to try and learn programming or web development. Lately I’ve been playing around with Python, and have been experimenting with a code academy introduction to JavaScript. Seems pretty fun, but I’m going to have to double down on my efforts to stay focused and study.

So this whole thing leaves me standing at a crossroads. I have several options:

Go to Australia for a working holiday, then from there start to travel around the world.

Try to get a Silver Fern visa from New Zealand, work there, then travel around the world.

Join a volunteer program, then travel the world.

I’ve looked around a volunteer programs and the one that looks the most interesting to me is English Opens Doors in Chile.

Normally the idea of teaching children English scares the shit out of me. I’m horrible with languages, and I would just be a deer in the headlights if put in front of a class of kids, all of them looking at me to somehow teach them my native language.

The EOD program does it a little differently. You don’t need to speak Spanish (you’ll learn it while you’re there) and you’re not the one teaching the kids. The head teacher is teaching the kids. You’re just there to help the kids with their conversational English. The other big plus is that you don’t pay EOD, they pay you. Room and board is taken care of with your host family, and they give you a small monthly stipend to use however you want. It’s not much, but then again, the cost of living in Chile isn’t very high.

If I went with either OZ or NZ, I’d have to save up a little more money. This is the hard part since I’m currently out of work and stuck in a really shitty economy. If I went to volunteer, I could leave in a few months and be over seas quickly. Though this is just postponing the issue of needing more money to move to the South Pacific.  I’ll have to think about it.

My favorite part of planning for an adventure is by far picking the gear. I LOVE picking the specific gear I’ll need for a trip. I enjoy comparing and contrasting various items for weight, cost, performance, etc. I guess it’s my inner nerd.  I have a wish list so far.

I need to get a real backpacking backpack. I’m still doing research on this. I won’t necessarily be living on a cliff face in Patagonia for weeks on end, but I will have a lot of my belongings with me.

I also need to get a good DSLR camera. Lately I’ve been looking at the Pentax K-r. I want to be able to take amazing shots of my journeys around the world. A good DSLR is key.

I also recently fell in love with the GoPro Hero 2. I’d love to take video like in that link.

 

So yeah, hopefully if things pan out, I’ll be able to start posting about amazing travel adventures here!

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I want to reinvent myself but I don’t know how

27 Mar

It’s no secret that I’m not really happy with who I am as a person. I’m overweight, have poor sartorial style, lack wittiness, am generally introverted, and often find that I’m a third wheel to conversations.  Most importantly, I have no passion for anything.

I’ve been working on the weight thing for a while. I’ve been keeping to a specialty diet for over a month now and am down about 20lbs. I’m going to stay at it until I have a six pack. I’m hoping that this summer will be the first summer that I will feel comfortable in a bathing suit. The sartorial issue is linked to the clothes, as once I lose the weight, I’ll go out and buy nicer clothes.

I think the introvertedness and social awkwardness is also linked to the weight issue. I feel that being in better shape will open the doors to many social situations that I’m currently excluded from. This will bring more self confidence and people will be more apt to include me in there conversations. Hell, people might actually even be interested in me.

But perhaps the most pressing issue for me right now is my lack of passion. I know I’ve written on this before, but it’s been about two years since I lost my passion for everything. I have yet to get it back. I miss being constantly absorbed in something. I used to live and breath history. It was at least half of what I spend my time thinking about.

Now I spend the majority of my time thinking about politics and atheism. I would say those are my two passions, but they’re not. I’m burned out on both of them. I’m too cynical about politics to pursue a career in it. I pay attention to what’s going on, but from afar. As for atheism, I feel very much post-atheism. Yeah, I’m an atheist. So what? I don’t get any pleasure from debating religion. In fact, it’s something I actively try to avoid. I just end up getting angry and frustrated with nothing to show for it.

So the two things I spend the majority of my time thinking about don’t make me happy. Ok, so what doe I enjoy? What are some of the things I’m interested in?

Art. I like making things. Though this feeling has slowly waned in the past year.

Computer games. I enjoy them, but I’m not overly passionate about them. I don’t know how I could use that to get me a career or to impress women.

Computers? Meh, I really couldn’t care less honestly. I just picked it up as some way to make money. Talking hardware specs doesn’t get me excited. I just needed some useful skill that I could use to put food on the table.

Hacking? This interests me a bit, but I don’t have the pull to spend all my time working on it.

Traveling? I guess this is the closest thing I have resembling a passion. I want to travel the world. I want to spend my life seeing extraordinary things. I want to be an interesting and eccentric person with a sea plane, flying around on adventures.

Yet I’m not really sure how to make this happen. I don’t spend all my time looking at maps, or discovering places to travel to. Perhaps I should start more.

The big problem I have is that when I find a subject that I think is interesting, I always feel as if other people were there first, that other people in my social circles have claimed that subject as “theirs” and thus I would simply be a copy-cat. Not genuine. Not unique. Not me.

Ex: Oh, you already claimed “programming” as your thing? Guess I can’t do that then. I don’t want to be competing with you, don’t want to be perceived as trying to *be* you. I realize this is silly. There is nothing new under the sun. There are going to be people in every field that I get interested in. I have to be able to assert myself, ignore them, and tell myself that I’m awesome. If only I could do that…

I want to have worth, I want to be in shape, I want to have a passion that I’m knowledgeable on and that other people find interesting, I want to be more out going, I want to have people want to spend time with me. I often get the feeling that if I just cut off contact from everyone I know, nobody would notice. Nobody would call, nobody would bother.

 

Reason Rally Recap

27 Mar

Over the weekend I went to the first ever Reason Rally in Washington DC. I’m finally back now and have had time to unwind and unpack.

While I was fully expecting to have to stand in the back all day staring at a large screen of what was happening on stage, something amazing happened. My friend Ashley F. Miller won an essay contest and was awarded two VIP passes! She was extremely generous in letting me use the second one. As a result, I got to sit in the very front row of the entire Reason Rally event! I was so excited, I was slightly weak-kneed.

The speakers were all wonderful, but by far my favorites were Tim Minchin and Eddie Izzard.

Reflecting on the whole event, it was pretty thrilling to be out in public like that with people talking about atheism on stage. It was a little nerve wracking at first, but the numbers made me feel safe.

Overall, I think it was a great success, especially since we pulled in 20-30,000 people in the rain. I can only imagine what it would be like if it wasn’t raining.  I found it interesting that my mother told me that she was unable to find any coverage of the event on the news. You would think that if 20,000 + people gathered on the national mall for atheism, the news would at least cover it. Apparently Fox news covered it only to downplay it and dismiss it.

I think that the rally was a very important step in coming out and fighting the notion that atheism is not socially acceptable in America. I’m not sure how much it will change the lives of those constantly living in fear of being discovered, but the idea was to get a national conversation going and to rally the troops.

Either way, I was thrilled to be apart of the largest gathering of atheists in history.

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