20 August 2010

Gamescom - Day 2

I slept a lot better last night. From the mere 4,5 hours I went up to almost 7 hours this time and throughout my stay at the Gamescom I felt a lot more refreshed. Yesterday I had to be hasty in the morning because I overslept half an hour. Today I had to be hasty in order to buy me some food before heading to Gamescom. But as usually, when I buy food it is too much.

My friend and I got there at quarter to ten, minutes before they opened the gates. A huge mass of people were waiting to get inside, to be the first wave of that day, and we were afraid that it would take ages to move the crowd, but it merely cost us ten minutes. After taking a small detour we immediately headed to Hall 9 to watch the StarCraft 2 matches. We got some got spots and sat on some cubes, very close to the commentators of the games, Day[9] and Apollo. We watched all of the games that were presented so we stayed there for more than 4,5 hours, and they didn't even show all of the matches, due to time conflicts. We also watched presentations of R.U.S.E. (sucked), and Total War: Shogun 2 (quite good) inbetween some games.

After the matches we took our lunch-break, and we went to the Blizzard booth in Hall 8 to see if my friend could sign in for the Challenge match I won the previous day. Unfortunately he only got a runner up spot, and all of the contestants showed up. My friend promised that he would sign up a lot earlier tomorrow. The contestants were quite good. The winner actually broke my record of losing 1/1/0 units in the first Terran Challenge, he only lost 1/0/0 and in the Protoss Challange he surpassed my 158 kills by more than 30. But he had to do it again because a lot of the contestants had equal points, counting all of the challenges. Then one of the guys did like 198. I think at that point 3 of the contestants had 1 point, so the judges decided to let the players play Rush Defense. A lot of them had major issues but one guy managed to lose only two units to the Zergling rush, so he won. He got his prize, and this is where I feel a little cheated. He got everything I got, plus a StarCraft 2 Collector's Edition. Damn it :P

Anyway. Soon after I let my friend know that I would derive from our original goal to final spend more time in other Halls than just 8 and 9, so I actually got the balls to wait more than 2,5 hours in line for Diablo 3. My friend decided to join me but abandoned me after abouth alf an hour to participate in a Blizzard quiz. He didn't get into it, so he could just watch others do it and win more blizzard fan stuff and games. He also watched some show matches between TLO and Dimaga in StarCraft 2. Both things I could actually do while waiting in line for Diablo 3, because the waiting line was just a bit further ahead of the Blizzard stage.

Finally I got to sit on my seat to play some Diablo 3. I decided to play the Witch Doctor class because I could remember some of his videos and I found his playstyle to be very cool and easily accesible. Monk and Wizard also seemed cool but somehow too strange for a brief 20 minutes of gameplay.

At first I was dissapointed with the graphics. The textures were blurry, and the effects looked a bit too colorfriendly. But after while I noticed that this game has it's own art style. Yes, it is still very blurry and feels empty, but somehow the rough edges of cliffs and the bad weather felt really dark and alien in a good diabolic way. I can't say anything about the sound because, despite being in this booth it was still too loud to understand any Quest-dialogue. Nothing was in written form by the way. The gameplay itself felt a lot like Torchlight. Very streamlined, very action-oriented but with well thought-out skills that feel very complimentary. It's also nice to see the Tetris-inventory return. The whole demo was very focused on the action. I didn't have to return to town once for any reason. Other than that this game, compared to its predecessor, felt a lot like StarCraft 2, compared to its respective predecessor. The developers don't seem to focus on anything new and fancy. Instead they use some fancy new stuff to polish the well-established game experience that we've already seen in Diablo 2. But hopefully they'll add some PvP features in the future.


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