Roderick

Quite the opposite, it is a lot less stilted and more naturalistic. Especially Cain is hard to take seriously in English, he's such a quivering, shaky old manperson.

On a whim I switched the game to German language (for practicing reasons). Imagine my surprise when it initialised, without prompt, a 3 Gigabyte download that I was unable to stop if I wanted to ever play again. Afterwards, imagine my surprise when the voice acting turned out to be great in German, and for the first time I had something of an emotional reaction to the otherwise quite humdrum opening cinematic.

Really? I thought it was James Hong.

I may have overstated how original the followers are, but they are much better written, and believable, in my opinion than the main characters. I enjoyed spending time with them, even though they were archetypes. The only one I found grating was the Enchantress, but I always smile when the Templar comments on how the battle went. It was super weird when my templar met the templar on Nightmare. They acted like they were different people who just happened to be on the same quest! It was like a bad time travel episode of Star Trek.

Blizzard storytelling is like epic fantasy metal. Druiiiiiiiids. The type Brutal Legend sort of tongue-in-cheek paid homage to.

That's a good story to tell your grandkids!

Ahhhhh. It has been a while since I saw it.

The House Bluth motto should have been there's always money in the banana stand.

I'm not a James Hong fan per se, but Shen is just really loveable and funny. The correct way to display a rambling madman. When Bethesda do it with the mad god Sheogorath, it always makes me cringe because it's so artificial. The delivery is off there, he's just an actor pretending to be kerrrrazy. Shen, on the other, and probably also James Hong, are actually batshit insane. Fun fact: when I saw the name Michael Gough in the voice acting credits, I thought they had hired Batman's butler Alfred from the first four movies. Turns out it's just a video game VO regular with the same name.

Leeuwenhart#2825, level 35 Wizaaaard. I haven't played with anyone yet, so it's terribly exciting!

[blizzard exec] You're hired! [/blizzard exec]

I didn't have a lot of problems with Starcraft 2. It was absolutely pulp and just as much a pastiche as Diablo 3, but Raynor felt quite sincere and was consistently the center piece of the story. For what it's worth, that's all I need to buy into a game story! I'm not going in with terribly high expectations here. I think the reason Starcraft 2 worked better was that its genre (science fiction western) doesn't have the huge backpack of overwrought clichés that fantasy has. As a result, Blizzard were able to craft a pretty focused story that felt more like it had a vision behind it. Diablo 3 just goes nuts, like they don't even know what it is they're actually going for. Quick, sum up the Diablo 3 premise! ...

Just finished Diablo 3, so I can finally inspect this thread. The one thing I have to comment on is how incredibly weird the story in D3 is. It's almost confidently amateurish. It's a pastiche of Diablo 2, but takes such weird turns that it feels like it was written by someone who has ingested a lot of stories, but doesn't really know how to make one themselves. And then there's the characters themselves, whose motivations are often incomprehensible. Diablo 3's biggest writing problem is the exposition, though. It's downright horrible how all the main characters, most notably the villains, are constantly explaining themselves in the most facile way. It gets to a point really quickly where the world stops being believable at all, even as a pulp vehicle. These characters don't have a speck of integrity as people, they're purely functional narrative devices used for cheap exposition. I wasn't expecting Blizzard to bring Shakespeare-levels of writing, but this occasionally beggars belief. All the more since Diablo 2 had a surprisingly ingenious narrative structure and subtle character developments. I would trade in all of the main characters in Diablo 3 for one Marius (who, despite overacting, had a rooted presence). Boggling the mind in that respect is how well the mercenary companions and the hero's entourage are written. All of them are keenly developed characters full of wit and vibrant personality. What they say is well-written and properly acted. I felt hugely more drawn to the subtle, engaging troubles concerning the templar, the scoundrel and Covetous Shen (please give him a game of his own!) than most anything the main characters force-fed me with their stilted, exposition-riddled monologuing. I repeat what I stated earlier and elsewhere: Diablo 3 feels like it was written by a bunch of different people who hardly communicated with each other. Its dissonant writing styles and lack of cohesive tone suggests not much attention was paid to establishing any sort of narrative vision.

From a visual standpoint, I always pictured the story to be very yellow, hazy, washed-out because of the heat. Suddenly seeing all this color is a little jarring, but hey, I'll give it a shot.

My life in Germany is super weird, living in with my parents in a small hamlet. I feel disconnected from everything, yet that is also kind of good. Life has its own slow pace here, and I spend at least an hour a day in the garden tending to plants. I hope I find a job soon, though. I still have my work for the gaming mags, but that's not enough to either sustain me or keep me busy. Ah well, more Diablo 3 I guess.

Romeo + Juliet is a masterpiece that reduces me to an emotional wreck every single time. For that alone, I'll give The Great Gattling Gunsby a shot.

This looks like fun and the art style is pretty neat. Hopefully there'll be a demo on steam or somesuch.

Shit just got real! Good work on updating the old forums. Though they fitted like an old pair of slacks, age was kinda showing.

Holy shit, that was exactly the thing I wanted to put here. I haven't played D3 much further than that point, but my jaw dropped at that terrible bit of heinous, overblown, completely unrealistic exposition. Blizzard usually works its way quite well through the bowels of cliche and pulpiness. Starcraft II I thought was written pretty slickly, knowingly. D3 on the other hand seems to be all over the map. It's like it was written by the three little piggies: one a decent writer, one moderately OK, and the janitor.

I enjoyed Mr. Caffeine. I'm sad I didn't see the 2010 Konami presentation, with the 99 Nights guy going "One meeerrrion twoops... wowww." E3 presentations are the best, I can't wait and will try to remember going on Steam as well. I've got a yearly [N]Gamer viewing too, so maybe doing two of them is too much, or maybe it'll be fine

After the price drop it sold very well and it's still going strong. Vita, on the other hand, is in the shitter and no one seems to care about it or talk about it.

What would be the medium of this 'group' 'watching', Skype or Messenger?

The Vita has been a huge flop, so expect some Sony spin and hyperbole on how it's going to turn around. From Microsoft I expect few interesting things. Nintendo might bring some surprising game announcements coinciding with the Wii U or whatever it'll be named, and to push the success of the 3DS even further.

Wow, this is pretty fucked up. I bought the game yesterday and can't even install the damn thing. I keep getting a weird 'corrupted file' message when it tries to install the patch. Despite being somewhat mild about there being technical difficulties, even though a company the size and patience of Blizzard has no excuse for rushing a product out of the door, it's infuriating. What's problematic is that I can't even find an official solution to this problem. The only hint that I've gotten is that I should remove the 'corrupted' file (updates MPQ) and try again. But this doesn't help anything. Right now I've entered into the complete absurdity of downloading the digital version of the game (7 gigabytes, which will take all day if not longer), despite having no idea if this will solve the problem. And I am not happy about the prohibitive 'always online' bullshit either. Where I am now I happen to have only the weakest of internet connections, so I may not be able to play a singleplayer game. It's ludicrous.