DLC vs. Expansion Packs: The troubling future (well, present) of gaming

(You might notice that this entry isn't strictly WoW-related. If you read this for that specific content, I should warn you that I expect this blog to become more of a general gaming blog. That said, WoW is one of the games I play most, and I've certainly been playing it for a long time, so don't expect it to completely fall by the wayside.)

We like it when new content is added to our games. Games are devoured - we generally continue to play one until one of two things happens: we beat it, or we grow tired of it. Games with high replayability kind of force the latter, as there is either no true end to the game, or the game heavily encourages starting over. Yet often the reason we grow tired of something is that we run out of content. You can only slay Deathwing so many times before it grows old, especially if you've got the gear you want off him. So, for a very long time, game makers have found ways to extend the lives of their games.

Straight sequels, of course, are a tried-and-true method for this. Video Games are an odd medium in this regard, because while we tend to groan when we see yet another Austin Powers or Men in Black sequel (both of which were awesome original movies) a lot of the really exciting "triple A" games are part of decades-old franchises. Think how exciting it is whenever the new Zelda game comes out. That series started the same year I was born, and there have been (roughly) a billion entries in it.

In the days of Gamepaks, there wasn't really anything you could do to alter a game after it shipped, so if you wanted anything else, you just needed to hope for a sequel. Computer games, however, had the advantage of existing as files on your computer, so companies realized they could release "expansion packs," adding on significant amounts of content while still retaining the same basic framework the game was built on. It meant far less development time than a totally new sequel, and if it was the sort of game where you had an established character who had leveled up, you could keep all that progress.

But while the internet did exist then, it was not nearly as central to society. Everyone had crappy modems that often tied up their phone lines (if someone else picked up the phone to make a call, they'd break your connection. Now that most people who can afford to play video games have an independent internet connection - and indeed, that a solid internet connection is a more reasonable expectation among people of my generation than having a landline phone number - and also that consoles tend to have a significant amount of data storage, downloaded games and game content are becoming quite the norm.

Look at WoW, for example. I never bought the original WoW. I downloaded the demo version, which was limited to ten days and didn't let me trade with anyone, and when the time was up, I just kept playing and allowed them to start billing me for a subscription.

Anyway, the point is that while there's still a (shrinking) market for physical copies of our games, especially on consoles with their limited storage space, the realm of expansion packs is swiftly being taken over by DLC - downloadable content.

This is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, I think that theoretically, it's awesome. There's a quick, convenient way for you to get more of the game you enjoy.

The problem, however, is the way that DLC is produced. Understand that the original idea behind expansions was just that: it was an expansion of a complete product. If you play through, say, Warcraft III, the original, unexpanded game tells a complete story. You get to play as all four factions, and the entire Third War plays out under your command. The events of the expansion, The Frozen Throne, all took place afterwards - really fitting as more of a kind of half-sequel, one that focused in on a couple of characters and their specific conflict.

Now, however, a lot of DLC is built around the idea that the game isn't really complete if you haven't gotten it. Specifically, a lot of games are released with DLC already available: as in, they could have released the game with this stuff, but they chose not to so that they could charge extra.

The most egregious example of this is actually from one of my favorite games of the generation, Assassin's Creed II. ACII was a revelation - a vast improvement over the original game that also introduced a wonderful protagonist. But as you play through it, you eventually hit a gap where the characters literally tell you that there's missing memory, and that you have to skip ahead. The game, as it shipped, basically complained to you about not having bought the DLC.

Playing through Mass Effect 3 now (took a while to get it. Loving it so far, but let's see about this controversial ending) there's another weird little bone I've got to pick. After picking up Liara on Mars, she told me about her exploits fighting the Shadow Broker. She says that she lost a friend there, and that it would have been nice if I'd been there to help. But I wasn't, because the Lair of the Shadow Broker was DLC for Mass Effect 2, and I beat the game before it even came out. So now I've got a game making me feel bad for one of its characters because I didn't drop the extra cash to download this content. Mind you, the Shadow Broker was an established character all the way in the first game. There was no reason that he couldn't be worked into the series proper.

Look: games cost a lot of money to make, but they're also fucking expensive to play. I'm not complaining about companies that are inspired to add content on to their existing creations. What I am complaining about is a kind of, well, extortion. You've bought the game for sixty bucks, and then they tell you you've got to spend another twenty to get the complete package. It's like buying a chair, but then finding it's really only a stool until you buy the back.

The sad thing is that I'm pretty sure the game designers aren't behind this practice. Instead, I think that just as big film executives will force cuts in movies to, say, speed up the action rather than allowing the characters to actually have personalities, game executives want new sources of revenue and will force certain content into the realm of DLC. DLC is the perfect product - once you've made it, there's no more cost in distributing it other than maintaining a server from which customers can download it. Games are big business - in fact, they're as big or bigger than the film industry at this point. And as we all know, the bigger the industry, the more people will be working to get away with whatever they can do to maximize profits. So what recourse do we, as gamers, have? We who want to buy the game as a complete package?

The best solution I can offer is to wait. Popular games will often come out with a "million player" or some such edition, and often they offer you a second disk with the DLC on it at no extra price (well, except that the original game will have gone down in price by then.) Like any medium, we do like to play things on the release day, but if you want to get all that cool extra content that was extracted from the game in order to make you pay twice, your best bet, I think, is to wait.

One last note: Not all DLC is bad. Oftentimes, they are truly additions created after the fact, or even things that they were working on during development that would have been cut due to various restraints otherwise. And, admittedly, I can't tell you which sort of DLC is which. But if you think that no DLC is made by cynically removing parts of a complete game, I envy your optimistic worldview.

Power Creep or Versatility: The thing that draws us to RPGs is also their core weakness

Most games have RPG elements these days - that is to say, they use some kind of leveling system, or a way in which, as you play, you become more powerful. As you level up and grow more powerful, the enemies you face grow stronger as well, but in the good games, you're not merely on a treadmill of numerical difficulty - the array of powers you have changes your behavior and the enemies will serve to test you with more complex strategies.

This is not always entirely successful. While the world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (haven't played Skyrim yet, so bear with me) is compelling in its freedom and size, every enemy leveled up with you, regardless of when in the story you were, so it became a totally viable strategy to simply prevent yourself from leveling up and simply deal with simpler, more easily vanquished monsters.

Remember that in typical side-scrolling Mario games, Mario never really gets any more powerful. Sure, you go back to old levels to "farm" up Super Mushrooms and Cape Feathers to prepare yourself, but ultimately the Caped Mario in Donut Plains is no more powerful than Caped Mario in the Valley of Bowser. The only thing that truly changes as you go through one of these games is that the levels get much less forgiving, demanding greater and greater perfection in your timing and reflexes.

WoW is an interesting animal in this regard. While perfect execution of your rotation does require practice, and each expansion makes subtle changes while adding new abilities, for the most part your character behaves the same once all the key abilities are in place. Despite the fact that, say, End Time is a level 85 dungeon demanding iLevel 365 gear, it's actually a lot easier than Magister's Terrace was. Everything does scale in WoW - someone in awesome gear at level 60 is going to be a dark stain on the floor if they try to fight someone with crappy gear at level 85. But - at least in PvE - it's not the numbers that make the fights challenging, it's the encounter designs. Despite everyone's obsession with gear, it's really not the determining factor of how well you do - it's just a barrier to entry.

Diablo 3 is a curious example, because there are aspects of the game I think are great and aspects of it that I hate. Diablo 3 is built on replayability. You only get halfway to the level cap when you beat the game on normal, and the expectation is that you'll then immediately soldier on to Nightmare difficulty, leveling up further and getting more loot. The problem I have with this is that it is truly a treadmill approach to leveling. The levels themselves are randomly generated, which does keep you exploring rather than just walking the path you've learned by heart, but it also means there's very little flow to the levels. You might encounter the toughest enemy in the dungeon just after setting foot inside, and the rest of it could be a cakewalk.

On the other hand, I think that the approach to ability Runes is pretty clever. It's kind of what Glyphs or Talents in WoW would be if Blizzard were to start over from scratch. None of them are inherently stronger than the others, and the fact that you have to choose one Rune for one Ability in a given key-bind (yes, I know you can technically reassign ability to other keys, but I feel this breaks the spirit of the design) means you have a very tough choice to make depending on the fight. The only problem is that the fights (other than actual bosses) are randomized, so despite the potential for a kind of puzzle to figure out the optimal strategy, you'll generally just sit with the same, versatile build and keep corpse-running until the elite spawn is dead.

I love RPGs, mind you, but in an ideal game, I think the plain-old power of your abilities and skills would remain at roughly the same level, but you'd be faced with more complex foes that require new abilities to take them down.

The Beta Problem

I'll admit, I haven't logged in to actual, real WoW in maybe a month. I'm not getting to a quitting point, it's mainly that the novelty of Diablo 3 and the Beta are drawing me away. My guild's been off-and-on getting enough people for actual raids, and I realize I'm not helping the situation, but I figure if I can't take a break from WoW, that's probably a bigger problem than if I do take a break.

The Beta level-cap is now 90, which as we should all know is Mists' level cap (I doubt we'll be seeing 10-level expansions again, at least until we get past level 100.) Beta Jarsus is level 88. Part of me wants to get him to 90 to start testing out the heroics and raids, but on the other hand, I think I might be at that point where I've done what I want to do in the Beta.

Obviously, the real reason anyone's in the Beta is testing. If you're not getting on the forums to report on issues you've come across, you're kind of doing it wrong. That said, there's literally over a million people who are at least eligible for the beta. The chance that the problem you've come across is one that no one else has is pretty unlikely.

I also don't really want to spoil everything for myself. Granted, as an altoholic, I'm going to be running through all this content on probably more than ten characters (every expansion I've had more toons at the level cap,) so by the time that I take, say, Torem, the Dwarf Elemental Shaman through, I'll be very surprised if I find any new quests, and there will be very little novelty left, but I've purposely left things a little spotty in my questing on the beta (well, I was pretty thorough in Jade Forest when that was all that was open) to ensure I do actually get to see new stuff (the Beta has actually been somewhat accommodating in that regard, given the missing and broken quests) when I play the game for real.

The beta's also got some frustrations. For example, several patches ago, when they implemented account-wide mounts, I lost a ton of them, including my precious Turbo-Charged Flying Machine and my Mekgineer's Chopper (the latter of which will remain character-specific - guess that answers the question of whether my Hordies will get the Mechano-Hog.) I made a forum post back when that first happened, but I haven't complained since because I'm sure that's something they'll work on before the thing gets released (if I lose my Chopper on live, though, you can be sure I'll complain. Before the release of Wrath of the Lich King, which introduced the Mekgineer's Chopper/Mechano-Hog, a friend of mine and I had literally been talking about a hypothetical video game we would make if we had any idea how to make video games that would involve, among other things, Paladins riding motorcycles.)

Probably the main reason I was interested in the Beta in the first place was to get my hands on the Monk. It's been very interesting to see how the Brewmaster's developed. I haven't actually tanked any high-level content with them, but it's definitely gone from a convoluted mess to something that actually makes a lot of sense and even makes Active Mitigation seem more interesting and less "you will now suck at tanking, suckers."

I'll probably still log onto the Beta on occasion, and I might even get Beta Jarsus to 90, and check out the Dread Wastes and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but (and don't hold me to this) I think I'm going to save the rest of it for the real thing.

Questing in Mists

I've been in the beta now for a fairly long time. I don't really play it every day (in fact, I haven't played real-WoW in over a week - it's that end-of-expansion lull) because, after all, it's Beta, and all the progress I make is going to be erased once it ends. I've been leveling Jarsus (he's 88, half a level short of the current beta level cap.) The annoying thing is that it seems like either the Dungeon Finder isn't working or no one is testing the dungeons, because I don't even get a time estimate when I queue as a tank.

And of course, dungeons are where it's easiest to get a feel for a tanking spec.

So I've been confined to soloing (in Ret, because soloing in Prot remains kind of painful unless all you round up all 8 dudes you want to kill at once.) So, here's the interesting thing about questing in Mists of Pandaria: there are a lot of options. Like, I mean a LOT.

Wrath of the Lich King remains my favorite expansion, not just because I loved the setting and I thought the difficulty curve was just right (which puts me, at least among the more loudspoken members of the internet, in the minority. But then, I'm pretty sure Wrath was where WoW had its highest number of subscriptions, so they must have been doing something right...) but also because the questing (notably with the then-revolutionary implementation of phasing) felt very epic and personal. Wrath introduced the idea of building an entire zone around a single massive quest chain. Now, it didn't actually do that in any of the zones, but you had things like Upper Zul'drak, the pre-Wrathgate quest chain, or, of course, the massive Sons of Hodir chain, that were clearly the centerpieces of their respective zones.

Cataclysm took this concept to its logical extreme. All the top-level zones and many of the redesigned zones are composed of a single quest chain (ok, granted, Uldum is two, while Twilight Highlands and Deepholm give you a choice of the order in which you might do some of those quests.) The first time through, this is quite amazing, but what it leads to is having every single character go through basically all the same content. Being familiar with it will maybe make it easier, but it takes a lot of the fun and excitement out of leveling your alts.

So it's interesting to see what Mists is doing. To me, it kind of feels like a reconstruction of the original questing design: specifically, that it's all about being a wandering adventurer, exploring the world and helping out where you can. The new zones have overall feels, but not really defining stories. However, Mists improves on the formula quite a bit: In Vanilla, you'd find yourself getting really arbitrary quests that didn't feel motivated by much of a story (one of the most enraging quests I remember from that era was one you got from a guy in Stormwind's Mage Quarter that sent you all the way to the Charred Vale in Stonetalon Mountains. You go there, collect basilisk livers or something, go all the way back to Stormwind, and he gives you a wand. End of quest, no follow-up. You just went literally all the way across the world for a crappy green-quality wand.) In Mists, despite the lack of a single, monolithic chain that defines the entirety of a zone, there are many different quest chains, and many different hubs dotted around.

The point is, you don't have to do all of the quests in a zone to level through it. There is choice.

Now, I think this is primarily a positive. There are some very cool questing experiences (I had one involving an attempt to steal into the crypt of the Mogu emperor, which had lots of traps and eventually gets flooded with Zandalari soldiers) but you won't necessarily get sick of them because you can have your alts do different ones.

However, there are potential downsides: the other side of that coin is that you will miss things unless you're a total questing completionist. For example, the epic destruction of the Serpent Statue in Jade Forest, which is a major plot point, is something I have not experienced (admittedly, I was trying to clear every quest I could in Jade Forest back when it was the only zone open, but I was stuck on a few quests that were bugged - and in fact, some of the quests were probably not implemented either.)

The other thing is that you can easily get a full quest log. Cataclysm trained us to pick up every quest we saw - and usually that wouldn't be a problem, because you'd rarely have more than four quests to do at a time, given the linear nature of Cataclysm's quest flow. In Mists, however, you might get sent to, say, a Wise Man in the mountains, and along the path, you'll run into some Grummles (adorable Gophers/Sherpas) who give you a bunch of quests. Your instinct is probably to go do the Grummles' quests, but then you'll realize that they're sending you off on a totally different quest chain, and by the time you're done with it, you'll have probably run into some Shado-Pan people who will then have their own quest chain and if you keep doing everything everyone asks of you, you'll never meet the Wise Man at the top of the mountain.

Obviously, this is one of those things that will get easier as we get used to the quests there. If you're taking your fourth or fifth alt up through there, it'll be obvious which chains lead to what, but I know that on Jarsus, I'm going to really try to make sure I hit the important plot points, and that's going to be a bit tough.

Transitioning back to this being a WoW blog

I'm on Act IV of Diablo 3, and I've found that the most difficult enemy by far is having a three-year-old laptop running it. In certain environments, like open desert or dark, rocky caverns, the game runs smoothly and I feel like a total badass, tearing bosses apart like they were no big thing (incidentally, Archon, at least on Normal difficulty, makes me into a freaking god.) However, if we have a change of venue to snowy castle ramparts in the middle of a battle, or... well, a place that would kind of be a spoiler, the game crawls along as if I were running some old DOS machine. I actually kind of wish I could switch it to 16-bit sprite graphics in those moments.

Still, I'm powering through with a combination of the Templar's heals and health regeneration and being higher-level and more geared than I think they expect you to be (or maybe Normal is tuned to be very forgiving, even for a Diablo noob like me.)

Anyway, one of the things that struck me about the game is that, stylistically, it's certainly got some cool ideas (I love the concept of Angels as being incorporeal energy housed in suits of armor - they're like Ethereals, but less interested in profit and more in being bastions of light and goodness (even if some come off a bit anti-human.))

Demons, on the other hand, are handled in a mostly standard way. I guess it's not so much the demons themselves, but the demonic environments are all filled with spiky black metal, fire, and gross, bloody things everywhere. At least what I've seen of them, the demons in Diablo feel very, very similar to Oblivion in Elder Scrolls 4.

Now, admittedly, there's a reason for this. The Fire and Brimstone demons are pretty standard in western culture, and that image of them is clearly derived from figures within the religious cosmology of Christianity. Actually, the Diablo universe is a much more Christian fantasy universe than Warcraft. Despite the absence of, well, Jesus, or even God (though Anu is close,) the universe there is divided neatly between Angels in Heaven above and Demons in Hell below. Despite the stakes being for all of creation, Diablo is kind of a smaller scope than Warcraft - perhaps it is simply because the game isn't as big as WoW, but there's also the fact that there are two sides in an Eternal War that are very clearly marked (even if it turns out that humans are actually more powerful than either side - a device I tend to like) and thus, every conflict in the game ultimately boils down to "are you good or are you evil." Sure, evil fights amongst itself (and this is a fairly important plot point) but from your perspective it's rare to come across any other conflicts that don't turn out to be part of the central one.

And again, part of that is that it's not a sandbox game, but a linear RPG.

Demons in Warcraft, on the other hand, have got a fairly different feel to them. Yes, I think they started out in this style, but as the mythology has expanded, I think they've come up with a much more original take on them. And the weird thing is that a huge part of it is just changing the color of the fire. Yes, Green Fire, the (un)Holy Grail of things Warlocks want, kind of encapsulates how demons and the Burning Legion in Warcraft feel totally different. They're not just in big fiery caves filled with lava (that's where the Fire Elementals go!) Instead, they're products of Hyperspace (in fact, the Twisting Nether very closely resembles the Sci-Fi concept of Hyperspace.) Although one might consider Fel Magic to be Warcraft's "substance" or "source" of evil, you have to remember that there's plenty of evil being done without it (in fact, assuming my theories line up with Blizzard if they ever choose to explain this, the Old Gods - who are definitely evil - don't want to have anything to do with Fel magic.) Warcraft, despite aspects of it fitting into the standard medieval fantasy setting, is really liberated by its comfort with anachronism. Thus, turning demons from being straight-up nightmare creatures dreamed up by someone with some really fucked-up blood and gore fetishes and into a kind of alien army who has conquered or destroyed thousands of worlds - while still being demons and using dark magic - creates something far more original.

Warcraft started with a straight-up binary conflict - Orcs vs Humans - and if I am not mistaken, once had a much simpler mythology where (and I could be wrong) the Orcs were coming out of Hell, and Humans fought in the name of Heaven. However, due to judicious retcons, huge amounts of lore written, and many games expanding the mythology (Warcraft II introduces trolls, ogres, elves, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, dragons, Outland, Warcraft III introduces the Burning Legion, the Scourge, the Night Elves, the Ancients, the fact that the Orcs aren't just inherently evil, the Tauren, the Draenei (though, more accurately, the Broken and Lost Ones - see "judicious retcon") the Naga, and even the first signs of the Old Gods, and then WoW introduces... oh Jesus, there's no way I could list it all here.)

The fact is that, while there is a general sense of "Good" and "Evil," they're much less tangible subjects. Sure, the Naaru are clearly good, and the Titans at the very least mean well, and the Burning Legion is clearly not nice people while the Old Gods are that Lovecraft-style "these things are like ants to me"-style evil. However, neither good nor evil is a substance. Yogg-Saron is the Old God of Death, but that doesn't mean that he/she/it literally causes or even embodies death - it's more like a title and perhaps a field in which he/she/it has some expertise (it never really came up, but I always had a theory that the Scourge was essentially using Fel magic to steal Yogg-Saron's necromantic power without becoming its pawn - see my earlier posts about why I think the Burning Legion is ultimately more powerful than the Old Gods.)

Anyway, Warcraft kind of takes a Unitarian approach to its mythology. Yes, there is the Light, but there's also the Loa, and the Ancients, and the Titans, and just because Malorne isn't a Naaru doesn't mean he's "impure" and therefore "evil." Warcraft's a world where there's enough room for everyone's gods (well, except Twilight's Hammer's.) The result is a level of diversity that keeps the game fresh. One thing that was kind of missing in Cataclysm (late-game) was the Ulduar - a major side-story that gives us a break from the rest of the expansion. Don't get me wrong, I love the Scourge as villains, and I had a blast tearing through Naxxramas and ICC, but it was nice to get a break from "Skulls, Ooze, Ice, and decay" and get a big Titan instance. In Cataclysm, we got Fiery Dragons and Old Gods, then just Fire, then Old Gods and Fiery Dragons (actually, the Throne of the Four Winds was a pretty nice break, visually, though my guild certainly never spent any real time on it, being a "side instance," and story-wise, it was still part of the overall Deathwing and Elementals plot.)

So what is my point here, exactly? Well, I like WoW's lore. It's got a richness that allows for lots of stories. Perhaps the single strongest aspect of it is that what started as a binary morality has become a far more complex, and thus believable world.

Diablo v WoW

So, like many people with the Annual Pass - or simply fans of the series - I'm playing a lot of Diablo 3 (I'm on Act 3, having beaten the first major boss, Gluttony-dude.)

I should mention that this is the only Diablo game I've played, so everything here is specifically about Diablo 3.

WoW clearly has a lot of Diablo DNA, and I know that a lot of the initial class design for WoW was inspired by Diablo. Both are RPGs that have you killing big monsters for shiny loot, crawling through dungeons, managing your gear loadout.

So I figured I'd compare the two.

Despite its multiplayer capabilities, Diablo is at its core a single-player game, like the vast majority of games I play. That means that you, yes you, can face incredibly powerful demon lords on your own (well, with a sidekick. Question: I have become incredibly dependent on the Templar's healing and health regen abilities. How the hell do you play with anyone else? Note: I'm a Wizard.) It's actually kind of strange to be able to go kill Belial, Lord of Lies on my own, because I'm so used to thinking of giant monsters in Blizzard games as the ones you need a group of at the very least 5 to beat.

It's actually pretty cool to be self-sufficient (well, as long as I have my Templar buddy around. I kind of feel bad for the Scoundrel and the Enchantress, because I almost never take them anywhere.) It also varies the gameplay a bit. In WoW, if you're dps you typically only use your "utility" moves in PvP or very special situations. While running a dungeon as dps, you usually only switch between your "AoE" rotation or your "single target" rotation (or sometimes a "cleave" rotation, for smaller groups.) In Diablo, you don't really have a Tank, per se (though I've found that if I can get the Templar to wedge himself into a doorway, blocking the swarm of skeletal soldiers or what have you while I blast them from behind him with my Electrocute, we're nearly unstoppable.) When you're on your own, suddenly stats like Vitality (Diablo's version of Stamina) and armor start looking more attractive, even to a squishy Wizard, and things like Frost Nova (similar to the Mage spell, but it also stops them from attacking) and Shock Blast (which does damage and tosses enemies away) become very important parts of your arsenal. Hell, Demon Hunters (thematically a cross between a Rogue and a Hunter, with a tiny dash of Warlock thrown in) have an entire secondary resource system specifically for defensive moves.

It's also kind of cool that you get a little cast of characters that follow you around. While the dialog sometimes gets repetitive (I can't tell you how many times the Templar's asked me how criminals are dealt with in my land) you do feel like you're the leader of a little band of intrepid heroes - even the crafters have decent personalities.

There are some issues, however. Diablo uses a kind of dungeon randomizer - whenever you enter one of the game's vast dungeons (and most of the time you spend killing things is in these,) the game will take several basic room tiles and stitch them together, filling it with enemies and objects appropriate to that dungeon. You'll sometimes come across areas that are more deliberately laid out, when the plot or gameflow demands it, but it means that even on the same character, if you leave a dungeon and come back (other than using the "crap, I've got to go back to town and empty my bags" Town Portal spell,) the dungeon will have a totally different layout. The point here is to make sure that you don't just memorize the layout and speed through it on every playthrough, and it certainly achieves that, but the unfortunate side effect is that a lot of the dungeons lack flow. You're killing the same set of enemies from start to finish, and while there are cool devices like crumbling walls or chandeliers to drop on them, it mostly feels like more of the same until you get to your next checkpoint.

Gear has a similar feel to it. In WoW, the randomized gear you occasionally get is usually made into enchanter fodder (admittedly most of the magic gear you get in Diablo also goes to the Blacksmith) while you tend to equip either quest rewards or specific boss drops. In fact, a lot of the motivation to run a dungeon multiple times comes from the need for a specific loot drop. In Diablo, however, there are literally no specific loot drops (at least none that I've seen so far.) The best you'll get (again, this is just over halfway through Normal mode) is a yellow-titled item. These are items that you pick up, spend a couple seconds "identifying" and then find that they are specifically designed with certain stats (and they tend to be a lot better than the blue pieces, which are equivalent to WoW's random green drops.)

But these drops do not come off of specific bosses - I have no need to go kill the Skeleton King again (though I bet it would be a hell of a lot easier this time around, assuming he doesn't scale up with my gear/level.) So it's strange, despite being a game that is all about the dungeon crawl, there's not a whole lot of motivation to retread past conquests. Unless I'm playing it wrong.

Dungeons in WoW are really well-designed, actually. There tends to be a real flow to them, and it allows the trash to be nearly as interesting as the bosses. Diablo dungeons are basically like the giant field in the Firelands at all times - yes, there's some trash pulls there that require different strategies, but for the most part it's a big slog.

One more thing - making Left Click both your cheap attack and your walk button makes it really frustrating to get out of fires and the like when there's a swarm of enemies (or just a really big one) around you.

Mind you, I like both games, and while novelty has its hold, I'm playing Diablo. It might take me a long time, but I intend to play through it on all the classes, but I think that WoW is ultimately a better game. Even as a single-player game, the quests in WoW have evolved past employing only simple "kill x of these guys" - the only problem with it as a single-party game is that the big stories are somewhat anticlimactic.

I should also take a second to note that the ability and rune system in Diablo looks very much like the ideal they're striving toward with Glyphs and Talents. It's especially successful given the need for "utility" the single-player game uses, but it's also interesting in that by restricting you to six abilities at any given time (including buffs) and a maximum of three passive effects, you find yourself having to make real choices (My indestructible non-boss build? Electrocute with Chain Lighting, Ice Beam with Snow Blast - for the tough elites - Frost Nova with Shatter and Forceful Blast in case I get swarmed. Like the Templar, it's hard to wean myself off of this build.)

Edit: Oh, and one other thing I love about Diablo 3 - your money is account-wide. In WoW, assuming everyone's on the same server and faction, you can send gold around easily enough (minus the 30 copper, which wasn't a lot of money even in Vanilla days, unless your max-level toon was level 5 or lower) but there's something very convenient about just having the gold you collect on one dude be available on the others.

This also extends to your crafters: because the main in-game gold-sink (aside from the Auction House) is the training of your crafters, it makes sense that, given that it's everyone's gold, everyone should benefit from the training. In fact, even though you don't get Shen, the jewelcrafter, until Act II, your other characters will see him in New Tristram with all of the jewel recipes he's trained for (he even has special dialog there, which requires you to have an alt.)

Actually, Diablo is generally very Alt-friendly. With shared gold, and the fact that there is no such thing as "soulbound" items, you can very easily drop off powerful gear for your other characters. While your first guy might struggle by with some outdated, low quality gear, the awesome rare pieces you pick up can be put in your stash and picked up by alts as soon as they're high enough level to wield them. That's how my Demon Hunter (who started as my main, but was quickly outpaced by the Wizard) wound up with two insanely powerful hand-crossbows with which she slaughtered her way through dungeon after dungeon.

WoW could benefit from a few of these concepts. One: I love the Stash concept, even if the space there is pretty limited. It's kind of like a personal guild bank. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I could just toss certain items into a communal storage space - things like cloth and basic trade goods - so that my characters could pick them up as they needed them. I also wouldn't mind making Gold account-wide. That way you wouldn't have to worry about a new alt needing funds before they can access a mailbox. It would also really help anyone who decides to reroll on a new server, and encourage people to try the other faction.

Diablo 3 and WoW's "fallow" phase

I find myself very much in the position I was toward the end of Wrath of the Lich King. A new expansion is on its way, and even though it's months off (we don't even have a release date for Mists, though I think we can expect it soon) we're very definitely in a "Cataclysm is pretty much over" phase. Even though my guild is only 1 boss down in Dragon Soul on Normal (a lot of our key raiders left after Cataclysm came out - for one, I know that one of our most dedicated healers refused to ever heal again after the changes that were made, which I think explains why we haven't made at least some decent progress.) Anyway, the point is that at this point, I'm not really feeling very motivated to gear up alts and all that with Pandaria around the corner.

However, there's a new game that's just downloaded on my computer (and I'd be playing it now if I could - gotta wait until midnight.) That is Diablo 3, the shining jewel of the cool stuff you get for the Annual Pass (guaranteed Mists Beta was the reason I signed up, but at this point I've mostly gotten a feel for the Brewmaster, and I don't want to overexpose myself to all the dungeons and all the cool stuff before I actually get to play the real thing.)

Anyway, I've never played any of the Diablo games before. WoW was my first Blizzard game, then I got StarCraft, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, and as you can probably tell, I'm impressed with the company's work.

I realize that multiplayer is a legitimate way to play Diablo, but it's actually pretty exciting to have the prospect of a single-player RPG made by the people who make WoW. I came to WoW not as a fan of MMOs (it's the only one I've played) but of RPGs. I grew up on Secret of Mana and Mario RPG (oddly not Final Fantasy - the first of those I played was Ten, and that was a while after it came out when I was in college.) While it's cool to raid, and I love being a badass tank (we'll see if I can still be a badass tank when tanking itself is completely redesigned for most tank classes - at least I know I'll still be good on my DK,) it's always been a little frustrating, on the other hand, that I can't face down the big bads of Azeroth without either submitting myself to the crapshoot that is Raid Finder or scheduling it out a week in advance with my guild.

Don't get me wrong, I love the sense of team spirit that comes with beating a tough boss with my guild, but at the same time, sometimes I just want to be badass by myself, and WoW has always had very few outlets for that once you've cleared all the max-level quests.

True to my nature, I expect I'm going to play all five of Diablo 3's classes, but the conundrum I face now is which of those I'm going to start with.

My preference has always been classes and characters that mix magic and melee. The Battlemage - with specifically an Arcane/"Fantasy Equivalent of Science" style of magic (think lots of secret and mysterious tomes, with maybe a space and time flavor) combined with a gigantic, ornate warhammer and heavy armor - is the perfect class archetype for me. However, seeing as this is a new game, I sort of feel I should start with something very different. So far, the only class I've been able to eliminate is the Barbarian. Somehow, the "I don't need any kind of magic, I can just smash things" character has never really appealed to me. On one hand, the Wizard fits that "Arcane" feel that I enjoy, but that almost makes me think I should save it for a later alt. The Monk could be cool, but I think the finalists are the Demon Hunter and the Witch Doctor.

I should be noted that when I played a lot of Magic the Gathering as a kid, I liked to play Black for the most part. Surprising for someone whose main in WoW is a Paladin? It should be noted that I'm of the generation that saw Nightmare Before Christmas as a kid (also don't forget that beside that Paladin, I also play a Rogue, a Death Knight, and a Werewolf among my "top five" toons)

Anyway, the Witch Doctor has a cool feel, with all the zombies and dark magics, though I worry a bit about the play style. Pet classes sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of feeling too automated. Your pet is effective, sure, but it makes your own actions seem less important. Demon Hunters have "badass" written all over them, but part of me is a little worried about playing the "fragile speedster." This might just be rooted in the fact that I was always one of the big kids, and speed is frightening to me.

Then again, removing me from my comfort zone is kind of the goal here, so Demon Hunter seems to be winning out.

And it's not like I won't be making a character of each class.

Anyway, this should do a good job in carrying me through WoW's fallow period (much as, of all things, Plants Vs Zombies did before Cataclysm.)

Here's hoping my computer doesn't explode when I try to run it!