Look at Diablo 3

I've waited years for diablo 3. Since they announced it in 2008 I've been following its development with growing interest. I've watched community websites, participated in the beta, even made a few small web tools that were re-used by a few random Russian websites. I bought the Diablo 3 strategy guide three days before the game came out and read it all. I also played a metric ton of Diablo 2. And some Diablo 1 back in the day. I also enjoy Torchlight, Titan Quest, even Darkspore. I'm looking forward to Grim Dawn and Path of Exile. I really love Action RPGS. Make items drop, add numbers when I hit things and give me multiple levels of progressions to look forward to and I'll be hooked. With that in mind...

Diablo 3 is a great ARPG that does good things differently.
Not to say that it's perfect but D3 does some things really well. I'm going to dissect the thing it doesn't do well in a few paragraphs but I wanted to start with the things I love about the game. First of all, they removed the stats system. If you've read my Torchlight 2 review, you know what I think about them. Having to decide where points should go is often a zero-sum game: Either you know where they go or you don't and there aren't that many possible viable options. Diablo 3 removes that whole system by placing stats automatically (Not unlike World of Warcraft) for your hero when you level up. You still can add to your stats by equipping different items but you don't have points to maul over. Not to say that there are no stats in D3. There are tons, critical hit chance/damage, melee damage reduction, life per hit, life per kill, life steal, magic find... Everything is surfaced to the player this time around, in Diablo 2 you barely knew what your magic find was. 

You see everything in Diablo 3. From your main stats to the small ones you maybe didn't know about.

The skill system is also done without using the points mechanic. You unlock all of your skills in the 1-30 range and then you unlock runes to customize the effects of your attacks. This can go from adding damage too increased range or splitting projectiles, freezing meteors, poison hydras and you can change almost at anytime what your skills are. A 30-seconds cooldown here, a removal of a magic find/gold find buff there, it's all very well implemented. You can try pretty much every build you want, no need for special items to make any of this work like some things did in Diablo 2.

6 skill buttons, 3 passive slots, that's a lot of choices.

You also get 6 runes per skill, some of them don't matter to me, but most of them are fun.

Tons of other little things like Nephelem Valor, the Paragon system and the newly added quests where you defeat tough bosses to get nice items can't really be covered here because they're part of future patches and I haven't played much with that content. Needless to say, they're nice ideas and I look forward to future patches.

The stats are maybe too superficial.
Since you can't place points directly into stats, your equipment defines how you're customizing your character. The problem is different in which there is no confusion or no situation where you know or don't, but instead you need to get the items that increase your core (DPS, HP, Defense to some extent) values. It's not a bad thing by itself, but what's the point of there being Intelligence, Dexterity, Strength, Vitality when all I'm going to get are Vitality/Intelligence items with my witch doctor or Vitality/Dexterity with my monk? The classes are well rounded and diverse, but they are all using the same stats. Vitality for everyone. Then Strength for barbarians, dexterity for demon hunter/monks and intelligence for witch doctors/wizards. In no situation will you find an item that lowers your core values but nets you ton of a useless stat (Let's say you have 100 intelligence and find a useless item that gives you 900) that you will want to equip. Needless to say, this is not a critical issue since you can give your items to other characters.

How I would fix this
Give good reasons for any stats to be there. Maybe there could be passives that turn unused stats into viable additions to any build. Maybe strength could be the stat to boost your summoned creatures as a Witch Doctor, maybe a wizard's armor skills could be improved by dexterity. Not to say that all stats should change whole systems for each character, but adding some reasons why someone would want strength that badly on a hand crossbow.

And the items, too random.

I wonder if I'll be able to craft
one good item with all this stuff.

I love loot games, I love finding random stuff all the time. I remember in D2, I found a unique mace once from a physical immune swarm of bugs in act 2. I also crafted myself a nice runeword armor. I found many set pieces in diablo 2 as well! I've now played Diablo 3 for more than D2 I'm sure, and I've found nothing. Not a single piece of legendary equipment, not a single set item. Diablo 3 is skewed towards the end-game. Anything below level 60 isn't probably worth it (A friend of mine found legendary level 3 boots, while neat in theory, they would be useful for 4-5 levels) and even if you find anything remotely rare, if the stats aren't great, it won't be useful to anyone. Itemization in diablo 3 is not perfect right now, most of the legendary items are basically a huge list of random possibilities, some are good and some aren't. I suppose Diablo 2 didn't have all of the crazy stuff at launch, but I hope we'll see truly unique legendaries with interesting properties. I also hope the new Paragon system will help me find good items randomly in the world. You can also find items that are plainly useless. Mage helms with bonuses to monk skills and the like.

Crafting is also painful, you spend materials and money to create random items with random properties. With all the stats in this game, it's not hard to make a level 60 armor with 5 things on it that are completely useless. With the prices related to this process, selling the items on the auction house instead of breaking them down into materials then taking the money to buy better items seems like the way to go if you want better equipment. You also need to find higher-level recipes and I have found none of them either.

To make matters worse, in my opinion, everything is going on at the auction house. You can buy legendaries for insanely low sums. I took half of the gold I had and bought all legendaries for my character. What does this mean? Some people play much more than I do? They're luckier? They use bots? How can there be so many legendary items on the auction house while I've found nothing? Otherwise, I'm not a fan of auction house-type systems, so I'm staying away. I sincerely hope the game isn't balanced around level 60 players buying items from other players. Then again, I'm still not sure around what diablo 2 was balanced.

I'd be losing money not to buy this!

How I would fix this.
Add the enchanters from Torchlight or the system in World of Warcraft where you can transform your stats into something else. If I found a really good weapon that gave strength as a wizard, I could transform the strength into intelligence. Or remove that magic modifier and re-roll it. As I understand it, the difference between an average item and a really good one is most of the time because of one sub-par modifier. As for the items themselves, I would add more legendaries and set items of all levels and make them drop a bit more, maybe. I have nothing bad to say about the auction house, it's a neat experiment if anything else, just don't balance the game around the idea people will play forever and get enough gold to buy everything they need.

Some lost potential with the enemies
Enemies in Diablo 3 are interesting. They come in all sizes and varieties with their own inherent abilities. Then you have champions and elites that come with 1, 2, 3 or 4 modifiers such as molten (Fire burns where they walk and then they explode), avenger (When they die, all other enemies become stronger) and missile dampening (All your projectiles are slowed in time then kill the monster instantly) and you have unique enemies with some special powers, then bosses. The challenge ramps up pretty quickly in Inferno because the enemy's stats outmatch your own by a fair margin. I have nothing against the normal enemies and the bread-and-butter nature of action rpgs, what I have some beef with are the bosses. I remember being disappointed the second I looked in the D3 strategy guide, days before the game launch.

What's the point?

All bosses are like you see in that picture. Their HP and XP (And other stats I'm sure) increase at each difficulties but their attacks and other special characteristics never change. It's true for the first and last boss of the game. Why then, surface that they do the same thing at all difficulties? Was it planned at some point that bosses would do different things later on? I remember in diablo 2 on nightmare difficulty, Andariel was green! That's different, right? There's so much variety in D3 and they couldn't make the bosses tougher besides obvious numerical increases of their stats?

How I would fix this
Adding modifiers to the bosses could be funny but maybe some custom tailored new attacks would be the way to go. Nothing prevents the skeleton king from summoning ghosts or zombies or whirlwinding for much longer or teleporting differently on higher difficulties. I understand the desire to not add resistances - and immunities - because there's no such thing as a "fire" wizard versus an "ice" or "lighting" one, but adding variety would make replayability that much enjoyable. As a side note, I've read that the special quest to get the good item faces player against tougher versions of the bosses, I'm looking forward to that.

The story is taking away from the game.
Normally I wouldn't maul over the story because in terms of game design, whatever you tell is fine as long as the game plays well. I just feel that stories in ARPGs should be as small and unnoticeable as possible, they shouldn't span through big cutscenes that pop in your face and full-screen videos of your character telling you how they defeated the demons. Blizzard has always relied on the same tropes - corruption, betrayal, cow levels, staying a while and listening - so I'm not going to kick dirt their way for making the story kinda bad and unbelievable at best. In diablo 2 the story was told through text bubbles that you could close instantly. You can also close them quickly in D3 but they still break the momentum a bit.

"We're sick of the recent trend towards bright, cartoony RPGs."

How I would fix this
Easy, add an option to automatically skip all cutscenes and speeches after you beat the game. I know what the story is now after I've beat it once, I don't want to watch it again, I just want to click-click-click-click.

Look at Dungeon Defenders

Dungeon Defenders is a great take on the tower defense genre, I really enjoy playing it. I bought it on iPod (And it was a terrible experience all over) and waited maybe one year then I bought it on Xbox360 (Split-Screen Coop is not great and the griefing options were many) then on PC with all of my friends. Dungeon Defenders mixes action-rpg with loot mechanics and tower defense systems to create a nifty little game with some flaws that I'm going to look at in the following article.

A side word on DLC...

I understand advertising but I
don't have to like it.

I haven't played any of it. There are about 6 new classes and about twenty levels and new modes in the game that get added by buying more things. I'm not a big fan of buying content for a game post-launch so it's not a point against Dungeon Defenders, however the way it's presented could be more elegant. When you boot up the game, you get two screens of DLC and "BUY NOW" buttons, when you get to the character select screen, all the extra content is shown but if you want to access any of it, it pops out a store page. I know you want me to buy your game, but if I haven't played since about a year and I see a new "Nightmare" difficulty added after "Insane" and want to try it, I expect it to work, not tell me that I have to buy that feature that appears right there as if it was unlocked. I know, minor gripe with the way publicity works.

How I would fix it
Make everything dlc-related clearly shown as such. Add a red overlay over the things you can't use before you pay, add a symbol, make the text another color, make a separate menu to buy these things and don't show them in the main game where I think I own that content.

All classes aren't created equal

Mao the level 0 monk and pals

The four available classes at launch were the Squire, Apprentice, Huntress and Monk. If you plan to play alone, do not go with archer or monk, you won't be able to progress in the game at all. This is because the Squire and Apprentice can summon towers that will prevent enemies from reaching directly your crystal (You must protect a crystal in each level against waves of enemies), Monk and Huntress cannot. The monk has auras with various effects such as slowing down enemies and killing them in some fashion and huntress can lay down explosives but they won't be as effective as barricades and barriers that can be put up by the squire and apprentice.

These towers have various and
 interesting effects, none of them
 will help you win the game alone.

If you're playing with friends, a monk or a huntress can be a good addition to the team if they don't plan to use their traps, for balance reasons all defenses cost a certain number of points and they are shared amongst player. You can also specialize your character in different ways such as making your towers better or your regular weapon attacks better. If a monk or a huntress leveled up their attack and speed, it only makes sense that another played would put the towers up while you focus on killing enemies. It's kinda frustrating if you want to level-up a monk or huntress tho. You can always switch to another character so you put towers with your squire and then switch to your monk... But that will create another problem, as I will explain in the next point, so it's out of the question for me. Why make two classes that can't reasonably solo the game well?

Even then, the Squire is way better at putting towers up than the Apprentice is. The apprentice's towers have elemental attributes (fire and electricity) which means that some of your towers will deal 0 damage to any fire or electricity attuned enemy, which means that you'll have to put more than one tower even if it's strong enough to take care of the enemies. Squire towers are great, they cover any situations and they deal full damage to all enemy types, one could say that the mage towers have more diverse powers but that's not exactly right, the chain lighting tower and the harpoon tower have similar usages, idem for the bowling ball tower and the fireball one.

First level with a monk, I almost failed.

How I would fix this
Add one tower that blocks enemy movement and one tower that shoots ranged projectiles for all classes and that solves pretty much everything, now you can solo the whole game with any characters and you can still have the weird auras or explosives for the Monk and Huntress. For elemental towers, maybe lower their base damage, make it so elemental attacks deal more damage to opposite enemy types - make it a rock-paper-scissor system - but not 0 damage to enemies of the same time. Maybe half, maybe full, but having a part of your arsenal doing nothing against random enemies is frustrating, so that has to be fixed.

The game feels too slow
Between enemy waves you will have time to go around the map, open chests, pick up mana crystals and build towers. If the characters moved fast enough, if the maps were small enough, if the chests and defensible positions where nearby enough, this wouldn't be a problem. The maps get bigger, the chests are placed at very far positions and if you didn't put any points in movement speed - which you shouldn't if you want good towers or good weapon damage/health - you're going to break down the action pretty hard between enemy waves because you'll slug along the map trying to go and gather resources, place towers, upgrade towers, etc. Especially when you're playing alone, this becomes a problem in that it ruins momentum.

That's not a huge map but getting around to the chests between wave is annoying even then.

While you're fighting, moving around to tackle enemies and collect mana to upgrade your towers is fine because you already move around to kill enemies but when there's nothing else to do except walk around some huge maps doing nothing, you're not having fun. After playing all of Orcs Must Die 2, I noticed that while that game had some flaws, the action seemed more fast-paced because you didn't have to walk all over the maps to collect things between waves - also the timer between waves was close to 10 seconds, not 70 like in Dungeon Defenders.

How I would fix this
Stop putting chests randomly on the map, just make them closer to the things you're supposed to protect. Or award the mana automatically. Or just give a tactical view between waves when you're building so you can build anywhere you want on the map. Why would you physically need to move your character to a spot so you can build a tower? I understand why you would do that in the battle phase, but during the peaceful building phase? You should be able to just place your towers with the mouse and just get your mana and items that way.

I really like the stats/item system
Dungeon Defender is part tower defense, part action-rpg. The loot game is neatly implemented, you gain items from defeating enemies or in chests, some special challenges also give you unique things and you can buy them in stores. You also can upgrade your items with mana, choosing what stat to level along the way. That leads to really powerful customized items with the stats you want to fit your play style. Personally I like the magic staves that shoot multiple projectiles. You also have familiars with different abilities such as killing enemies or boosting your towers in different ways. That whole part of dungeon defenders is great - except when you get to the endgame where you need insane amounts of mana to upgrade anything, but I won't hold it against the game. I know how I feel about stat points allocation but since this game is about towers and defending spots, it doesn't matter too much how you spec your character. I like how different classes have different stats such as the huntress being able to upgrade how many times her traps will explode.

Another little thing they added since I started playing is "Pro Mode", basically it makes leveling-up your items faster. A nice idea over the regular "You have to fill up the mana bar before you can put your points" system.

Tons of content, even if it could be displayed some other way
The campaign spans over 15-something missions, you get about the same number of challenges (special missions with very specific conditions such as being unable to build any towers or goblins raining down on you) and there are four difficulty settings to complete them. You could play Dungeon Defenders for a while, but I wish they'd surface the data better. It says you need to be level 40 to do such or such challenge, is it on Normal difficulty? How about on Insane? What kind of level would I need? Why is the interface for the level selection kinda bad and too busy like that? I'm sure there are better ways to display the same information while showing more of it in a clearer way. (Also like I said in the first point, don't show me all that stuff I won't be able to play, thanks.)

Challenge: UI Crush

Look at Orcs Must Die 2

Part tower defense, part action RPG, orcs must die 2 is a compelling package at first, there are tons of traps, weapons and trinkets to collect and upgrade and there are also tons of level to try and perfect. After playing with it to completion, twice, my desire to play it again is greatly diminished for various reasons regarding map  and item systems design.

Right this way Mister Orc

With four spawn points and no
chokepoints, this map is not fun.

The maps in OMD2 are ranging from mines to castles to ice caves and lava-filled structures. All maps have spawn zones where enemies appear and rifts where enemies try to go and die. They did a great job of adding more environmental hasards this time around such as minecarts that roam maps, killing orcs for you, or chandeliers ready to fall on enemies. The maps never are simple; sometimes they have multiple levels and they also might have up to 4 doors where enemies come out of. Sometimes there are natural chokepoints where you can dump all your towers, but must of the time there aren't and you need to place them at multiple spots, this gets harder in single player where you have enemies coming out of two different ways most of the time. I love chokepoints in my tower defense games, making huge piles of towers on one spot is a great way to have silly, senseless fun.

Another thing I have against the map design in OMD2 is the fact that it doesnt allow the use of your favorite turrets. I really love most of the turrets that come out of the ceiling and some of the wall-based ones. It's really a frustrating experience when after level 3 or so, there is no spot anymore to place ceiling turrets. After a while the corridors become so wide that it's not really useful to place traps on the walls either! Floor traps and guardians (NPCs that either block the enemy's path or attack them from range) work pretty much everywhere, so they're the go-to in terms of versatility.

How I would fix that
A small amount of level design changes would fix my issues with the maps in OMD2. Add more chokepoints, lower the ceiling at places, tighten some hallways, funnel the path the enemies take... That seems like it would fix both this problem and part of my other one.

Swiss Army Traps Knife (Or how often do you use the corkscrew)
There are TONS of things to use for your character in OMD2. Almost 20 weapons, traps and trinkets, it's enormous. You can also upgrade them with skulls gained from beating levels under certain conditions such as not letting a single orc pass or finishing under a time period. The upgrades are interesting, most items have a general upgrade that you can purchase multiple times and increases a base stat for that item, such as attack or reducing cost. Most items have unique upgrades where you need to choose between two things. In theory this is a neat idea, in practice one of the choices is superior to the other no matter how you see things. For example, archers can either regenerate health or shoot fire arrows. Archers are fragile and can't take a hit, they really die in one or two attacks. The health regeneration is so slow that they still die all the same, while burning enemies with their attacks is great and adds a bit of crowd control (Because enemies on fire run around). Other items have special upgrades such as being able to place floor traps on the walls and the like.

Guess how many of these things I've used. Answer is not much, and there are two more pages of these things.

Weapons are varied and interesting, from a wand that shoots mind control bolts to a ring of polymorph, you can really select something that suits your playstyle. Except if you want to attack all the time. Or not have to click constantly. Or if you want to deal any kind of damage. I bought many weapons to try them out before realizing that most of them require mana to attack and will stop doing anything before your mana goes back up. Most weapons need you to click repeatedly to attack, I know it's a small thing but it gets tiresome after a while. The default attack for the sorceress's wand is really low so you kind have to spam charged shots. Trinkets are fine since they have passive effects (and an active one that you activate with mana). They would matter more if the game was about you killing all the orcs instead of your traps doing most of the job,

Archers are good but they go down really fast, fast enough that regenerating health wouldn't matter.

Another problem with this system is that there is zero incentive to try any of the weird stuff. I've beated the whole game with the default sorceress weapon, a trinket to regenerate guardian health, a trinket that increases the gold you make, archers and paladins. Never I lost and had to rethink my strategy to change things around and approach the enemies in a different way.

How I would fix this
This is not easy, but a way to give meaning to all items and traps is to give a reason to use them. What I would do is add another upgrade for all items that would be multi-level and would go up when you kill enemies with that item. To make it worth trying, this upgrade would improve items greatly such as removing mana costs or increasing damage in a significant way. Maybe tie-in achievements to specific weapon usage? Have some levels require you to use specific things to 5 skull the map? Upgrading your items to the maximum level could give you part of a golden key, when you get them all you unlock a special challenge map! Anything!

Look at Cook Serve Delicious

I've been playing a ton of Cook Serve Delicious over the past two weeks and boy is it fun. In its most simplistic form, Cook Serve Delicious (Henceforth referred to as CSD) is a stressful microgame collection glued to a restaurant management sim game. It's also very indie, not sold on steam yet and programmed in Game Maker, I suppose that taking a look at smaller games should be made with a more forgiving mind, but the ideas and designs can still be judged on the same level.

Restaurant Tychoon
The game is a loop of alternating cooking and management sequences. In the management section of the game, you purchase, upgrade and choose foods to be on your menu, you buy equipment to help your restaurant run smoothly and you read emails - flavor text and useful info from the game, sometime with money bonus or little side missions. The goal of choosing properly your foods is to stuff your restaurant with high-paying foods that you get used to make. 

That's the menu I usually run with. Very healthy stuff. My backup menu isn't as good.

All foods have different 'micro-games' associated to them. For very simple foods such as the Corndog, it might be to press K for ketchup and M for mustard. Some more complex ones such as Soup require you to memorize multiple key sequences for different recipes. The chicken soup is K W U then Shift, then Y then the down arrow key three times. You also pick up menu items that will generate Buzz for you. Buzz represents how much people will come to your restaurant which translates to more money.

So far most of my buzz is generated by healthy foods, I take a small hit for selling wine tho.

Some foods have to be phased out of your menu every two days, some are staple and will be popular forever, some are healthy and generate more buzz, some create more chores for you to do. There are five chores in CSD and they happen during the cooking hours. Cleaning the toilet, washing dishes, hauling out garbage, setting up rat traps and catching burglars. Your restaurant upgrades will make these chores easier, you can also buy a tip jar to get extra money and some items to make your customers wait longer before you serve them.

A page of (mostly) useless upgrades. Mail filter? Really? The spam is kinda funny.

A problem I've encountered with the whole management aspect of the game is that every restaurant upgrade is available really soon. I manage to buy the upgrades that made my chores easier really quickly, I even got the gun control upgrade (Reduce chances of theft) before I ever saw a burglar in my restaurant! When you've upgraded everything in your restaurant, you're left with food upgrades and these get trickled down as the game decides.

Food upgrades are interesting because they raise the price of your food items but they most often then not increase their complexity. Some recipes are the exception, such as chicken (The minigame is always to tenderize the chicken exactly six times then season it and cook it) where the upgrades only increase prices, but things like Salad add new ingredients and new recipes, making these foods harder to prepare. You need to upgrade your foods if you want to rise to higher star ratings, so at one point you're going to make more difficult meals.

How I would fix this
Adding upgrades to help you prepare specific foods would be helpful and interesting. With about 25 different food items there are still more ways to prepare them. The upgrades don't need to be spectacular, for instance the Wine item is served by tapping the Up arrow key until you pull the cork out of the bottle. Why not add a corkscrew? You'd press C to use it then hold Up instead of taping it. Or maybe items that stop the cooking process of meats when they're done? Automatic ice dispensers for the soft drink machine? By adding restaurant upgrades to more items besides the basic chores there will be a sense of progression towards unlocking things to help the player.

Another neat upgrade idea I've had is a list of recipes cards you could hang around somewhere on-screen for a quick refresher at your most used items. I've had to memorize all soups and I dread upgrading them, for it will mean having to learn even more soup patterns. KWSP Shift Y down down down L down down down anyone? Is this the konami code or soup?

Delicious?
When you're in the cooking portion of the game, it's a restless free-for-all of action where people line down in your restaurant and ask you for things. You start with 4 cooking stations which means you can serve 4 people at once (This number gets upgraded whenever your restaurant rises in star rating) and it becomes quite stressful to deal with everything. Rush Hours make people come in droves to your establishment and by then you really need to calm down and process each order masterfully. Some need to cook for a while, some are complex key presses (Lasagna), some rely on memory (Steak) and others on precision (Beer).

If you mess up an order a little, you'll get an "Okay" rating instead of Perfect, if you mess up alot, you'll get a "Bad" rating, which generates negative buzz for the following day. There is something frustrating about the binary nature of certain decisions in the cooking process. I understand that serving the wrong meal by pressing a different key that you intended is an honest mistake that can only be blamed on the player but what I can't understand is the fact that once you've messed up an order, you have to serve it bad. This is especially frustrating because you get multipliers for each perfect orders you make and you get a money prize each day you complete with 100% perfect orders.

Rush hour, more like fish hour.

As an example, the process of making salad is complicated by the fact that you have 8 ingredients with similar starting letters, Thousand Island Dressing, Vinaigrette, Ranch, Cheese, Bacon and croutons, onions and peppers, greens and carrots, tomatoes and mushrooms. If someone asks for a salad with ranch, cheese, tomatoes and mushrooms and you hit R C T, you've messed up, tomatoes and mushrooms is linked to the "M" key, so you've messed up this salad. And you have to serve it. You know it's a bad order but can't do anything. Wine is also pretty finnicky, when you upgrade your wine, you actually add new wine selections to your menu. If you have wine A, B and C and someone asks for wine B and you tap the up key ever so slightly on the wrong bottle, that's it, you have to finish the job and serve the wrong wine even tho all you did is start popping the cork about a millimeter.

How I would fix this
Allow the player to trash any messed-up order. Maybe add a cash penalty so it's not inconsequential or just leave the time wasted preparing the wrong order as the downside. Some parts of the process can't be rolled back, such as giving the wrong order to a customer (I'm not advocating for a 'Are you sure you want to give this order to that client?' prompt every time you serve someone, that would ruin the flow of the game) but I sincerly doubt that chefs go "Oops, dropped two pounds of beef in that chicken soup! Oh well, gotta stick to it!". I know, this is not a simulation game with realism cranked up to 11, but having players make frustrating actions is not a fun thing.