The Witcher and Ultima VII are like opposite ends of the Isometric RPG timeline

It's serendipitous that I chose Ultima VII: The Black Gate as my buy-one-get-one-free with The Witcher, as Black Gate is one of the original (if not the first) real-time isometric RPGs, while The Witcher seems to mark the place where the genre transcends itself and merges into the broader BioWare/Bethesda trend of modern WRPGs. Alongside first person games like the Elder Scrolls series and Ultima Underworld, the isometric style dominated PC RPGs for over a decade, providing us with your basic list of citations of classic WRPGS: Fallout, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Diablo, and Whatever.Com.

Something something something we could talk about how the genre goes back to Rogue and Adventure and how it obviously spawned originally from tabletop games. Anyway, some of the big deals about Ultima VII here in video game world are that it does away with grid-based movement, automates turn-based combat in a real-time format, and introduces investigative dialogue trees (i.e. the player learns keywords that then become choices in future conversations). That's a short list, and I'm skimping here because Western RPGs are far from my area of expertise, but the idea is that Black Gate really cut back on the discretized feel of RPGs up to that point. The isometric style was a giant leap in the direction of real-time cinematic gameplay, even if it was still turn-based and heavily governed by off-screen calculations. It was a much bigger step away from tabletop than, say, the early Wizardry games. I realize this has little to do with isometric graphics, but, well, that's just how it happened. I'm not lying with the above list of examples (or the many more Internet and I could cite) - these games are bound by far more than their visual style, even if it is the most immediately recognizable characteristic. 

With that in mind, I should note that while Diablo II and its isometric dungeon-crawling progeny like Fate, Torchlight, and Sacred are certainly influenced by the WRPG trend born of Ultima VII, their hard real-time action and dungeon-crawling focus pretty significantly distinguish the gameplay to the point where most gamers put them in a subclass of their own. We'll just call them action-RPGs or dungeon-crawlers. 

Not that Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout 3 aren't already closely tied to the classic isometric RPGs of yore, but The Witcher really brings it all back home in that the player can literally switch back and forth between traditional fixed-overhead-camera point-and-click Baldur's Gate gameplay and over-the-shoulder free-look WASD Mass Effect action. The combat is somewhat turn-based, offering a command pause for complex actions (like using spells or potions) and syncing attack strings to rhythmic clicks instead of waiting on one-to-one inputs like The Witcher 2. The classic hub structure is present, latching the player to a temporary home base while they fan out completing quests, but the environments are thoroughly interconnected and deviate from the dungeon model. Dialogue trees, now not as Zorkily arbitrary as Ultima VII, are the fundamental means of fleshing out the story. It all comes together as a very explicit Farewell to Isometry; a changing of the guards. Playing it in 2013, six years after its original release and loooong since any mainstream isometric RPG, is enough to make one nostalgic for the old days. 

Playing The Witcher back to back with Ultima VII gives an interesting look at how far we've come - and in particular, how not that far we've come. It's funny - all those little gripes I listed about Ultima VII yesterday are totally and amazingly resolved in The Witcher (most of them were resolved by, uh, 1994), yet the latter game doesn't seem particularly better. Oh, it's way funner, and I'm far more engaged already. While last night I had to force myself to make it through a half hour of Black Gate, I played The Witcher for two hours straight and was barely able to put it down. But there's nothing driving me to play Witcher instead of Ultima, nothing I'm particularly anxious to experience, discover, or overcome - it's just easier to play. Somehow, in the 15 years that passed between these two games, no new means of interaction have become standard. The medium, or at least this subset thereof, is still offering players the same choices it has been for decades. This really isn't an inherently good or bad thing, but it's certainly an observation warranting reflection. 

Not here on this blog though!

Aside: off-topic, but this isn't really worth another post. The Witcher is notable as a great jumping-on point for isometric RPGs. The genre is notoriously inapproachable, with the general consensus that if you aren't willing to learn the AD&D rulebook, you don't deserve to get anything out of these games. While mastery of The Witcher may not make Icewind Dale any easier, it at least provides a semblance of the experience at a perfectly palatable learning curve.

On T2 and D3: In this corner, we have Diablo III

Arnold's greatest role

Yes, T2, the Judgment Day, rarely, and perhaps fairly so, compared to the third film of the Mighty Ducks franchise, where I believe they all went to college or some such. Terminator 2 is better, it's like a million times better, it's definitely the best Terminator movie and perhaps Arnold's greatest role (who cares?).

Now that I'm done paying lip service to a joke that I wrote last week, because that's what comedy is, let's talk turkey: Terminator whoa lol typo IRL I mean Torchlight II, Diablo III's biggest mainstream competitor. Torchlight II is a relatively sudden sequel (it's <2-year dev-cycle cowering beneath D3's 11 years in the pipe) capitalizing on the unexpected success of the first game. Torchlight itself was an action-RPG descended from Diablo and rightly so, as the creative personnel from the former Blizzard North were responsible for its development (including the composer - love those tunes).

Torchlight was, well, fucking fun, simple, and cheap. Didn't even have multiplayer. Torchlight II "corrects" that last bit by bringing to the table that element so craved by mindless e-junkies, but otherwise its improvements on the first game are sparse. The visuals are fairly identical, the classes more reshuffled than new, and the levels... as randomized as ever. So hey, it's more SNK's idea of a sequel than what we have today, but it still feels more refined than the first game (at least from the first act). Because I'm lazy and because both games are generational contemporaries of D3, I'm going to refer from here on to "Torchlight" as a single entity encompassing both games. Also because you can get BOTH Torchlights for barely half the price of D3.

Somehow, Torchlight ends up looking the more WoWy of the games, despite the outcry of so many Diablo fans that III looked more like WarCraft than Diablo

Diablo III is far more striking than Torchlight. It grabbed me and made an immediate impression - both the Voodoo Guy and Monk classes gave me familiar but refreshing gameplay from the geckos. By comparison, I played the first few quests with three of Torchlight II's four classes, all of whom immediately fell into recognizable roles: the summoner, the ranged (amazon/hunter/whatever), and the brute. It feels old; comfortable, but dated. This is exacerbated by Torchlight's such closely timed releases, which left little room to do anything unexpected. The immediate experience, those first few clicks, certainly put me in D3's corner. Maybe Torchlight was a fun stopgap, but now Diablo was BACK.

A few hours into each (aren't demos fucking great? Helping you make decisions and all? Thanks, consoles!), that impression had been largely inverted. Yeah, the snappy and visceral melee crunching makes D3 quickly rewarding, but it suffers hugely from the aforecomplainedabout skill system, on two fronts. Strategically, because Blizzard has done everything they can to simplify combat - the way they've limited slots and dropped hot-swapping feels like consolification (funny, since of the two games, Torchlight is the one available on consoles). What it comes down to is that you essentially pick one skill to be your mainstay, put that on the left mouse button, and click away. There's no encouragement toward or room for experimentation in the early game - as I discussed before, every new skill requires an old one to be swapped out, so at low levels when you only have access to two or three of those slots, it's an extremely rigid experience.

INSANE.

The simplified skill development has also resulted in a de-RPGing of the game. Every character is the same and all new skill upgrades come at fixed levels. Beyond the loss of customization, this is a pretty powerful deterrent to level progress. In these hacking RPGs, one of the biggest things that keeps you going is the urge to get "just one more" level up, one more skill point to put just where you want, giving X spell that extra status effect you've been waiting on or earning a new summon for your reanimated army. Take build determination out of the player's hand, and all of a sudden that determination wanes. If I'm playing a fire-centric caster at level 13, and D3 has decided for me that there isn't a new fireball boost until level 17, that pretty significantly moves back the goalposts, and maybe soon they vanish from view altogether.

After the [period of time it takes me to regain the energy to make a post], I'll talk about what Torchlight II does in contrast to these missteps, and also some of what fucks it up.

Hey, this post kind of was a Judgment Day! Thanks T2 for being as timely and accurate as ever!

On D2 and D3: Which is better?

For about a year when I was 16, then again when I was 20 or so, I suffered under a powerful malady. That affliction is known to the wider gaming public as D2: The Mighty Ducks. A gripping film brimming with love, triumph, defeat, black people playing hockey (?), and Queen's "We Are the Champions", Disney's D2 has spent the two decades since 1994 pulling at the heartstrings of America's youths and adults alike. Sadly, those who took "D2" above to refer to this age-old tragicomedy will be sorely disappointed to learn that I meant Diablo II.

Yes, just about every review of Diablo III started with the writer giving a long-winded story about how he/she "spent many long nights" in the thrall of 2000's Diablo II, perhaps losing a girlfriend, house, homework assignment, or dog over it. I don't think my tale is quite as pathetic, mostly because (in my original run) I was playing on a shared family PC that sat in our living room, significantly limiting and publicizing the amount of time I spent online. I still of course loved the game (as did just about anyone who let it sink its claws in deeper than level 5 or 6) and spent more hours with it than I care to calculate, so it's no mystery how anxious I was to get my hands on Diablo III.

The trick with these addictive types of games is that "once you pop, you can't stop", as Dave Pringles famously said - but if you don't start [pop] at all, you probably won't get the fuss. So when my machine (a 2010 laptop with integrated graphics) failed a quick Can You Run It lookup for D3, I said "whatever" and moved on. What I learned from this is twofold: A.) don't trust anything Can You Run It says about integrated video because it's probably wrong and B.) always try the demo. On my way to play StarCraft II today I decided to give the Diablo III "Starter Kit" (i.e. demo) a spin, and lo and behold, it ran fine. I didn't even look at the graphics settings -  whatever it auto-adjusted to (I'm guessing the lowest levels) ran as smooth as you could want (well, like, probably 30 fps or so - fast enough that there was no visible lag).

Man again my boring stories take up way more space in a post than I expect. You'd think you were reading some asshole's blog and not a professional video game journalism site. But that's what everyone thinks, here at IGN.

Diablo III's skill system is stupid, that's what I'm here for you to learn. It's not exactly awful, but why they decided to take such a step back from D2 is beyond me (or is at this point in the post beyond me - later we'll learn that I know exactly why and I'm just being a good storyteller, you're welcome). I can see why Blizzard thought it was time to shake up the old skill-tree paradigm which has been languishing since the '90s, that every RPG and its brother, and its brother-in-law, has done to death. But uh, just completely dropping custom leveling for fixed unlocks seems a bit backwards. The system is quite simple to explain: at fixed levels, you unlock a predetermined skill which can then be swapped into a categorized slot. Unlike D2, you can't assign any skill to any slot - instead, you have Primary, Secondary, Defense, etc. skills and one slot for each, so at any given time you can only have one of each equipped. That means that every time you level up and gain a new skill, you have to sacrifice an old one if you want to equip it. 

There are no "skill points" to be allotted; once a skill is unlocked, its strength is determined solely by your gear. That means the only point of customization is equipment - stripped down, every level 67 Barbarian is identical to every other, meaning there are only ten characters you can ever make: male and female (superficial difference) of each of the five classes. The game clearly knows this, as there are only ten save slots.

According to Blizzard and fans, this system is to allow a player to alternate styles at any given time, without needing to create a new character (or hack to "respec" their old one). According to me, this system means that unless you intend to max level every character you play, certain skills will always be locked away from you. Forgive me for being a "casual" player, but I don't necessarily pick up a game with the intention to pour hundreds of hours into it, nor expect to have to do so to access all its content. Even with a dungeon-hack like this, I lose a significant amount of steam once I've been through the story - even as much as I loved D2 (see above), I never came even close to maxing out a character, so I certainly don't intend to this time.

What Blizzard is doing, and you can hardly blame them for it, is catering solely to hardcore fans ("gamers") - the people who KNOW as soon as they purchase the game, "I WILL spend 500 hours on this". Those are the only ones who are going to appreciate this new skill system, and who are dedicated enough to grinding for gear to customize their avatar. That uh, fucking sucks for us who have jobs and bills.

Blizzard: A once-great developer now making games for this guy (girl?) instead of the rest of us