An Homage to Diablo 3

Yeah, I said it, Diablo 3, so what, get off your high horse. Diablo 2 is old. Sure it’s great but how many level 99 Bowazons can you have? Oh Diablo 3? Diablo 3 was released a couple years ago under the name “Titan Quest.” I was so excited for the game. Unfortunately my crappy laptop and desktop were lucky to get 10 FPS out of this game with minimum settings. However being the determined young adults we were, my friend and I chugged through the entire game at an unsteady 10FPS.

Flash forward. I just built a new computer, Quad Core, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard disk space, 512MB Video Card, the works. First game to be installed was Titan Quest, even before my brand new copy of Age of Conan. I was so excited to see the game run I started up before even hooking up speakers. I maxed out all the video settings, set the game to my monitors native resolution, and WOW, Titan quest in its full glory, running so smooooooth, and looking so beautiful. I only played for 40 seconds or so but that’s all I needed for the night. The real topic of this post is character classes and the importance of dual classes.

Two games come to mind when I hear dual classes, Titan Quest, and Guild Wars. First lets do some math. D2 has 7 classes (5 original + 2 expansion). Titan Quest starts you with 8, but any 2 can be combined. Now remember in TQ there is no real “primary” class, so that’s a total of 28 combinations. 28 Unique classes, while the developers only need to create 8. Guild Wars is similar, they started out with 6 classes, yet 1 is primary, giving 30 classes total.

There is however one huge issue that arises here. Some combinations are greatly imbalanced. I will give great credit to D2 as its classes were for the most part well balanced. Although it is always better to specialize, each class had 2-3 setups that allowed for maximum performance with varied play styles, for example the bowazon and javazon. But of Guild Wars’ 30 combinations, about half suffer from major flaws compared to the other combinations. It’s as if each specific combination needs to be balanced separately rather than being an exact combination of both classes, which would cause major headaches for developers.

I don’t really know what my point is other than dual classes are the new sliced bread. Bring on the triple classes!

Conan impressions are soon to come, unless I get sucked into Titan Quest.