Katarina and I finally got through the story. 12 chapters in all which is just huge considering Diablo 3 has 5 Acts which each Act equals about as much content as 1 VH Chapter. The final boss was epic to be expected. The only difference between the two games is that in Diablo, they expect you to survive the fight to defeat the bosses. In VH, they expect you to die…… A LOT! It usually takes about 10-15 deaths to defeat a significant boss. You have the option to pay gold to rez and continue the fight where you left off. This is the only way as it is impossible to defeat a boss without dying in this game.

Ive started doing VHs equivalent to Adventure mode now and it seems pretty cool. Its similar to D3 as far as new maps and challenges.

More on this later as I investigate.

In case you were worried, Legendary, Blizzard, Universal, et al. have already doubled their money, which I’m sure cheers them up in the face of less than stellar reviews.

I can kind of understand the negative direction of these notices. Critics seem almost willing to overlook the fact that this is a video game movie as long as it involves them in a focused plot and three-dimensional characters. Unfortunately, Warcraft is not On the Waterfront or Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a fantasy epic about silly fantasy races and equally silly magic because, you know, the source material is a video game. You can hanker for Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones all you want (and these come up often as the standards for comparison), but what you get is something different.

What you get is a film treatment of the lore on which Warcraft is built. Notice I didn’t say World of Warcraft. This is intended to be a serious adaptation of Warcraft origins — where did characters like Durotan, Gul’dan, Medivh, Lothar, etc. come from? How were the orcs changed by Fell magic? And so on. The “world” of World of Warcraft is definitely there, but people expecting to see a cinematic recasting of the “World of” world should stay at home. They should also stay at home if they expect the IV-drip character development of Game of Thrones or Peter Jackson’s ludicrous video-gameization of Lord of the Rings, because this movie is intended to be as faithful to the Warcraft RTS as possible, as though Blizzard and the film companies got together and asked, “What would happen if we could slow down something like Warcraft III, go down to the ground, and get to know some of these little pixelated figures?”

So that’s what it is. The figures are expanded to “life-size” and given interesting motives, disappointments, crises, and other dramatic movie stuff. Azeroth is very impressive, and this is the movie’s nod to World of Warcraft. Territories look immense and real. Places like Stormwind, Iron Forge, Black Rock, etc. look exactly like you think they will. There’s a little too much gryphon flight, but whatever — it’s a pretty good gryphon or whatever you call that pet. Most interesting of all is the obvious influence of Blizzard artists on production design: practically every detail — down to the look of armor, swords, and shields — is reproduced faithfully from items you would see in the games. It truly is like being on the ground in a Blizzard title.

As for plotting and character development: I didn’t see anything wrong in either of these departments. The plot was appropriately epic and very easy to follow. The characters are as well-realized as they can possibly be. I just don’t understand all the bashing. I guess if anything goes wrong, it’s that the movie is too faithful to its source material and wants to pull the audience into it wholesale rather than portioning it out in more digestible slices. But this, to me, is really a positive, even if it turned out to be an error in judgment. It tells me that Blizzard takes its IPs very, very seriously will not let movie companies change them. This, ultimately, is the best thing about Warcraft. It’s a movie first and foremost for serious Warcraft fans — those wackadoos on the forums who can trace the lineage of the Proudfoots and the Hellscreams and tell you all about other things in the world that you don’t really care about. If you sit there for a few minutes, you’ll figure this out and the movie suddenly becomes quite good.

Enjoyed and would see again. 8.5/10 blood shards.

I bought a new computer, hoping that it will motivate me to start some real work on some graphics/video projects I have in my head.

First thing i did was installing FO4. And it was terrible. I didn’t know what it was at first, but the game now looked very unimpressive. Then I realized – it was running too smoothly, the high fps count made it look like a Venezuelan soap opera. I need to find a way to cap fps.

I never owned a computer that could run recent games at maximum setting, so that’s all new to me.

So I bought the Witcher 3. What’s the point of making a beautiful detailed open world if you’re forced to play in third person? This totally kills all immersion for me. Trying now a mod that changes the camera, but it’s not perfect. At last you can cap fps to 30 in the menu. 

 

 

First my Battle.net account was automatically locked when I logged in with my correct password, because my “login pattern” had changed. By which I guess they mean I logged in at all.

Then resetting my password was about an 11 step process involving 4 emails, a code phrase, many warnings, a “Battle Tag” I didn’t recognize at all (probably from total disuse) in the subject line of an email I was warned to ignore if I didn’t recognize… but if I had followed that advice my account would still be locked… on and on until finally my account was unlocked, I was invited to pointlessly log in on the Battle.net webpage, and then when I finally made it back to the Diablo III client, I got this:

“Thanks for trying to play our fucking game, here’s your punishment.”

FFS. You folks mock console gaming but I’ve never had to deal with this level of Keystone Kops fuckery on my XBox.

Building modular chunks to craft an evil science lair from. Progress is slower than I’d like, but should improve toward the weekend, I hope.

And then the six year old struck and this is all I got done for the rest of the day… LOL:

Also looks like they are much closer to Retail release than I thought.

Patch notes here:

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=b6896bca5de420860e7f4c200&id=55d0fb040b&e=db17ae0499