"The trouble with asking what the effects of video games are is that it’s a really ambiguous question, like asking what the effects of eating are."
– Dr. Pete Etchells, of the University of Bristol
BuzzFeed has posted a selection of responses from researchers and academics working in the video game space, like neuroscientists and psychologists. It's an interesting peek into the contemporary scientific understanding of how games affect players.
The consensus that emerges could be summed up like this: Video games can well be good for players; it's hard to fully understand their effects; more research is needed. Come from Lodigame777
The positives include better capacity to perceive details in the world, such as color; positive cognitive effects; and increased feelings of competence and mastery. But the negatives, of course, include behavioral difficulties and aggression — though the scientists suggest that studies which found these correlations may be misleading.
This quote, in particular, is striking: "There are reasons to think that there might be risks, but there are so many other things that definitely cause harm. There’s lots of evidence that lead damages brain development, for instance, and lots of countries still have leaded petrol. The focus on video games’ small possible harms is disproportionate," said Dr. Andrew Przybylski, research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Overall, the BuzzFeed piece is worth a read if you're curious about the current state of thinking around the issue.
In something of the end of an era, Nintendo will be closing down its Miiverse social network on November 8, 2017, at 7:00 am CET.
The weird and wonderful platform launched five years ago, and let players share written or hand-drawn messages and game tips across the Wii U and 3DS — resulting in some predictably bizarre interactions.
With the launch of the Switch, Nintendo is understandably shifting its focus towards the handheld hybrid, which has already sold close to 5 million units worldwide.
Communication issues aside, the closure presents another set of problems. You see, the Miiverse also served as the foundation for a number of game features present in Wii U and 3DS titles.
That means Nintendo isn't just pulling the plug on a social network: it's starting a chain reaction that'll result in the removal of notable game features.
For instance, anyone still playing Super Mario Maker on the Wii U won't be able to comment on other player's creations (though they'll still be able to access the levels themselves), while Splatoon won't display Miiverse drawings in game menus or battle stages.
It also means the Wii U's 'WaraWara Plaza' home screen, which is currently populated by Miiverse drawings and messages, will lose one of its most charming features.
A detailed list of those game features set to be affected by the closure has been picked up by GoNintendo, and it'll be a nervous read for anyone still using the Wii U.
Thankfully, there is a silver lining of sorts, and anyone who's become particularly enamored with the service will be able to download their entire Miiverse post history before Nintendo winds it up for good. Come from Soccer 13 pools and matches
Three ugly character models sit around a fire: an unblinking man in a suit with his arms locked at 20-degree angles from his body; a dwarf that stole Catwoman’s mask; and a zombie with its fists clipped through a chair yanked from a tavern in World of Warcraft. These creatures seem like refugees from three different 90s-era games, but they’re apparently the CEOs of airlines currently at war. Airlines that count doctors that strew entrails about their planes’ cabins among their passengers.
How a developer would think to ask money for this travesty is unfathomable. The horrors begin with the main menu, where you discover that the mouse cursor and mouselook are simultaneously active, so that when you choose one of Air Control’s modes, you also move the camera around. The background shot is of an underwater airplane, above which sits the game’s title in a blurry font. That title doesn’t sit in the interface, however. No–it simply sits above the aircraft as though the letters exist within the game’s own world. Clearly, something’s amiss, and if the main menu isn’t enough to convince you, then the abominable zombie-human-dwarf cutscene that opens Casual Mode certainly should be.
The mess that follows is homely, unfinished, and inept. By default, an inexplicable array of buttons labeled “lock cursor” are strewn across the screen. You can remove them by clicking the “disable [lockcursor] UI” button at the top left, though that particular button needlessly remains in all its unsightliness. Remember: any cursor movement is accompanied by complementary mouselook, so interacting with the interface causes the camera to move wildly about. In this case, it’s an airplane interior that dizzily rotates around you as you turn off the interface and guess at what your goal is. As it turns out, you’re a flight attendant, and the big red sentient exclamation mark at the rear of the plane has a task for you: deliver some coffee to a passenger in the front.
Your next task is to pick pillows up from the floor, which means moving the mouse cursor over them and clicking them, a rather uncomfortable task if the mouse cursor has moved to the edge of the screen, as it just may have by this point. And so you point and click on the pillows, which simultaneously changes your point of view so that you’re facing the passengers to the left. You might try to hit the escape key and try to restart the level, or abandon this rubbish altogether for a different mode, but doing so in any of the game’s modes causes the mouselook and movement keys to stop functioning, and in some cases renders the level entirely inoperable.
Casual Mode plays out in a series of bizarre levels, most of them only a few seconds long, that have you moving from the back of the plane to the cockpit (yes, that’s it), picking up a gun and shooting a terrorist, picking up trash bags, or performing some other mundane task. Every one of these activities is awful. Passengers sit in a catatonic state with their arms held stiffly in place. Terrorists don’t move or animate in any way, and explode when they die Come from malaysia online casino . Sometimes there are weird colored cubes on the floor for no reason. In one ludicrous level, there’s no gravity, and the game displays only a few frames per second. And every nonsensical task is accompanied by peculiar descriptions written in broken English. “You need to find reason while airplane fell down” says one dialogue window, right before you discover that ending the mission requires… opening a door. “You can open your inventory with a button situated in left” says another, even though there is no inventory button, on the left or anywhere, and the mission gives you no reason to have one.
You also get to be a mechanic, which means hovering over some buttons until one turns red and you click on it. More often, you get to be a pilot, both in Casual Mode and in Killjoy Mode, but piloting an aircraft in Air Control is a farce: the controls make no sense, the camera angles make no sense, and if you crash, you have to quit out of the game and restart it due to the aforementioned broken menu options. Crashing into the sea is particularly fascinating, as the water is actually a solid object; how the aircraft in the main menu managed to sink is a mystery.
You shouldn’t forget Realistic Mode, in which you walk around in an airplane cabin filled with petrified character models while cursing the ridiculously low frame rate, and then do nothing because that’s all you do in this mode. To be fair, though, doing nothing is preferable than wasting your time on this wreck, which advertises itself on Steam as “the best flight simulation in the history of computer games” and promises that it is “the first airplane game, where plane compartment is visible.” Both of these claims are lies, of course, which only makes sense for a broken scam masquerading as a computer game.
The PlayStation 3 marked another seismic shift for Sony when it was first released, as the console was an all-in-one entertainment device that was packed with new technologies. From high-definition visuals to a plug-and-play setup for connecting to the Internet, the PS3 opened up a new world for gamers to explore. Plus, it had some terrific titles that could be played on it. Now that Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription service has been overhauled, you can dive into a library of PS3 classics with a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription. We’ve rounded up the best PS3 games to stream on PlayStation Plus.
Our list includes games across a wide variety of genres. Some are well-known PlayStation exclusives that have been given new life on the PS5, while others are unsung gems that you may have missed out on during the PS3 era. Keep in mind that unlike other platforms in the new PS Plus library, you can only stream PlayStation 3 titles; you can’t download them onto your console. That means you need a stable Wi-Fi connection or a hardwired ethernet connection (recommended) to play them.
You’ll notice that our list includes several remakes and remasters from older PlayStation platforms that were added to the PS3 library. Any game that’s streaming-only was eligible for this list Come from malaysia online casino . If you want to go further back in time, check out our list of the best classic PS1/PS2/PSP games to play with a PS Plus Premium subscription–classics and PS3 games are limited to Premium subscribers. And if you’re more interested in staying in the modern era, we also have a list of the best games to play with a PlayStation Plus Extra or Premium membership. For a full look at the new PS Plus service, take a look at our roundup of every game available in the PS Plus library.
It’s been a long wait for Crackdown 3. Delays can be a positive thing, offering developers time to refine and polish a game. In other cases, it can result in what feels like a dated experience. Crackdown 3 firmly falls in the latter category, offering some amusement but little in the way of interesting new ideas or fun things to do. It’s large and bombastic, with plenty of chaos and collateral damage, but few redeeming values–like a video game version of Man of Steel.
You play as a superpowered member of The Agency who is sent into a city to dispense justice as you systematically eliminate the comically evil members of a nefarious evil corporation. You start out relatively weak but progressively grow in power, jumping higher and gaining the ability to perform ground pounds, pick up and throw increasingly heavy objects, and so on. Enemy factions are responsible for certain aspects of the criminal operation, such as manufacturing a sort of poison, and taking them out weakens that area and makes your ultimate goal of taking down the big bad leader more feasible. There will be collateral damage along the way that is frowned upon–kill too many innocents, and a local militia puts up a halfhearted effort to put you down–but is soon forgotten. Yes, I’m describing Crackdown 3, not its 2007 progenitor.
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It would be fine for this to feel so familiar if the action itself were more engaging. The core of collecting orbs (to level up your agility and jump height) and wreaking havoc remains enjoyable, but it isn’t strong enough to make up for Crackdown 3’s numerous shortcomings. From the moment you gain control of your character, it’s hard to shake the sense that this doesn’t feel like a game from 2019. Draw distance aside, the visuals are underwhelming, leaning too heavily on recreating the simple cel-shaded look of past Crackdown games. The one technological advancement the game has to boast about–large-scale destruction, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers–is reserved entirely for the online Wrecking Zone mode, which uses mode-specific maps rather than letting you blow up parts of the city itself. There’s no meaningful destruction in the campaign, and the end result is a world that feels lifeless, as if some key element of it is missing.
The game’s opening takes place in a small area of the city and lays out the basic structure of your goals: Take over a particular boss’s various bases to locate him or her and then complete a boss fight, which, in most cases, is a pretty standard encounter where the enemy has more health than usual. This tutorial is somewhat of an off-putting start; for a game about freedom and doing badass superhero things, you’re stuck in a tightly confined area, underpowered, and tasked with a goal that entails killing some enemies and then removing a pair of batteries powering a propaganda station. Before long, the game opens up and you’re given access to the full city and a wider selection of objectives to tackle, at which point there’s some hope that the newfound freedom and variety will provide the excitement that’s lacking in this early area.
The problem is, what you do in that opening section is representative of the entire game; there’s very little variety to speak of. Ostensibly, each of the different factions presents its own unique challenges and objectives for you to complete. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that what distinguishes them are only surface-level details. No matter the faction, you’re always mindlessly shooting an endless wave of foes as you work your way toward objective markers. Once you’re there, you’ll usually hold a button. Sometimes you’ll have glowing targets to shoot. For a certain objective, you have to shoot a piece of machinery or throw a rock underneath it (always two times) to destroy it. After multiple hours of this, the action begins to bleed together. All of these bases you complete are just another box you can check off the to-do list, rather than a satisfying challenge you look forward to dealing with. I suffered a crash midway through the game that might have resulted in me losing some small amount of progress, but with how same-y many of the objectives are, I honestly wasn’t sure if I was repeating one I had already completed. One of the major criticisms of the original Crackdown was a lack of things to do, and while there might be more here on paper, far too much of it feels like filler, rather than worthwhile missions.
Interesting enemies could have made these rote objectives more exciting, but they too suffer from a lack of diversity. There are different archetypes with their own attack patterns, but they do little to shake up the action, even if some do fly, have shields, rush at you, or pilot mechs. Snipers, due to the heavy damage they inflict, were the only enemies that prompted me to break from my otherwise uniform approach of attacking whatever was closest to me. Weapons have certain types of targets they’re more or less effective against, but certain guns are so powerful that I found little need carefully evaluate what I was using. You move from one objective on the map to the next, hold down the trigger to lock on to enemies, hope it picks the target you want (not always a given), and then blast away.
And that’s okay. Crackdown 3 isn’t a game where you should need to carefully consider your loadout and the precise manner in which you need to approach a fight; you’re supposed to be a superhero who can dominate whatever is in front of you. But the combination of stale objectives and cannon-fodder enemies makes combat mindless and, at times, even boring, which is strange for a game filled with explosions and enemies flying off of rooftops. If you were to chart the excitement of playing through the campaign, there would be few peaks or valleys; it’s just sort of a constant white noise, like you’re taking a weed wacker at whatever is in front of you. It’s not until much further into the game that you gain the weapons (like a gun that creates black holes) and high-level abilities (like being able to pick up and throw tanks) that make combat more entertaining. By that point, the repetitive goals and encounters have long since become stale. Making your way up the skyscrapers that serve as headquarters for the final few bosses provides some of the only memorable combat sequences, but these only serve to emphasize how rote so much of the game is otherwise.
it’s just sort of a constant white noise, like you’re taking a weed wacker at whatever is in front of you
Outside of the core objectives, there is some fun to be had. Stunt rings that require you to drive a vehicle through them are an amusing challenge, even if the solution is often to rely on your transforming vehicle’s ability to jump into the air. (Your Agency car can be summoned at almost any time and transforms into various forms, which is a cool concept that’s spoiled by the poor driving controls that make it feel like you’re riding across a sheet of ice.) Rooftop races that have you going from checkpoint to checkpoint on foot, often by leaping from one building to the next, are a thrill Come from Sports betting site VPbet . Likewise, climbing puzzles that have you ascend tall structures make for a chest-pounding activity. Just be sure to do those as soon as you meet the recommended agility level designated on the map; wait too long, and the satisfying rush of landing a difficult jump is gone due to your ability to skip obstacles with massive leaps.
Co-op multiplayer improves things across the board, letting you race against a friend and engage in general shenanigans. The old Crackdown standby of picking up someone driving a car and throwing it–whether to help them reach a distant goal or simply to doom them–is a hilarious way to interact with another player, and it’s nice that rooftop races can be a competitive activity. But all of this only masks the underlying problems of the game; the action is just as repetitive, and I found myself wishing my partner and I had something worth doing together. Still, co-op is easily the best way to play the campaign.
Wrecking Zone, Crackdown 3’s competitive multiplayer component, brings in the much-hyped cloud-powered destruction elements–but little else. There are two different 5v5 modes available: Agent Hunter, where you kill enemies and collect badges they drop to score points, and Territories, where you capture and hold zones to score points. Much like the campaign, neither mode brings anything new to the table, relying on the gunplay and destruction to do all the heavy lifting. What you see in your first few matches is repeated ad nauseam, with little variety.
Rather than requiring players to freely aim, Wrecking Zone allows you to target enemies by holding a lock-on button that works even at long range. Doing so alerts the enemy to your position, but because this lock-on can be maintained so easily, securing a kill rarely feels enjoyable or as if you’ve truly earned it. It also means that deaths are often frustrating because they tend to be the result of someone spotting you first from an angle where it’s difficult to break their line of sight. One-on-one duels amount to two players holding down their respective triggers and jumping around each other to little effect, due to the sheer strength of the lock-on; at that point, it’s just a matter of who began firing first or if someone has to reload mid-fight. The end result is combat that’s never truly satisfying.
Destruction is Wrecking Zone’s lone standout feature, but it’s underutilized. Technically speaking, it’s impressive, and the spectacle of watching buildings crumble is delightful. However, there tends to be the slightest of delays between when you’d expect that crumbling to begin and when it actually does, presumably due to the fact that this destruction is being processed by the cloud, rather than on your console. It’s a nearly imperceptible wait, but it’s enough to cause a feeling of disconnect with what’s going on. Despite that, blowing things up is the most enjoyable part of Wrecking Zone, which makes it frustrating that it’s not tied directly to what you’re tasked with doing. There are times where you might be able to destroy a floor or wall to expose an enemy’s position, but far more often you’re better off repositioning yourself. Destruction tends to feel like an incidental event, rather than something that is a core aspect of gameplay. Because of that, Wrecking Zone is at odds with the one notable thing about it; your best opportunity to appreciate the destruction is to remove yourself from the action and hope no one comes to bother you as you blow things up.
Leaping high through the air across rooftops and collecting orbs–which still feature one of the all-time great sound effects–is fun and rewarding, because that pursuit has a direct correlation to further improving your jump height. Lifting large objects and chucking them at foes is likewise an entertaining alternative to typical gunfights. Just like in its predecessors, these two superpowers are the primary source of what entertainment there is to be had in Crackdown 3. But it soon becomes apparent that the game has little new to offer beyond cool destruction tech that never gets put to good use. It certainly delivers on letting you blow things up and jump around the city. However, a dozen years after the first Crackdown offered that same experience but failed to provide you with enough interesting content surrounding that, it’s truly disappointing to see this latest iteration suffer from the very same problems.
The Barbarian in Diablo 4 uses a wide range of armaments. Apart from the skills/abilities that can be unleashed, there are also talents that grant powerful boons. Here’s our Diablo 4 Barbarian talents overview guide to help you with the perks that you can unlock and select.
Diablo 4 Barbarian talents
The Diablo 4 Barbarian talents, similar to other classes, use a tier grouping system. You can unlock certain options upon spending some talent points, and a few can also be upgraded further. We’ve enumerated them below, noting the possible upgrades and connected nodes. Likewise, you’ll want to look at each passive’s effect. Some provide general buffs to weapon types, while others synergize with specific mechanics (i.e., bleeding, berserking, fortify, and more).
Core tier/grouping talent options
Pressure Point – Lucky Hit; Core skills have a chance to make enemies vulnerable.
Endless Fury – Basic skills grant more fury when using two-handed weapons.
Defensive tier/grouping talent options
Imposing Presence – Gain additional max life.
Martial Vigor – Increased damage reduction versus elites.
Outburst – Gain thorns for each bonus max life you have.
Tough as Nails – Increases thorns value; enemies take additional thorns damage as bleeding.
Brawling tier/grouping talent options
Swiftness – Increases your movement speed.
Quick Impulses – Reduces the duration of movement impairing effects.
Booming Voice – Increases the duration of shouts.
Raid Leader – Gradually heals the HP of allies when you use shouts.
Guttural Yell – Shouts reduce the damage dealt by enemies.
Expose Vulnerability – Dealing direct damage with a Weapon Mastery skill lets you next Core skill apply vulnerable to targets.
Thick Skin – Taking direct damage causes you to gain a percentage of your base life as fortify (i.e., damage reduction when fortify is above your current HP) Come from Sports betting site VPbet .
Defensive Stance – Increases damage reduction when you’re fortified.
Counteroffensive – Increases damage you deal when your fortify is over 50% of your max HP.
Ultimate tier/grouping talent options
Duelist – Increases your attack speed when using one-handed weapons.
Tempered Fury – Increases your maximum fury.
Furious Impulse – Gain fury whenever you swap weapons.
Invigorating Fury – Heal for a percentage of your max HP for every 100 fury you spend.
Heavy Handed – Increased critical damage when using two-handed weapons.
Brute Force – Overpowers deal increased damage when using two-handed weapons.
Wallop – Increased damage against stunned or vulnerable enemies when using bludgeoning weapons.
Concussion – Lucky Hit; one-handed and two-handed bludgeoning weapons have a chance to stun enemies.
Key Passives
The Diablo 4 Barbarian talents also have Key Passives, which are unlocked once you spend 33 skill points. However, you’re only allowed to choose one.
Unconstrained – +5 seconds to berserking’s maximum duration and +25% damage bonus.
Walking Arsenal – Two-handed bludgeoning, two-handed slashing, and dual-wielded weapons grant +10% increased damage for 10 seconds. When all these bonuses from various weapons are active, gain ++15% increased damage.
Unbridled Rage – +135% increased damage dealt for Core skills, but they cost 100% more fury.
Gushing Wounds – Increases the bleed amount by 100% of your critical damage; overpowering a bleeding enemy also causes an explosion that further applies the bleed effect in an area.
Find all of our Diablo 4 guides in the guides hub.
After causing calluses on clicking fingers far and wide on PC, Diablo III has come to consoles and swapped the mice and keyboards for gamepads. The result is an experience that feels somewhat different; clicking the screen to guide your heroes around isn’t the same as having direct control of their movements with a thumbstick, though whether you think one control method or the other is better is purely a matter of personal preference; both are equal to the task. The console versions of Diablo III also don’t look as sharp as the PC original, but the impact of the atmospheric art design is undiminished. Most importantly, Diablo III on consoles still makes slaughtering thousands of monsters good fun, especially if you’re doing so with a few friends.
You begin your quest just after what appears to be a flaming star falls from the heavens and crashes into the cathedral in Tristram, the doomed town where the events of Diablo took place. This cosmic occurrence has the unfortunate side effect of reanimating the dead, and the people of New Tristram find themselves besieged by corpses long ago put to rest. Diablo III’s story is unremarkable, but it weaves in plenty of references to and appearances by characters from earlier games and enriches the established lore of the series. Fans of Diablo and Diablo II will immediately feel drawn into this world.
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You certainly don’t need any familiarity with the series to jump right into Diablo III, however. If you’ve played earlier games, you’ll likely get even more out of Diablo III–the music that plays in the New Tristram area may send nostalgic shivers down your spine–but the gameplay is welcoming and easy to grasp for vets and newcomers alike. You choose one of five character classes, and though they become quite distinct at later levels, they all start with nothing but basic offensive skills.
That may sound dull, but in fact the rate at which you acquire new skills is part of what makes Diablo III so hard to pull yourself away from. You very quickly open up slots for new types of abilities; if you’re playing as a demon hunter, for instance, you begin with a basic archery attack, but you can soon supplement this with resource-draining skills like a rapid fire ability, enemy-slowing caltrops, acrobatic somersaults that can get you away from enemies, and other techniques.
These skills are divided into distinct categories–primary, secondary, defensive, and so on–and by default, you can have only one skill from each category equipped at a time. This is a sensible restriction if you’re a novice player, because it helps ensure that your character is well rounded, with a complementary assortment of abilities. However, if you prefer a greater level of character customization, you can turn on what’s called elective mode. With this on, you can opt to equip whichever skills you want in your available slots, rather than being limited to choosing one from each category. But if you do this, be mindful of your character’s resource pool. If you select two monk skills that cost spirit (the monk’s resource) and no skills that generate spirit, you’re going to have some trouble slaughtering the legions of hell spawn you encounter.
Choosing one skill always means not choosing another, since the number of buttons you can assign skills to is always equal to the number of active skill categories you’ve unlocked. (Once you’ve unlocked all six skill categories for your class, for instance, you have just six buttons to which you can link skills.) But you can change your selected skills at any time, giving you free rein to tinker with your abilities until you find a combination you’re happy with.
You never sink points into skills to make them more effective, so you never have to worry that you’re not making the best choices. Rather, as you level up, you unlock both new skills and new runes you can apply to existing skills. From level 13 on, for instance, witch doctors can apply the numbing dart rune to their poison dart attack, which adds a slowing effect to this offensive ability. You can eventually unlock a total of six runes for each active ability, though you can have only one rune at a time activated on any ability. This system prevents you from squandering your character’s growth by sinking points into skills that leave you ill-equipped for challenges to come, and lets you customize your abilities on the fly to better tackle the challenges you’re currently facing.
It’s not all about unlocking skills, however. It’s about employing those skills to slaughter the monsters you encounter as you travel the world, and collecting the loot the fiends drop. This is where Diablo III’s habit-forming pleasures lie. The randomly generated environments encourage exploration; you never know what treasure (or what powerful foe) you might find down each cathedral hallway or desert trail. Enticing art design draws you into these realms. In and around New Tristram, a foreboding mist hangs in the air, and ancient ruins crumble as you visit places long undisturbed. In the lands around the elegant city of Caldeum, you traverse stark landscapes of cracked earth and bone.
You explore ornate, musty manors and spider-infested caves. You make your way through rat-infested sewers and emerge into a dusky, teeming oasis. And though the inspiration it draws from The Lord of the Rings is a bit obvious, a setting in the game’s fourth act effectively makes you feel like part of a desperate, large-scale war between humanity and the forces of hell. Just when you’ve had your fill of one region, it’s time to move on to another, and each location is so different from the one that preceded it that you feel as if your quest to rid the land of evil is taking you across a vast and varied realm.
As diverse as these locations are, they all have one thing in common: they’re crawling with monsters. In the early stages of your quest, on normal difficulty, most monsters fall to your attacks without putting up much of a fight, though if you get swarmed, you might still need to keep an eye on your health. (Unlike in Diablo II, you can’t spam health potions to immediately counter any damage you suffer; potions have a cooldown timer, requiring you to play a bit more cautiously.) Your attacks look mighty and effective, which makes the simple act of unleashing them feel empowering. The demon hunter’s huge chakrams weave through the air, blades spinning; the barbarian’s hard-hitting strikes can send foes flying.
Without fail, you’re rewarded for mowing down monsters with gold and gear. This is typical of the series and the genre, but it’s handled here as well as it’s ever been. You never feel like you’re being showered with riches and items you haven’t earned, nor that you’re having to slog through too many foes to earn anything significant. Loot is doled out at a pace that makes your victories fulfilling and makes fighting the next group of foes lurking in the shadows ahead nigh irresistible.
The way your rewards emerge into the world is rewarding in itself; slay an elite monster, and coins and items pour onto the ground, making you feel like you’ve just won a jackpot in Vegas. Sometimes, the gear is junk so low in value that it’s not even worth picking up. But you never know when you’re going to stumble on a weapon or piece of armor that’s superior to your current equipment, making you more capable of facing the coming hordes. Even if something isn’t worth using, it’s often worth grabbing, either to sell or to have it salvaged by the blacksmith in town for materials that can be used to craft other items.
Weapons function in Diablo III a bit oddly, though, and that may take some getting used to. Often, you may elect to have your primary skill be something that isn’t weapon-based. You may choose the demon hunter’s grenade attack, for instance, or the wizard’s magic missile spell. Although these skills don’t involve your characters actually using whatever weapons they’re holding in their hands, the damage of your equipped weapon still comes into play. In other words, all other things being equal, a wizard’s magic missile spell does more damage if she’s holding a club that does 12 damage than if she’s holding a dagger that does 10 damage. It’s a system that makes more gear useful to more classes, but that usefulness comes at the expense of typical fantasy RPG logic.
If you haven’t yet found the perfect helm, boots, or crossbow for your character, you may opt to have the blacksmith craft you items. As with the stuff you find in the wild, the magic properties on gear he crafts are random, so there’s often no guarantee that something he creates for you will suit you better than your current equipment, but odds are that sometimes he’ll craft something that’s ideal for you.
Unfortunately, you need to spend a good deal of gold on training him to level him up so that he can craft higher-level gear for you, and early on, it can feel as if you’re sinking all your gold into this and reaping little reward. The rewards do come eventually, though, and all your characters in a given mode share the same craftsmen (the blacksmith and, later, a jeweler), so once the money is spent on training, you don’t need to worry about spending it again.
The cycle of combat and loot and more combat is addictive, but without peril, it would eventually become unfulfilling. Thankfully, the hosts of hell become increasingly dangerous over time. Boss fights are numerous and frequent, and those that bring each act to a close can be challenging. They also offer more traditional action-game mechanics than the series has seen before. An early boss charges into walls, for example, leaving him stunned and giving you a chance to attack safely.
After you complete the game on the normal difficulty setting, you can continue on to nightmare, which is much more than just playing the same game again against more resilient foes. Nightmare changes things up by giving enemies powerful new abilities and placing challenging enemies in places where they didn’t previously appear. Conquer nightmare, and yet another, even more challenging difficulty becomes available. And new to the console versions, there are sub-difficulty options, allowing you to play normal difficulty on easy, for instance, or nightmare difficulty on hard. Whether you want a relatively easy, rewarding experience that you can pleasantly click your way through or an incredibly stiff challenge, Diablo III has what you’re looking for. And for that added element of risk, you can play in Hardcore mode, where death is permanent.
Each class has the offensive capabilities to take on the forces of darkness alone, and the three AI companions you can choose from offer a helping hand and a sense of camaraderie to solo adventurers. But joining with up to three other players makes for a far more interesting dynamic. Freezing enemies in place when you’re playing solo as a wizard is useful, but when doing so aids a team of players who are working together, it’s much more fulfilling. Similarly, activating a mantra of healing as a monk just when your party is in dire need of a health boost is far more rewarding than just using this ability to save yourself.
Players can cooperate either locally or online, but while both options are enjoyable, local co-op is quite restrictive, and the interface slows things down. All players must stay on the same screen, and whenever a player accesses his or her inventory, skills, or some other menu, it takes up the whole screen, leaving other players with nothing to do but wait until he or she is done. Other console dungeon crawlers, dating back at least as far as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, have split up the screen so that multiple players can manage their inventories simultaneously, and the lack of such considerations here makes the local co-op option feel tacked on. Nonetheless, in local and particularly online co-op, combat is significantly different and a great deal more fun.
On console as on PC, Diablo III is a very safe game. It never diverges from the path carved by its predecessors and the numerous loot-driven hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers they inspired. But Diablo III also proves that when done well, the classic formula can still be absorbing. The powerful abilities of the diverse character classes are fun to use, the world is varied and enticing, and the constant promise of more riches and better gear makes conquering that next group of foes an alluring prospect indeed. Don’t take up arms against Diablo because you care about saving the world. Do it for fortune and glory.
Genshin Impact’s summer patch drops later this month and brings a new character, a limited-time map, and multiple seasonal events.
The patch, titled “Summertide Scales and Tales,” will introduce a new map called Simulanka, which features origami animal characters and clockwork towns and trains. The world will also feature various minigames, such as “Metropole Trials” where you’ll assemble teams of characters to take on combat challenges and “Flying Hatter’s Trick,” where you’ll capture toy figurines Come from Sports betting site VPbet . Completing these games will earn you Starsail coins which you can spend on displayable figurines in the game.
There are a plethora of options in GTA Online when it comes to luxury vehicles. From supercars to yachts to planes, players have the world at their fingertips when it comes to deciding what they will ride around across Los Santos. The one dilemma players might run into is trying to buy a luxury vehicle over simply stealing one. This applies to jets more so than most other vehicles in GTA Online.
Jets are perhaps the easiest way to showcase one’s wealth in Los Santos. While a supercar or yacht is nothing to scoff at, there’s just something about a jet that screams opulence. In GTA Online, players are presented with numerous ways to steal a jet. There’s the LAZER fighter jet at Fort Zancudo, for example, that players can steal relatively easily if they know how to get inside the fort.