It sucks. Why?

It seems the game basically consists of one popup and one button. Here’s a screenshot:

Of course I realize that there’s much more to Diablo 3. And I’ll probably like it. But what good is good gameplay, nice graphics, and polished character classes for your action RPG if you can’t actually play it?

I am absolutely sure that Blizzard employs competent people. Anything else would simply make no sense; and since none of their launches are ever smooth, I guess we can conclude they decide not to invest enough money into the infrastructure to cushion the launch peaks. Saves them money in the long run, of course.

But if the company doesn’t want to handle the peaks, then they should not hype the game in such a way as to generate peaks. Open up the servers before you start selling the game. Then you’ll have a more organic log-in behavior.

The worst is that nobody managed to edit the little “breaking news” box on the startscreen to let the players know what’s happening.

I am really, really tired of games companies not doing their job. I’ve actually created a “blacklist” after the Mass Effect 3 debacle, committing myself to never buying a Bioware title again. Well, Blizzard, congratulations. You just made my list. I am sorry to tell you that you will never sell Titan to me, whatever that will turn out to be. I’ll still play Diablo 3, but it’s the last of my money you will see.

Update, the next day: Well, I guess my sarcastic comments came around to haunt me, from a karma point of view. 19 hours and 16 minutes after launch, I still can not play the game I bought because the servers are overloaded. Again or still, whatever. This is a textbook example of how not to launch a game. And be that as it may, I am one annoyed geek.

But it gets even better: In 1995, two years before I wrote the Deadland engine, I was attempting my hand at an U6 style tile engine. That project was lost a long time ago, due to combined hard disk and floppy-disk failures. There was even a whole design doc for this one, complete with a worked out story and all. It was a really big setback to my game programming ambitions when I lost all of that. Still, it’s cool to have at least some screen shots – I had thought that none survived.

Attentive readers (Hi, Pedro) will probably notice that some of the tiles look a lot like the one in U6, and indeed that did serve as the basis for many of them. But already you can see in these screens that I was working on replacing them (the walls, for example).

Deadland was inspired by two games in particular: Wasteland and UFO (sold in the United States under the “XCom” brand). It was written in turbo pascal with large sections (ie. the graphics routines) written in assembler. It didn’t run too well, the stand-alone graphics demo these screenshots were taken from, ran at about 9 fps. There was also a stand-alone character generator, of which unfortunately no screenshots remain.

The map consists of, if I remember correctly, two layers; the floor and the walls are seperate, allowing for more combinations and less graphics work. The darkness effect is achieved by having the same color palette in several levels of brightness in the global VGA palette, and shifting a pixel down before painting it. Easy optimization here is to pre-calculate tiles in different color levels, but that would have eaten a lot of RAM. And, yes, I did draw those graphics myself – pixeling them in fine detail in Deluxe Paint II enhanced.

Deadland was the successor of my first tileset engine, for the Dragongate project, which was more of a top-down implementation and had a much smaller field of view.

I think I lost the complete source code to this game in one of my hard-drive crashes. This is alright, because now the code would have historic value at best. Still, it’s too bad I never completed this game.

Needless to say, I am still kinda proud of what I did back then

_Update, 2007-07-13:_ I have found a few additional screenshots.