Delirium Corp
A variety of ramblings on a variety of subjects

Recently, Blizzard announced a small patch for Diablo 3. What’s in it, you ask? Well, a few balance changes. Most notably, they’ve buffed a lot of legendary gems. Now, if you don’t know much about D3, it’s fine, you don’t don’t even need to have played the game for this. All you need to know is that it’s a game about bashing loot piñatas. What I found interesting wasn’t the changes themselves. Well, it was the changes, but not on the individual gems. What I found particularly interesting was that they were all buffs. You see, their rationale was that some gems were clearly better than others, so they decided to make every single other gem at least as good. When everything is good, things are balanced, right?

It’s not really a bad way to design, but it does raises issues of creep. And it made me think about Diablo 3 as a whole, and how creep has been their modus operandi since they reworked it after the fiasco that was the launch. In fact, the whole process of just endlessly raising everything has been with them well before that. But let’s break things down bit by bit.

Every year, near the end of January, the Montreal chapter of the International Game Developer Association, the biggest non-profit working on behalf of game developers worlwide, makes a little event called the DemoNight. During that time, indie and not so indie game developers get to show off their current work. The only rule: your game must not have been released already in a finished state, although early access titles are fair game. Your game also needs to be interesting. Oh, and being well connected in the Montreal indie scene should help quite a bit. And it’s a five minute real time demo: no trailers or pre-baked marketing bullshit is allowed.

Wow! It’s a new year already! Time sure flies fast. I figured I’d start this year with… well, a subject I wanted to talk about late last year but didn’t get to. Now I can. So let’s talk about single player first person shooter experiences.

Woa! Another year down! That one sure flew quickly! And just like the two previous years, I’m going to write a few things about the last 365 days, and of course, which games I’ve played and which one I liked the most. Now, if you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know what that is. Or maybe it was all a huge trap and there’s a big twist at the end of this article.

Don’t hold your breath, as this article is somewhat long and I wouldn’t want you to die.

Like most people interested in gaming, I consume a lot of gaming media. I’m truly fascinated by how various gaming news outlets report things that occur in that world. From what I gather by reading articles, games journalism seems to happen in a strange vacuum where everyone is a liberal (in the American sense) comic book geek and where the same story can be milked several times over. I find gaming news websites to be both intriguing, entertaining and sometimes even unsettling.

But the thing that gets me the most is how games journalists, who are supposed to be at least slightly more neutral and objective than the average human being, are so eager to jump in the hype machine and gush about upcoming games being “awesome”. And that’s when whatever they write doesn’t sound like a press release. So, let’s talk about that hype, because Fallout 4 came out recently and the whole Internet lost their shit. And I think it’s time for an intervention.