A quick note to the commujity that the latest IncGamers Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure featuring all the top game news of the past week. It’s great way to find out about what’s happening in the world of videogames and upcoming titles. Don’t forget our regular features, the BS story of the week and the Special Needs Forum Post of the Week’. Listen to the podcast now and leave your comments and feedback.

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You might not realize this, but the Diablo novels have a pretty big impact on the world of Diablo and even the Diablo games. Three of the main character classes of Diablo II exists in lore purely by the ancestry of Sanctuary's Nephalem, the union between angel and demon. A fourth class (Druid) is also basically an offspring of Barbarians anyway.

Rathma was one of these Nephalem, and is the progenitor of the Priests of Rathma more commonly known as Necromancers in the words of ignorant locals. Despite the fact they deal with life and death, they are not using demonic magic.

Perhaps because he is so different and misunderstood, it has become one of the most favoured Diablo 2 classes, and there was an outcry by fans when it was announced he was not returning for Diablo 3. Jay Wilson said it was because the class was already "too perfect" and left little room for new thinking and improvement without mucking up a working concept, and he's probably right. Still man tries to explain why he's so cool, and the rest of us are here presenting the Necro's skills.

Take a look at his skills below, which shows some of the game mechanics later used for both pet classes, DoTs and debuffs, all in this 10 year old game.

If you have any cool images of these skills in use, please don't hesitate to add them to the skill pages.

Necromancer Curses	Poison and Bone	Summoning
Amplify Damage Dim Vision Weaken Iron Maiden Terror Confuse Life Tap Attract Decrepify Lower Resist	Teeth Bone Armor Poison Dagger Corpse Explosion Bone Wall Poison Explosion Bone Spear Bone Prison Poison Nova Bone Spirit	Raise Skeleton Skeleton Mastery Clay Golem Golem Mastery Raise Skeletal Mage Blood Golem Summon Resist Iron Golem Fire Golem Revive

BTW, also see the Amazon, Assassin, Barbarian and Druid skills!

A huge thanks goes out to all our contributors in the last week: JMJimmy, Leugi, Bandreus, WildKard, Martym, Widus, AtheistInHell, Siomer, Gluecks, Holyknight3000, Krischan, Veskin7 Bukito, Butch Audacity, Kire and - V -! The Diablo Wiki would not be the best Diablo resource on the web without you!

If you like DiabloWiki, do help out. There's over 600 pages waiting to be made, lots of pages that could need filling out, and of course the Stubs that need more detail.

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The audio and transcript of the interview I recently conducted with Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer is now online, and if I do say so myself, it’s worth a read. (Or listen, though I cringe at the audio quality via my crappy mic in the noisy coffee shop in which we met, a block from Max’s house in SF.) Most of our conversation was (naturally) about Torchlight and their plans for the upcoming Torchlight MMO, but we talked a bit about general game design issues as well, and Max had some interesting comments on what made D2 so slow and TL so fast.

Flux: Do you think, looking back, at games like Hellgate and Diablo 2 and other such games that take four or five years to make – could you apply any of the lessons you’ve learned with Torchlight to those sort of titles?
Max Schaefer: Yeah, I think so. I think that the era of the five-year, eighty-million dollar project is largely over.

Flux: Tell that to Blizzard!
Max Schaefer: Well not for Blizzard! *laughs* They have their own rules over there, for sure. But as far as the economy downturn and a lot of failed projects out there, people are looking for faster, quicker development and cheaper development and less risk, and I think that there’s a pretty good gap in the market right now between the casual game and the super-big budget project, and I think that customers will like it, especially since you can get a lot more product out.

Flux: Could you imagine, if you went back and made Diablo 2 or Hellgate right now, could we shave a year off?
Max Schaefer: I think that if we started over with Diablo 2 right now, we could have easily shaved a year off. That would’ve saved some marriages, by the way. *Laughs* But yeah, we didn’t have anywhere near the kind of tools that we do now, and that really makes a huge difference. If a level designer, a quest designer, a particle designer, an item balancer, and all these people can get their work in without having to bug a whole staff of programmers and wait a day for the build to see if it works – that’s a huge time-saver.

So, better tools, the knowledge that development isn’t running on a blank check, and a commitment right from the start to work quickly and efficiently. Paging Diablo 3 in 2012?

Click through for some more comments on what Max said, and what we talked about during the half hour when the mic wasn’t running.

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Continuing to cut a swath through the Diablo 2 characters, this week’s column tackles the Necromancer. Here’s the opening, click through to read the whole thing.

Why the Necromancer is Cool

The Necromancer seems to be a favorite among us dead beats and die hard Diablo fans. With Cain always boring us to death the Necromancer is the only old creep in Diablo 2 done right in Blizzard’s quest for the holy frail. But really, he is only ten feet tall when we the players put him on this rack here and give him a run for his Gumby. I always knew he was stretched thin. Tonight we hook at what exactly it is about him that players like so much. We will take a trip down memory bane as we stretch his limbs and give him a pul ruin. And speaking of stretched skin, what’s this cheap snare drum set doing here?

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Something Awful has contributed a comedy piece purporting to answer that very question. They’ve got (fake) emails from various imaginary Blizzard employees on the issue, which you may find amusing to read. Here are a couple of their “quotes” from the Diablo team:

“We were actually ready to send the gold master out last month, but it turns out somewhere along the line spellcheck turned every instance of ‘Diablo’ into ‘Dublin’. Right now we’re regrouping figuring out whether we want to start the whole thing from scratch or just roll with it and rework the graphics/story to go all-out Gaelic with what we’ve got.”
Eric Hiccupcure
Diablo III Speedboat Physics Consultant

“A few weeks ago one of our testers told us, ‘You guys do realize that there’s no such thing as magic in real life, right?’ and we’ve been scrambling to rework the majority of the skills ever since.”
Skeet Faultline
Diablo III Test Animal Wrangler

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No, I didn’t miss an I in that title. There are a pair of “new” Diablo 2 wallpapers available. These were added to the official site a few weeks ago, when Blizzard redid all of their game pages, including the D2 page, in their new, flash-o-rific format. Neither piece of art is new (compare the 2000 version of the Amazon vs. Reaper), but these wallpapers are new takes on them, and both are quite lovely.

 

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In an almost unimagined event, someone on the Battle.net forums asked a genuinely new and interesting question. Even better, Bashiok replied to it.

	Blizzard Quote:
	I myself am not color blind, but I recently heard that this guy that is visually impaired is sueing Sony for not making games cater to people who are visually impaired. I found out that there are actually some games out there that have an option for “color blind mode” which changes the color pallette and such. I know D3 will change the color of the item types to help color blindness, but will there be a color blind mode option? Bashiok: There are people on the development team that are colorblind so it’s something we’re constantly aware of. Aside from that though as a company we’re always interested in making our games as accommodating as possible. World of Warcraft for instance added a color blind mode which helps clarify item quality levels through text and not just color, whether Diablo III will need that option or not - it may.

 

Elsewhere, it was more of the same, with someone agitating for Ninja and Samurai class characters in the Diablo world. As though medieval Japan just floated in from the east?  Bashiok’s reply was wordless; he simply pointed to the image you see below:

	Blizzard Quote:

Click through for two other Bashiok posts, following up on issues brought up earlier this week…

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Greetings everyone we have a few pieces from the fan art gallery this week to show you. Let's begin shall we.

First up is a new artist Khairil that has brought us his concept of the monk. This concept was made before the monk's announcement. Check the image link for more details on his image and brief thoughts.

Lastly returning after a long hiatus we have johntorrio back with a pencil art of The Barbarian. The view is from his back but it is an early concept. Check his forum post on his thoughts about the image and his plans for it.



Click the thumbnails to see larger versions of all these images.

If you enjoy Fan Art and want to contribute to this growing community, please stop by the Fan Creations Forum. Many artists visit frequently, posting works in progress looking for feedback and conversation. You don't have to be "arty" to join in. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to send me a PM.

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We’ve posted a couple of these before, and now that every gaming site on the internet has reviewed Torchlight, this will probably be our last news post summarizing them. Reviews remain almost unanimously sparkling, which surprises me. I expected that some sites would go negative and cynical, just because. Perhaps Torchlight and Runic Games weren’t ripe enough targets to motivate that sort of contrariness? I’m sure SC2 and D3 will get some bad reviews from people who just want to hate on Blizzard, knowing they’ll get notoriety for doing so.

An easy, one-page listing of 26 Torchlight reviews is provided by the excellent resource that is Metacritic.com. The average score is 84/100, and the lowest, by ImpulseGamer, is still pretty good, at 71. The fan reviews on Metacritic are even more generous, with a 9.2/10 average, tallied from 105 votes/comments.

There’s nothing wrong with reading the reviews on MetaCritic, and they tend to be from larger gaming sites, if that gives you more confidence in their authority. But since I don’t see any point in linking to MetaCritic, and then posting a bunch of direct links to the same reviews they cover, the following are all reviews from sites that are not included in the Metacritic listing. Variety! They’re posted in descending order, with the “our opinions are too nuanced to sum up with something so vulgar as an integer” bunch at the very bottom, where they belong.

• Pixel Verdict—5/5
• Associated Technology—98/100
• My Gamer—9.6/10
• Bit Mob—90/100
• The Gamer’s Temple—9/10
• Games Radar—9/10
• Spawn Kill—9/10
• GameZebo—4.5/5
• The Hachiko—4.5/5
• New Game Network—8.3/10
• Games 32—82ish/100
• Gaming Heaven—8.2/10
• Gamer’s Nexus—8/10 (Not to be confused with Gaming Nexus’ 91/100 score.)
• 7 out of 10—8/10 (Irony!)
• Gameplay Monthly—B
• The Great Cornholio—7.5/10
• Game Kult—7/10
• AusGamers—7.5/10
• Aggro Gamer—No score,but very positive.
• Crispy Gamer—No score, but positive.
• General Games—No score, but positive.
• Icrontic—No score, but positive.
• Strategy Informer—No score, but positive.
• Kotaku—No score, but positive.
• N-Philes—No score, but positive.
• Fall Damage—No score, but positive.

I’m sure there are a few more reviews out there that we’ve not linked to yet. But honestly, what’s the point? Is anyone still on the fence about dropping that big $20 on Torchlight? Who’s sitting there after reading 50+ reviews, all with very good scores, thinking, “I’m just not sure yet, but a few more good reviews could win me over!”

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After nigh on a year since we heard of patch 1.13, we get an update that will make both Blizzard and the players sing the blues. Everyone was excited to hear this patch would increase the stash size, but after months of analysis they have decided not to take the risk of system overload or missing data during peak times. While that's bad, wait -- [pretty bad] -- they can jump straight to quality assurance for whatever else the infamous patch holds.

How far along is the development of Diablo II patch 1.13? It is on its final stages or mostly completed, but because of the Warcraft III vulnerability fix those developers involved in the patch were moved to help with the emergency a few months ago. The latest we got about how far along is Diablo II patch 1.13 was on July 20 when Bashiok said the following:

	Blizzard Quote:
	20 July - The 1.13 patch is very far along so it should only be a limited amount of testing before it hits the Westfall PTR. Still, any number of issues could delay a release so any dates or estimates for release won't be made available.

By September 30, the Diablo II team was about to release the patch within a few weeks window, but held back that decision to diagnose if the Battle.net platform would withstand the impact of the increased stash feature. So what's holding the patch from being released? Bashiok explained in order to remove the increased stash feature, which by the way was one of their big highlights for this patch, they had to remove a lot of this feature's code and that takes time, then an internal test of patches to make sure it's stable enough for release. Bear in mind localization too.

In retrospect, this patch has been a PR nightmare dragging on for a year, and from this sour experience they have learned to hold back. Translation: We won't get as much info on Diablo II patches until they are on PTR. Regardless, we can't deny that Bashiok has been very brave facing the wrath of the hungry wolves and has come through updating the community at least once or twice a month, letting us know their internal decisions, unexpected issuess, and diagnostic/analysis outcomes.

Bashiok posted a new update a few hours ago. It's now official, patch 1.13 is currently under scrutiny of the Quality Assurance team and that phase is nearing completion. We won't get a release date because they have learned to keep shut. They can't foresee any possible complications or issues -- and boy have they had a good taste of that throughout the year -- so all we know is that now that it's under quality assurance's scope, it won't be far from reaching the localization team. My personal guess: Give it a month or so there, and we might have this patch on PTR either around christmas 2009 up to January-February 2010. Give or take a few weeks.

	Blizzard Quote:
	Bashiok: We've recently completed a revised version of the Diablo II 1.13 patch that removes the increased stash size. A larger stash will unfortunately no longer be a feature included in patch 1.13 due to the previously mentioned concerns. As higher priority work continues on Warcraft III we're hoping to complete our quality assurance tests for the 1.13 patch in the next few weeks. But as always, the types of issues that may appear and take higher priority are rarely foreseeable. We continue to plan a release based on our best intentions.

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