What are your initial impressions of the game?

What do you like about it?

What are your criticisms?

How does it compare to previous Diablo games?

What are your hopes for future patches, content, or adjustments?

I'm a big fan of Peter Watts (Blindsight, Echopraxia) and Greg Egan (Schild's Ladder, Diaspora) and always looking for more to read. That said I find myself a little bit difficult sometimes as I'm not really a fan of massive scope stuff like operas or anything too dated. Granted I really haven't given either of the latter much of a chance as I think I just prefer tight, focused stories with a small cast of characters.

I recently started The Quantum Thief and am liking certain aspects of it but you're really thrown into a blizzard with that one.

Just tested it myself. Here’s the process that worked for me, in case anyone else needs a guide. No guarantees, of course, but hopefully it works for others too:

From Desktop Mode

Download the Battle.net installer
Add the installer as a non-Steam game
Change the installer settings in Steam to run with Proton Experimental
Run the installer
(tip: to make it easy to find the launcher in the next step, you can change the install path to be in your downloads folder instead of deep in the Proton path)

Once installed, exit the installer
Add the installed Battle.net Launcher.exe as a non-Steam game
Change the launcher settings in Steam to run it with Proton Experimental
Run the launcher
Log in
Install Diablo IV
(tip: uncheck the high res textures option which is on by default to save yourself about 40 GB of space)
Close launcher
(tip: if D4 is the only Bnet game you’re planning on playing, you can rename the launcher in Steam to Diablo IV)

From Gaming Mode

Launch the launcher
Click the Play button on Diablo IV
Enjoy!

Other Tips

During installation or the game, whenever you need a keyboard, press STEAM + X to call it up.

Occasionally, during installation or in the Launcher in game mode, my trackpad input would get wonky or stop responding. When this happens, hold the STEAM button down while using the trackpads, and they should work again.

Beyond that, the game automatically worked from me. It loaded low graphics settings (which are perfect for the Deck) and recognized my controller. It even opens with some accessibility settings before you start playing that lets you scale the font size up too, which makes it easier to read on the small screen.

I can’t say much about how the game actually plays as I really just did this to test if it works. I’ll be putting in my first actual time with the game tomorrow.

I came across a site about Chinese tech and video gaming and found it very Buzzfeed-y with its headlines and writing. It made me wonder what are the websites that curate a standard of thoughtful articles, essays, discussion, etc. and aren't part of the American internet scene.

I don't care what language it's in, what it's about, what country specifically it's centered on, if it's community-centric or not. If you have a suggestion, let's hear it.

Edit: An example I have is The Blizzard. It's really a subscription-model digital magazine (about soccer) but you can read various articles online.

Figured I'd start putting together a thread as the flood of announcements and articles start coming out from this year's BlizzCon.

The site, where you can pick which streaming "channel" to watch: https://blizzcon.com/

Full schedule: https://blizzcon.com/en-us/schedule

Opening ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyApQc-ZmSA

Diablo IV

• Blizzard on Diablo 4's Rogue and how PvP works within the open world
• Diablo IV: What's Next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO3LQqpiBvQ

Diablo II: Resurrected

• Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRP62MGOrUo
• Interview on Eurogamer: The big Diablo 2 Resurrected interview
• Some more details on Ars: Diablo II Resurrected tops BlizzCon announcement flurry
• Diablo II: Resurrected - Deep Dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE

World of Warcraft

• World of Warcraft Classic will be extended to include first expansion The Burning Crusade this year, along with paid character cloning and boosts, and "pre-nerf" raid bosses.

Overwatch 2

• Behind the Scenes of Overwatch 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRj-GotnNaQ

I'm reading about the latest Gitlab shakeup, about (not?) filtering customers on moral grounds. Yesterday, it was Github's decision to continue to support ICE. There's Twitter's decision to allow politicians to (somewhat?) violate its own rules about threats and harrassment. Blizzard banned a star video game player for speaking out about the Hong Kong protests.

I'm on Mastodon, and while it's faded from the headlines a bit, the Gab-war still rages there, with the Tusky-v-Fediverse debate over apps blocking domains, and instances blocking other instances over their support for yet other instances.

Yada.

I'm thinking a lot these days about the "slippery slope". Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, Github/lab, etc ... these are all business(-like) entities, privately controlled, which are nonetheless approaching the status of public infrastructure ... at least, sort of.

PG&E intentionally shut off power to millions of Californians last week, to prevent hypothetical fires. You see where I'm going with this.

When/As smart capabilities for power grid, ISP, etc emerge, do racists, white supremacists, get Internet? Electricity? Hospital/Ambulance service? Where is that line?

Is reverse discrimination appropriate? "We don't rent to racists..."?

Not sure what I'm expecting here. Just starting the thread, see where it goes.

ETA: A really interesting, thoughtful 2-minute excerpt from a Rogan podcast

Edit #2: The Hacker News thread that prompted me to start this thread.

There's been a bit of drama regarding the direction of the general story, but I reckon they know what they're doing - I'm mostly excited for the new zones anyway. And quests, storylines in new zones, etc.

WoW has been on a slow and steady downward trend in terms of popularity, and it's not very talked about in gaming communities - but hey, it's now 14 years later and it's still going strong with millions of subscribers! Although mildly annoying that we can no longer see exactly how many there are, it's understandable - if nothing else for the beauty of an updated version of this graph!

So who's excited for BfA?

I've been out of the game for years. I left midway through Legion, early into BfA, and then finally SLs burnt out any lingering love I had for the world and its lore. Apparently DF is better, but it's not a world that interests me anymore. Alternatively, Classic was neat, but it's a solved game and mostly a time capsule.

So I'm surprised how much I look forward to playing classic hardcore when my daughter goes to sleep and I have a bit of time to myself. I'm never bored; even boring walks might have stealthed panthers or stuff, so I have to pay my full attention. Whenever a bag drops, or I get an upgrade, it's the best feeling in the world. Leaving a kobold cave alive is such a rush. Watching your hearthstone finish casting in the middle of an enemy camp and letting out that breath that you're holding is incredible.

It absolutely sucks when you die, but then it also makes me more likely to try out classes and races that I usually steered away from, because why not?

Is anyone else on the same boat, or looking forward to the official servers?