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+---- Thread: Darkspore (/showthread.php?tid=39053)
Darkspore - Dusk - 2011-03-10
http://www.darkspore.com
Maxis' new game, presented at last year's E3. It's a co-op (with single player mode) dungeon crawling game in the style of Diablo, but since it's Maxis they brought in the only good feature of Spore, the Creature Creator.
The closed beta starts tomorrow and you can probably still find a key on the internet somewhere. I got mine from Gamespot.
My expectations:
It looks pretty innovative. One of the things that is often missing from these types of games is the ability to truly customize your character, and this game promises to have that. However, many Maxis games seem to lose their awesomeness somewhere between 2-5 hours into the game when you realize the huge lack of depth and balance to the game. That's what killed Spore for me, at least. I think it's still a fun distraction for dungeon crawler lovers like myself while waiting for Diablo 3, though. I'll post a better opinion tomorrow or some time this weekend when I've actually played it.
Darkspore - Scaeva - 2011-03-11
I still got 3 keys "for friends" after just signing up for the beta 4 days ago. I anyone wants one just PM me or something.
From the videos I've seen so far the beta is set up very well. After most things you get a few questions in which you can rate something (the difficulty of a stage for example) from 1 to 5. I don't really have any expectations yet (all I've seen so far are the tutorial and stage 1-1), but it looks pretty cool.
EDIT: Just played it for ~2.5 hours. The character editor is very, very addictive (and changing colors takes freaking forever). The gameplay itself is quite nice, but I'm not sure how on how much deeper it will become. Right now I have 4 heroes (Blitz, Sage, Goliath and Arkana) and each of them does play in a different way. I would've liked it if I could run though, the walking speed gets annoying after a while.
Darkspore - Dusk - 2011-03-13
Played 4-5 hours and reported a few bugs.
My take:
It's a fun game. It's a little like Diablo meets Spore meets League of Legends (the combat style and items system, not the relation to DotA). There are 100 heroes to choose from, and each plays differently. Each hero you pick has a basic attack, a passive ability, and up to 5 skills that unlock over time. Items boost your stats, but do not grant additional abilities. Each dungeon is pretty linear, but open enough so that it doesn't totally feel that way.
The creature editor is awesome as always, although since I only had a few spikes and shells I couldn't do a whole lot to really change the look of my heroes other than change the color. You're locked into the base body shape, which is a little limiting, but it makes sense.
I can't say I was very impressed as far as actual gameplay goes. It's pretty well done, but it's also very generic. It's interesting that you can bring 3 heroes of your choosing into the game, but you pretty much end up using one exclusively unless it gets low on health or it dies, anyway. Swapping also made things really confusing when trying to heal party members, because you couldn't heal their reserve heroes, or even see their statuses. It'd also be nice if they'd let you coordinate with your party to figure out roles so you knew what to bring beforehand. I also hope the battles get more interesting later on, because the first couple of levels was pretty nice about letting all party members run around with zero coordination, shooting things.
I also did not see a trade feature in game, which significantly devalued the loot. Rolls were always set to random and there wasn't any way to let a party member have a particular drop they wanted. Instead, I just received notices that I was getting a bunch of random items as I was going through the dungeons, which felt pretty boring. Part of the fun of dungeon crawlers is finding a bunch of valuables to sell off later, and they definitely missed this concept.
I didn't get a chance to try the PvP, which could be pretty interesting.
Overall verdict: fun game, worth trying if you like the genre, but I'm not expecting a whole lot out of it. It is still in Beta, but I do feel that the game lacks the necessary depth to keep players playing.