It's a busy week down at Blizzard, where two of their largest current titles are undergoing some rapid changes (that's Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2, for those who don't know). While we may not know what the third Diablo would have looked like if David Brevik designed it, it's evident that Blizzard put in a solid effort for the title and will keep trying to fix issues as they become prevalent.
The latest issue is due to effect gameplay on a large-scale, so fans of the series should certainly read on so they're not taken by surprise.
Those who are accustomed to roleplaying games are no doubt familiar with 'crowd control' attacks, which limit or reduce the effectiveness of multiple enemy mobs on-screen - that would otherwise be attacking with 100% efficiency. Typically players will enter fights highly outnumbered, making crowd control attacks one of the most important offensive and defensive strategies.
Currently, crowd control attacks in Diablo 3 simply have diminished effectiveness at high difficulty and levels. Blizzard did this so that the game would get progressively harder and more challenging, as otherwise high-level players would have much less of a challenge when taking on multiple opponents. After months of tracking this system, however, Blizzard noticed that as players rose to higher levels they simply stopped using crowd control attacks at the same rhythm they did earlier on in the game. After reviewing the data, Blizzard decided they had to come up with a new system of crowd control which would achieve the same effect, but without the noticeable flaws of the original system. To achieve this, they created a new attribute for enemies called 'CC Resistance', which rises and lowers depending on when CC attacks are used against them.
Blizzard's tracked statistics for Crowd Control Usages as players level. In brief, here's how the new crowd control effects will work in the upcoming Diablo 3 patch:
- Monsters have a "CC resistance" that is stored on a per-monster basis.
- The CC resistance starts at 0%. For every 1 second CC that is applied to the monster, the monster receives 10% CC resistance.
- Monsters lose 10% of their CC resistance every second that they are not CC’d.
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Elite monster CC resistance is capped at the current reduction values already active for Elites. In other words, CC resistance on most Elite monsters is capped to:
- 35% in Normal
- 50% in Nightmare
- 65% in Hell
- 65% in Inferno
Blizzard is aiming to have these new crowd control effects launch with the Patch 1.05, which is the next scheduled update. While the gameplay should have the same progressing difficulty as gamers are used to, this time gamers won't see as much 'Immune' notifications when using crowd control at higher levels.
On the more sci-fi end of things, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm has finally reached beta status. However, the beta is currently only open to pro gamers, media officials, and the like - so unless you happen to be WhiteRa, you'll have to wait a little longer. The beta isn't under any kind of NDA, so there are already thousands of Heart of the Swarm videos being posted on YouTube. If the first few days of beta have proved anything, it's that Blizzard have put countless hours into balancing the gameplay with new units. If it's like the original beta, there'll be hundreds of tweaks before the game reaches coveted open-beta status.
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