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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Thursday, October 02, 2014

Too Much Diablo IV

Been playing a lot of Diablo III, so it really isn't a surprise that there would be a Diablo IV dream, the VR version of the game. Nice lightweight headset and gloves made up the VR rig. There was only a little noticeable delay - but only on character movements, the backgrounds were rock solid for the head tracking. There were some polygon lighting oddities but overall it looked pretty darned good. The camera position was fixed and the game itself was still pretty much the isometric view we're used to, but closer and thus more immersive. There was, oddly, still no first person view. The game controls involved hand movements and finger gestures or touches. The gloves had the pressure points in them, and the item you held in your hand was just there to provide some weight and resistance.

Cool game play, and this time the game was focused on less world shattering fare, recovering reputations for your DIII companions, finding lost relatives, freeing imprisoned sisters, and going up against a corrupted order of Paladins intent on storming the High Heavens and taking control from the Angels, some of whom have been less than supportive of humanities newfound importance. In other words, it carried on right from DIII's middle stories. The one thing I found missing was going after Chen's jewel, (to be fair I haven't played the new acts and it may be covered there....)

In the dream I worked up quite the sweat swinging around and attacking things with spells and weapons both. There was a lot of voice chatter from other players, and that was disorienting, as the sound wasn't as well coordinated as the video for some reason. I was using five pound weights as my resistance grips, which made for a pretty aerobic game session. I was not completely blown away by the graphics, but they were certainly well done, with lots of variety that helped make each location stand out in a way that made navigation without the map possible for some of us, anyway, a couple of my companions kept asking me to drop a flag so they could find the rest of the group. (In real life that would more likely be me, I always seem to be the slowpoke in the MMOs I play.)

Where the game design really shone was in the Special Effects, amazing fire and smoke as well as other elemental effects. Also, Combat Engineers! Yes! I was able to build Golems, like the old Necromancer, beef up peoples' weapons and armor, make barricades, bridges and weapons of mass destruction- bombs and traps ala Demon Hunter. There was also stealth, and rapid transit (Zip lines! Hooty hoo!) I was a happy camper. (Note to Blizzard - you can completely steal the Combat Engineer idea, and I'll still gladly pay you to play it!)

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