Torchlight came out recently, which a lot of people here raved about. Me, it just made me question my enthusiasm for Diablo III. I remember liking Diablo II at the time, and Torchlight is pretty much identical to Diablo so clearly I should like it as well, but for some reason it just didn't grab me. And by "some reason," I mean that the game was essentially a clickfest. I won't say there's no skill there, because there is, but it's not a skill that I felt very excited to learn.
Edit: I think something else that bugs is that I didn't feel like I was in direct control of my character. The point and click interface makes me feel more like I'm playing an RTS than an RPG.
I also just read this this article about design lessons from the original Doom: how back in the day, mobility was a big deal, and bullets moved slow enough that you could actually dodge them. Nowadays, games that we think of as Doom clones basically make the player into a big, not-particularly-fast damage shield whose job is to run from cover to cover. Bullets are pretty much instantaneous most of the time. Which is certainly realistic. But running around the battlefield dodging enemies is rarely made into a viable tactic. This is even more the case in most RPGs.
Enter Avencast. I've been playing through the demo. I'm not sure that I actually feel compelled to grab the entire game (though it's on sale on Steam right now), but it definitely does EXACTLY what I've been looking for in an RPG for a while, which is for mobile combat to be genuinely fun. You'll be facing loads of enemies firing spells at you, and you'll be firing spells back, but you'll also need to be dodging all over the place to survive (well, in the early levels you don't exactly HAVE to dodge all over the place because things deal so little damage, but it's still damn fun). Spells are also cast using a combo system instead of WoW-style spell slots (I think you can use WoW-style spell slots to some degree, but you don't get a huge array of slots like in WoW and comboing feels a lot more satisfying, like you're actually casting a spell).
There also seems to be fairly decent puzzles as far as Diablo clones go. At first I was a little miffed that I had to actually READ one of those books you find lying around telling random ancient history (you need to find the name of a person's murderer, then translate that name into the rune language). But after adjusting to the fact that this smash-stuff game was also going to include reading and thinking I actually enjoyed the little book and a puzzle that felt fairly organically woven into the setting.
I'm not sure I think this is the best thing ever (some pieces of it feel a little amateur and the overall story is pretty generic) but if you've been itching to play a slightly more intelligent version of Diablo, it's definitely worth a look. One last interesting tidbit is that rather than having you complete, say, the first 5 levels for the demo, it actually has you skip ahead to random sections of the game. So you have one section that's level 1-4ish, another where you're level 12. I'm not sure if there was another section after that or not (haven't finished it yet).
Edit: I think something else that bugs is that I didn't feel like I was in direct control of my character. The point and click interface makes me feel more like I'm playing an RTS than an RPG.
I also just read this this article about design lessons from the original Doom: how back in the day, mobility was a big deal, and bullets moved slow enough that you could actually dodge them. Nowadays, games that we think of as Doom clones basically make the player into a big, not-particularly-fast damage shield whose job is to run from cover to cover. Bullets are pretty much instantaneous most of the time. Which is certainly realistic. But running around the battlefield dodging enemies is rarely made into a viable tactic. This is even more the case in most RPGs.
Enter Avencast. I've been playing through the demo. I'm not sure that I actually feel compelled to grab the entire game (though it's on sale on Steam right now), but it definitely does EXACTLY what I've been looking for in an RPG for a while, which is for mobile combat to be genuinely fun. You'll be facing loads of enemies firing spells at you, and you'll be firing spells back, but you'll also need to be dodging all over the place to survive (well, in the early levels you don't exactly HAVE to dodge all over the place because things deal so little damage, but it's still damn fun). Spells are also cast using a combo system instead of WoW-style spell slots (I think you can use WoW-style spell slots to some degree, but you don't get a huge array of slots like in WoW and comboing feels a lot more satisfying, like you're actually casting a spell).
There also seems to be fairly decent puzzles as far as Diablo clones go. At first I was a little miffed that I had to actually READ one of those books you find lying around telling random ancient history (you need to find the name of a person's murderer, then translate that name into the rune language). But after adjusting to the fact that this smash-stuff game was also going to include reading and thinking I actually enjoyed the little book and a puzzle that felt fairly organically woven into the setting.
I'm not sure I think this is the best thing ever (some pieces of it feel a little amateur and the overall story is pretty generic) but if you've been itching to play a slightly more intelligent version of Diablo, it's definitely worth a look. One last interesting tidbit is that rather than having you complete, say, the first 5 levels for the demo, it actually has you skip ahead to random sections of the game. So you have one section that's level 1-4ish, another where you're level 12. I'm not sure if there was another section after that or not (haven't finished it yet).
I think the biggest obstacle will become the camera angle, which they are keeping as the fixed isometric sky cam rather then a more free floating cam. I can see that being a little akward.