Devil's Third -- Multiplayer: Introduction, Character Creation
So, I actually happened to let the whole year down last night, because SOME jokers in Japan decided to have a huge presentation that was on until after midnight... I decided to lie back and absorb the messages I had been bombarded with, then awoke later to find that it was time to get up for the day. Accursed day! Come to vanquish my horrible night! Bah!
Ah, but these are excuses. The real trouble is that this is a serious lapse in form and a broken promise to the very passage of time itself! ... ... ...well, I'm not apologizing. 2017 can shove it. (Did you ever even MEET the year 2016? No way!
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Anyway, what's this?! It's... multiplayer! ...kind of! Unfortunately, the game's multiplayer component ended when the servers shut down on December 29th, 2016. Therefore, this was actually captured before then.
Consider it part of my testimonial and recognition that Devil's Third did indeed exist, and its online multiplayer component had a lot of heart, eve though you'd have to dig intentionally to FIND positive remarks on any aspect of it, mostly by people who never played it and are going off the word of someone else who barely touched a mode before the game itself even launched.
You don't even have to LIKE it, by the way... the point is that if you want to speak to the quality of a game's character, at least investigate it with an open mind first, rather than repeating a statement of negativity you once heard and took as fact after hearing it enough times or by a particular person whose opinion somehow carries more weight to you than your own personal curiosity.
That's why these videos are here, if we want to get down to it. I feel, as though I "owe" it a proper sendoff, even though I wasn't a very good friend to the game, much less a particularly skilled player...
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One thing I think needs to be pointed out and given proper kudos... the multiplayer game is actually tied INTO and run concurrent with the main single-player campaign. Sure, the plot is schlocky as all get out, but there ARE consequences at large for the things it sets up, even if Ivan has no intention of actually doing anything about any but the biggest dominoes in a very specific and direct fashion... so how does the world decide to resolve the sudden onset of complete societal breakdown? With multiplayer gun-toting action, boy howdy! (Never mind the fact that the absolute destruction of all technology EXCEPT the technology to kill each other to pieces is already part of the Hollywood science syndrome... that's casually contradicted as soon as it's more convenient to ignore it. Understand yet?)
Anyway, you can't just pick up a gun and start letting your rowdy neighbors have it like that... no, no, no, you've got to PREPARE first! A government agency (which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in reality) has to contact you (somehow... unspecified), using unusually casual tone and familiar address.. to inform you that the government is no more... but then... who's telling us this? So you register your name and THEN you can have a gun and some money and junk! See? All official!
So... somehow "Dollen" ("dollar"... "yen"? No, sorry, I don't think so... but a nice try, Japan!) established itself as a brand new and totally formalized currency even as this societal apocalypse got underway... never mind how impossible the task of just up and INVENTING a currency is, even WITH an established governing body, much less with no possibility of production or logistical dispersion... but wait, it gets better! There are also GOLDEN EGGS! ...wait, what? (See? I told you this game doesn't take itself THAT seriously!)
Golden Eggs are essentially the means through which Devil's Third took a stab at a premium, microtransaction-enabled currency. How well or poorly this worked out, I can't really say, because I personally would never spend extra money on such things, though it DOES make for a weird "economy" that I'll be sure to tear into later for all its oddities as a player, but you fortunately aren't required to navigate macroeconomics in a written exam to properly navigate the menus and start shooting people.
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Beyond that... there's... a not-entirely-anemic level of customization to be had, which... is admittedly more than I figured for a game of this sort, although not all options are likely to be equally interesting or appealing, so if you don't like ANY of the four or so choices in a given category... too bad?
I'd also like to point out that the game DOES take down your chosen name as your unique identifier to be associated with your NNID, and you MIGHT notice that a suspiciously specific construction thus gets rejected somehow... and you'd be right to assume that there's an incredibly small number of players to begin with, and the odds of ONE of them wanting to stake out such a similar callsign would be nothing short of astronomical... so... ... ...to be continued?