Q: What has been changed to make the game work on the 360?
A: The UI is COMPLETELY overhauled from the ground up. Nothing works the same. All new art and navigation. The concept of item slots is done away with you just have a number of items you can hold ( 50 ignores stack counts ). Potions and scrolls stack up to 99. Potions auto pick the best potion to heal you or regen mana. You dont have to think about it or map it. We iterated on the UI a ridiculous amount.
You can have 4 active mapped skills at a time, and a secondary set that you can swap between (using the dpad) for 8 mapped skills. Most of us actually find it easier to use a variety of skills on the console vs. PC, oddly enough.
Force feedback is in for quakes, strikes, low health heartbeats, and tugs on the fishing line
Feels nice.
Q: How are controls different?
A: Control is direct no virtual cursors ever. Combat is a little different you move forward slightly with melee attacks and all the attack animations are redone to support this. You dont target enemies youll get a red highlight for a primary target that is in range, but for melee attacks you hit everything in your damage cone (secondary targets get secondary damage ). Feels natural and does what you expect.
Ranged combat is actually in many ways easier kiting and dodging are significantly more viable with a controller and the autotargeting for ranged attacks works pretty well. lobbed skills mapped to the triggers have a default distance, but you can finesse them for longer or shorter throws by holding the trigger at a given depth. Combat pace feels faster and more maneuverable. If youve played classics like Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath, you have the general idea ( but no jumping ). Movement speed is analog you can move slower by easing on the stick, something you cant do at all on PC.
Q: Has anything been removed/added for the console version?
A: No skills have been omitted. Some skills have had alterations to their functionality to make them feel better ( i.e. you dont select corpses to summon a Nether Imp you just cast it and if theres a corpse around, there you go ).
Pretty much everything from the PC version is here. We didnt remove any features, with the exception of secondary weapon sets, because there was no way we could find that didnt feel horrible in inventory management. Socketing, enchanting, fishing, the infinite dungeon, item combination, are all represented.
We brought over some goodies from TL2 to the console version. Loading times are much reduced. Better animation blending makes combat snappier ( hard to describe, but youll probably feel it ). Automaps are brought over from TL2s new automap system ( They are rendered out and much more readable, and icons cleave to the borders of the ring ). In addition, there are three new armor sets (one for each class), some new random quests for one of the miners in town, and a new pet the Chakawary.
