Picking and Thoughts on Titan Quest

This weekend I attempted to implement the mouse function back into the editor. Of course the first thing to do is change the OpenGL picking setup, and of course it didn't work properly. I didn't tried too much because I was busy with other stuff and didn't spend a lot of time on it, but right now it's effecting the performance, and might not even pick the right spot. If possible I should develop some sort of module ore class to handle this picking things more easily so next time I need it I can just plug it in. It may or may not be possible...will have to see.

One thing that distracted me from game development is me playing Titan Quest trying to entertain myself. But now I think about it...what a waste of time, haha... But hey sometimes one has to relax. I did come up with some interesting thoughts about APRG genre though. It seems to me on PC the only successful ARPG is Diablo series. Even some developers break off from Blizzard, forming their own companies, they still can't best Diablo in my opinion, even with new technologies. Different gimmicks, skill trees, stories, different amount of side quests etc etc have been tried in different games, and a lot of them sound more impressive than Diablo, but still, it can't be beat in my opinion. At least Diablo gave me more enjoyable time than the others. After playing Titan Quest, here is few of my observation on making good ARPG (obviously my opinions might have high probability of being incorrect, since so many others have failed to beat Diablo):

1. Fine tuning of level of difficulties and type of challenge: ARPG should be simple, dumb but not too dumb I think. It means that control of the character should be simple. The difficulty should be easy, but not to the point of dumbness. The games should offer player some challenge but not to the point of frustrations (die often, heavy punishment on death which include long reroute after death, long loading time after death etc)...Another way to say it might be it should be convenient for player to die, but rewarding to stay alive and kill a bunch of monsters,...I think.
2. Look Good: This sounds shallow but I think it's extremely important for ARPG to have everything look extremely good and cool in the game. This actually a bit related to point 1's reward aspect as well. I highly doubt any player will feel good if he gain a knife with +200 attack but looks like a banana. With a bad look, number and stats don't matter. It would be nice to make the player feel his character has become more powerful by the look of the equipments, statures and the attacks. Actually I think that's one of the problem with Titan Quest: equipments look blend and better equipment don't look that different or better. Titan Quest's expansion Immortal Throne did a much better job in my opinion. The armor etc actually make your character look nice. Few ARPG try to make the attack looks different when level up (except more varieties of skills) but I think that's actually one cool thing that can be done. The enemy also need to look nice, and they have to look better and better as the player progress, because it gives player more satisfaction when the players destroy them. If every enemies look like Tofu of course no one will get any satisfaction out of it, even if you make the Tofu extremely hard to kill. Blizzard's Diablo I think, actually did a good job in this area. The only exception to this "Look Good" rule might be some "need help" NPC since it might be better to make them look sorry to trigger player's sympathies.
3. Varieties: This kind of games need varieties...whether it's in the environment, type of enemies, quests, story etc. Anything that can shock and ow the players would be nice. But in my opinion it doesn't mean "a lot of" side quests. Because usually a lot of side quests means a lot of blend side quests. Plus, people are lazy, and might just ignore the side quests, or frustrated by it. It might be better...to force the varieties onto the player, challenge them visually and mentally rather than give them a bunch of similar challenges.

That's my thought so far. In general I think the expansion Immortal Throne is done much better than Titan Quest, it shows that the company did learn something. Unfortunately I heard the developer Iron Lore is closing now.
Another thing that makes me wonder is...Consoles should be the better platforms for this type of ARPG. I knew a few from the SNES etc. But consoles offer more possibilities with the control etc in my opinion. Yea, puzzling, how come not a lot of developers attempted ARPG on consoles.