I know this isn't a ranking, but rather, this is a review of Diablo 3.
My
credentials? I've played Diablo 1 and 2 for years. I think I've played
Diablo 2 more than any other game...and that's a big statement,
considering I spent most of my undergrad years trying to find the
"perfect MMO" (which doesn't exist btw).
So after putting in 150 + hours in, how did Diablo 3 fare? Let's find out
Initial Reaction
I
wasn't gonna buy the game. At least until a few weeks later...to see
how the reactions of people were. However, I folded to peer pressure and
bought it the day before (sigh. my first paycheck), installed it, and
was ready to go at 3:00am release time.
I was in my friend's living room, all four of us...all ready to start and get
ahead of the rest of the world...only to find out about Error 3007 (or
whatever the number was). Copy/pasting my password and hitting enter for
an hour, I finally gave up. Turns out, the game went live an hour
later...4:00am EST.
Anyhoo. I woke up the next morning
and started playing as a monk, figuring the bruiser-type character was
always my playstyle. Harold and I were blasting through and saving
Tristram.
It was more or less like any game; start in a
low leveled area, get a quest, kill some low level monsters, learn some
skills, kill stuff faster, get more quests, etc.
Leveling Stats and Skills
The
first disappointing thing came when I found out that you have no
control over the allocation of stat points. They are "random" and
automatically distributed when you level. This took out the need in
Diablo 2 to calculate the nooks and crannies (how much STR do I need for
end game equips...DEX for max block. etc) , thus there went the unique
building of characters. Essentially, every level 60 Monk would look
exactly like me, outside of equipment.
The skill
system...I'm still up in the air. No more saving skill points at level 1
in order to max out a level 30 skill. No synergies to make successive
skills stronger. Just you had access to every skill. In one sense, you
don't need to create new characters for every build (although, I hear
they patched that in D2 where you get free respecs). You had access to
every skill and you could build accordingly, which was kinda cool. Only
having 6 hotkeys made it challenging and thought provoking, because
every slot was important. The runes to add an effect to each skill were
hit or miss. You got them automatically by leveling, but the problem is,
more than half of the runes are useless (after gaining two more level
60s, this further backs it up).
Story
To be honest, I knew i wasn't playing this game for story. I'm not even sure exactly what happened in the first two Diablo titles. But this was no excuse for the third one to churn out such a lame and textbook story. The difference between the first two titles and this one is that Diablo 3 forces you to remotely pay attention to the terrible plot line by making you complete every quest there is. Checking the forums, there were some players who came up with much better alternatives than what was released.
Leveling Itself
The
inevitable thing about MMOs; grinding. Grinding is normal in any game,
whether it was just beat on the same group of penguins for hours or
talking to the same NPC over and over for quest EXP. At first, D3 did a
seamless job of just "naturally" leveling up your characters, where
there was no need to grind. Just progress normally through the game.
And
while this remains true, the grind is just too easy. I don't think I've
ever hit max level this fast in any game. Within the first week, me and
most of my friends got to level 60 (although we used a loophole in the
game to repeat getting quest exp, but still). Getting to level 70 in D2
was a joke. Getting to level 99 took months. Now I understand this isn't
the "endgame", where there will probably be a raise in level cap when
they come out with expansions (dirty money grabbing adsfjaar), but
still. My initial thought was "yay. I got to level 60. now I can focus
on getting 1337 equips. Until...
Difficulty
I
mean, it would've been a shame if Inferno was a breeze (hah). Props to
Blizzard for trying to make the game difficult to extend our gameplay,
but...this was just ridiculous. Now, leading up to Inferno, it was no
problem. The new skills, the item/level gap were fine between nightmare
and hell (although difficult at first, both those became a breeze), but
then when you hit inferno, it was just ridiculous. I could only survive
for four seconds, since that was how long my invulnerability skill held
up.
Item Farming
This
was what made Diablo 2 so fun. Killing monsters to try to get some nice
loot. Uniques were jaw dropping and to find one made life so much
better.
There's no "set" end game items. This is fine,
but for perfectionists, to know that "there's something better than
yours", it's just unsettling. However, this allows more playability to
find better stuff.
Now, it'd be fine if I just needed
to farm equips to get to the higher act, but there was a 0% droprate in
Act 1 for equips that can get you through Act 2. This forced people (my
friends included) to do retarded chest runs, only to die one after
another until someone opens the Resplendent Chest, and hope to obtain
something worthwhile. For me, I find satisfaction in killing monsters to
collect the spoils. Spoils I can possibly use to progress in the game.
However, after act 1, there just wasn't anything worth picking up.
On
top of that, now they implemented an "input limit", which prevents you
from creating/joining games too quickly, thus eliminating doing any sort
of "run".
Which paved the way for...
Auction House
Auction
House is pretty standard in every game now. It established a currency
and a market within the game, which is much better than the SOJ or 20/20
markets, because everyone can participate. The problem is when the game
becomes dependent on the Auction House. In the other games I've played,
Auction House existed to make the game easier. In Diablo 3, it was a
necessity. In almost all games, you fight in your current area, get
equips that allow you to progress through the next area and repeat the
process. In Diablo 3, in order to progress to Act 2, one must farm
enough gold in Act 1 (or below) in order to buy Act 4 equipment to beat
Act 2. On top of that, the Real Money Auction House makes no sense to
me. Now I understand there's a black market of gold farmers in the
world, but this is clearly just Blizzard's attempt to try to get a cut
into that profit. Now, for a free-to-play game, it's understandable;
servers need money to stay open. Especially on a game where no one has
no monetary investment, rather just time commitment. However, many..many
people paid for Diablo 3, so you figure that all the game's features
would be available with that one time purchase. With the implementation
of a RMAH, those with more money shall get ahead. The price of gold
itself is ridiculous; 1M for $10? I guess it'd only take me about 5 days
to make back my money in the game. That logic doesn't make any sense to
me. It just made the 1% (or the lucky ones who found insanely nice
drops) stronger, and made the 99% more desperate to find loopholes,
which essentially exploited the broken game.
Loop holes
I
think everyone realizes by now Diablo 3 is a far from finished game.
Why did they not release it later boggles my mind. However, with the
frustration, there were a number of loopholes/bug/glitches that were
exploited in order to progress. The frustrating thing was that Diablo 3
devs were quick to patch them, but didn't offer any alternatives only to
drive it's gamers even more frustrated.
Example: The
Monk had a skill (bugged skill) that allowed automatic regeneration of
their Spirit (or mana). This made it possible to spam heal in order to
survive any situation. Now yes, that's rigged, but it made Monks
relevant. Once they patched it, Monks just became fodder, with no real
way to defend itself. In a sense, they penalized you for being a
tank/melee class, rather than allow you to be able to tank.
There
were leveling loopholes that people discovered, which I mastered to a
T. I got so many friends to level 60 so they could share the pain that
made us realize "this game just isn't fun".
End Notes
And
I think that's the end thought. This game just isn't fun. There's no
replayability. The end game is more frustrating than challenging, and
with the implementation of a RMAH, inflation is an inevitability, with
the higher tier equipments only making their way to the money market
rendering the regular gold market useless, making the game for non-money
spenders impossible to keep up. There's not even PvP implemented in
this game.
This game does show a lot of promise which
could easily be fixed by a series of patches, but considering the game
has been out for little over a month with millions of players, but no
significant changes, it doesn't seem worth it to try and weather the
storm to hope the you land in the a more favorable area.
Time to abandon ship.
