Grilling the Devil

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.