Review of Diablo 3 by Blizzard Entertainment

Squire James · May 24, 2012

Wow, they made Diablo 3 a rent-a-game? You know, a game you pay for as if you bought it, but in reality you only rented it until Blizzard sees fit to shut down their servers? Pass.

xenophone · May 25, 2012

Diablo 3 is a good game. Lots of polish, gorgeous environments, fun combat, powerful character customization, but.....

Good story??!! What in gods name are you talking about? This game doesn't have a story. That's pretty much it. There simply isn't a story. There are some incredibly cheesy voiceovers/dialogue, but how anyone could point to this and say that there is an "epic" story is truly astonishing. This game has about as much story as Super Mario Bros.

Dausuul · May 25, 2012

Like I said, I don't expect great story from a computer game. But I had come to expect at least a decent story from Blizzard. They did a fair job with Diablo 2; the story was nothing special, but it gave me enough of a hook to engage with the game world, and the choice of Marius as narrator for the cut scenes meshed perfectly with the game's atmosphere of brooding horror.

The story of D3 actively pushed me away from the game world, and shredded the atmosphere. Nothing destroys a horror tale like a lot of blundering "epic" baloney. When the big moment of the Act I cinematic was

Tyrael throwing a temper tantrum in Heaven

, that was it as far as I was concerned.

"You won't help the humans! I'm so mad that I'm going to rip my wings off, what do you think of that? It doesn't do one goddamn thing to help the humans, in fact it turns their best ally from a giant flaming archangel to some dude with a sword, but it shows you all how mad I am, so there!"

And then Leah looks up at Tyrael with big admiring eyes and starts gushing about his "sacrifice," when she ought to be screaming at him "YOU IDIOT! WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?" At that point, I concluded Tyrael had boarded the freight train to Mary Sue-Ville, and it was time for me to get off.

SSquirrel · May 25, 2012

Squire James said:
Wow, they made Diablo 3 a rent-a-game? You know, a game you pay for as if you bought it, but in reality you only rented it until Blizzard sees fit to shut down their servers? Pass.

You do realize that the original Diablo came out in 1996 and you can still play that game for free on Battle.net, 16 years later right? I don't see Blizzard shutting down servers anytime soon. Isn't it EA that has a tendency to kill off older versions of games that have an online component?

I've been playing the game since launch and I participated in the open beta. Have there been a few server problems, sure. They did have 7.5M copies hit the streets in the first week, counting the 1.2M free copies from people doing the WoW Annual Pass deal. They did a very small (especially when you consider each character has over 30 powers and each power has 5 runes) fix yesterday that included about half bug fixes and about half nerfs as far as player abilities and rune changes went. They're doing pretty well as far as that goes.

As for the NPCs and stash being cross character, I have to wonder how much loot switching the OP did in D2. Whether it was just between my own characters via a "mule" (aka a bank character) or with friends in the game to hold it open while I hopped characters quick, in D2 people would swap loot to other characters they didn't play just so they could pass things around. The unified loot solves that problem.

No passing money and gear thru your mule to get it to a new character you are starting. Or your Barbarian finds 2 Paladin set pieces. Would you really vendor them? No, you would either have a trusted friend in game or be in your own passworded game, drop them on the ground, quickly switch characters, and rejoin the same game. BAM! Paladin is now well geared.

A year before WoW came out the 1.10 Diablo 2 patch was released that added skill synergies. This meant no more waiting so many levels before you actually started putting points in abilities. Now you could power up some abilities that would give you bonuses along the way. Some friends from an online BBS and I started playing D2 again every night, trading gear, cubing runes up and sharing the wealth. We played for hours every night right up until WoW came out and we started a day 1 guild that lasted for over 5 years.

I know I played plenty of D2 solo at home and occasional games of it over LAN when 5 of us were living together, but I definitely spent more time on B/net, especially when you started seeing drops that were not in the home game and would only be in the ladder games online. Very cool stuff and some of it was pretty achievable even at low levels.

I keep seeing people refer to D3 as a single player game. It isn't. Blizzard has made the 3rd Diablo an online game. Yes, you can choose to play it alone, but even doing that, if you have any friends on your list, they are always a quick message away, even if they're playing SC or WoW. The game is an online game and while single player is an option, it's seems clearly designed to foster an online community, which Diablo 2 did as well, w/much worse tools.

In teh end I coudl care less. My wife and I are both having a great time w/it, but so far it's been working on our own characters. I have a 4 day weekend this week and I think when we're not at the pool w/the kids, we may well be playing D3 some more. After all, I burn real easily and we're already going to be out all Friday evening. Need to hide from the daystar some

Jhaelen · May 25, 2012

Dornam said:
For all characters there is a "best" way of speccing for Boss/Grind fights. Most of the skills never see they light of use because others are clearly leaps and bounds better in any and all situations.

So, 5 years of development and balancing and the result is ... this?!

I have the distinct feeling that the reason for not offering PvP Arenas right from the start has something to do with borked balance!

Other than that I must say I enjoy the game but not in the amount I enjoyed D II. All in all D III feels like a dumbed down version of D II so far but maybe this gets better in the higher tiers of play when the AI may make fights more interesting.

You're ignoring that Diablo 2 has much of the same issues even after, what, 13 patches over ten years?

It took quite a while until Diablo 2 skills were at least 'somewhat' balanced (PvP never was!) and could offer an interesting end game. Runewords, elite set items, randomized mobs in Hell difficulty - none of these crucial features were available right from the start. It took Blizzard _years_ to provide all of this.

Pour · May 25, 2012

I finished the game and wondered what I had just played. It didn't feel Diablo to me, and I know that's a very broad accusation to make, but if I had to narrow it down, I guess I realized story and tone really do make a world of difference for me personally. I thought it was completely disjointed from Diablo 2, despite following many of the same cues superficially (like... Act settings), and a total stranger compared to the original Diablo.

The graphics, sound, button mash is fun, it really is, and I'm casually playing Nightmare when the mood hits me, but there was no Gothic or Biblical or Apocryphal resonance for me, no transportation, no real grimness. It's a cartoon, a pretty cartoon, whose former mystery as been retconned and explained to death. I should have known when I bought the Book of Cain and saw how heavily they utilized the DISMAL Diablo novels. It feels like the Diablo world could now be a plane shift away from Azeroth, with all the kitchen sink bells and whistles, drawing from way to many real-world sources to sustain a unified, dark, true Diablo vision in my opinion. D2 walked a fine line as it was, but somehow those classes held a certain congruency the current line up does not: Chinese wizards, Israeli monks, African witchdoctors, Romanian Demonhunters, and basically 'Fantasy' Barbarians (they really had no real-world race beyond Northman).

And just forget the story. All the cheesy cackling and miserable voice acting, obvious gotchas, mary-sue waste of time, immasculation of Tyrael, xenomorphing of Diablo, the introduction of named angels only to waste their even being there, terrible representation of a supposed Lord of Lies, the rewrites of characters like Adria and the nameless warrior becoming a prince named Aidan (ugh)... I better just stop there. I really would have rathered no story than what we got. And the ultimate insult: a happy *bleep*ing ending. I literally sat there as the end credits rolled and wrestled with the frown on my face. Just a piss poor showing in my opinion, a destruction of mystique and lore and mood, a generic-izing piece of garbage aimed at being more of a cash cow than any service to the series.

Loved the music, though. Still love Matt Uelman, too, though.

SSquirrel · May 26, 2012

Pour said:
It didn't feel Diablo to me

Funny it feels exactly like Diablo to my wife and I and we've both been playing since the original Diablo.

Pour said:
D2 walked a fine line as it was, but somehow those classes held a certain congruency the current line up does not: Chinese wizards, Israeli monks, African witchdoctors, Romanian Demonhunters, and basically 'Fantasy' Barbarians (they really had no real-world race beyond Northman).

The Barbarian in this game is the same Barbarian from D2. One of my friends has taken one a bit farther than I have and has talked to people (some of the non-quest related chatting you can do) and people have comments for him referring to D2 and the things he did in that one. Which is a nice touch.

The Monks are Russian not Israeli. How are the Wizards Chinese? The closeup art in the opening section has non-slanted eyes and the guy certainly doesn't sound Chinese to me. Just looks like a white kid w/black hair.

Pour said:
And the ultimate insult: a happy *bleep*ing ending.

Funny, I thought heroes saving the world in D2 was a happy ending?

Pour · May 26, 2012

SSquirrel said:
Funny it feels exactly like Diablo to my wife and I and we've both been playing since the original Diablo.

The Barbarian in this game is the same Barbarian from D2. One of my friends has taken one a bit farther than I have and has talked to people (some of the non-quest related chatting you can do) and people have comments for him referring to D2 and the things he did in that one. Which is a nice touch.

The Monks are Russian not Israeli. How are the Wizards Chinese? The closeup art in the opening section has non-slanted eyes and the guy certainly doesn't sound Chinese to me. Just looks like a white kid w/black hair.

Funny, I thought heroes saving the world in D2 was a happy ending?

Glad somebody enjoys it! Cheers.

Libramarian · May 27, 2012

My computer is too old and slow to play d3, but I saw a preview video that made me cringe at how bad the voiceacting was. I could definitely see right there how it would not have the same gothic, brooding feel of diablo 2.

Why must every new game have voice acting? It's so overrated.

I'm pretty sure voice acting is also to blame for the difference in feel between Morrowind and Oblivion/Skyrim.

BobTheNob · May 27, 2012

Story? Seriously? Your worried that the story is lacking.

Its as simple as this. The story is just a little icing on the cake. This is Diablo...its hack n Slash people. The point is reveling in your characters constant ability to grow and push further and further up the difficulty chain. To delight in getting some rare drop that sees you jump ahead. To giggle when a strange combo of abilities sees enemies explode into gory gibits.

If anyone actually sais Diablo III is bad because the story is lacking, well, you only have yourself to blame for sourcing the wrong game. If you wanted a richer story, you came to the wrong place, who's fault is that?

If you buy a motorbike, then go back to the seller and complain because you expected air-conditioning, they would laugh themselves silly.

Caveat Emptor people.