EPTNight 1
We spent a lengthy amount of time picking character classes and finding our footing in the game again. We decided we’d be playing without the AH and on Hardcore – and that since we each had exactly one class we hadn’t played much before, we’d be learning them. That would be the gameplay that would provide the most challenge, and so was the gameplay most likely to hold our attention. The first night was reasonably dull, and we only leveled to about 11 or 12 over the course of a couple hours (we dawdled a bit, learning new skills and runes about classes we’d never really played before). It wasn’t all that exciting, but it was also different abilities, and that alone made the experience worth semi-engaging.
However, we’d both been here before. The quests weren’t new, the items weren’t new, the feeling of “if we keep this up, we might get to content that’ll hold our attention next week” was very not new. It held our attention, but left us with a feeling of dread for what we knew was coming when the newness wore off.
Night 2
I came into this night excited. I had completely forgotten (but been reminded by a post I saw on the forums) about “Monster Power”. This was something they added to make the game more difficult for players who chose to play that way.
We immediately set it to MP10, and were amazed to find ourselves not dying. But even more amazing, it felt hard. Really hard. We were nearing the end of Act 1 at level 14-ish, and the whole experience was intoxicating. We both spoke excitedly about how we were going to tackle each room, how much fun we were having, how much this reminded us of Diablo 2, and then all those old experiences started coming to life again.
I remembered how hard my frenzy barbarian used to annihilate himself with Iron Maiden on him in Act 3, how painstakingly my sorceress had endured kiting Duriel, the night I learned the hard way never to go afk in Worldstone Keep and the sheer, ridiculous number of skelemancers I created back when my arm was messed up and I was trying to play one-handed. Like a middle-aged man suddenly able to don his high school football attire and play on the field of his youth against new foes, I found myself immersed in the culmination of the nostalgia of days gone by and the incredible newness with which this challenge presented us.
We even died. Yes, that’s right – in our second night of play, in Act I Normal we (the once-proud conquerors of Diablo 3 Hell on Hardcore with no dupes, hacks, or traded gear) died. Now, admittedly, the mistakes we made were silly and careless (but then, the D3 we knew didn’t punish you for such things).
We immediately made new characters, and got to level 6 very quickly. However, in the spirit of days gone by, we had willed ourselves to stay up way too late, such that I got very little sleep that night, and my friend got almost none. He was up by 6 am the next morning with his sister’s kids to play around and go to the zoo.
Night 3
The night started in a stark contrast to the end of the night before. We had been energetic and excited, now we were both quiet and subdued – almost as though we knew beforehand the result of the night’s gaming. We played for a time, neither of us speaking, but it was different. It was all different. We became suspicious that I had done something wrong in hosting the game – but we had no such luck. It was obvious that MP10 was not the answer we had hoped it would be, and after playing a bit more, the reason became evident: we were fighting harder enemies, but we were also higher level while doing it. We no longer were in danger of dying. Heck, we no longer even needed potions. All it took was our being 4 or 5 levels higher from having started the game on MP10 to begin with – and the Diablo 3 that we knew far better than we wanted to was back. We felt ourselves throwing caution to the wind, taking risks, playing sloppy – because we hoped we were wrong.
But after more than an hour of not really interesting play, it became harder and harder to believe. And that idea started to dominate the conversation, too. Soon, all our old greivances started coming out. The story was in the way. The itemization was bad, and we hadn’t seen a single unique in our (admittedly small) time playing. We didn’t like how this spec worked or that you couldn’t use one ability or another effectively. Finally, as we approached Skeleton King, my friend decided he’d seen enough.
“Dude, you might wanna pot now, he’s coming out,” I said. My friend was sitting at very low life.
“I got this,” came his reply.
Maybe he’s just saving his pot – maybe he’s going to do something more creative to get life back, I told myself, though I guess deep down I knew what was coming.
As the Skeleton King came out, my friend leaped over to him and got in the first blows – getting himself killed immediately. The statement was clear: if, even on the highest difficulty, the beginning of the game is this mind-numbingly easy – why *should* I want to keep my character (and my enthusiasm in playing) alive?
“Time played,” he said as I finished the encounter with the Skeleton King, “1 hour, 28 minutes.”
He logged off after, saying that he was pretty tired and would need to get up just as early the next morning. I could probably appeal to him to give MP10 a little more time, or maybe to intentionally put ourselves in a situation where we’d always be intentionally under-levelled, but honestly it seems to me like he made the right call. After the game we had played the night before, we were both too let down by the game in front of us to keep playing – and having one decisive moment of “screw this game” was far better than the often slow and drawn out process which normally leads to us leaving a particular game.
Closing Thoughts
Hardcore in Diablo 2 worked. You could die in that game at any point in time if you weren’t playing attention (if you weren’t gifted a bunch of gear). You learned lessons by dying, and because you were always just a screen away from an enemy you’d need to give your full attention to, death also lost part of its bite. Sure, it took away parts of your past achievements. You lost some gear. You didn’t have a random video game accomplishment to show for your time. But never did it go into the realm of eating away at your future.
This is where Diablo 3’s hardcore hits me. I don’t mind dying in Diablo 2. I can always make a new character and have new experiences in no time. In Diablo 3, there is just too much downtime between level 1 and the first time an enemy could really kill you, so that death isn’t just a loss of things you’d gotten in the past – it’s a loss of time you’d need to spend in the future if you were going to continue to play this game. Not satisfying, enjoyable time the way it was in Diablo 2, either – because, again, a hack-and-slash game that doesn’t make you afraid of dying makes you acutely aware of just how much ARPGs fall behind other types of RPGs. The story gets repetitive. The itemization feels off. The AH absolutely sucks (and drop rates suck pretty hard, too) – but the real culprit behind the complaints I have about the early game is that the game is just too shy about killing me. Give me that and all else could have been forgiven.
That's why hardcore in Diablo 3 doesn’t work – not because you lose the stuff you had, but because you must lose so much future time doing stuff that realistically cannot be interesting without going far out of your way to get there. Effectively, rather than just taking away virtual stuff that didn't limit the real fun of playing anyway (thereby, making the detriment economic rather than behavioral), the game actually places you in "detention" by forcing the next x hours of play to not be fun. The game actually says "you're grounded, now go to your room and think about what you've done for the next 12-20 played hours".
Sure, we're creative people, and we can probably find a way through much effort to get each stage of the game to be interesting. We can remake characters in MP0, get them to level 10 and 11 and have another hour or two – or more or less – but in the end, we’re investing time on not having fun to purposefully making the game harder later so that we can have fun then. Why would we do that? How long could it last? Is there a point where it stops working that way? How long would we be comfortable racing through MP0 because we just can’t take playing the game the way the game wants to be played: as the type of game where you are almost literally forced to succeed at the beginning – so that any choices you make in the early game is so uninteresting that you no longer even want to make them.
That’s why my friend’s character is dead now. Because he felt that was the most interesting choice he had left in the game to make.
To some extent, the patch does make things "better". I got far more excitement out of Night 2 than I ever did in hardcore beforehand (primarily at the notion of being able to die without the dread of "there's another week I'm going to need before I can play this game for fun"), but the direction of the game still feels like something a robot would make to approximate fun rather than something a person would make because they know what "fun" means. That's the real reason I don't want to play - because I really don't have much hope that the game will actually be able to provide me entertainment with longevity, it seems like it's destined to only ever be an approximation which has occasional glimpses of the real thing.
