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As mentioned in my first blog, I woke up at 12am PST (2 am my time) to play diablo 3 on Tuesday of last week – and I think it’s safe to say that it’s been in the forefront of my mind since then. It’s a great game. Let me briefly list some of the high and low points below for those who care to hear a brief review.
+ Show Spoiler +
High Points
1. Skill/Build Diversity – In D2, most people picked a spell or two and put as many possible points as they could into them, and then put other points in passive skills or something else which let you use your one ability. This made for many, many builds – all of which were quite narrow. In D3, every build gets 6 abilities. So while there are fewer builds, each one has a playstyle with some depth to it.
2. Difficulty – The forums are full of people saying inferno is too hard. Thumbs up. I’m more or less guaranteed to have content in front of me that I can’t beat for some time and I like that.
3. Shared Stash – No more hosting games to mule things!
4. Really, really rare stuff – I haven’t seen a legendary yet. I am really excited by that. I was worried that with wow and all – they’d stick to the formula of “we’ll give you lots of the best loot if you play”. They didn’t. Yay!
Low Points
1. Fixed Stat Allocation – I liked that a person could build a sorc like a barbarian and run around chopping people with a 2-handed axe. I thought that made the game interesting. Automatically assigning stats seems to add nothing that some balance work couldn’t do – and it takes away and interesting part of d3 theory.
2. Story – Hold on, hear me out. I’m not about to say “LOL horrible plot” (though, really, it wasn’t very good). It bothers me that sometimes the story gets in the way of just playing through the game – that’s all. In Diablo 2, you could leave town and never talk to anyone until you had to use Warriv to get to the second act. The “plot” of Diablo 2 could be “I left town and there were lots of things to kill – and I did that”. In Diablo 3, there are little barricades that make you need to do quest things to progress. That really isn’t what this game is about.
3. Unexciting Boss Drops – I understand you don’t want people farming bosses, but please just make them slightly more exciting, eh? It feels so silly to kill Diablo in Nightmare, only to have him drop nothing but trash and one blue item. I know game-mechanic-wise why they did it, but it sucks the epic feeling out of doing that.
4. Diablo has breasts – I get that the demon took the body of a girl. But y’know what - in D2, the wanderer was male. That doesn’t mean that when you fought him in act III he needed a giant boner to remind you the gender of the human he consumed.
But now on to the meat of the blog. My biggest complaint about my experience Diablo 3 comes from what everyone else is saying about the game. It seems most people seem to be talking about Diablo as though it is or should be a different type of game. It isn’t wow. It isn’t Skyrim. It’s a Diablo game. Diablo follows a simple rhythm.
Step 1. "Hey look, there’s some really shiny looking items out there on those baddies."
Step 2. You kill them.
Step 3. You take their stuff.
Step 4. Repeat until you have sufficiently good stuff.
Notice here that I didn’t say anything about the plotline. Diablo isn’t going to win any Oscars or amaze you with its outstanding plot twists. In previous Diablo games the only reason you know there WAS a plot were the couple minutes of cutscenes between acts. Diablo is not a game you play for the plot. If you want more plot – I bet there’s some areas of Skyrim you didn’t explore yet.
Diablo is also not a game you play for perfect balance. If you played Diablo 2, you remember what I’m talking about. Unfixed bugs and balance issues both in PvM and PvP were rampant. Heck as far as I know gloams are still bugged. In Diablo 2, though, you just dealt with it in whatever way you wanted (avoiding things like gloams or going out of your way to beat them anyway). Diablo 2 wasn’t guaranteed to have all classes be capable of dealing X dps, having Y survivability metric or having fun-ness quotient Z. Some classes appeal to some people – others don’t. For some reason, playing video game characters has shifted from “hey, this class doesn’t do it for me – maybe I’ll try another” to “this class doesn’t do it for me - and that’s why Blizzard is lazy, hates barbarians, and has sold out to their corporate overlords. Quit being so negligent and just give Wizards an AoE melee attack.” Stick with your class or don’t – but let’s hold off on spouting some ridiculous rhetoric because you died a few times on Hell Difficulty (remember, that's where it's supposed to start getting hard).
I’m not saying “don’t complain about Diablo 3”. Heck, I did it above. Though, I did also say it was a great game and my “low points” are more a list of things about the game that I could have done without or that feel silly - whereas my high points actually affect the real meat of gameplay. Complain if you want. If you feel something needs fixing, I’d even urge you to do so. Even if you’re just venting – that’s fine. But let’s keep our comments about the game reasonable relative to what type of game it is. It’s a game where people like designing characters, hacking down piles of fun and/or challenging enemies, and being rewarded for it with good items. In my humble opinion, the only reason a person ought to be irritated enough to make a big deal out of it (such as demanding game changes, impressing upon others the idea that Diablo 3 is a “terrible” game, using diablo 3 as “proof” that blizzard is lazy, stupid or doesn’t care, etc.) is if this aspect of your personal gameplay is being significantly impeded.
Are there really so many people who have nowhere in the game that they can go to chop down a pile of demons and get new and glorious loot? If not, what's with all the complaining - and since when was a diablo game something more than a really well designed hack-and-slash game?
 
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If not, what's with all the complaining - and since when was a diablo game something more than a really well designed hack-and-slash game?
That's the issue. There are is a specific gamer audience that this game is aimed to sell to and its exactly that, the people who love the hack-and-slash games. However, a good portion of people buying the game are riding the blizzard bandwagon only to realize that D3 is made for an entirely different style of players.
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On May 25 2012 06:19 randommuch wrote:Show nested quote +If not, what's with all the complaining - and since when was a diablo game something more than a really well designed hack-and-slash game? That's the issue. There are is a specific gamer audience that this game is aimed to sell to and its exactly that, the people who love the hack-and-slash games. However, a good portion of people buying the game are riding the blizzard bandwagon only to realize that D3 is made for an entirely different style of players.
Besides that I think that everyone has something he doesn't like in a game and some voice it. For example you have jack, bill and Steve. Jack doesn't like the story bill doesn't like how the spells work and Steve doesn't like the AH and they all post a thread where people with the same concern flock to. Basically like this it looks like people are saying everything is crap but in reality they only have a problem wih 1 part of the game. Of course there are always some people who either don't like the game or as you said expected it to be different and got disappointed but this is how I think it usually goes anyway.
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On May 25 2012 06:00 Treehead wrote:
Diablo is also not a game you play for perfect balance. If you played Diablo 2, you remember what I’m talking about. Unfixed bugs and balance issues both in PvM and PvP were rampant. Heck as far as I know gloams are still bugged. In Diablo 2, though, you just dealt with it in whatever way you wanted (avoiding things like gloams or going out of your way to beat them anyway).
Minor point: gloams in D2 do a fuckton of damage, but they're not bugged, AFAIK. The bugged monsters are the claw vipers that appear in Act 5 -- their attack simultaneously does poison (DoT) and physical damage, but it's calculated wrong. The entirety of their physical damage is applied each and every frame of the poison attack, which obviously makes them ridiculously broken. You're right, though, that nobody cares because Diablo isn't a game that should be all about balance, it's a game about sending millions of monsters to their right-clicky doom and farming for loot a few orders of magnitude beyond what you'd be comfortable admitting in public.
What really bothers me about D3, and this is by and large the only issue I have with the game, is the WAY they made higher difficulties hard. I'm fine with getting one-shotted left and right. I'm fine with needing ridiculous gear to handle Inferno; it should be that way. What I'm not fine with is how dramatically different normal monsters are when compared with rare/champion packs. It shouldn't be that 90% of the monsters in a zone are no real threat but the remaining seven will wipe your entire party all day long, it should be that 100% of the monsters in a zone are a serious threat, and a few of them are a very serious threat, i.e. you have to be very careful about how you engage them and what skills you use to take them down one by one. If it were the bosses that were several orders of magnitude harder than normal mobs, that would be fine, but as it is, random champion packs are far, far more dangerous than most bosses. That's silly, and it smacks of lazy design. ("Hey guys, how do we make the game challenging? I don't know, let's just make the champion packs have all their stats buffed by about a million percent. Great idea, Bob. Next project.")
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On May 25 2012 06:19 randommuch wrote:Show nested quote +If not, what's with all the complaining - and since when was a diablo game something more than a really well designed hack-and-slash game? That's the issue. There are is a specific gamer audience that this game is aimed to sell to and its exactly that, the people who love the hack-and-slash games. However, a good portion of people buying the game are riding the blizzard bandwagon only to realize that D3 is made for an entirely different style of players.
I completely agree with that sentiment. However, I bought it as a hack-and-slash enthustiast and am pretty tired of reading criticisms that are trying to change the heart and soul of Diablo.
For example, a lot of people are harping on the crafting system, saying it's too expensive and too random to actually be effective. As far as I'm concerned, however, it's just a re imagination of the gambling systems known to the Diablo franchise. When you spent your money gambling, you did so knowing full well that 90% of what you got was going to be trash. However, people new to the franchise are suggesting things like "crafters should be able to choose stats" or "there shouldn't be a gold cost when you're providing mats already." Maybe I can understand where they're coming from, as a completely randomized crafting system can be extremely alienating to those outside of the Diablo mindset, but it is something that should never be changed. Gambling, even if re-named "Crafting" is a staple to the franchise and deserves to stay in with its current risk/reward.
There are things about D3 that I think are imperfect, if not outright bad design philosphies. However, I have faith that things will work out in the end. Most important to me is that it stays true to the franchise, something I think the game has succeeded in. Patches can fix the kinks, of which are made plenty, but the core should remain the same.
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I like how you pointed out good and bad points in a balanced way and I agree with what you said too.
It seems you wanted to talk about the game itself but don't forget some silly things like no offline play even in solo and the pretty bad server uptime.
Anyway, +1 to all that has been said here.
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On May 25 2012 10:27 ulan-bat wrote:
I like how you pointed out good and bad points in a balanced way and I agree with what you said too.
It seems you wanted to talk about the game itself but don't forget some silly things like no offline play even in solo and the pretty bad server uptime.
Anyway, +1 to all that has been said here.
Meh, IIRC, the whole online bit was to keep client-side mucking around from ruining the game. At least, that's what they told me and I bought it. Honestly, a few connection issues for lack of duping and hacked up items seems like a fair trade to me. Though, I played wow - and after the first day of that, the next three days after wow's release, my server was down. The day or two of occasional locks seemed small in comparison. That was my experience anyway. I gave up bitching about server maintenance/repair a long time ago.
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On May 25 2012 06:00 Treehead wrote:+ Show Spoiler +But y’know what - in D2, the wanderer was male. That doesn’t mean that when you fought him in act III he needed a giant boner to remind you the gender of the human he consumed.
Mate, that was exactly what was needed. That is all.
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Interesting to see how many people are weirded out/offended by diablos breasts.
Imo they are neither exaggerated nor extremely noticeable. When I saw the cutscene for the first time I probably thought "Oh, Diablo has breasts, so female host -> female demon". How else are you gonna show that it is a female demon?
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On May 25 2012 21:56 Kreig wrote:
Interesting to see how many people are weirded out/offended by diablos breasts.
Imo they are neither exaggerated nor extremely noticeable. When I saw the cutscene for the first time I probably thought "Oh, Diablo has breasts, so female host -> female demon". How else are you gonna show that it is a female demon?
How did you know the version of diablo you fought in diablo and diablo II was male?
It's a demon. It doesn't need gender. That's the point.
I'm not offended or weirded out - I just think it's a bit silly.
On May 25 2012 09:38 Iranon wrote:
What I'm not fine with is how dramatically different normal monsters are when compared with rare/champion packs. It shouldn't be that 90% of the monsters in a zone are no real threat but the remaining seven will wipe your entire party all day long, it should be that 100% of the monsters in a zone are a serious threat, and a few of them are a very serious threat, i.e. you have to be very careful about how you engage them and what skills you use to take them down one by one. If it were the bosses that were several orders of magnitude harder than normal mobs, that would be fine, but as it is, random champion packs are far, far more dangerous than most bosses. That's silly, and it smacks of lazy design. ("Hey guys, how do we make the game challenging? I don't know, let's just make the champion packs have all their stats buffed by about a million percent. Great idea, Bob. Next project.")
I feared random elites more than the bosses in D2 (can you say "Lister"? - and I probably died more to those exploding skeleton dolls than I ever did to Diablo). I think the main reason why is that I knew what Diablo, Mephisto and Baal can do. Different elites must be handled differently and you don't really know what your plan of action should be until after they're on top of you in some cases. I don't think I'd call it "lazy design" as the elite properties are far more complicated and interesting than the properties in D2. The fact that their stats might be too high or the normal mobs stats might be too low can be easily fixed with balance patches - if it's determined to be a problem.
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Honestly the story sucks and it shouldn't be an excuse that the story previously sucked so its okay that D3's story sucked. I mean, it feels like someone wrote it overnight. Did they hire a writer or did the programmers write the script themselves ??? If they turned this into a book it'd be 80 pages long.
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On May 25 2012 23:25 Treehead wrote:Show nested quote +On May 25 2012 21:56 Kreig wrote:
Interesting to see how many people are weirded out/offended by diablos breasts.
Imo they are neither exaggerated nor extremely noticeable. When I saw the cutscene for the first time I probably thought "Oh, Diablo has breasts, so female host -> female demon". How else are you gonna show that it is a female demon? How did you know the version of diablo you fought in diablo and diablo II was male? It's a demon. It doesn't need gender. That's the point. I'm not offended or weirded out - I just think it's a bit silly.
No, YOU'RE silly. Just because you arbitrarily decide that demons do not need gender, does not mean that they do not need gender. In fact, I would go in so far as to argue that it is essential to a demon's identity to have gender, whether it be male or female. It is pretty much as important as a demon's sexuality in terms of lore given that the nephalem were the offspring of bisexual demons.
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On May 26 2012 03:17 Xyik wrote:
Honestly the story sucks and it shouldn't be an excuse that the story previously sucked so its okay that D3's story sucked. I mean, it feels like someone wrote it overnight. Did they hire a writer or did the programmers write the script themselves ??? If they turned this into a book it'd be 80 pages long.
I'm okay with people saying that it's okay for a game to have bad plot but have good gameplay that's up to par with the franchise. However people should be allowed to complain that the story is bad, because otherwise you are giving Blizz and other developers a free ticket to ignore making a good storyline, and in the end that will make for less enjoyable games. Yes it will still be an enjoyable game and SC2 is still a fun game, but wouldn't D3 and SC2 and the like be so much better if they had epic and tightly-constructed and gripping plot?
That said the internet often overdoes discontent and turns it into a gigantic crusade that even annoys neutral observers.
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