Diablo 3

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Dungeon Crawler RPG
ESRB: M (for a bunch of gore you can only see from far away and watered-down demonic stuff)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 18/12
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Wiki page

I was a huge fan of Diablo 2, and was pretty big on Diablo 1 as well. Also, some of my problems echo that of the ailments of the PC gaming community. What with the need to always be online despite the servers not being available on the first day. Let's get something straight on that: that is not something you should have to put up with. I don't understand the people who act like they've got Stockholm Syndrome defending their captor's motives. No, people. I played Mass Effect 3 the day it came out. And I subscribe to all of that bullshit from the EA servers. It had some problems, sure, but I could at least play the game I fucking paid for. The same is true for many huge games like...oh, I don't know... Call of Duty! So yeah. Not being able to play on day one: terrible. So don't make excuses for that. At any rate, most of my disappointment comes from how this game compares to its predecessors. But here's the real kicker: it's disappointing when compared to other games as well. Wrap your mind around that. Admittedly, I also can't understand why this game took 12 years to make. I really shouldn't consider that when making a review, but I can't help but think about it.

Need I say more?

I'll start at the beginning. The first Diablo came out in 1996. Back then, a simple concept like a "dungeon crawler" was a very new thing. It had that hip isometric view that kinda sorta made you feel like the game was in 3D (and it totally wasn't). And the story was very bare bones because games like Resident Evil with its gripping real recorded voice-acting was still a new thing; everyone was still reeling from almost becoming a "Jill sandwich"! So that all worked very well for the time. At some point, an expansion was made. But that was made by a different developer and was weird, so whatever. In 2000, the second Diablo came out. Not sure why it took over 3 years (development cycles were shorter back then) but it didn't matter because the game was bigger in every way. You adventured across the continent, had more customization and more classes, more background lore for everything, more in-depth itemization... everything! It made Diablo 1 look like some class project while this was a grandiose, big ass game. Despite the first game obviously coming out first, this one seemed like it was the defining dungeon crawler. Roughly 12 years later, Diablo 3 came out. It's unclear how much time was actually spent on developing the game, but regardless it seems to have existed in a bit of a time capsule. Games continued to evolve, yet this one did the bare minimum. I'd expect this level of changes to UI, graphics, and gameplay from a game like Dynasty Warriors 7 compared to Dynasty Warriors 6. But that's because Koei prints out a new game in that series like twice a year or some bullshit. But 12 years? So much shit has come out since then that could have influenced this game... at least a LITTLE bit.

Many developers learned a lot from this firecracker. Blizzard was not among them.

I can easily break this down into two major flaws: story and gameplay. Well, that's sort of an over-simplification of all games. But these are easily the biggest components since other things can be a bit more forgiving. And setting would be the third biggest thing, but fighting demons in hell still seems to work... for the most part. You might be saying, "Diablo has never been about story! That's not really fair!" You'd be right. However, Blizzard seems to have decided that videya games nowadays have a whole lotta talkin' in 'em. So the story is much more prominent, frequent, and jumps right in your face at all times. Hell, the cinematics in this thing probably took half the budget. So you'd think they'd, like, put a bit of effort into the story, right? Well, not really. At least, that's what I'm choosing to think. If they honestly hurt their brains on this one, that just makes them seem like fucking idiots. We don't want to think that, do we? So let's recap the end of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. Baal, Diablo, and Mephisto are defeated, but the Worldstone is destroyed. This will change the world forever, with unforeseen consequences. Holy shit! At the start of D3, I bet shit's all fucked up! Right? Wrong. Apparently, some star fell out of the sky or something. That whole Worldstone thing happened 20 years ago, it seems. Other than the Barbarians having their mountain destroyed, a whole lot of "meh" was the consequence of this event.

Check it out. I did more research in a single minute than the whole D3 team in 12 years.

Already I don't give a fuck about this story! Then we re-fight Leoric and the Butcher and travel to a desert city in Act II... and basically we're chasing the Dark Wanderer again except now there's no Dark Wanderer. I apologize for sort of giving out spoilers, but I took particular offense to this slapdash adventure in "whatever looks cool". I know Blizzard's made a lot of money on "whatever looks cool" type of storytelling, and D2 could easily be pinned as doing the same thing. But we've got a triple A title with a huge budget and 12 years of time forcing a non-story into our faces and they can't be bothered with remembering what happened in the previous game? Bullshit! In D2, the Dark Wanderer was supposed to be the guy who beat Diablo in the first game. That sort of pushed the player out of the story, but it was at least consistent with the ideas presented in the story. I can't even think of a time a story just decided to forget an ending's importance. Maybe Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. But at least that game decided to be hilarious and tell the player that it was fucking up it's own continuity.

"I think he said he was my father. Meh. Probably a lie. Let's make out since we're clearly not related."

In my review of Dungeon Siege 3, I stated one of the strong points of that game was that they tried very noticeably to bring fresh ideas to dungeon crawler combat. Diablo 3, on the other hand, did not. It is very content to feel almost exactly the same as the previous games. There are some changes for sure (like no more potion spamming and resource management is wholly different) but you still left click to move and have a handful of abilities. And that's it. And the abilities are kind of offensive to me. They have such a clear design mindset of just *looking* creative but don't seem to have any kind of refined process for giving the player a clean set of useful tools to choose from. Basically, a lot of abilities are fucking useless. OR the abilities are only useful once you acquire a specific rune for it. Adding runes to abilities is a neat concept, but the execution is poor. Again, many of them don't seem to represent a unique playstyle choice but rather are just forced deviations from the normal ability. And some of them are still so obvious like "more damage". The ability Hydra is a good example because each rune is simply a different type of damage. They tried to put some additional things to make each one interesting, but Arcane Hydra kicks so much more ass then all of them because it has splash damage, increased range, and increased missile speed. So, say, fire Hydra feels a bit dumb because it shoots like once a minute, has no range, and always misses. Clearly those 12 years weren't on balancing abilities.

Ah ha! Slow moving, short range, non-splash damage frogs! What will you do!

My final gripe is just an amalgamation of a bunch of things that make me ask: why did this game take so freaking long to make!? Remember that I said the story is much more prominent here? Well, that doesn't mean they used the in-game engine to render little cutscenes in a cool way. Take Mass Effect for an example: the characters are shown up close using different camera angles and they animate in a way that mimicks how humans (or other sentient beings) converse with one another. Diablo 3 keeps the camera super far away, and the little people on the screen just bob their heads up and down and a subtitle with a goofy little picture of the person talking comes up for your convenience. Welcome back to the 90's, Jesus! So they clearly didn't do much there. How about graphics? Well, they are stylish and pretty... but they are also blocky. And you can't move the camera ever. A game level is a lot easier to design when you don't have to fully design it, you know?

No, this isn't the Lego version of Diablo.

And guess what else? At release of game, there was NO PvP mode and the harder difficulties weren't fully polished. Future patches will be needed to address those concerns. You know, beyond the 12 years that could have been used on that. Oh, but there's randomized dungeons! Big deal. So they move a couple walls and rearrange the furniture. It's really not any more palpable than it was in D2, despite being apparently like hundreds of times more varied. The building blocks are just too simple. The only thing that is cool are the little mini-events that can sprout up. But often times these are just little scripted things and not, you know, cool battles with cool rewards. The reward is knowing you got to see it, I guess. And there's these really cool backdrops that try to give you the feeling of exploration, but comes nowhere near something like Skyrim. Because Skyrim actually lets you explore that shit rather than pushing you through a relatively linear story with a couple of forks along the way.

Look at that cool underground city down there! Oh, wait. Mini-map says the cave has ended. Hm.

I wanted to treat this review like my Witcher 2 review, because I think I could easily make a 60 point list of problems like I did for that. Regrettably, and for reasons I cannot get into, my playthroughs of this game were months ago and I did not compile such notes at the time. I did take some screens (shown throughout this review of my wizard, JeffMageman) as I recently had the chance to play a bit with a new friend. Naturally, I am still having fun. Don't get me wrong, Blizzard can still piece together an enjoyable experience. Especially since this new friend has never played the series before, heh. But if I can't recommend this game to new players or fans of the series, who does that leave? It's too slow and simple for a modern gamer to give a shit about. And returning fans will only get a bit of nostalgia from it, but not a whole lot more.

Also, check this out! My prior reviews all sort of led up to this one. Here's why I reviewed each one in reverse chronological order:

Tales of Symphonia 2 - Here's an example of how much worse a sequel can be. At least these guys didn't take 12 years between games, though.

Dungeon Siege 3 - A much less polished game, but it tries much harder to be fresher. With D3's budget and ridiculous development time, it could have been a hell of a game.

Too Human - This game took about as long to make, but most of that time was from what's called "development hell". I'd wager it's possible that if you cut out all that time from this game's development cycle, it'd probably amount to only 2-3 years. But again, this game tries to be WAY different from a normal dungeon crawler.

Deus Ex 3 - The original had a terrible sequel. And despite being abandoned by its original team and shelved for a few years, these guys churned out a pretty sweet game. How did they manage that?! It's like they knew what they were doing or something and weren't just wasting everyone's time.

Prey - Another game with a long "development hell". Except here some of the problems were from TRYING TO DO NEW THINGS. As a result, they made a solid game that could possibly be attributed to inspiring other games (Portal, Super Mario Galaxy). Gee fucking whiz!

Mass Effect 3 - Bad endings aside, this is what an astounding game looks like in modern gaming. And it was made in just over a 2 year development cycle. Also, this and the other two games were all both started and finished before D3 was released. I tend to attribute this to BioWare being competent and not a bunch of lazy idiots. But that's just a feeling.


Conclusion:
If you own one of those PC contraptions for some reason and are stubborn as hell, you might enjoy this game. But if you have a modern console and more demanding tastes, chances are you're better off swinging a sword around in Skyrim or something. Hell, you can get Torchlight on XBLA for like $20.

By the way, my Google searches kept bringing up beta screenshots like this one. From a fucking decade of beta, I guess.