Blizzard’s ‘Diablo III’ is a guilty pleasure of a game, but not without problems.
Diablo III is the big controversial title of May 2012, and I’ve played through the first half of
Act III, so I’ll have more to say about the game once I’ve finished. The below review only covers up to that point.
So far I’ve played on Normal difficulty so that I could get a good feel for as much of the game as possible. I’m playing on PC, though the game is available on both PC and Mac. I’ve played as a female Wizard, though I typically choose more tank-like classes.
I’ll play a different class on Nightmare or Inferno later and report back with an expanded review. Also,
Player-vs-Player is still in development, so once that’s out I’ll give it a shot and let you all know how it works.
Disclosures aside, let’s look at
the good, the bad, and the ugly of Diablo III. I can’t say whether this game is right for everyone, but over all I’ve had fun with it, which is exactly the point of a game like this.
The Good
Blizzard’s Diablo III was a long time in the making. It’s been over a decade since
Diablo II came out, and many fans of the series have been disappointed in what they perceive as both a lack of progress in the third game and, a little paradoxically, too many changes from the original.
But I’ve been enjoying Diablo III a great deal for what it is: a guilty pleasure of a game. I see Diablo as a game you can simply dip in and out of whenever you want. Hop in with a couple other players, slaughter hordes of monsters, and hop back out again. There’s very little fluff weighing the game down, and not much of a story to get involved with. What story there is clips along at a nice pace, and bits of lore you pick up and listen to as you play add nice details around the edges.
Graphically, many people complained that the game looked as though it was crafted using 2005 technology, but I disagree there as well. The painted 3-dimensional look is really lovely in its own way. Instead of a flat dungeon crawler, there are layers upon layers. Fighting along the ramparts of a fortress, you can see monsters down below and up above. They come not just from all sides, but from the sky, from clifftops and gorges. The juxtaposition of both 2D crawling, and 3D graphics makes the game more fluid and entertaining.
Diablo III is all about being a powerful hero, wielding massive power and doing massive damage to endless waves of enemies. There isn’t a ton of strategy beyond picking which awesome powers to wield. If you’re looking for tactical combat, look elsewhere. It’s not a smart game, really, but it is fun.
Some fans of the older games also complained about a lack of a skill tree. Again, I disagree. The skills you unlock each have a series of runes that are also unlocked as you progress. New skills and new runes are not necessarily more powerful than older skills and runes. Instead, they do a variety of things. One rune may change the cool down time of a power, another may increase its damage, still another may increase the distance or width of that power. You have to choose which rune and which skill you’ll place in each slot. This creates something of a skill web rather than a skill tree and I like how it works quite a bit.
All told, the graphics, the frenetic combat, and the powers are all pretty pitch perfect as far as I’m concerned. Diablo III works for what it is: a melodrama, where everything, including the story and the villains is larger than life, and where slaughtering demons and monsters is a gaudy parade of powers and lights.
Beyond that, I like the music and the sound-effects seem fine. Nicely produced all the way around if nothing particularly special. The cinematics, while blessedly rare, are gorgeous. The angelic fight in particular is really lovely animation.
The Bad
Not everything about the game actually works, however. Only two or three times have I been able to join a full four-person co-op. This is extremely frustrating, as four-person co-op is by far the best way to play. The monsters are at their most difficult, and the variety of powers that four players wield makes the game a lot more fun. Almost without fail, if I’m playing multi-player I’m playing alongside just one other player. Having a menu of games to choose from, and being able to see how many players (and possibly what class players) were available would be very helpful. Indeed, it seems like a no-brainer.
As with all dungeon-crawler, hack-and-slash action RPGs, the gameplay does get old after a while. While Blizzard did a good job making each Act have its own distinct look – you travel between grave-infested forests, plains, deserts, and besieged castles, just to name a few – the dungeons you enter start to wear thin after a while. This isn’t so much a complaint as it is an acknowledgment of the inherent limitations of the genre. Or maybe the limitations of the genre so far, and an indication that more innovation is required.
The merchants are pretty much only useful to sell gear. And I haven’t had much use for the craftsmen either. By the time I’m at a level to actually buy or craft a better weapon, I’ve almost certainly found something that’s way more powerful, making buying and selling all but irrelevant except to get rid of loot. So far the most interesting thing I’ve actually bought has been dye for my armor.
This item imbalance – and it is an imbalance – is not the only problem with creating an even-keeled game. Some bosses are far too easy, making the difficult bosses surprising and unexpected. I’d like it if all the bosses were a great deal harder, or at least if each new boss was progressively more difficult from the last.
Meanwhile, weapons serve as little more than stat upgrades, granting extra life or magic damage (etc.) to your character. You never actually wield the weapon for its own sake. I’m not terribly bothered by this. I hardly ever play magic users in RPGs, but in
Diablo III it’s actually pretty fun to play as a Wizard and just lay down the powers of mass destruction. Double-beamed Disintegrate is a wonderful thing. Raining meteors down on the approaching horde is also great. Who needs to whack baddies with swords or axes when you can cause so much magic destruction?
Still, it does feel a little off not to have more emphasis on weapons.
Beyond this I have relatively few complaints about gameplay. The hack-and-slash action-RPG is not my game of choice. I prefer games where combat is tense and strategic, at least to some degree, such as Dark Souls or Dragon’s Dogma. But you have to critique these things on their own terms, and
Diablo III isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is.
The Ugly
Outside of gameplay, there’s plenty of ugly with this game. The painted world Blizzard created is fine in my book, but when it comes to certain business decisions there’s much to be desired.
For simplicity’s sake, I’ll list these problems:
- Blizzard made the odd and troubling decision to require all players to be logged online all the time in order to play the game. Even in single-player mode, players are forced to have an internet connection and be logged into Battle.net. Always-online DRM creates its own set of problems and inconveniences for players such as…
- Launch issues. The problem with relying on Blizzard servers isn’t really that they’re going to go away any time soon. But whenever any problem takes place with the servers, those problems extend to anyone who owns the game. Want to play single player if Battle.net is down? Tough. If hackers decide to bring the servers to their knees, you’re out of a game. This brings up questions about ownership of digital property that don’t look good for gamers.
- Bugs. Lots of bugs. And hacks. Apparently lots of hacks. Players have reported numerous incidents of hacked accounts where all their items and gold have been stolen. This is a problem with always-online DRM, but it’s also a symptom of…
- The real-money Auction House, where players can buy and sell items from one another, giving Blizzard a cut of each transaction. I can understand the convenience of this, and I can understand how such a system can extend the revenue stream for Blizzard. But it also rubs me the wrong way. It encourages playing a game to make a profit, and can create incentives for hackers to break into accounts, steal items, and then sell them for real money.
- $60 is not the right price point for this title. With competition like Torchlight 2 priced at $20, it just doesn’t make sense. This isn’t to say it’s a bad game or not worth spending money on, but it seems way too expensive for this sort of game. Then again, I think a lot of games are overpriced. I think there really is decent replay value in Diablo III, but something closer to the competition would be more accurate and fair to gamers’ pocketbooks. Blizzard could easily release expansion packs or DLC down the road to increase replay value and bring in more bacon.
I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of issues that people may have with this game, both in terms of what it gets wrong in-game and on the business side. And I’m sure many Diablo purists will disagree with some of what I found really enjoyable about the game.
But that’s thing about games. We all have different tastes and opinions and we can’t do much better than say “To each their own.” For me, Diablo III is a great escapist title. Not much meat on the bones, but plenty of bones to keep you busy not thinking about the meat.
