Diablo III Review

[Halcyon.]

Editor note: this is the translation of the Romanian review that was posted on May 23.
It’s three in the morning in my party’s second day of playing and the third Diablo that our heroes just bashed down makes one final pirouette before crashing on a pillow of dust. It’s a morbid picture, seeing the Prime Evil getting bullied like that, left bloody on the cold marble floors of Heaven, after a tirade of clicks, keys and screams that mash together on Skype in a mix of loud shrieks that echo in three lofts spread throughout Europe.
Everyone who’s involved has a deja-vu feeling that has been lasting for the past 30 hours – we’ve done this before at one point. It was about twelve years ago – sure, we were different people entirely and didn’t know anything about one another, but we’d been trapped in a similar (though lonelier) experience. Blizzard’s new policy in regard to the offline single-player mode (or lack thereof) brought us to this point, in which even if we wanted to solo the war on (The Lord of) Terror and his many relatives, we still have to stay connected.

Many were put off by that – and not just because of its eventual instabilities and problems that their ISP might have, but because we had to put up with the notorious number 37 upon launch. Our group managed to connect after an hour and a half and we got on with it, sporting nothing more than a vague impression from the beta and really excited about what lay before us.
Assassin: I too waited for an hour and a half until I could connect to Battle.Net and play for a couple of hours. I was lucky to have other things on my plate at the time, otherwise I might have reacted as harshly as some members on our forum. And when I think about the players who took time off work or called in sick to have enough time to play Diablo III…
Bossman: I didn’t have any sort of illusions that I would play on launch day, because I had seen what had happened during the open beta test. Even so, I didn’t expect Blizzard to mess up so badly, especially considering the amount of experience they’ve amassed over the years. Especiallynow that they also enforced their vision that you have to always stay connected in order to play the single-player campaign (a debatable idea to say the least, but more on that at late).

Zuluf: What we were about to see can be described through the words of a second act NPC from the previous game: „Some say the taste of [Diablo III] is bittersweet, but I find it to my liking.” Despite the growing tensions (justified by the Error 37 and the irreparable flaw of not having an offline single-player mode), me and Mangodash (a guildmate from WoW and now a co-leveller in Diablo III) were pleasantly impressed by the explosive mechanics, the fluent unveiling of the game’s content and varied decor.
Without a doubt, Diablo III is a Blizzard certified game – it has a certain high-end production value that just sweats through its ergonomic interface, the epic fantasy cut scenes and the visual impact that a clever and attractive design will always have while not burning down more modest systems.
On the other hand, the story is a pastiche of recycled clichés that Blizzard games love more and more lately, delivered with sometimes sketchy voice acting and with a flavor that’s dampened compared to what Diablo II smelled like. My impression of Sanctuary, formed by previous games and the first published Diablo book (which is also the only one I’ve read) is a desolate one, in which doubts and obsessions in a character’s mind make anyone a possible portal to the underworld. The happenings usually have a more serious tone than the encounters we face in the current game, sporting a Disney outfit, delivering typical henchman lines about her master, Belial, before she proceeds to torturing people like she’s moonlighting in a gulag.

Bossman: what I thought was weird about the story in Diablo III, aside from the clichés already mentioned, was the fact that the writers played the „it’s always been part of the plan” card to explain everything. I’m surprised they were so naive (just so I don’t use harsher terms) as to think that anyone would take their explanation that everything that happened in the previous games was actually all part of Diablo’s master plan.
Sure, hack and slash games typically don’t have impressive stories, because it takes a very light motivation to get someone to slaughter entire hordes of minions, but we’re not really talking about a debutant studio trying to balance its first title, nor a short production cycle that would justify an excuse such as „there was not enough time for more.”
Additionally, I thought there was a visible difference in quality between the first two acts and the last two, not just in terms of pacing. It’s as if from act 3 onward the producers suddenly ran out of time and quickly stitched something together so they wouldn’t get lynched by the angry fans waiting for the launch day.
Zuluf: these things used to be found more frequently in Warcraft games. In fact, I’m under the vague impression that the canons got slightly reversed: Warcraft lately seems to be more serious and more in the vein of „save the entire world”, while the new Diablo has all these funny subplots, secondary storylines with puns included and an encyclopedia of creatures described either in a caricaturized oriental voice, or the old man tone that Deckard Cain hilariously spreads his knowledge in.  And Leah, one of the main characters, is the flawless girlfriend archetype, with her hair falling over her eyes and the delicate, photographic features of a Final Fantasy female protagonist.

Sure, maybe things evolve and it certainly can’t be said that Diablo looks bad, the only discrepancy is in the content of the color palette and lighting, both in the literal sense as well as in terms of symbols. The series’ recurrent theme, hope in humanity, is much more prevalent this time around. I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but I would have wished that the script didn’t have to use cheap tricks to say what it has to say. Even Marius, the cinematic narrator from Diablo II, had a more mature and authentic discourse than the overused expressions that make themselves heard in the new four acts.
Bossman: even so, I appreciated that the three followers – the Templar, Scoundrel and Enchantress – alongside the secondary characters, have their own stories waiting for be discovered if you have the patience to listen to what they have to say. Yes, I know, said stories aren’t really monuments of originality, but the way they fit in and the various comments your companions make when following you gives them enough volume to surpass the collective pixels  label NPCs from these kind of games usually fall under.
Then again, I’m the kind of player who collects everything not bolted to the background and listens and reads everything and everything in the game world. Exploring all of these dungeons, cellars, caverns and so forth, I started to grasp the cogwheels animating the world of Sanctuary. I wonder what the people who finished the game in under 10 hours understood from the bits of story they glimpsed?
Zuluf: that deja vu I was talking about at the beginning of this article persisted because of the fact that the monsters you fight are largely cloned after some of the old models (the Fallen and their respective shamans, Goatmen, Quill Beasts, Zombies), complemented by certain new creatures and abilities, but in the end split into the same „classes” of mobs as the ones in D2: normal, champions and elites.
The difference between these classes is in the buffs or auras that confer them magical abilities, such as Return Damage, Vampiric, Molten, Waller, Jailer, etc., whose number increases on higher difficulty levels. If on Normal such a monster will only have one aura, on Inferno (the last mode) you’ll be confronted by four of them. Nothing new here – and more than enough for hardcore Diablo fans, to whom farming and trading items is the engine powering the idea of fun.

The crafting system fully contributed to formulating a moneymaking strategy on the Auction House, because of the randomness factor items you craft have. It basically works like this: you can use the Salvage option to destroy magical items and get raw materials of multiple tiers, depending on the object’s level. And in return for a monetary cost on top of a bunch of raw materials, you build objects. You only get told how many magical properties an item will roll, not which.
It’s more or less the new Gamble, a very volatile trick on Blizzard’s part to reduce inflation (the continuous farming of objects will devalue the game’s coin, a point well made in GreedyGoblin’s article here). Another leash on the market is put by the 10 slot Auction House limit per player, and the equipment you put on sale can’t be recovered once five minutes since posting the auction have passed, a decision intensely criticized by those of us who were sloppy enough to fill up their slots with gear that was too expensive for the qualities it offered to actually sell.  And then they had to wait for two days.
On top of that, there are functionality issues with the Auction House’s interface, features that would ease navigation, but are missing, such as sorting according to the minimum bid. Things that may yet be introduced with a patch and besides, because no other Blizzard game was ever feature complete when reaching version 1.00.

Aside from blacksmithing, the crafting system includes Jewelcrafting, whose role is the same as the Horadric Cube’s in Diablo II, but strictly to improve gems. Basically, for three identical gems (plus a number of pages or Tomes later on) you can get one gem from the next tier.
They’re split into four colors and numerous tiers, and you’ll need plans for the more advanced ones. You can also train both your blacksmith and jewelcrafter, but at some point you’ll need to look for recipes to improve their artisan abilities.
Assassin: at this point, I think the crafting system doesn’t work as it should. For instance, the gold cost is so high it actually makes more sense to purchase stuff straight off the Auction House. Especially since you can actually see what you’re buying, and the prices are pretty varied at this point, so you have a really high chance of getting excellent items at incredible discounts.
The downside is that the Auction House is very primitive in its functionality, and the lack of certain options whose presence is absolutely fundamental (you can’t search for item names, for instance) prevented me from trying various bidding tricks.
Yes, using the Auction House is optional, but maybe we’ve got periods in which we feel the need to be traders rather than warriors, especially in games in which better gear and endless supply of gold are more than means – they’re ends of their own.

Zuluf: another familiar element was the background – in a way, acts take over from the geographic influence of their counterparts in the previous game, with one notable difference: the new Act 3 resembles Act 5, and the old third act isn’t anywhere to be found. I can’t say I’m really missing the chases through the nocturnal delta, dodging evil pygmies, and the facelift that the new iterations received is very spectacular at times: multi-floor levels filled with traps that can be triggered at the player’s leisure and sensational background elements.
The effects – whether we’re talking about the time-slowing bubble of the Wizard or the Seven-Sided Strike that the Monk can cast look fantastic the first time around and don’t become annoying by the hundredth. It’s an old talent of Blizzard’s, to build smart, balanced animations and convince you that a succession of separate moves tie together naturally and to thus build an unveiling of events that would encourage you to be as fast as you can and keep thinking on your feet.

Bossman: when it comes to scenery, I really liked the vertical aspect of the levels and the various interactive elements, such as traps, entire bits that crumble down, the small earthquakes, the way that a manor’s tinted windows are lighted when thunder strikes on the other side during a storm, and so forth. The atmosphere and artistic design keep a high bar in Diablo III, although it can’t be said that the engine really impresses through its technical capabilities, despite the fact that luring monsters into traps is always satisfactory.
On the other hand, things lost their „desperate” allure that they had in previous titles, something that made them unique, that „dark” style that people kept mentioning once the first screenshots came out. I only realized that when I was watching Tartoru play the Torchlight 2 beta, at which point the first thing that came to mind was „hehe, even this sorry bastard is playing Diablo III”. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was in fact another game.

Zuluf: regarding the heroes, stats distribution is done automatically now – something I don’t mind at all, because it makes characters all the more versatile. Builds can now be instantly swapped and you can reuse a tanking character as a damage dealer or support – the only prerequisite is you have the gear for whatever change you expect.
Because in Diablo III, once you get to the maximum level and get all the skills and runes, you don’t have any elements distributed in dump stat slots. It’s a pretty ingenious and clear system and despite the fact that I know people who are pretty let down by this format, I really can’t grasp why they feel the need to customize their character in mathematical ways that somehow always get rigid once you want to play competitively.
Assassin: I really liked the new skill system, similar to the one in Guild Wars. If I want my character to have a certain set, I’m no longer forced to start over, like in Diablo II. I can just swap abilities and runes without getting penalized (replacing them doesn’t cost gold, and the cooldown is negligible). You only lose your magic find buff after level 60, but you most likely won’t swap anything out during a farm run.
Zuluf: normally, every slot out of the six available has a respective class of abilities that you can pick one out of. Using elective mode however (an option I suggest you activate as soon as possible from the options menu), you can choose any skill in your arsenal for any slot. The customization is not only in picking your abilities and spells, but also picking out three passive skills from a total of 14, 15 or 16, depending on your class, and the active abilities each have a set of runes that can be attached for additional effects.

The classes are more or less the same as in Diablo II, with small tweaks or merges. Bossman and I played as Monks, a Paladin with melee abilities resembling the assassin, auras and kung fu strikes that get molded together in a Russian shaolin who speaks of discipline and spirit (which dubs as the mana-like resource you charge up with your fists and use up via spells and kicks). In a group, his function is often to heal and extend auras that, depending on the runes you picked out, offer various beneficial effects.
Bossman: I really don’t understand why Blizzard had to give him a Russian accent. I always thought I’m playing Rasputin and kept hoping Bartok will show up and help me.
Zuluf: The Barbarian is the other melee class, a very efficient tank who brought along a lot of his signature moves from Diablo II: Leap, Cleave, buffing shouts or his Taunt ability. Similar to the Warrior from World of Warcraft, the Barbarian uses Fury to fuel up his devastating attacks, but is somewhat less equipped in terms of crowd control than his Diablo II counterpart.

The Witch Doctor is basically the modern Necromancer, loaded with poisons and summoning spells that bring forth exotic monstrosities to rain death on his enemies. As expected, the resource he uses up is Mana, but with a faster recharge rate than before – and pretty interesting combo possibilities thanks to the synergy that certain skills form. For instance, the zombie dogs can be blown up with the Sacrifice ability. Quite a few of his spells have an area of effect, and his end-game damage far surpassed my expectations.
The Wizard is a more Asian iteration of the classic Sorceress, keeping the Blizzard spell in her arsenal alongside Hydra or Teleport, armor spells that were somewhat ridiculously strong (as proven by the quick nerf on Energy Armor). It’s one of the most interesting classes you can play, because of its high mobility and glass cannon properties.
And finally, the Demon Hunter is more or less an Amazon/Trap-assassin hybrid which uses not one, but two resources – Hatred and Discipline, to both slow down and burn their enemies with traps as their chakrams flutter around burying deep in flesh and bones. Ranged weapons are his specialty, and despite it being such a vulnerable class, its high mobility and obscenely high damage (Mangodash has 37k damage on Inferno Act I) make it a viable DPS class.

Sure, there are balancing issues and certain holes in the game were already easily abused (Athene’s group, for instance, did this), which triggered an instant nerf on certain abilities on Blizzard’s part. There’s still a lot of work to do before a decent balance, but it’s pretty late if you check out the content: everything the game has to offer has been killed already, on all the difficulty tiers, sometimes exploiting pretty weird design elements.
Such as the ability to resurrect your comrades in a party. The classes that spawn adds which can survive more than two hits can always distract the boss long enough to get their colleagues back on track. Or in the second phase of the Diablo encounter, when, if entering with dead teammates, you’ll face fewer adds.
There still are exploitable mechanics – but I do remind you that the situation was similar on the launch day of every Blizzard game. It always took a few patches to tweak the game into ideal functionality and a more fluent gameplay. It’s just that the content has already been exhausted, the challenges have been downed and in the age of livestreams, Youtube and forums filled to the brim with people testing every imaginable limit of the game describing their achievements through screenshots and builds – in THIS age – a videogame bought by millions of people on launch day has no leftover secrets within a week. The mandatory internet connection basically makes it a gimp MMO game that won’t get any content updates, ever. It’s a World of Warcraft afflicted by the Peter Pan Syndrome.
 
Speaking of which, bosses have abilities and phases similar to what World of Warcraft had to show, though at a much more basic level. Some of them spawn damage-dealing pools (or AIDS, if you ask the average WoW raider), others bombard the floor, leaving behind certain safe zones, while others just blink away and spawn adds in alternating phases.
What’s certain is that there’s always a positional war to be played and the only group decision you get to make if you face this content in co-op mode is if you stack together or split up for certain events. In many cases, the small heal range, the aura ranges or group buffs force people to stay together, the only points at which you have to „dance” being when you’re forced to do it because of some imminent meteorite.
There are certain nice elements that remind of nice old times though. Golden Axe featured these gnomes carrying sacks on their backs, who dropped potions when they were struck. If you didn’t hit them quick enough, they would run out of the game space. The treasure goblins in Diablo III are very similar, leaving behind gold every time you hit them, and triggering a dps race that ends, if you’re not strong enough, with the goblin teleporting out of harm’s way.
As for longevity, I really don’t know how long this game will last. What’s certain is that Blizzard won’t constantly add content, which was to be expected, considering Diablo III is not, after all, an MMO. Sure, there will be patches that will solve various bugs and balance out the classes, but that’s about it.
The only way to continue the adventure will be an expansion pack, but aside from farming the best gear, getting achievements and maybe doing some business on the Auction House featuring real money transactions at some point in the [CENSORED]ure, there’s not much else to do. Especially since there’s no PvP at this point, either.

Assassin: because of some questionable and exploitable design elements, the game was utterly cheesed through in a few hours, and Diablo was killed on Inferno difficulty within the first week. Once time passes, the Internet will feature more and more posts about how you can profit off certain vulnerabilities the game has – from farming gear efficiently to how to skip entire areas to get to the bosses.
Furthermore, the real-money auction house hasn’t been implemented yet, as it was pushed back even further. It’s a delay that might extend for quite a while, explained by certain security issues that might affect game accounts. If security can’t be provided to a reasonable degree by Blizzard’s staff, the company might even be sued if certain players get robbed of real money because of faulty account protection.

Zuluf: the lack of an offline single-player, despite progressive speeches about how we should all feel so good to be connected and other resounding nonsense, is still a severe handicap to some players’ experience. I have friends who really don’t care about the human interaction and only wanted to go through Diablo III, the hack and slash game, on their own. Yet when the servers are down, these people can’t enjoy features of a gameplay that doesn’t depend or care about Battle.Net being there for the multiplayer.
I’m not gonna side with the general hysteria that this can’t fly, but this DRM system is an issue that might as well have not been there. For lots of consumers, it would actually be better off. Back in the day, Blizzard used to sell retail copies because Battle.Net was simply the best, most efficient and lacking in problems online lobby on the market. They sold enough. What happened?
A security system affecting their legitimate clientele, born out of the fear/greed of a corporation that basically stamps out money, won’t really serve the corporation once enough people decides they want a divorce. But who knows, maybe they don’t really care about that segment – they can count their losses better than I can speculate, anyway.

Bossman: as irony would have it, I’m one of the people who thought the „always online” DRM Ubisoft shipped Assassin’s Creed with wasn’t such a bad idea. Everyone has an internet connection nowadays, so what’s the big deal? That’s before actually playing the game and experiencing it firsthand. And the same thing happened with Diablo III.
I think it’s really lame for me to have one more dungeon level to clear before reaching Azmodan in act III, only to get a „Server shutdown in 3 minutes” warning posted in the chat window. If I wanted to get that kind of message, I would have played Runes of Magic, Aion or any other MMO game for that matter. Diablo III is not an MMO. It’s a hack and slash that forces you to stay online in order to prevent piracy.

And just off the top of my head, the 20 hours I spent in the single-player campaign can get another 5-6 added to them waiting to log on the servers.
Let’s be clear here, it’s not that I didn’t know and was caught by surprise by an „OMG! I have to be online all the time” flu, it’s that when you pay 50-60 euros (which is not a modest sum for a game) you expect such problems to be but distant memories. You expect Blizzard (who are neither broke nor inexperienced) to have enough servers running that the immense overflow of players won’t cause any issues, because you already know from Amazon reports that Diablo III has more preorders than anything else in history. And the „you can go outside and play while the servers are up” attitude I’ve seen on various forums was questionable to say the least.

Zuluf: in the end, Diablo III isn’t a bad sequel in the core parts. A messed up launch event, two achievement rollbacks in three days and the notorious error 37, sure, aside from marketing decisions that affect the core gameplay in not so happy ways, but the product is there and it’s all it promised to be.
Bringing the same drug for the hack and slash junkie that he’s been bitching about getting for the past 12 years. It’s the same frenzy, the same mind frame, epic battles between good and evil and running after gold, gear and XP.

The difference between Diablo III and II isn’t as big a leap as the previous iteration, but again, nobody can say it’s a surprise. The modern Blizzard plays it a lot „safer” and they’ve mastered that art. The final product, however, was lighter than I expected and a lot more shallow in points where I’d hoped for more from one of the biggest juggernauts in the videogame industry.