Diablo III Review - I'm Addicted to Hating This Game

I recently had a trip back to the west coast to visit my family. As is often the case when I'm traveling, I end up sleeping very little, staying up very late and waking very early, which leaves me with a lot extra hours with which to catch up on some PC gaming.  Last winter it was Civ V that ate up my free time, this spring I decided to check out Diablo III.

I have a lot of experience with the Diablo franchise.  I played a lot of the original game back when it had come out and for many years after until Diablo II was released.   I completed it numerous times with all 3 classes and really just wrung it dry.  Diablo II was an obsession for me.  I played so much that I had NIGHTMARES about mis-allocating stat points. I quit playing one afternoon after I got the Buriza Do-Kyanon for my high level amazon.  I remember feeling so elated and then so horribly depressed that finding a crossbow in a video game could stir up such emotions, and so i gave my account away to some random sucker on battle.net and that was that.

Since then, I picked the game up occasionally and played some other action RPGs (Titan Quest, also Torchlight) but they never really recaptured the magic of Diablo II.  I had decided that I was pretty much done with the genre until an article I read on sirlin.net about the skill system in Diablo III piqued my interest, and so here I am again playing Diablo.

Diablo III

First rule of being a demon hunter: Always wear high heels.

In case you didn't play the previous ones, Diablo III is an action RPG that pits your character against hell's minions in randomly generated dungeons.  The story takes place over 4 acts, during which you'll kill tons of enemies, collect loot, and learn who is behind all the terrible things happening across the kingdom of Khanduras.   It's all very grim, with native Khandurans having gone so far as to name their wilderness areas the "Stinging Sands" or the "Fields of Misery."  Hell, there's even a farmer in the fields of misery and his farm is called the "Carrion Farm." What the hell sort of farmer names his farm that?  Needless to say, the story is absolute rubbish; you're basically going to go from point to point collecting this or killing that until you find out who the big bad primeval behind it all is.  In case you're dense, it's DIABLO.  Spoiler!

Khanduras is a sucky place to live, but at least it's scenic. 

So the story is terrible, but how does it play- fantastically, actually.  The combat feels extremely thick, with loud meaty sound effects, tons of destructible objects, and swarms of enemies to vanquish.  It's incredibly satisfying to fell a horde of minions and then get a nice on-screen indicator that tells you exactly how many you killed in succession and what your xp bonus for that is. The entire genre is predicated upon our desire to be rewarded for clicking with magic items, and this game doesn't dissapoint. There are tons of bad guys, and tons of magic items, so click away to your heart's content and prepare to be loading your pack full of more axes, staves, daggers, and rings than you know what to do with.  Add on to that multiple new game plus style difficulty levels and five distinct character classes, and you've got a grind-fest loot addict's action-rpg fantasy.

Blizzard also cut a lot of the extra non-combat clickery out of Diablo III. There are no more scrolls of identify or town portal; you can just do those things all the time now.  Also, there are no more stat or talent points to assign (which is actually a good thing as discussed on sirlin.net and on the video below), and you're basically free to play with any combination of 6 talents active at a time. In addition, each talent can be modified by one of 5 runes that changes its effects, and you can assign up to three passive skills so there are quite a lot of builds to play around with for each character class.

So why do I hate this game? Well, a lot of reasons, most of which are related to the horrible effect that the auction house has on the game.

1)  It sure is nice to pick up all that loot, but most of it is rendered completely fucking worthless by Blizzard's inclusion of an online auction house.  My level 37 demon hunter never picks up anything that's as good as what I can get on the auction house, so everything i pick up either gets sent to the magic item chipper to be made into crafting materials or listed on the auction house for gold.  For a game about loot, why is it that I'm more excited about picking up gold than I am magic items? That ain't right.

2) Crafting is absolute shit.  So I can convert my useless magic items into materials for crafting, but then i still need to spend 1500 gold to make a crossbow with all random properties that'll most likely be shit.  Gee, I'm sure glad I decided to spend 6000 gold crafting 4 random crap crossbows with +intelligence instead of just going and getting a good one on the auction house. Wasn't that fun?

3)  There are a lot of talents and runes, but most of them are absolute crap.  It's not REALLY a choice if you're picking between multi-shot which fires a spray of death out in a 60 degree  arc that pierces through everything in its path, and a sentry turret that does 20% weapon damage to one target every once in a while when it decides to fire.  Hmmmm, serpentine chakram with a tiny hit box that misses everything or a ball of fucking lightning that streaks out shocking tendrils at everything that even looks at it.... how do I even choose?

Welcome to the real game in Diablo III.  

4)  Diablo III is not difficult.  Previous diablos had sort of a rogue-like quality to them where you could just get stuck on some heinous shit.  This could happen in late act I and early act II in Diablo II.  I played through the entirety of Diablo III without any real challenge until the final boss.  I'm most of the way through Act I on nightmare difficulty and am just now occasionally needing to drink a healing potion, and that's only when a rare monster has a particularly challenging set of special abilities.  Everyone is probably thinking, "well of course silly, you're only on Nightmare!"  I don't care! I shouldn't have to play through even 1 difficulty of practice mode before I get to the real game.  Give me the real game right from the start, I'm 20 hours in at this point and have other shit to do.  Please!

5) On that note, what the hell is even the point of health potions?  Health potions are on a timer now, so you can only drink them every minute or so. You'll wind up with a billion goddamned potions in your pack that are worthless 'cause you can only drink them every once in a while. Why not just make it so that your potions got more potent as you went up in level, and you just have unlimited potions? Obviously the limiting factors for potions are potency and cool-down, not quantity.  That's just bad design.

6) Damned if this game is not seriously repetitive.  I mean, I know that's the genre, but really almost every combat encounter boils down to spamming multishot until everything is dead, and if anything lived I can just vault away and bola shot it, and even then if it survives i can hit a fan of knives and probably kill it at that point.  That's it, every encounter is: right click 3-4 times, hit the 2 key, hold down left click, hit the 3 key.  Occasionally I need to use some shadow talent to get health back.  Sometimes I hit the 4 key to rain down a hail of arrows, JUST FOR FUN.

Fan of Knives! 

Whew, all that said, I'm probably going to keep playing this game off and on.  It's not a good game, really it's bad, but I'm not above playing bad games.  Despite being a one note song, the combat is still extremely satisfying for a reason I can't articulate.  There's also some part of me that's hoping I'll eventually get to the REAL game.  I suppose I could just not use the auction house, but really then I'm making up some new game to play with Diablo III.  It would do me just as good to try playing with my feet or wearing a blind-fold. Hardcore mode sounds like a good solution, but with no offline mode available, the idea that I might get dozens of hours into a character only to die to a poor internet connection is dissuading me.  Newcomers to the genre might enjoy it more than I do, but for me it seems like they took one step forward and two steps back with this one.