Diablo III

It is here.  In what is easily one of the most long-awaited and highly anticipated release ever, Diablo III has finally been released.  As much excitement as that brings, it also poses an interesting dilemma.  How can anything which people have been salivating ever live up to the hype?  Well, Blizzard isn’t in the habit of letting down it’s fans and with how long they’ve waited on this, surely they wouldn’t release something that wasn’t ready for prime-time.

The original Diablo was released in 1996.  It was an instant hit and set the formula for what makes a diablo game: different classes, different abilities to pick from, beautiful cutscenes, and a dark story all interspersed in a fast paced hack and slash Action-RPG with an emphasis on loot.

The sequal would come out 4 years later, but in what has become traditional with Blizzard releases, it was originally planned to come out much earlier.  To this day I still remember reading the announcement in a gaming magazine that Diablo II had been delayed from it’s original release date.  It was heartbreaking because I hadn’t yet learned the lesson that most of the time delayed releases are a good thing.

Diablo II was like a giant fireball that exploded to take over the world.  The formula was the same, but everything was better in so many ways.  Also, by this time Blizzard’s battle.net platform was ready to go and it’s capabilities allowed Diablo II to soar.

So 4 years between major releases in a franchise is quite long by modern standards.  A lot of big franchises these days have annual releases.  If Blizzard stuck with the same pattern you would expect to see Diablo III come out sometime in the 2004 time frame.  Well, years went by without much word of anything.  Blizzard seemed to be very tied up with their cash-cow World of Warcraft and no one had any concrete information and what was next for the diablo franchise.

Now here we are in 2012 and Diablo III has finally come.  All the hype and the long wait seems to have paid off as Diablo III became the fastest selling PC game of all time.

You can generally gauge how far you are in the game by how you’re feeling about the game.  The campaign stretches through 4 Acts and once completed you can play again with a higher difficulty.  There are the familiar Normal, Nightmare, and Hell difficulties but now there is a fourth and hardest difficulty: Inferno.

Playing through normal is like flying through the clouds.  You are so excited just to be playing Diablo 3 after waiting 12 years for it that everything feels amazing.  Playing through Nightmare is enjoyable as you start to feel some familiar grind.  Playing through Hell feels like the alcohol is beginning to wear off and a lot of imperfections begin to show through.  Playing through Inferno very quickly makes you realize there are better things to do with your life.

Once again, the game stays true to the formula that has made the game successful in the past, but it just didn’t seem enough this time.  Diablo III is still a great game, but it has three very major issues which prevent the game from from reaching it’s full potential.

Major issue #1 is the loot mechanics.  The obvious and very unfortunate aspect of this is that Diablo is a very loot-based game.  People play to get loot.  That’s what is fun.  That’s what keeps everyone going.  To have loot be a major issue just seems inconceivable, but that’s how things apparently panned out.

So what do I mean by poor loot mechanics? Let me explain.  The level cap in Diablo 3 is 60.  While playing with my first character, I once gained over 20 levels without ever finding a single item which could replace anything I was wearing in any slot.  Keep in mind that the game is a constant killing field where you endlessly kill waves of almost mindless evil creatures and they all drop loot.

The game doesn’t end at level 60, but leveling from 1-60 is a significant part of the game and to go over a third of that time without gaining a single item that was an improvement is just absolutely laughable.  The sad thing is it’s not just a run of bad luck.  After that poor stretch and then looting a single piece of armor that would be an improvement, I then went another 12 levels without finding anything else useful.

There are two main culprits to blame for this.  The first is that Blizzard has simply made the odds of finding something good too low.  Whatever calculation they used to determine how much people play and how scarce they want good loot to be seems to be on the harsh side.  The second, and more idiotic culprit is Blizzard’s new idea that the key to loot is complete randomness.  The insanity of this is almost too much to bear.

Remember all those cool unique and set items from Diablo 2?  Well, these types of items still exist, but are much more rare and they are purposefully made weaker than what the completely randomly generated weapons can be.  Having some certain item to lust for is a large part of what keeps you going – you are trying to find that item!  You want to know what’s fun?   Playing a looter where you don’t know what you’re hoping to get and never get it anyways.

Major Issue #2 is directly related to the first issue and it is the infamous auction house.  In Diablo 2, your sphere of available items included what you personally looted, what your friends looted, or if you chose to sit around in the battle.net chat and happened to see someone spamming something you wanted.

In a relatively small sphere of availability, item drops could be set to be feasible.  However, if you are implementing a global trading system, like the auction house, then you really need to make great items really, really rare – otherwise this auction house will be full of them and they will be cheap to procure.  So the auction house is likely the main reason why the loot system is so terrible.

The auction house is also a terrible idea because of the information it makes available.  No matter what point you are at in the game, you have a near unlimited number of upgrades staring at you as they sit on a digital shopping shelf which you could only buy if you just had some more money.  Playing Diablo 2 when it first came out, you didn’t instantly know everything that was out there.  You enjoyed upgrades as you found them and felt satisfied with what you got.  Now, in Diablo 3, when you rarely find an upgrade it usually ends up being somewhat of a disappointment because you are aware of similar but much better upgrades in the auction house.

Was the auction house created as a means to provide additional revenue to Blizzard?  Since they take a cut of the real money auction house sales, this was likely a major idea.  The company has millions of people paying a monthly fee for their Warcraft franchise and to put out a game with no source of ongoing income surely would seem foolish to upper management.  They also talk about how this cuts out all the third party sites that illegally sell items (which still sell gold . . .).  In short, the auction house kills the vast majority of the fun that is to be had in a loot-based game.

Major issue #3 is the game’s terrible storyline.  Diablo 1 and 2 told stories that were engaging and genuinely dark.  This made it so that when you play through the game again it continued to be enjoyable.  With something like this it’s hard to tell exactly where things went wrong, but Diablo is no longer a dark game and the new story told is hardly worth telling.

The rest of the game is a mixed bag.  Other faults exist, though none as major as the three already outlined.  There are some things that were done really well.  The different classes are all unique and they make use of very creative spells and abilities.

The game’s cinematic cut-scenes continue to place Blizzard in their own league.  Many people love to yap about how the era of cut-scenes is destined to end.  Some say cinematics are on the way out because they are not interactive and this break from the interaction is enough to separate the player from the experience.  Hogwash.  Games serve as a medium to tell stories and cinematic cut-scenes  enhance the ability to connect players with what’s happening in the game.

Diablo III is fun.  It is polished, and well thought out, but at the end of the day, it’s hard to describe the game as anything other than a disappointment.  After the enormous success of its predecessors and the unbearably long wait for this installment, it was probably impossible to be anything other than a disappointment.  Perhaps the best way to gauge success is to think of the seemingly innumerable times my friends, family, and I have re-installed Diablo 2 over the years to have another crack at the fun (this despite our characters always being idle long enough to be deleted and having to start over each time).  However, when I think of the future with Diablo 3, it seems much more like a “completed and done with for good” type of game.