review: diablo iii (one month after release)

Video game (hack 'n slash)

The highly anticipated sequel to Diablo ii (threequel to Diablo i?).  Published by arguably the most prominent and successful game company on Earth.  I spent years anticipating this one.

While this is (obviously) a very successful title with several million purchases, the game has some flaws in terms of game design.  I feel that most who would criticize this game because of unstable servers, lag issues, disconnects, or spotty services in general do not truly understand the complexities and technical challenges involved in providing excellent internet services to millions of subscribers.  Considering the sheer volume of players, I feel that the development team has actually done quite well in this area.  This review will be focused on game design rather than technical issues.

What works

Just about everything in the earlier difficulties works well.  For those who may not know, Diablo iii is broken up into 4 "difficulties".  I would use the term difficulty loosely here, and we will see why a bit later.  Completing the game on one difficulty unlocks the next.  Each successive difficulty contains the same content, but with bigger numbers, essentially.

Rapid character progression and abundant customization options

In the first part of the game, you get to level up your character.  Leveling up is pretty fun.  Your character has much more freedom in what abilities they can use.  You rapidly become stronger, and get to notice how much awesome your character is becoming.  There are no real penalties for sacrificing killing efficiency.  You can wear a hat because it looks cool, even though it doesn't give very good stats.  You can use an ability because it is fun or has good graphics.  Since there are different ways to play, the game is interesting and fun.

Death vs. progression is a function of skill/tactics

Action never slows down too much.  At times it seems like monsters may be spaced a bit far apart, so that it takes a while to start fighting the next monster pack - but not to the degree that it becomes annoying.  For the most part, you mow down monsters at a steady pace.  The only way you would die is if you make some egregious mistakes.  If you do die, it is because you were not paying attention, or you were not playing smart.  In other words, you were probably "standing in the fire".  

Item upgrades can be obtained from monsters you yourself have killed

When you kill monsters, they will often drop items.  Finding items that you can actually use, and make your character more powerful is actually pretty common.  It is important to note that receiving item upgrades from a monster you killed with your own hands is very satisfying, and actually plays a role in activating reward centers of the brain.  This sensation of reward is what keeps games fun, and is why people play them.

What doesn't work

The game changes dramatically at the end game.  The last difficulty setting is "Inferno", and it is played at maximum level.  At this point in the game, your character can no longer level up.  The only way to become more powerful at this point is by getting new items.

Slow character progression

Earlier in the game, you could make progress in half an hour or less.  Leveling up is quick, and results in a noticeable power increase with new abilities to boot.  It is also easy to progress through the quests, and get to see new content.  But in Inferno, it can take days to complete one "act" (one difficulty level is composed of 4 very roughly equivalent acts).  This is somewhat understandable, as there is not as much incentive to play after you have beaten the game on Inferno (so why not draw it out?), but it does result in an experience that is unpleasantly slow at times.  Additionally, you rely solely on items to become stronger in Inferno.  This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for...

The auction house is the only feasible way to get good items

In Inferno, almost every item that you find is completely useless to you.  Most of it is vendor trash (useless to other players as well).  I seem to recall a Blizzard developer "blue post" explaining that due to the Auction House (a system that Blizzard developed to replace 3rd party selling of digital items or gold to other players), the chances for good items to drop would have to be greatly reduced.  Otherwise, if you have several million people playing and they can all get good items easily, the economy would be flooded with great items.  There would be little incentive to play if your character so easily and quickly rises to his maximum potential by possessing the best items in the game.

This is a huge problem.  Remember how finding a sweet item upgrade from that monster you just killed activates reward centers in your brain?  Here's something that doesn't activate those same reward centers:  Playing the same content over and over for days to scrape together enough gold to buy an upgrade on the auction house.  If you can't beat Act 2, you have to play Act 1 over and over and over and over again until you get enough gold to buy the gear it takes to beat Act 2.  Total fail here.  Browsing through hundreds of item listings on the AH searching for an upgrade isn't fun...  It sucks.  

Some people like economics and playing on the AH, they are in the minority in my opinion.  The game is no longer about action and demon slaying, it is about finding good items on the AH.

Now, why would Blizzard do this?  I suspect the fact that Blizzard takes a cut of sales in the "real money auction house" is a large contributing factor.  Sure, the game is free to play and server architecture and internet services maintenance has a cost associated with it - but this seemingly innocent design decision to make some extra cash through the micro transactions really hosed the game's fun factor.

The auction house.  Get used to this if you want to do Inferno.

Death vs. progression is a function of YOUR ITEMS

Oh, that monster killed you in one hit before you even had time to react?  Guess you better farm gold for a few days until you can buy some better items.  This is literally the only factor of difficulty in the end game.  If you are not progressing, your equipment is not good enough.  If your equipment is very good, you can mash the keyboard with cats duct taped to your hands and still kill everything.  Fun, right?  No.  Pointless.  Getting killed in one hit isn't fun or exciting, it is tedious.

Ridiculous monster combinations

A little more background - there are packs of monsters ("champion packs" or "rare packs") in the game that have special abilities.  The application of these abilities ("affixes") happens randomly.  These are essentially just souped up versions of the normal packs.  In each successive difficulty, the champion packs gain an additional affix until Inferno, where they will have 4 affixes.

This wouldn't be so bad if some of the affixes weren't so overpowered or impossible to beat in certain combinations.  Take this for example:

Arcane, jailer, vortex.  Awesome.  So you get pulled into a pack of monsters (vortex) that hit like trucks, and then jailed (unable to move character).  Then the arcane sentries start flying.  All you can do is try to kill them before you die, but you'll die instantly if one of the arcane sentries hits you (these are basically purple lasers that rotate on the floor).  Normally you can avoid them without too much difficulty, but it is impossible when the monsters pull you to them and freeze you in place.  

So, what do you do when you encounter something like this?  Leave the game and start it up again.  Kind of lame, but it's all you can really do.  You don't lose much progress necessarily, but you will acquire less gold and fewer magic items for a period of time if you had recently killed any champion or rare packs.

Imbalance between ranged and melee classes

Just about everyone who got a melee oriented character to Inferno came upon the realization, "Oh...  This sucks."  You have to stand next to a monster to do damage, but monsters do ridiculous damage to you in one hit.  Enough to make it nearly impossible to kill them by standing there and wailing on monsters, which is what you like doing and had worked for the whole previous portion of the game.  The only solution here is to spend millions of gold on better items, or start over with a ranged class.

Additionally, some monster affixes such as "molten" or "plagued" unfairly punish melee characters.  These abilities place zones of certain death on the ground all over the place, which the monsters can just stand in.  You have to stand right next to a monster to kill it, but if you come anywhere near it you will die almost instantly from the zone of death.  Nice.  These affixes are essentially trivial to deal with for ranged characters, who have the mobility to avoid these effects (unless the champion pack also has abilities that cause you to lose control of your character).

Much fewer customization options

There are some abilities that just plain do not work in inferno.  The wizard's energy twister, or the witch doctor's locust swarm are examples of abilities that are generally never used in inferno, although many other examples exist.  You might have had lots of fun using cool abilities while leveling up, but they are just not worth it anymore.  Not fun.

Why is this?  There is a huge emphasis on defensive abilities, for one.  Your character is limited to using 6 abilities, and so lower priority offensive abilities must be sacrificed just so you can stay alive.  But at the core of the issue, progressing in Inferno requires peak efficiency.  Since it is impossible to balance a multitude of abilities such that all have equal efficiency, get used to your nether tentacles.  This will be your primary source of damage as a demon hunter in Inferno.

Cutscenes and constantly being taunted by the villain for a particular Act

(Storytelling)

Diablo iii has lots of cutscenes all throughout the game.  The action will stop for a moment, you will lose control of your character, and the scene will begin.  If there was an option to disable cutscenes, this would have been alright.  But there is no such option.

Diablo iii is a game that's designed around redoing the same content over and over and over again, hundreds of times.  Cutscenes get dull around the second or third time.  By that point I'm playing to slay beasts and demons, not for story.  The cutscenes have to be skipped every time.  Even this wouldn't be all that bad, but  for some reason Blizzard decided to add cutscenes right before and even during boss fights.  This means that every time you die fighting a boss, you have to skip the cutscene.  

During the fight with the last boss in the game, there is a point where after you damage him enough, there are 2 cutscenes right in a row, so you have to skip the cutscenes twice...  Why not just make this one cutscene?  Or better yet, don't put cutscenes in a boss fight.  No one wants to see the same cutscene on any boss kill attempt after their first playthrough.  This gets annoying very quickly.

Add to that the fact that the added enjoyment via the cutscenes is modest at best even on the first playthroughs of the game, and you've got a real failure of a design model.

Allow me to digress for a moment, and discuss a different game: World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King era.  This was, for me, a pinnacle or very high point in video game storytelling.  You see the villain sprinkled throughout your journeys in Northrend.  He is always doing something badass, but he gives you some space;  you do not interact with the Lich King is not in every single quest.  This results in an experience where by the end of the expansion, you really want to kill this guy.  He is a villain you love to hate.  You've witnessed a wide breadth of atrocities he has committed.  You are ready to bring him to Justice.

The same can be said of FF7 with Sephiroth, and FF3 with Kefka.  The story was done excellently in both of these titles.  The gradual interactions with the villain helped to establish a personal and emotional connection to them.  It made them feel like a real person.  When it is time to fight them, it is Sweet.  Thrilling.  Gratifying.  You are putting the entity responsible for vast devastation and great evils to justice.  

How does this work in Diablo iii?  Every 2-5 minutes you get this from the boss for that Act: "Hey, hero...  What's up?  You destroyed my ballistas/demonic contraption/battle lieutenant but I totally don't even care.  You'll never defeat me."  Every. 5. Minutes.  (I'm slightly exaggerating here, but this is what it feels like when you are on an Act for the 50th time).  It's stupid.  

I get the feeling that the developers were attempting to establish this personal connection to the villain, but this was a total failure.  It's not going to work on content that is designed to be repeated hundreds of times.  Additionally, the span of an Act is only a couple hours...  This is not enough time for this design model to work.  Wrath of the Lich King could take a few weeks to beat for a relatively normal player, and the same could be said of FF7 and FF3.

And when you finally do kill the boss of the Act - who gives a shit?  In this game, his death does not persist or matter in any way.  You will probably just vendor the worthless magic items he dropped, leave the game, remake it, and kill him again.

Rating

For all its flaws, Diablo iii is still a fun game.  It is worth playing, and worth the price tag.  This is just not the game that I was hoping it could be - the game that I could play for days on end without tiring of it.  Perhaps that is because I am growing up now, and am not entertained so easily by video games.   Although, I honestly doubt that factor is large enough to explain the bulk of my concerns with this game.

Some of the issues will undoubtedly be improved as time goes on and Blizzard continues to improve the game.  This review is as of 6/15/2012, one month after release.

I don't have a strict rating system in place yet.  For this one, I'll use nipples.  Diablo iii (as of one month after release), I hereby grant you 3.5/5 nipples.

~swamp