Well my friends, what is there to say about a game like Diablo 3? I’m for sure for those of you familiar with the series fully realize that it has been twelve years since the game’s last iteration took center stage and are probably foaming at the mouth right now in some sort of sugar-coated, caffeine driven psychosis, ready and willing to embrace the hundreds of hours you’re about to invest in your hunt for loot. The good folks at blizzard have done an excellent job of creating an aura of hype around the release of Diablo 3 (not that it needed it) and it seems that the day of reckoning has finally arrived as swarms of flustered nerds who have grown tired of their WoW lifestyle crowd into the internet pipelines all around the world looking to get their latest fix.
When Diablo 2 landed on the gaming world with a thud of solidified grease and bile, it reinvented the standard for dungeon crawling looters who gathered like dope fiends ready to show off their latest stash. The formula was simple enough to understand. Give players the freedom to create their heroes from scratch with their own unique skills and abilities while simultaneously thrusting them into a world filled with angry piñatas bursting with precious goodies; And like a ravenous toddler on their birthday, sprawling through mud, worms, and sharp blades of grass, those who played Diablo 2 were possessed by an insatiable demon pushing forward until their minds and bodies broke. Players of Diablo 2 hunted for days, months, years for the best items, consuming an ungodly amount of time and energy that could have been spent, I don’t know, growing tomatoes in their bathtub or some other hipster activity. Don’t get me wrong, Diablo 2 was an incredibly refined experience for its time. The game featured a challenging and exciting campaign with a pretty decent story to boot. The skill trees which dictated your spells and abilities gave the player the ability to create a character that was unique to them (unless of course someone decided to copy your build, bastards) as it was based on a point system. Once the points were put into a certain skill they were locked into that ability for the rest of the game. This gameplay dynamic meant the player had to be mindful of how to spend their points, otherwise, they would have to start all over.
Diablo 3, for the most part, doesn’t dare change the basic formula that made Diablo 2 so successful. In fact, the developers (of which none of them worked on Diablo 2) went out of their way to simplify the formula by taking out a few variables here and there. The visual aesthetic of this game is quite nice and the depth of field adds a bit of flavor to the overall presentation. Everything glistens with HD quality and it is extremely satisfying to knock some deranged creature’s block off and to see their gory bodies flying towards your screen. My only complaint here is that the viewpoint of the camera makes the character on screen seem so minuscule in comparison to the world which inhibits your ability to really get a good look at your character as he struts around in his latest gear. I mean, if I’m going to be sitting here sweating my ass off with no air conditioning while my dog gives me dirty looks as he indulges in his vindictive flatulation, I want to be able to see my character sporting his newly fashioned swag in all its glory. How are the music and sound? It’s pretty generic for the most part although the battle sounds are pretty spot on in accentuating the carnage on occurring on screen. Then of course there are the achievements. Well, there isn’t really much to say about achievements now that I think about it. You’re either into them or you’re not. There are some pretty decent rewards for unlocking them such as sigil upgrades and what not.
For example, as you progress through the game and so happen to accidently break your old record of smashing forty clay pots with an axe by smashing one hundred clay pots with an axe, you will be rewarded with a clay pot breaking sigil which features a broken pot. I am not one hundred percent sure on this, but it certainly sounds reasonable that this game would include such a feature. And if it isn’t there, I’m sure blizzard will add it as a five dollar DLC.
The most significant change comes to the skill tree which can now be freely altered at any given moment inside the game. This has caused some of the more hardcore Diablo fans out there to cry out from their poorly ventilated rooms, stirring about in black leather chairs that have been embedded with their nerd musk. Whether or not this change is a positive or negative depends on whether or not character uniqueness is important to you. Trust me, no one is here to judge or perform any other similar hostile acts but in a world filled with such series as The Elder Scrolls and the like is evidence enough that most players do indeed care about such qualities.
One of Diablo 3’s biggest failings in its inability to allow the player to create a character that is different than their neighbors. The only way you can differentiate yourself is by your gear, thus creating its other fatal flaw, the loot. By placing so much emphasis on the gear, the game has morphed into nothing more than an extravagant and overpriced scavenger hunt. I suppose this wouldn’t be so bad if the game would offer players a way to skillfully dispatch their foes on the battlefield, validating the many hours it took to farm a decent set of gear, but instead the game is designed in such a way that you’re either doing some bizarre form of kiting or running straight at your opponents with failing fists.
If this wasn’t bad enough the drop rate for good items seems excruciating skewed in this opening version of the game. Legendary items are nearly impossible to come by and when you do find one, expect to be heavily disappointed by their attributes. Because of the terrible drop rate in the game most players will find themselves running to the auction house. What is the auction house you ask? Well, since the game is engineered to not only make you bloodthirsty for loot but to also strategically inhibit your ability to find good loot, the kind folks at Blizzard have created a virtual store existing outside the game to purchase and sell items. Items on the auction house can be bought and sold for in-game money and/or real money, bypassing the need to do any real farming as long as you’re willing to pay top dollar. Interesting, right? No, it really isn’t. It’s a trick I tell you! And millions of people are falling for it all around the world, including me.
The Auction house creates a bit of a symbiotic relationship with the game since items are so terribly difficult to find. I can’t begin to explain my frustration as I sit here farming away finding quiver after quiver with my level 60 Barbarian only to be forced to either sell it or toss it on the battlefield that is already littered with all the other staffs and voodoo dolls that I don’t need. The amount of tomfoolery here is quite a feat to behold. These scumbags are out there right now making millions of gold in this godforsaken place, driving that hateful dagger further into the ravenous creature on the other side of the screen. A creature so lost and bewildered that he cannot prevent himself from placing bid after bid on items he will use for a day or so before the need returns. Surely they must realize they are getting ripped off but their desire for instant gratification has reached such critical mass that they have deteriorated into the absolute embodiment of desperation. Shame on you blizzard! Shame on you for
capitalizing on the most primal urges of your fellow man! Shame on you for wrecking the souls of these poor people! They put their good faith in your abilities in hopes for a moment’s glimpse into happy times and good fortune and you robbed them of a dignified experience. Shame on you.
*Gasp* Sorry about that, back to the game!
Story? Yea don’t count on it. Unless of course you find superfluous discussions of how some country girl named Leah is going to build an Inn while you’re hacking and slashing your way through the hordes of hell purposeful enough for a game like this, you will be disappointed. It is dialog snippets such as these that make the game’s story feel uninspired and as tasteless as meat torn from a rotting carcass that has been sitting in the sun for twelve years.
Act 1 feels reminiscent of the first Diablo, (I think because it’s related to the same shitty town, I don’t really know), and plows along very predictably with some skeletons, dungeons, fields infested with cow corpses, and oh hey it’s the Butcher again, fuckin eh.
Act 2 is a nightmarish journey walk into the desert where you’re greeted by hundreds of annoying wasps from hell. And oh yeah there’s a little kid disguised as Belial, you know, the demon from that Milton poem, or something like that. Act 3 and 4? Well, let’s just say it would be a miracle if you didn’t get arthritis in you index finger from all the clicking you will be doing. I really don’t know what the hell happened in these Acts as my screen was constantly filled with bloodied limbs and terrible loot from all the baddies I was slaying. More often than not I found myself clicking randomly on the screen until I found the correct path where I proceeded to click some more until everyone was dead. I collected my loot, and then I got the fuck out of there.
Oh and there’s the whole ‘always online’ aspect of the game that forces us loyal consumers to be connected to the internet in order to play the damned thing. It’s hard to comment on such behaviors without getting into some angry philosophical debate on the nature of consumer ownership so I will leave this topic alone until a later date. Just be warned all ye who plan on playing this game; You will be at the whim of not only your internet connection but the Blizzard servers who have been struggling to keep up with the traffic of new players as they invade their digital space.
But alas, I have to admit that amongst these negative thoughts floating around in my cranium I have this terrible itch to play. Momma always told me that I was a terrible liar and I would be a terrible liar indeed if I were to tell you that Diablo 3 wasn’t running in the background as I put these words together, ready to be embraced at a moment’s notice. I am here, plotting and planning how I will be tackling Inferno mode and allocating hours from my busy schedule to accomplish this monumental task. Yes, I have spent well over 120 hours playing this game and yes I am quite proud of my burly Barby and his wonderful outfit that I spent a few thousand gold color coding for not reason in particular. I have made a few cents off the auction house and I am now considering taking up the task of molding my Diablo 3 addiction into a sustainable source of income. I am also considering binding all my skills and abilities to my mouse so that I may repeatedly punch myself in the gonads with my free hand until I throw up. This does not add any validity to what Blizzard has done here because believe me this is not really a game as much as it is an exercise in thievery. Somewhere in some dark office space, Blizzard
executives are eating donuts wrapped in gold trimmed napkins laughing their fat asses off as the auction house grows exponentially every day. Then why am I playing this game you might be wondering? I’ll relate my answer to that of an old past time of mine when I was a child.
Whenever there was an opportunity for me to go outside and play without being shot I would sometimes bury my toys in the soil only to uncover them at a later time. Why I did this I do not know but perhaps I enjoyed the idea of not knowing what was happening to them while they were away from their daily adventures. It was as if in those few hours that they were covered in the soft soil of our giving earth, they would have a few moments to bask in a sense of freedom. Only after a while, of course, I began to forget where I placed them. This made me quite sad. So sad in fact that I would spend hours upon hours digging and digging until our lawn looked like it belonged in one of Steven Spielberg’s war movies. Then the thought crossed my mind that perhaps they had exercised their new found freedom and dug to the other side of the world where a certain kind of magic existed. A magic so wonderful and profound that just trying to imagine it would create brilliant synapses in the mind’s eye which would bring true inspiration. So I would dig and never stop digging until I could find the trail to this new world and share in its creative embrace.
You know what, never mind, this is too depressing, I need to get back to trying to find a new weapon for my Barb. See you on the other side.