As a foreword, I’d like to say to whoever thought that the server(s) you had ready for launch would be quite enough: nice job, dilhole. To their credit, they did fix it quite fast as I actually managed to play a few hours after the servers went live, but come on, with the amount of preorders? You had to know there’d be a shit-ton of traffic. There just is no excuse.
And as for the game itself. It, to me, seems to have a severe identity crisis. It’s like it wants to be an MMO, yet isn’t. The interface is taken straight out of World of Warcraft too and it doesn’t really work here. Specifically the chat window. It’s ok for the Barrens chat, but for another game altogether, one that lacks said chat it’s frankly a terrible decision. I imagine it would be useful if you were to play with others, but why would you join some random guy’s game of Diablo I don’t fucking know and with friends I use Skype. The maps, not dungeons we’ll get to them later, suffer from the same thing as Fable and honestly every other RPG out there nowadays: they’re just very wide corridors to your next objective that just happen to be filled with enemies. Neverwinter Nights had a very confusing forest at one point and it wasn’t always clear where you needed to go and you stumble across a wizard’s tower and do an impromptu quest there involving two brothers and their experiments and then it falls to you to judge whose fault it was that those experiments were buggered. So why exactly they needed over ten years to get around making this?
I don’t know. Really, I don’t know. This game’s been popping up every now and then on various gaming news outlets starting way back as 2008 and even earlier if my memory serves me well. Maybe they got too much WoW on their plate.
The dungeons. They are randomized, with random layouts, random monsters and random loot. This is an amazingly good idea to put into something like this.
One thing I’ll say is that playing co-op with a buddy has been quite fun, even if I tend to frost ray (read: super death laser) everything to death before my friend gets to smacking range. Just one disconnect: players seem to get different loot, which means we have to loot everything twice. If one of us finds a chest, the other needs to haul his ass there to check what he got that the one who did the opening doesn’t see. And usually this leads to me getting all the stuff my buddy would find helpful and vice versa. Or we find just utter garbage. I know it might be to cut down on the ninjas, but that’s only really an issue if you’re playing with strangers. And I don’t get the trade window. I can just chuck what I don’t need but my friend does out of my bag and have him pick it up his own damn self. It might be for gold, but I haven’t found anything to spend it on. Sure, you can buy magical stuff from vendors, but I know well enough that vendors overcharge for stuff you can get from mobs. Alas, playing with someone seems to make this game laughably easy. Me and my said buddy have cut a swath through all those random dungeons and the first boss without even breaking a sweat and we’ve died only once each and that’s only thanks to those bullshit tree things that leave those pods that cause damage if you stand over them and that was just because we started looking through our inventory and didn’t notice them.
I guess I’m still on the fence about Diablo III. So far the game’s felt a bit meh. Maybe I need a good run of DayZ for ArmA II to get a clear perspective. Or a zombie chewing on my jugular. If I get over the damn choppy frame rate. Goddamnit I hate PC gaming.
Know Thy Games 