A His and Her Look at Diablo 3

My friend, Greyson#1678, joins me in reviewing Diablo 3. Now, we’ve only just started playing the game, both somewhere in the teens in terms of character level. Greyson#1678’s main character is a witch doctor, and mine is a demon hunter.

Him: I have a copy of Diablo III I got as part of buying the WoW annual pass. I will not comment on the connection issues people are having, because well, when that fades in a week, nobody will care.

Let’s start with the cons:

1. Him: How many monsters can I kill per second? Like Diablo II, there really is an endless stream of monsters coming at you. Maybe I’m just getting old, but the idea of a game being completely based off annihilating 500,000 random, nameless creatures, and spending 100 hours of my life to do so is not appealing, and well, not engrossing. If I wanted to do that, I’d go to my office and stuff some envelopes. I like playing in fantasy universes, where I am powerful and magical, but the world needs to feel dangerous and alive; it currently does not. Maybe it will, and maybe ACT 1 is a warm up for new players, I’m not sure.

   Her: I agree…I find myself getting mired down re-clearing areas I’ve been through already on the way to complete another mission. Now, part of that is my own OCD-like need to clean things up, AND one could argue that it does help pad the coffers, as well as level and clothe your character.

2. Him: The quests seem to take a back seat to the killing. How is this damned cathedral four levels deep, and bigger than the town and countryside I ran through to get here? Who builds this stuff, where do the resources come from? How did Cain survive being blasted down four levels of it too? The guy is like 80. Oh right, because you want me to kill 700 imps, bats, and skeletons on the way down, and you need space to put them all in. There are some plot gaps that I expected, but also the dialog is sparse and really not that different from every other Diablo game (click activated audio with subtitles). Somehow I feel like I’ve done this before.

   Her: You have, and you are going to do it again and again and again until you get it right! Maybe we won’t notice that there aren’t enough quests to make the game long enough for the price, so we’ll slow you down with creatures (see forum post on Korean teams beating Diablo 3 in 7 hours). Even before Greyson#1678 made the above comments, I had commented to my friend, Samhaim (who was playing with me at the time): “This is one hell of a crypt.” “Wow, this is the ODDEST cathedral.” “I wish I had a cellar that large.” Now, it’s funny where we draw the line for reality in our FANTASY games. I can believe in magic, demon-hunting, witches, wizards, and the like, but NOT in an old man surviving a magical blast or the mystical ruins of a medieval cathedral.

3. Him: Crafting? Why would I even want to bother in single player?

   Her: Ditto, but remember that multiplayer is a big component/draw/appeal of D3.

4. Him: I’m not sure how replayable the game really is. There really doesn’t seem to be staged events that I could leap into, like when we’d go into Shadowfang Keep or jump into the LFD, because it was fun and challenging. Part of the advantage of dungeons in game like WoW, which are completely separate from outer world content, is that I could jump into something challenging for an hour and leave, and those instances are where my skill really developed. To redo Diablo III content would involve me running around corners for an hour, doing the same thing over and over again, which isn’t quite the same. Multiplayer co-op seems really well done, but will I be able to join a pickup game and have that be rewarding? I don’t know. It really depends on the community that develops.

   Her: Well, D3 really isn’t the same type of game that WoW is, so I don’t think it’s fair to compare them directly. D3 is heavily tied to a linear progression through the story. There really isn’t any single player mode to WoW. You simply cannot survive/progress on your own…you NEED others to get the most out of it. I do think that your points can be taken as why D3 won’t replace WoW, though.

5. Him: Most importantly, the game isn’t innovative. It doesn’t really do anything drastically new in terms of combat dynamics or interaction. Don’t get me wrong, it does a lot of small things right (see below), but there isn’t anything ground breaking about this game. It doesn’t feel that much different than Diablo II, except for having a new pretty shell.

   Her: I have to agree with Greyson#1678, but is that a problem? Does every new title published HAVE to be innovative and hugely different? Did Blizzard promise innovation and not deliver? I don’t think so. Like Mass Effect 3, I think it’s enough to have a title you love continue developing the story/adventure/world with new elements, some updates, and challenges. Now, some might argue, what about Left4Dead to Left4Dead2? That was a different issue where players (I was one of them) were outraged that the second was released so quickly on the success of the first, especially since Valve had not supported the original with promised content updates. Instead, players were forced to buy the next release.

Now on to the pros:

1. Him: It’s pretty, polished, smooth, and has a great soundtrack. Blizzard has a real talent for making games both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The colors are bold and gorgeous, and a lot of effort was put into making the scenes and areas you explore. You have to hand it to their artists.

   Her: I prefer playing alone in D3, so I can take my time exploring every nook and enjoying the atmosphere that they’ve created. Coming fresh from WoW, Mass Effect 3, etc. I was surprised/disappointed to find that I didn’t really have much control over my character’s physical attributes.

2. Him: Like other blizzard games, you feel like you’re in complete control of your character. Movement is very clean and your character is very responsive, and struggle against the interface or engine to get things done. I also don’t know how to explain this, but this the universe feels very tangible. In SWTOR, for example, my character seemed to either roll or glide around objects, some animations and movement were too stiff, and although there were lots of physics effects, they were poorly done, which made it feel cheap. This game doesn’t feel like that. My abilities work the way they should and allow me to control fights, I don’t reduce my damage by 20% by hitting an interrupt every 10 seconds. I snare or freeze whole groups of monsters in their tracks or blast them across the screen. That aspect is very satisfying. This also means that if the combat actually gets tougher and involves real strategy, conquering it could feel very rewarding to complete content.

   Her: Yes, abilities and world physics work as one would expect them to work, which makes strategy more useful than blind spamming in this game. Interestingly, it seems that the majority of the players find some skill or aspect of a class to be OP (overpowered). I’ve also heard that in reference to whole classes. If you’ve played, what do you think?

3. Him: Some people say the skill system is too complex, but I disagree. I like it a lot. You get to have six keybound skills activated at all times, that’s it. It’s more like the original Guild Wars in that regard. You have to set up your skills and work with them, and you can’t change them mid-fight. You can change them around between fights, but it’s really about developing your own strategy with those limited number of powerful abilities. It’s not overwhelming. Also, each skill can be customized with a single “rune” so that it has a unique, powerful, custom flavor. As such you really feel like you have active control over your class play style and mechanics. I feel like the rune system is the way glyphs were supposed to work in WoW, but never did. Skills are broken down into categories, defense, basic attack, secondary attack, etc. They have the system set up initially so that you can only have one of each class of skill active at a time, which is great for newbies, but restrictive for more advanced players. So, they let you turn off the skill lock system in the options, which I would suggest you do once you find two skills in the same category you like. I currently have two defensive abilities active so I can control fights better.

   Her: Coming from years of WoW gameplay, I have to laugh at that one. They have NO idea the complexity of the rotation/talents/glyphs system that you master. Then Blizzard updates the game, and you have to re-master your abilities. D3’s skill system is a refreshing breeze, in comparison. This is where more strategy comes in, you change up your skills to match the future challenge or environment (again, not while in combat).

4. Him: Co-op play seems like it could be a lot of fun. I’ve done it a few times now and they’ve put a lot of work into making the game very multiplayer friendly, which I think is its biggest strength. I can jump into public co-op and private games with a click of a button to play with random people and friends, even if that doesn’t have any cohesion. They also put that part front and center, so you feel like that’s supposed to be the focus of the game. They also put small on-the-fly, multiplayer events into the game to provide extra group challenges. These are spawned when the map for an area or dungeon is created, contingent upon you being in a group. I.e. they don’t appear when you play solo. The co-op play is also integrated into single player play, so it’s not like there’s a co-op and single player campaign. The instance of the world you see is that of the group leader. I.e. if you join me to play, you can run up and help me with whatever quest I’m doing. As such, PvP will also probably be fun, due to the smooth gameplay and multiplayer options once they get it going.

   Her: I agree that co-op is nicely, almost seamlessy, integrated and encouraged. I prefer to play mainly single player. I find that a lot of other players are in more of a rush to get from quest to quest than I am. I love to interact with the computer characters, get backstory, pick up scrolls/books/diaries for more lore, and loot every last stump, dead villager (seems as if there is a never-ending supply of those) or rotting pile of bones that I can find.

5. Him: Content is easily replayable. You can go backward and forward to do quests and dungeons over and over again, if you’d like. In a sense, your character progression is more about unlocking that replayable content. Although I’m not sure I’d want to do that over and over again, the game is clearly designed so that you can. Each new time you redo a quest the maps change, as with other Diablo games.

   Her: I’m not sure I qualify this one as a pro, but re-wandering/re-exploring does appeal to the explorer in me (hence, why I LOVED the Myst series), especially when combined with the atmospheric elements of the game, and the lights in my office are on low.

6. Him: The story, although linear, is still interesting, and they’ve put lots of short videos in between quests to keep you going. I do want to know what happens next, and that’s something important, I suppose.

   Her: It is important, and probably a big reason for most of us playing the game.

His Conclusion: Overall, I have mixed feelings about the game. I was hoping for something new and fresh, and they just didn’t deliver on that. But what they did create, like SC2 did with real time strategy, is something as close to classic dungeon crawler perfection as you’re ever going to get. Should you buy it? I don’t know, I guess it just depends on what you’re looking for. It will be a lot of fun to play multiplayer and as something light to do with friends, if the strategy picks up, but it won’t be engrossing, and you won’t feel compelled to play — or at least, I doubt it. Maybe things will change after ACT 1 when I hear life gets difficult, but as of right now, I play for a bit and log. Who knows, maybe that’s a good thing and I shouldn’t feel compelled to play a game for six hours straight. You’ll probably like this game quite a bit if you like blasting through armies of repetitive, randomly generated monsters with a pretty backdrop, aren’t obsessed with an all engrossing story (people don’t watch porn for the story, but it does add a little something), or simply want to burn some time with your friends instead of watching HBO. The game also has sport appeal, like SC2, and if the arena PvP system gets put into place, I imagine that niche will cater to a lot of people (although that was supposed to be a selling point of Darkspore, but that failed too). This is not to say it’s boring or a bad game, it’s honestly fun, gorgeous and cool, but it’s more of the same we’ve seen before, just a little better, the third season of the same series.

Her Conclusion: Wait, people watch porn for the STORY? Are you saying that D3 is like porn? Either way, I think that depends upon the audience…

Overall, I really like the game (and the majority of the other players I interact with echo this opinion). I was also a fan of D1 and D2. This game feels like a progression of the story with some new elements, plus gorgeous graphics and music. That’s enough for me, because I really wasn’t expecting much more than that. I do think Blizzard was smart to release it when they did. WoW subscribers are growing bored with Cataclysm, and at least half to three quarters of the WoWers I know, are playing Diablo 3. They can “scratch the itch” with D3, and return to WoW with renewed interest until the release of Mists of Panderia (some predictions point to summer).

Besides, if YOU like it, who cares what we think!