Diablo for me is not just a video game. Its a whole chapter in my life. It reminedes me of my childhood and my old friends, we use to bring our computer`s to a friends house and play Diablo II all day long. With the new Diablo coming out i just couldnt resist to do a review on it. Ive been playing the game since May 20 and here`s my review of the game, hope you enjoy it and see you on the burning steps of Caldeum and New Tristram.
STORY:
The story in Diablo III isn’t extraordinary, but it is intelligible and enjoyable, which means it’s improved over previous games. The main plot follows a fairly standard path of deception and corruption and concludes in a predictable way — especially if you’re familiar with Blizzard’s story tendencies. Diablo’s greater success is providing charm and humanity through incidental dialogue. All of the game’s NPCs have interesting back stories that are revealed through chunks of dialogue as you progress in a very Bioware or Left 4 Dead sort of way. These impromptu discussions are well-written and often humorous. By the end of the game, I was actually attached to some NPCs because of their dialogue, which is a new experience in a game that’s usually about clicking a bunch of demons to death.
GAMEPLAY:
The big question here is “Does Diablo III feel like Diablo?” and it absolutely does. You still click on a bunch of demons and collect glistening loot. There are some tweaks to the formula in Diablo III though, and nearly all of them fix problems you never realized were problems. The biggest change is the game’s skill system. Unlike previous Diablos, you never actually attack with your equipped weapon. Instead, all of your attack skills work as modifiers on your weapon’s basic stats. Equip a faster weapon, and your skills will come out faster, and the same is true for weapons with higher damage. It works, but it is a little logically incongruent, especially when your character does an attack that doesn’t involve your equipped weapon at all, like blowing darts.
Here’s the smart bit though; every time you level, you’ll unlock a new skill or a rune for an existing skill that modifies its behavior and appearance. This, combined with different enemy types, means that Diablo III constantly prods you to experiment with new skill combinations that can drastically change the way you play. For example, as a monk I had a combination of skills that would pull enemies towards me then do area of effect damage. Then I tinkered with my loadout and created a set focused on dashing and knockback, meaning that I was zipping all over the battlefield slapping enemies around instead of pulling them to me. This is an incredible improvement over Diablo II, where you’d dump all your skill points into one or two select skills and do the same attack all game.
There are a host of other tweaks on top of the core mechanics that make Diablo III
a more enjoyable experience. Sub-quests called “events” are randomly
generated into the map, and if you stumble across one, you’ll get a
ten-minute quest involving saving a group of bystanders from monsters or
running through a dungeon to find the treasure at the end within a time
limit. This capitalizes perfectly on Diablo’s sense of
spontaneity and is a great way to break up the hours of demon slaying.
The game’s crafting system is simple and brilliant, too. The results you
get from crafting are randomized, meaning that you have to roll the
dice and hope you get the stats you want. You also have to invest money
in the crafters so they can level up to make better equipment, which is a
fantastic money sink and prevents the in-game gold from becoming
completely devalued like it did in Diablo II. There’s even an
in-game auction house that you can use to capitalize on rare loot drops
that may not fit your class. It functions nearly identically to the
auction house in World of Warcraft, and it’s trivial to search for equipment or list your own for sale.
In fact, I have to get incredibly nit-picky to find something worth complaining about. You can’t compare gear to your follower’s equipment, which is a slight headache. You also can’t run around with the map overlay on, which is also a slight inconvenience. Uh…crafting recipes don’t pull items from your stash, meaning that you have to have the components in your inventory… and that’s about it. The limited and minor complaints I have about the game should speak more to the game’s quality rather than its downsides.
Of course, that’s all ignoring the elephant in the room – online DRM.
While I expect logging in and playing stable games will be less of an
issue going forward, it’s still a hassle to log in to an online server
to play by yourself. That means you’re at the mercy of lag and
disconnects even when you just want to play a quick twenty minutes. When
a server goes down or you can’t log in ‘cause your internet is screwy,
you can’t play the game you bought and that’s no different than a bug or
a crash interfering with the experience. Like everyone else, I
experienced several disconnects and connectivity problems in the game’s
first week, and that’s a real problem that shouldn’t be ignored.
ONLINE UPS AND DOWNS:
Though you’re technically online even when you’re playing alone, Diablo III deserves special mention for how easy it is to play with your friends. You can add a friend from either their battle.net e-mail or via their battletag, which is a chosen handle with a random number appended to the end. Once friended, it’s trivial to the point of clicking once to join someone’s game. Given how complicated PC multiplayer can be, that’s amazing and deserves special mention. My only complaint is that the game doesn’t have any voice chat support, which is bizarre. Granted, you’ll probably be using Skype or Vent instead, but it’s odd that a game would ship without that functionality these days. For you to play the game you have to have internet connection at all time wich is kinda a downer so far. We will see what comes out in the next few patches.
GRAPHICS AND VISUAL EFFECTS:
Diablo III is Blizzard’s best-looking game yet, and Blizzard makes some gorgeous ass games. Astounding use of vibrant color make Diablo III look like a moving metal cover. The environments work with the background and foreground now, too. Enemies will now crawl up at you from below or jump down from above, which makes it feel less like you’re playing on a large sheet of paper.
My only problem with the game’s visuals is that the environments dip into familiar Diablo territory too often. Act 2 of the game takes place in a giant desert, which is extremely reminiscent of Diablo II’s Lut Gholein. Act 3 even opens in a snow-swept castle and sends you out onto a battleground filled with siege equipment, hearkening to Mount Arreat from Lord of Destruction. Granted, Diablo II came out 12 years ago, so I didn’t mind seeing these environments recreated in 3D, but I was hoping for more original settings. That said, the game is still gorgeous, so even though you’ll recognize these environments from past games, you’ll never get tired of looking at them. I am amazed how good it looks and to compare Diablo III to DIablo II it still feels like the old game we all played and loved for so long...NOT. Its completley diferent then the last game and is a whole new game for diablo fans to enjoy!
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS :
It’s been a long, long wait, but it was all worth it. With Diablo III, Blizzard made one of the most approachable and enjoyable games in the world even better. In fact, aside from the annoying online-only infrastructure, I can’t imagine a single thing I would change to make this game better. That’s when you know you have a classic on your hands, and that’s also when you know you should play this game as much as you can.
FAQ:
1. Does Diablo 3 still like Diablo 2?
Answer:
To me the answer so far is no, I grew up on diablo 2, and know there were a lot of interesting things added over time but the core game was brilliant, it forced the players to not only rely on the armor sets, or unique items for combat but to rely on skill and setting. It forced the player to plan how they were going to play the game long before the game was actually played. When you did finally get started and found the unique items or complete sets you checked to see if they built up your planned characters. The beauty of the game was that your character was not only following the footsteps of the game they were following the footsteps literally of malius and his foolish quest. The other things about the game that I like were that your characters only spoke breifly when entering dungeons or caverns for the first time, this single line of text did not say much but it helped to solidify the different versions of each hero, I also liked how the NPC’s treated each class differently, now granted I haven’t got to far but it seems like very few of the NPC’s treat your character with any individuality, for example in D2-act 1 gheed hated necromancers, and if I remember correctly Act 2 or 3 saw a few NPC’s that either reverred necromancers or treated them harshly but fairly point being that these subtle hints aided in establishing the acts and the overall world of Diablo 2.
That being said what seems to really be a step backwards from the days of diablo 2 is the way the interface has taken a major step backwards, example number one is the potions, in D2 you could equip different potions or scrolls to any one of the number slots and use them as needed,also the potions seemed to never provide the player with the instantaneous effect D3 has but instead they provided a massive increase in the regen rate of the effect fields. Running, what happened tin the world of diablo, did its people forget how to run, well it seems like it since the stamina bar has been removed completely in favor of the latency bar as well as shrunk down to almost nill. Spells and abillity mouse selection seems to have been streamlined into a small little section at the bottom where players get the basic MMO set up as to compared to D2 where you could set up your personal number interliers from 1-9 plus mouse keys and switch on a whim, now your restricted to the left, right and numbers 1-4 due to the next disgrace. The skill system.
In diablo 2, the players were given a wide variety of skills based on the player skill trees, in diablo 3 the skill trees have been vastly reduced and now skills level up with the players level as opposed to players choosing where to put skill points into. This limits the players interactivity with the game and seems like mistake on blizzards part. Not only are we no longer allowed to advance skills at our leisure we now have one of the most ingenious systems of D2 and its expansion removed and altered for D3, and that is the rune system. In D2 runes were used to create special words that made unique items, that if combined correctly the item would gain special benifits, this fell in line with the Gem/socket system brought about in D2. In D3 the player no longer has that abillity instead the player’s rune system has been altered to serve the skill tree now, and while this is a good idea to an extent it destroys one of the love parts of diablo 2:LOD since the player has lost their customization of items for game play purposes. I would have like to see the socket/gem/rune/jewel systems maintained while also exploring this route but blizzard felt that was not what they wanted, which is a shame because it would have built upon an already excellent system.
Final few things i’m going to say about this game, one its not a horrible game, but so far the difficulty levels seems very off compared to D2, but i’ll reserve judgement fully on that till I finish the game, and two the always online single player, there are times where one can understand the benefits to always online and there are times where it looks like someones trying to be greedy, in this case blizzard/activision tried to be greedy. First off for a company that boasts 12million WoW players how is it that at launch their servers cannot handle the capacity of about 4 millions players, especially given the preorder numbers and the open beta weekend but i digress, what bothers me the most and i’m sure that many agree, having the single player be online only causes several problems, 1 being the short term server failure paperweight game, 2 four sets of TOS agreements that basically tell gamers that blizzard reserves the right to shut down accounts for no reason in one and that users are entitled to their money back if they refuse the last one before playing the game(I counted its four 2 page TOS agreements, I payed 60 bucks for a game, not to have to go to a lawyers office),3) D3 is the only known game that has full lag in the single player campaign, I give ubisoft credit because at least their servers can handle the load of their popular titles… and last what precedent does this set for blizzard games, does this mean that for both starcraft and diablo fans who still play the old games when blizzard decides it can no longer afford the cost of servers to house 20 million players, 30 million players, 40 million players, given estimates based on WoW and decides to shut down the servers of older games that don’t charge monthly premiums?
Thats the concern this practice presetns, what happens when we are no longer allowed to graciously play the rented game we payed sixty bucks for.
At least I trust steam to hit the off switch , I don’t even think one was designed for blizzards new generation of games.
2. Is the game worth 60$
Answer:
YES! Absolutley worth even more the game is amazing and i think 60$ for this is a fair price given the fact that you get your Battle-net account witch feels so good in the hands of a Long-Time blizzard games player.
3. Is the game harder, or easyer than the last game?
Answer:
Yes, it is easyer than D2 becouse of the fact that you have more options on D3 than on D2. But it is still challenging and it is not easy. If you find the game not challenging enough, go Nightmare, Hell hey maybe even Inferno.
Thats it, i hope you liked it good luck playing the game and most of all, hawe fun!
STORY:
The story in Diablo III isn’t extraordinary, but it is intelligible and enjoyable, which means it’s improved over previous games. The main plot follows a fairly standard path of deception and corruption and concludes in a predictable way — especially if you’re familiar with Blizzard’s story tendencies. Diablo’s greater success is providing charm and humanity through incidental dialogue. All of the game’s NPCs have interesting back stories that are revealed through chunks of dialogue as you progress in a very Bioware or Left 4 Dead sort of way. These impromptu discussions are well-written and often humorous. By the end of the game, I was actually attached to some NPCs because of their dialogue, which is a new experience in a game that’s usually about clicking a bunch of demons to death.
GAMEPLAY:
The big question here is “Does Diablo III feel like Diablo?” and it absolutely does. You still click on a bunch of demons and collect glistening loot. There are some tweaks to the formula in Diablo III though, and nearly all of them fix problems you never realized were problems. The biggest change is the game’s skill system. Unlike previous Diablos, you never actually attack with your equipped weapon. Instead, all of your attack skills work as modifiers on your weapon’s basic stats. Equip a faster weapon, and your skills will come out faster, and the same is true for weapons with higher damage. It works, but it is a little logically incongruent, especially when your character does an attack that doesn’t involve your equipped weapon at all, like blowing darts.
Here’s the smart bit though; every time you level, you’ll unlock a new skill or a rune for an existing skill that modifies its behavior and appearance. This, combined with different enemy types, means that Diablo III constantly prods you to experiment with new skill combinations that can drastically change the way you play. For example, as a monk I had a combination of skills that would pull enemies towards me then do area of effect damage. Then I tinkered with my loadout and created a set focused on dashing and knockback, meaning that I was zipping all over the battlefield slapping enemies around instead of pulling them to me. This is an incredible improvement over Diablo II, where you’d dump all your skill points into one or two select skills and do the same attack all game.
In fact, I have to get incredibly nit-picky to find something worth complaining about. You can’t compare gear to your follower’s equipment, which is a slight headache. You also can’t run around with the map overlay on, which is also a slight inconvenience. Uh…crafting recipes don’t pull items from your stash, meaning that you have to have the components in your inventory… and that’s about it. The limited and minor complaints I have about the game should speak more to the game’s quality rather than its downsides.
ONLINE UPS AND DOWNS:
Though you’re technically online even when you’re playing alone, Diablo III deserves special mention for how easy it is to play with your friends. You can add a friend from either their battle.net e-mail or via their battletag, which is a chosen handle with a random number appended to the end. Once friended, it’s trivial to the point of clicking once to join someone’s game. Given how complicated PC multiplayer can be, that’s amazing and deserves special mention. My only complaint is that the game doesn’t have any voice chat support, which is bizarre. Granted, you’ll probably be using Skype or Vent instead, but it’s odd that a game would ship without that functionality these days. For you to play the game you have to have internet connection at all time wich is kinda a downer so far. We will see what comes out in the next few patches.
GRAPHICS AND VISUAL EFFECTS:
Diablo III is Blizzard’s best-looking game yet, and Blizzard makes some gorgeous ass games. Astounding use of vibrant color make Diablo III look like a moving metal cover. The environments work with the background and foreground now, too. Enemies will now crawl up at you from below or jump down from above, which makes it feel less like you’re playing on a large sheet of paper.
My only problem with the game’s visuals is that the environments dip into familiar Diablo territory too often. Act 2 of the game takes place in a giant desert, which is extremely reminiscent of Diablo II’s Lut Gholein. Act 3 even opens in a snow-swept castle and sends you out onto a battleground filled with siege equipment, hearkening to Mount Arreat from Lord of Destruction. Granted, Diablo II came out 12 years ago, so I didn’t mind seeing these environments recreated in 3D, but I was hoping for more original settings. That said, the game is still gorgeous, so even though you’ll recognize these environments from past games, you’ll never get tired of looking at them. I am amazed how good it looks and to compare Diablo III to DIablo II it still feels like the old game we all played and loved for so long...NOT. Its completley diferent then the last game and is a whole new game for diablo fans to enjoy!
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS :
It’s been a long, long wait, but it was all worth it. With Diablo III, Blizzard made one of the most approachable and enjoyable games in the world even better. In fact, aside from the annoying online-only infrastructure, I can’t imagine a single thing I would change to make this game better. That’s when you know you have a classic on your hands, and that’s also when you know you should play this game as much as you can.
FAQ:
1. Does Diablo 3 still like Diablo 2?
Answer:
To me the answer so far is no, I grew up on diablo 2, and know there were a lot of interesting things added over time but the core game was brilliant, it forced the players to not only rely on the armor sets, or unique items for combat but to rely on skill and setting. It forced the player to plan how they were going to play the game long before the game was actually played. When you did finally get started and found the unique items or complete sets you checked to see if they built up your planned characters. The beauty of the game was that your character was not only following the footsteps of the game they were following the footsteps literally of malius and his foolish quest. The other things about the game that I like were that your characters only spoke breifly when entering dungeons or caverns for the first time, this single line of text did not say much but it helped to solidify the different versions of each hero, I also liked how the NPC’s treated each class differently, now granted I haven’t got to far but it seems like very few of the NPC’s treat your character with any individuality, for example in D2-act 1 gheed hated necromancers, and if I remember correctly Act 2 or 3 saw a few NPC’s that either reverred necromancers or treated them harshly but fairly point being that these subtle hints aided in establishing the acts and the overall world of Diablo 2.
That being said what seems to really be a step backwards from the days of diablo 2 is the way the interface has taken a major step backwards, example number one is the potions, in D2 you could equip different potions or scrolls to any one of the number slots and use them as needed,also the potions seemed to never provide the player with the instantaneous effect D3 has but instead they provided a massive increase in the regen rate of the effect fields. Running, what happened tin the world of diablo, did its people forget how to run, well it seems like it since the stamina bar has been removed completely in favor of the latency bar as well as shrunk down to almost nill. Spells and abillity mouse selection seems to have been streamlined into a small little section at the bottom where players get the basic MMO set up as to compared to D2 where you could set up your personal number interliers from 1-9 plus mouse keys and switch on a whim, now your restricted to the left, right and numbers 1-4 due to the next disgrace. The skill system.
In diablo 2, the players were given a wide variety of skills based on the player skill trees, in diablo 3 the skill trees have been vastly reduced and now skills level up with the players level as opposed to players choosing where to put skill points into. This limits the players interactivity with the game and seems like mistake on blizzards part. Not only are we no longer allowed to advance skills at our leisure we now have one of the most ingenious systems of D2 and its expansion removed and altered for D3, and that is the rune system. In D2 runes were used to create special words that made unique items, that if combined correctly the item would gain special benifits, this fell in line with the Gem/socket system brought about in D2. In D3 the player no longer has that abillity instead the player’s rune system has been altered to serve the skill tree now, and while this is a good idea to an extent it destroys one of the love parts of diablo 2:LOD since the player has lost their customization of items for game play purposes. I would have like to see the socket/gem/rune/jewel systems maintained while also exploring this route but blizzard felt that was not what they wanted, which is a shame because it would have built upon an already excellent system.
Final few things i’m going to say about this game, one its not a horrible game, but so far the difficulty levels seems very off compared to D2, but i’ll reserve judgement fully on that till I finish the game, and two the always online single player, there are times where one can understand the benefits to always online and there are times where it looks like someones trying to be greedy, in this case blizzard/activision tried to be greedy. First off for a company that boasts 12million WoW players how is it that at launch their servers cannot handle the capacity of about 4 millions players, especially given the preorder numbers and the open beta weekend but i digress, what bothers me the most and i’m sure that many agree, having the single player be online only causes several problems, 1 being the short term server failure paperweight game, 2 four sets of TOS agreements that basically tell gamers that blizzard reserves the right to shut down accounts for no reason in one and that users are entitled to their money back if they refuse the last one before playing the game(I counted its four 2 page TOS agreements, I payed 60 bucks for a game, not to have to go to a lawyers office),3) D3 is the only known game that has full lag in the single player campaign, I give ubisoft credit because at least their servers can handle the load of their popular titles… and last what precedent does this set for blizzard games, does this mean that for both starcraft and diablo fans who still play the old games when blizzard decides it can no longer afford the cost of servers to house 20 million players, 30 million players, 40 million players, given estimates based on WoW and decides to shut down the servers of older games that don’t charge monthly premiums?
Thats the concern this practice presetns, what happens when we are no longer allowed to graciously play the rented game we payed sixty bucks for.
At least I trust steam to hit the off switch , I don’t even think one was designed for blizzards new generation of games.
2. Is the game worth 60$
Answer:
YES! Absolutley worth even more the game is amazing and i think 60$ for this is a fair price given the fact that you get your Battle-net account witch feels so good in the hands of a Long-Time blizzard games player.
3. Is the game harder, or easyer than the last game?
Answer:
Yes, it is easyer than D2 becouse of the fact that you have more options on D3 than on D2. But it is still challenging and it is not easy. If you find the game not challenging enough, go Nightmare, Hell hey maybe even Inferno.
Thats it, i hope you liked it good luck playing the game and most of all, hawe fun!
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