DIABLO 3: THE REVIEW OF ALL TIMES (spoilers oh no)

I hate writing reviews for well-known stuff.  It's more fun to present opinions on stuff that hasn't been analyzed to death in endless circlejerks.  In Diablo 3's case, I'll make an exception because I believe my mind has two qualities that are generally mutually exclusive:

1) I am an intelligent, analytical human being.
2) I really really liked Diablo 2.

hey did you check kotaku no because I'm at a gamestop launch party

Alot of things have been endlessly mentioned in criticism of Diablo 3, so who fucking cares about that stuff.  Yes, the graphics are like hot topic brand Vaseline rubbed all over my monitor, my attempt to play through the entire campaign with the music on instead of Drive Like Jehu was an exercise in amazingly bad judgment,  latency is really good at making me never want to play hardcore, etc., etc.  I don't give a shit about the opening day problems, since as I am a normal human being these days I logged on at 6 AM and had no problems aside from achievements not working for a few hours, so whatever.  All I can take from that is that gamers are the most obnoxiously entitled fuckheads in history.

My ultimate verdict of Diablo 3, after getting through Nightmare and watching people play through inferno, would be "fairly tragic."  We have a game that was designed by people that either didn't really understand the full appeal of Diablo 2, or, unfortunately far more likely, are very cynically astute in how dumb gamers operate.

The biggest defense I've seen towards attacks on Diablo 3 are WELL REMEMBER DIABLO 2 VANILLA THAT WAS REALLY BAD TOO.  And they're right, Diablo 2 prior to Lord of Destruction was a complete mess of broken builds and limited item availability.  But here's a problem: Lord of Destruction came out already, but Blizzard apparently thinks you'll never remember that.  We are back at square one, with no charms, runewords, synergies, jewels, so on and so forth.  It's not like these concepts didn't work for LoD, so why the hell are they not in the base game?

I gave this guy sixty dollars

I find it hard to understand why there's so much brain-melting bellyaching over launch day outages, but nothing over the fact that Jay Wilson was either too fucking stupid to come up with any improvements to Diablo so he decided to just sweep LoD under a rug, or so dismissive of you and me that he knew that even after ten years, he could release a game missing a shitload of features the previous Diablo had and it would still be a huge critical success.  Fuck, were the launch day outages planned deliberately for this reason?  I've already muted Diablo 3's music, may as well put on Requiem For a Dream and get carted off to a place where they will inject enough sodium pentathol into my diseased brain that I can treat Diablo 2 as a new game.

And while vanilla D2 had some serious fucking problems, it was at least a massive departure from the original Diablo.  Diablo 3's only gameplay differences from Diablo 2 are that we now have a horrible "link skill damage to weapon damage" system and now there are blinky lights to show you were attacks are coming.  I'm sure it sounded great in Wilson's head: "Now I don't have to worry about people placing a million points in a single skill, you can compare all the skills along a single horizontal line!" The problem is, as has already been found out LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER RELEASE, is that this tends to mean that the only attributes that really matter are your vitality, added damage bonuses, and the attribute for your class that adds bigger numbers to your DPS.  Which means you get shit like this.  And then shit like the comments, where a bunch of mongs go ARE YOU IN INFERNO DIDN'T THINK SO THOUGH THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NO RELEVANCE TO WHAT IS BEING SAID.

coming soon, skynet automatically arranges your bids by greatest contribution to the doomsday clock!

The upside to this is that if the numbers are right, and rares generally severely outclass legendaries, the real money auction house is going to be completely insane with overlapping markets of people wanting the maxx dps yellows intersecting with the dopey people wanting the pretty unique items, both constantly running into each other until value has no meaning and Blizzard has to shut down the markets at least once a week, like a wall street computer contemplating the ultimate fate of mankind.

Of course, the problem is that the fact remains that uniques, especially worthwhile uniques, are clearly going to exist either for people willing to spend money or the really lucky, so remember those rare but still numerous moments of Diablo 2 when a Ber rune dropped from a zombie or an Ethereal Herald of Zakarum was just chilling in a barrel?  Yeah, expect a closer experience to when you were running The Pit 1500 times and your biggest drop was a 4os Colossus Blade.  That is to say, item hunting is going to be less about the visceral thrill of finding brand name items and instead looking for items that are not hype, but mathematically really strongth.  I'll probably stockholm syndrome myself into dealing with this, but still, what a terrible fucking idea.

Of course, maybe I'll be pleasantly wrong, and Blizzard will realize "oh shit we just made this game into a dumber World of Warcraft let's make these impossible to find rare items sexily worth it."

hahaha

Other things of amusing note:

Blizzard didn't even bother to make a complete game, setting wise.  Sure, Act 1 and 4 are unique, but Act 2 is literally the same progression of settings as it was in Diablo 2.  Hey here's a desert city, here's some deserts, here's some mysterious tombs, here's a hub area to mysterious arcane ruins that run in entirely right angles.  They even added a killer bug tunnel, though to be fair, it is not nearly as obnoxious as the Maggot Lair was (did you feel a chill down your back as I typed that out, I did, let's bundle up closer).  The only real difference is that they removed the palace in place of (get ready) MORE SEWER LEVELS *confetti*.

remember me moohahaha

Act III is thankfully not cribbing from swampworld 64, but is instead just shamelessly rips from Act IV and V of Diablo 2.  They only new environment there were square tower floors which were fun until the dozenth iteration of it and you're just like "okay great I get it blizzard you made a new map idea here's a milkbone."

I'd also like to talk about the story.  Diablo 2's was not good literature, but at least there was a theme: failure and weakness.  You are basically always one step behind from stopping the destruction of mankind, Marius basically is a giant weakling unable to do anything despite having the chance to do so.  It's a downcast, simple story helped by the bleak, ugly visuals.

Compare this to Diablo 3, which has no real theme aside from "you are a giant retard badass."  The reason bad stuff happens in Diablo 3 is not because the Prime Evils are just a little faster than you, it's because they left a plate of cookies outside of town and you decided to eat them while all your friends are killed.  There is a  really important distinction between your character failing because of external factors rather than because he or she is incapable of making good decisions while constantly walking into stupidly obvious traps, and Chris Metzen has a six-figure salary because he cannot understand that.  Meanwhile, Marius has been replaced by a young girl with really weird breast physics, and in the classic new Blizzard style, everything is super pretty and ultimately meaningless during cutscenes.

If there's anything I genuinely like in Diablo 3, it's boss monster modifiers.  Baddy packs suddenly have alot of scary ways to kill you, as opposed to the Diablo 2 model of "nothing matters except lightning enchanted."  On the other hand, monsters themselves feel far less creative in their base abilities, especially by the end.  Sneaky coordination like Oblivion Knights casting Iron Maiden on you while you're busy killing their melee buddies is gone, as are the OH FUCK baddies such as Gloams which made Baal running terrifying for summonmancers.  Speaking of Baal running, there's zero areas of the game where enemies lineup changes for each game.  There was a certain anticipation during a run if you were going to get the configuration that favored your class, or if you were going to have to chug pots like a giant baby while running from those exploding skeleton dolls.  Now every area has the same monsters every single time, and while boss modifiers kind of alleviate this, it's not a complete equivalent exchange.

I'm still on the fence about character abilities.  I've been mostly playing the Witch Doctor despite my realization early on that there is no straight up viable summoner class, and while there's lots of neat abilities, even in pre-Inferno it's becoming obvious that some abilities are just incontrovertibly awful compared to others.  With the Witch Doctor, you are literally shooting yourself in the dick if you don't take the escape skill and the damage leech skill, and since you have those, you may as well take two other cooldown abilities so you can have the massive mana regen skill and then oh boy thousands of combinations!!!  This hopefully won't be such an issue with balance patches and, more importantly, the slow influx of godlike items allowing for more experimental builds, but I think if this review represents anything, it's the guarded hope of things being better no thanks to the actual developers.

So ultimately I have this game, and I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it and the expansions.  I'm not proud of this.  Actually, I'm really not proud of this.  But really, the first step of living a true life is accepting our bullshit tendencies towards self-destruction, so who cares?  I've got a boring 1000 DPS dagger to find before my journey will complete, and I can shoot myself in the head without any regrets.