4.5/5 Pitchforks
It’s hard for a video game to live up to hype and expectations, especially when fans have been waiting several years to play it. Diablo III is the latest game presented with this seemingly insurmountable challenge, and for the most part its quality wildly exceeded my anticipation. Although the anti-piracy measures that developer Blizzard put into place are downright annoying, the company took notes from its success with World of Warcraft and skillfully used Diablo III’s 12-year development window to ensure the final product delivered fluid gameplay, an enriching art style and an endless craving for better gear. Dungeon crawling doesn’t get much better than this.
My biggest gripe about Diablo III is the game is a single player title that forces me to constantly be connected to the Internet. Without an Internet connection to verify the game, Diablo III won’t run, thus eliminating people’s hopes of easily pirating the game. On the downside of this scenario, if my connection lags or disconnects, my character dies and I lose any equipment and progress gained in the last few minutes. On normal or nightmare difficulties it isn’t a big deal. But when playing on hardcore mode, the loss of a connection means weeks of work is permanently gone.
Furthermore, in order to play I also have to hope Diablo III’s servers are online, which for the first week of launch was a major issue. Numerous error codes wreaked havoc on the game. Early into the second week post-launch the largest issues were resolved, but I expected a better launch from the company that runs the world’s largest MMORPG.
Unlike Ubisoft’s similar anti-piracy gaffe, Blizzard at least offers something to Diablo III players for its constant Internet connection — a real money auction house. The auction house supposedly works the same as its in-game-currency counterpart, except items are bid upon and bought out with real money. Naturally, Blizzard takes a cut of the payout, but the idea is neat if you can get past the company’s greediness in the whole situation. Sadly, the feature wasn’t online at the time of this review, so I’m unable to give more detail.
But enough griping about Diablo III’s negative qualities. The game’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The gameplay is easily my favorite aspect. Even if you’re not a Diablo junkie, the simple interface is easy to master. A mouse click attacks, loots and moves, and a small crop of buttons controls spellcasting and consumable items. The best change to gameplay from previous Diablo titles is how talent points are spent. My personal weakness with point-based systems is once I chose a talent path for my character I can’t undo it. When it comes to abilities, I frequently consider what will help me progress further into the game then and there, not what will work at end-game, and I often screw myself over. However, Diablo III does away with those concerns by allowing talents to be chosen at will and replaced any time the ability is off its cooldown. Every active talent has several unlockable runes that modify the base talent. This freedom really cries for experimentation and swapping talents to defeat certain enemies. It’s an innovation allowing everybody to play uniquely, which I’d like to see in similar games.
The art style is pretty spectacular. It’s very simple, with a lot of darkly colored backgrounds and primary colored equipment, and suits the game’s atmosphere extremely well by adding ambience to otherwise dull character models. The only drawback I’ve noticed is the Witch Doctor’s zombie dogs can look pretty similar to enemy combatants and cause a bit of confusion. Outside of the game’s normal appealing visual powers are its story cut-scenes. The cinematic cut-scenes are nothing short of awe-inspiring. At the beginning of each Act, gorgeous animation brings the main characters to life in a feature-film worthy sequence.
Diablo III’s story is rudimentary and predictable, but it does have more of a narrative than its two predecessors. However, the plot still primarily serves as a way to tie together quests and dungeons. After the first play through the story isn’t really worth paying attention to.
The dungeons, enemy variation and bosses are qualities that separate the Diablo franchise from other dungeon crawlers, and Diablo III is no exception. Alongside discovering new dungeons and world areas to explore are the hordes of randomly generated enemies seeking to conquer the region. Massive swarms of creature attack at once, and area-of-attack spells became crucial really early. But because of enemy variety spamming AOE spells doesn’t always work. Numerous enemies continuously spawn creatures, many of which fly or explode upon dying, leaving fire and poison pits that force you to move quickly. Learning what abilities work for certain classes of combatants and switching them appropriately really is an excellent cornerstone of Diablo III’s combat and keeps the game fresh through multiple difficulty levels.
Although Diablo III’s enemy variety is excellent, the boss battles are a bit underwhelming — especially on lower difficulty settings. Diablo himself is a very basic fight, and I found it easy compared to early bosses such as Belial. Nevertheless, the fights still add to the game and are pretty fun, especially when playing with friends.
The cooperative play works really well and skillfully solves issues I initially worried about. Finding people to play with is incredibly simple. Players on your friends list can pop in and out. By making your game public, anyone can randomly join you. My biggest concern is how loot distribution would work in multiplayer campaign, but Blizzard does away with my concerns by making only your item drops and gold visible. Gear can still be traded between players using the trade function, or by dropping items from your bag, but loot ninjas are a thing of the past.
Reach the reporter at tdmcknig@asu.edu