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I couldn't care less about the "hardcore" culture or competitiveness of these kinds of games. I never enjoyed that aspect of D2, and found most of the people who were obsessed with the ladder matches and competition seasons to be giant pains-in-the-ass.
The thing I love most about D3 so far is the couch co-op. Without that, I would probably lose interest. Single player action RPGs are a dime a dozen, and quickly boring. That's why I stopped playing Torchlight. These kinds of games are meant to be played with friends, and not via the pseudo-social interaction of the internet. Given the choice between playing a game in the same room as all my friends and playing with random people over Battle.net, I know what I'll choose every time.
I'd like to play Path of Exile next, but that isn't going to stop me from enjoying D3. I haven't found any of it cartoony. The art style is colorful, but still very dark. It reminds me of the Conan comic books, and that's awesome. The beginning and end of Act 1 in particular felt very much like D1. I had definite nostalgia flashbacks.
<== Was very disappointed with PC version of Diablo 3. The removal of character customization and stats really bothered me. Coupled with all of the latency issue as well as issues getting into games made for a very poor experience on the PC version.
However, I was very impressed with playing Diablo 3 Demo with a friend on the same console. We had so much fun I ended up purchasing the game to play local coop. I have been playing local coop and enjoying the game a lot. I will agree that playing local coop makes the game a lot more enjoyable.
I would still recommend Torchlight 2 or Path of Exile for PC players. Simplification is okay when it removes some of the wait while a player thinks over weapons / skills /builds in the same room, but a lot of my enjoyment comes from designing a character as well as playing / seeing the results of my build.
Yeah, not dark enough. I hate cartoonish graphics. One of the reasons i despise WoW. IMO the only game who pulled it off is Borderlands.
You have a weird definition of "cartoonish." WoW, sure. Definitely cartoonish. Torchlight also.
D3 and Borderlands though? What?
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Borderlands has comic-style textures, complementing its stylized models and over-the-top weapon designs.
Diablo 3 is a lot more colorful than its predecessors. Personally i think the extra bit of paint was refreshing, but that's entirely a matter of taste. I also like the color palettes used in WoW, although pretty much everything else about the in-game art style drives me up the wall (mostly the shoulder pads).
The toilet-seat-sized hands in WoW are worse than the shoulder pads.
Ahhhhh, now it makes sense.
There's a big difference between "comic style" and "cartoonish".
Comics use exaggerated ideal proportions. Cartoons use exaggerated comedic proportions. The lines blur a bit, but those are the generally accepted definitions.
What I hear when you say that you don't think Diablo 3 is "dark" enough is that you don't like color, which is an oddly specific and silly complaint.
Have you played Limbo? That game is cartoonish, but highly graphic and just about as "dark" as it gets.
The dark atmosphere is gone?
At the beginning of the first act you help the blacksmith kill his wife because she became infected while trying to help people wounded by zombies. For the rest of the game the repercussions of that action are most of what the blacksmith talks about.
The big pivotal moment comes when Adria betrays everyone, sacrificing her own daughter in a ritual that allows Diablo to possess Leah. By doing that, Adria destroys her daughter's soul and becomes responsible for the death of nearly all of the angels in heaven.
So I'm not sure what qualifies as "dark" to you if that isn't it.
Admittedly, the first game had a much darker ending (where your character kills his little brother and becomes Diablo's new host) but overall I'd say that 3 is much truer to form than 2 was.
Okay, let's not pretend there weren't any colorful things that made wierd sounds in D2.
The swamp frogs were pretty colourful and made weird sounds. And I really loved the pygmies' sounds.
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And I really hated pygmies riding one or another.
Other than the rainbow and unicorn level D3 is just as dark an atmosphere as D2 was.
I honestly thought D3 was more gloomy than D2, especially in the first act. Going through the ruins of the monastery and Leoric's huge torture chambers was awesome.
Admittedly, the end of the third act was definitely the opposite of gloomy, but that was sort of the point. It still managed to be visually stunning and emotive because terrible things were happening to such a shiny place.
Ok started playing diablo 3 as a Witch Doctor. He finds a sword and automatically equips it but it seems all random weapons are really just boosts? Does the barbarian even use new weapons? Seems like a lot of effort went into equiping mage characters with bows/swords/sheilds but the execution seems flawed? Are most people just picking items up and then selling them for appropriate gear?
What will happen is back to old D2 days:
Create a public game, have my bag of goodies. Visiting players come in, check the wears out, if the want, they trade in game.
The only thing you are really losing is the chance to get real money for your items, in game drop n swap will come back to the fore.
You all must hate GW2, then.
You can buy "gems" to puchase cosmetic items or other in-game services, or convert them to in-game currency to buy things off of the in-game auction house.
so why did they add/keep random drops for console players. My witch Dr finds a short sword and auto equips it? Is it truee that the attack modifier for the sword actually helps my spider jar attacks? Seems really silly if so.
Is the barbarian able to use the short sword or will he still use his axe/special abilities.
Yes wicked cool your weapon's dps is the base line all your powers use. So finding a nice short sword may very well improve your jar of spiders attack.
Thanks Aranna. Seems like they wanted to add random loot for console users but having a spellcaster use a shortsword to improve DPS from spells is flawed at best. Ohh well still a fun game.
I honestly thought D3 was more gloomy than D2, especially in the first act. Going through the ruins of the monastery and Leoric's huge torture chambers was awesome.
Admittedly, the end of the third act was definitely the opposite of gloomy, but that was sort of the point. It still managed to be visually stunning and emotive because terrible things were happening to such a shiny place.
It seems like there are hundreds if not thousands of long articulate rants spread across the internet that break down the issues that most people had with Diablo III in detail, but for the sake of completeness I’ll chime in one more time.
There are so many problems with this game from a gameplay, atmosphere, dialogue, and storytelling that it’s hard for many people I think to identify the worst offender. As a result, a lot of observations turn into sort of snowballs, with each complaint linked to the next. I’m going to try and identify each problem more or less on its own, starting with what I perceived as the worst.
Story
The backbreaker for me was the plot more than anything. It felt contrived and was blindingly obvious from the first act – at least for me. While the plot of Diablo I and Diablo II wasn’t Shakespeare it knew what it was, and did it very well. The first game was a struggle against a long buried and forgotten evil. It was fairly direct, but with magnificent lore surrounding it. If you still have a copy, go back and look at the original Diablo’s game book that came packaged with every copy. It was a magnificent piece of art that laid out tons of background information that helped set the stage for the game.
This world had once been rent by cosmic events, but had been at peace beyond memory. Men had forgotten the true horrors that lurked, and you alone as the hero were tasked with delving alone deep into the darkest horrors and nightmares of the past. You fight your way through the Monastery filled with petty demons and undead, but encounter more and more nightmarish beings the further you go. The entire time you are at the edge of your seat, because some new horror is just around the corner. Each boss battle is a terrifying thing. I distinctly remember my first battle against the Butcher – getting cut down in seconds – and sequent ones where each was a terror with looming death. I remember him chasing me through the lower levels and the horror of his room, with the piled and strung up corpses soaked in red – in contrast to the blacks and grays of the world. Everything was dark, the only light was cast by the rare light sources and the player themselves. In many ways this darkness was a psychological element to the game. You proceeded along a liner and direct, but detailed and believable story. Though isolated in design to a single location you proceed further and further into, there was an explanation for the depth of the location – why there seemed to be endless levels. The story wrapped up in a direct but satisfying way, with you confronting the Lord of Terror.
Cut to game two. Diablo II continues in the same direct way as the first game. You have clear goals that make sense. It isn’t super complicated, but the story moves logically from one place to the next. You start out in the rogue’s camp, where you discover the Dark Wanderer, your hero of days gone past, has passed through with hell following with him. The rogues – a character option from the past game – have been devastated and pushed back. Many of them have been corrupted into fiendish beings and their greatest hero – a character from the last game – has been risen as a dark terror you must overcome. Right away you are hit with the psychological terror. You discover that your past victory was a pyrrhic and question what the result of this one will be. It paints subtle nuances to an otherwise straight forward find and kill story. You clear the Cathedral and at the climax of the first act learn what it is to face down and defeat a lesser lord of the Burning Hells.
You proceed off to chase the wanderer, and immediately discover that here too has darkness followed him. You find another city under siege from within and without. There is here, as in Act I, a feeling of the world on the edge. You discover the Wanderer is trying to undo the great sacrifice of Tal Rasha – something you read about in the first game. You race through darkened crypts to stop him, along the way discovering the fate of the second of the three heroes from the first game – that of a depraved demon summoner who has all but lost his mind.
You fail to stop the release of Tal Rasha, and move to chase two of the three Prime Evils to prevent the release of their final brother into the world. You discover Kurast, once a beacon of righteousness, rotten from within. Here more than anywhere you see echoes of the first game’s story. You race to the climax and discover, in the depths of the Durance of Hate, the first of the Prime Evils, who you overcome in a brutal confrontation.
You travel form there through the very portal of Diablo and Baal to chase them into Hell itself, where you lay siege, with only the last redoubt of angels and heroes as your base of operations. You journey into the depths of Hell to kill the Lord of Terror forever. In so doing you slay the last hero of the first game, a mighty and good man driven made and transformed into a being of darkness.
Finally, you have to journey north in search of the last brother has he lays siege to the Barbarians and their sacred charge. You see the wreckage he has left his wake, stumble over the corpses of the barbarians who gave their lives to stop him, and see the hopelessness of your circumstance. You travel through endless fortifications that did nothing to stop him. Between this act and the last you feel mighty. You feel like you have grown from a simple neophyte into a mighty hero who can challenge the mightiest beings of hero. The game ends with the destruction of the World Stone – another pyrrhic victory.
Taking a step back, neither story is particularly original in its overarching themes, but it works together. There is psychological horror. There is victory but always at cost. There is the wreckage of bygone ages of man and a feeling of darkness to the world. In every game and every act the circumstances have grown more dire. Everywhere you go you find the great cities thrown down or besieged. You are the center of the story, the hero, undoing the mistakes of the past. You are growing as a character in power and driving things forward. The NPCs that show up are for the most part minor parts of the story that serve as bits of information, but not as the heroes themselves. You don’t have to take them along with you to do things, and if you check in with them it is only for side plots or information. There is no deception, no bait and switch, and no duplicity.
Now let’s look at Diablo III. From the very first act you have other characters – NPCs – at the center of the story. The entire thing is kicked off by Tyrael’s great fall, and the entire first act is a fight against a petty witch to recover him. You get deceived and run around by that witch the entire first act, with even the boss battle as a fight you walk into like an idiot. You recover Tyrael and have to go off with him, but he’s the one leading the story and driving it. It’s Tyrael that leads you everywhere and Tyrael who you respond to. You are not driving the story, you are riding along.
There is no real darkness here. New Tristam was growing and prosperous, and survives the attack largely unscathed (one blacksmith’s wife excepted). Caldeum is the greatest city in the world; one that may have a demon at its head, but shows no ill signs as a result. Incidentally, setting Act II in Caldeum and not letting you explore the city was, in my view, a mistake (but we’ll get back to that later). Even in Act III at the fortress you find not a fallen fortress, but one under siege. Throughout the siege you have NPC driven events like raising catapults and lighting fires, rather than PC driven events like crushing landings. You are helping toe defenders defendthe castle. There is never a feeling of desperation.
Back to the story though, we have Act II, were you are introduced to a blindly obvious traitor in Adria (if a non-sensibly traitorous one). You know there is something up with Leah, and that she is likely the daughter of the hero from the first game. Here both as a character and a player I can tell that I’m being manipulated and played. My in and out of game knowledge is letting me poke holes in the plot, rather than making it a richer thing as it did in the first two games. You are manipulated by the obvious Demon Lord the entire second act to get the ‘Black Soulstone’ and finally confront him in another ‘boss’ battle that feels contrived rather than difficult. As an aside, compare the Butcher (mark 2) and Belial to the original Butcher and Andariel. The Butcher and Belial may do more things, but the fights aren’t scarier for it, they’re just more annoying, more cartoonish and more obviously gamey. It has nothing to do with color or art and everything to do with presentation.
After defeating Belial you race to Bastion’s Keep to defend it and eventually push out to chase down the last of the minor evils, all the while the Blacksoul stone makes trouble for Leah, Adrea is obviously up to no good, and Tyrael is useless. You achieve your victory here at the end of a long grueling series of encounters and another ‘boss fight’ only to find out that Leah and Adrea are what as really important, and in a shock you are responsible for the fall of all of Heaven at the hands of a reborn Diablo who is mightier than ever before because of his Black Soulstone fusion. This leads to a truncated Act IV where you fight through heaven rescuing angels so you can finally fight and defeat Diablo in Heaven.
So, in comparison to the first two games, where you sought out and fight the great evils, in this one you are led around by an angel, fight some evils that don’t seem to be doing very much, are manipulated into helping give birth to a new Diablo, and then proceed to immediately defeat him after he wrecks heaven. Honestly, Diablo III didn’t feel like my hero’s story. It felt like Leah’s story. The plot centers around her as the rebirth of Diablo, not me as the hero stopping the forces of darkness. I’m the one being manipulated all game (quite obviously) into doing their bidding to achieve Leah’s destiny. If it isn’t Leah’s story it is probably Tyrael’s, as he’s the one who kicks everything off and leads you around. I’ve also got this weird and unrelated nephilim side story, and the off screen deaths of a bunch of heroes from the second game that never come up here.
Overall the story just isn’t interesting not only because the plot is contrived to bring back Diablo, but because it isn’t my story. I’m a passenger. Not only do I make no choices of my own (because it is a strict on the rails story), the choices that are made for me are ones that drive the tale of someone else. It is bad writing, even before we get to the incoherence of a bunch of the side stuff (the Black Soulstone, the nephilim, betrays, ect).
There are things that could have been done to fix those problems, both on a large and small scale. The problems in terms of plot and story start with the lack of a true driving force for your character. What drives you through the game at present is not an objective, but weak pushes from NPCs. In games past this would have been a villain, someone you might call an antagonist. Throughout Diablo III we are treated to one, pardon the expression, ‘limp dick’ villain after another. We have this weird evil fairy cult leader who shows up halfway through Act I, but mostly we’re just here poking around the area. We have a bunch of Diablo I villains recycled as mini-bosses without much explanation, but no focus of our hate. I think they wanted Maghda to serve in this role, but she doesn’t. Even when she kills Cain – which I think is supposed to be the turning point – she doesn’t feel powerful or scary. She’s a weak villain who killed a helpless old man. I’m mad that Cain dies, but more mad that he’s been killed pointlessly by a boring lame villain. The fact that she spends literally the entire act misleading and running from you doesn’t help in that regard. She exists as a high school bully; someone that you know doesn’t really mean anything in the scheme of things.
After her we get Belial and Azmodan, who both seem impotent and in no way terrifying. They both seem incompetent in their areas of expertise, and Belial seems outright harmless. Belial is ruling over a thriving city. He shows up (very obviously) trying to deceive you and later dies a punk. Azmodan feels compelled to taunt you throughout all of Act III even as every one of his little plots fail. When I finally killed him I didn’t have a sense of accomplishment, I had a sense of relief that this ‘great tactician’ would finally shut the hell up and stop telling me about his great plans. Diablo himself is simply not on screen long enough to have any form of attachment. There is no chance to rebuild the mythos before he falls again.
In the first game I hear about villains well in advance. I get to see their villainy and its results. The first thing that happens in the game before I make it into the Monastery is the discovery of a man on the verge of death who tells me about how treacherous Lazarus was and how an entire band of men were murdered by the Butcher. When I find these guys later the throw down has meaning. When I finally get all the way to Diablo it’s epic. The same is true of Diablo II. I hear about villains long before I see them, and get to see their victories long before I overcome them. Andariel succeeds in corrupting the vast majority of the rogues, routing them, and all but destroying the entire area while holding the gate to the next area against us. She doesn’t actually show up until you go find her, at which point you have a reason to want to kill her. You’ve seen what she’s done to the rogues and heard about her for an entire act. Duriel has less build up, but is a terrifying foe when he does up, and a real kick in the quad because his presence confirms you’ve failed. You see Meph’s actions in the form of the downfall of the greatest beacon of light in the world, and the corruption of an entire kingdom while he’s still trapped. Diablo you spend four acts chasing before you catch, and Baal you likewise have a ton of buildup to. These are powerful and terrifying villains not because they are phoning you every 5 minutes to taunt you, but because they are pursuing their own agendas. You aren’t even worth their notice for most of the game. I get to see that they are powerful and effective, not bad jokes.
First and easiest change to the plot to make it better? Give us a villain. Someone we can hate and want to chase down. Make it someone who scares us and is competent. For my money, if I’m working within the framework of the existing plot, I would have made it Leah. Instead of Leah as this poor innocent weak and pointless victim in everything, make Leah the driving force behind everything the bad guys are doing – and aware of it. How much if a kick in the balls would it have been if, when at the end of Act I you finally catch up to Maghda, you discover that Leah was the one masterminding everything? She was the one giving the orders. She was the one who had Cain, the man who raised her, killed. She has been with him for years trying to discover the hidden knowledge she needs to fulfill what she believes is her destiny, wields tremendous powers as the spawn of the Lord of Terror, and is now ready to put her plot in motion. This was all a plot to get some knowledge (perhaps about the shards of the World Stone) from Tyrael. You return to Tristam only to find most of it leveled, Tyrael slain or injured, and Leah racing off to Caldeum with the knowledge she needed to move forward. You now have an enemy you can hate and fear. You’ve still got the little twist the writers wanted but instead of leading you around for three acts like an idiot (despite being the most powerful person on the planet) it happens when you are still relatively fresh faced.
In Act II, continuing with this Leah as the villain, you arrive to find that Caldeum is in ruins. You discover she has Azmodan with her, and his armies have laid waste to the city. She (and they) is searching for something in the city.
Instead of running around the desert doing stupid things you are delving into Cadeum, the greatest city in the world, overrun with fiends of every kind. Instead of a city as this great thing talked about that you get to visit (but only 1 block of) you get to see the whole thing – and it is a disaster. Wow, now I start to get the feeling of darkness and evil growing. Things are really going downhill. Leah is here for something, and you don’t know what it is. Thousands are dying and demons are roaming the city. You make for the Mage Academy, which you discover barely stands behind the might of the sorcerers. You get a great opportunity to introduce us to the Vizjerei sorcerers, the only group we haven’t really seen from the first game. Wow, that’s cool. We meet Valthek and he reports that he suspects she is here for a shard of the World Stone that the Vizjerei recovered. He doesn’t know where it was stored, but perhaps the mad sorcerer Zoltun Kulle (who recovered it) does. He’s been living in the streets for years and hasn’t been seen. Now you get to poke around the city more. Eventually you find him and he relates to you the final resting place of the shard. You race towards it only to discover you are too late and, oh crap, Valthek is actually Belial. The real sorcerer never woke up form his duel with the wizard and the armies that Leah led here were led by Belial all along – the Azmodan story was a lie. They could never have convinced Kulle to reveal the location of the stone themselves, so they manipulated you. For an entire act you’ve been lied to! See how much more effective that is than telling you that Belial is here then immediately introducing only one new character who is clearly Belial?
Belial declares that your usefulness is at an end. Cue fight. You win and discover once more Leah has escaped, continuing her plan and carrying the world stone shard. But where is she going? What is she doing? Why not ask the half-mad Kulle who knows more about it than anyone? Yeah, you guessed it, he’s our new stand-in for Cain. He reveals that with the World Stone destroyed Leah can’t actually corrupt the entire world as Baal wished to, but that she could use it in a place of power to change some of the rules that govern reality. For instance, she could open gates between this world and the others – for instance she could open the gates of hell and allow an endless swarm of demons to pour into this world, drowning it and bringing on the apocalypse. The best place of power? The same place the World Stone itself once stood – the crater of Mount Arreat.
Now you have two choices as a writer. You can move forward with the same sort of plot as the main storyline – in this case Leah (truly her father’s daughter now) proceeds to Arreat. She succeeds in opening the gates of hell, but also a gate to the heavens. That’s been her plan all along! Her armies pour from hell to earth to heaven. You can stage Act III much the same way, and have Act 4 move to Heaven where you are trying to both save the Heavens from the army of demons, and also reach Leah so you can go back and close the open gates which one way or another spell doom for this world. Act III still involes the fight against Azmodan, who has been left to command the armies that defend the portals and which will conquer the world while Leah wages her war against the heavens. Alternatively you can go with a more straight forward fight against demons and a journey into hell to stop Leah.
In either case Leah is Diablo, his living breathing heir. There is no need to undo everything players did in the previous games to bring him back and add in stupid new things that don’t make sense with the existing lore like the ‘Black Soulstone’. The bad guys are pursuing their own objectives. They are successful and scary. You have a reason to chase them around and hate them. You still get manipulated, but you don’t see it coming for the entire duration of the game. You get the Lord of Lies to actually lie convincingly. You get Azmodan actually wagging a war with a purpose. You have a plot that reminds people of past games effectively. You have a chase, you have twists events that are similar but also distinct like the surprise villain at the end of Act 2. You get to see new parts of the world, and still touch on things from the first game (like the Vizjerei). You can even stick Adria in the game if you want. If you wanted to get really ambitious you could have Adria really be Lilith all along, and could probably work her in either as an act boss or a character that could be touched on in a later expression.
There are other issues with the plot – like the nonsensical return of many villains from past games (the Butcher/ Leoric), but they can be ignored if you get around the main plot’s lack of effective storytelling. If I’m caught up in the story I have less time to worry about why the Butcher is back and so forth.
Atmosphere
These games don’t feel like Diablo games of the past, and it isn’t simply because they ‘aren’t dark enough’ in terms of color use. Act II of Diablo II was plenty bright in color, but still felt like Diablo. Nor is the game ‘not dark enough’ because bad things don’t happen. The Blacksmith’s wife is a good example of a relatively dark event early on that had what should have been the right tone in the game. The problem is a combination of storytelling that does not evoke fear, graphical decision that seem slightly off, and cartoonish game play aspects that break immersion.
The first, storytelling, I touched on above. There are no real villains here, and the characters that are supposed to be villains are transparent, boring, or juvenile. They show up too often, taunt too frequently, and are easily seen through. There is no build up to confrontations with them. They don’t seem vile in the same way that Andariel in the depths of the Catacombs felt vile, nor are they wicked in the same way that Meph in the Durance of hate was, with his lake of blood and portal to the hells. Attached to that, there is no real existential threat personally or to the world. Tristram is never in real danger after the first couple minutes, Caldeum is almost idyllic for a city ruled by a demon lord, and even the Keep doesn’t feel particularly desperate in the way that Harrogath did. It is being attacked, but it is so comically massive that it doesn’t feel like it. Part of that is the size of the castle – it is hard to take seriously such a huge fortification – and part of it is that I genuinely don’t care about any of the soldiers dying here and don’t understand why Azmodan is wasting his time. There is no connection in the same way that there was with the Barbarians in Diablo II, whose tales you got to hear individually. There is no Qual-Kehk lamenting the loss of his warriors, no Anya tending to the wounded, nothing to connect you at all to the act. The entire castle is just a set-piece.
The dialogue is a huge part of that last problem. The swap from long monologues by characters into banter between your character and the NPCs was, frankly, stupid. There is no weight to the speeches of other characters with your character throwing quips into it. The breakup of lines is excessive. I understand the idea of giving more life and more realistic speech patterns, but it doesn’t work when the dialogue lacks depth and you have no input into it. What do I mean by that?
Basically the way dialogue works in many (most) decent games is that either the NPCs tell a story and I sit there and listen to it, or the NPCs tell their stories through interactions with my character that I have a variety of possible responses to – which produce slightly different outcomes or responses in turn and immerse me in what is going on. Generally speaking both have their merits and work well depending on the circumstance. The strength of long chunks of storytelling is that it allows a designer to give me a lot of information within the world that I can digest at once. I can then fill in my response outside the game (talking to my screen / self) to decide how I respond. I can also skip through the entire dialogue very quickly if I’ve heard it many times before and don’t wish to again. The strength of giving me dialogue options is that it makes me feel more autonomous and actively involves me in the storytelling process. I have to pay attention so I can respond. Diablo III chose a third option of short conversations occurring between NPCs and myself that I had no control over. My idiot character would make whatever response to whatever line the writers decided. It is not effective in terms of immersion or storytelling, and given the plot involves you being led around like a tool by the villains and manipulated the entire time it is particularly frustrating. I can’t even play the part of the cynical guy going along with it because my responses in the game make it clear that my character has the naivety of a six year old child.
Beyond that, the dialogue itself is poorly written, and worst of all I have to sit through it / click many times to get through it every single time I want to play. It’s obnoxious in every way and baffling to me. Did no one realize that this was a bad idea? Was there no quality control at all at Blizzard when the game was being developed?
My feeling is that, especially, moving away from the monologues / stories from NPCs really undermined the dark and goth feel of the game. In the past we usually heard full tales – usually of woe and darkness – from characters. Now we get quips and one liners (especially from PCs) that just don’t have the right tone.
Graphics do play a part in the darkness aspect, especially in decision to move away from any areas that are what I would really describe as dark. I’m amendable to the argument that your character should have a bright light source, and agree that there is not much use in beautiful textures if you never show them off, but they went a bridge too far here. Every area is brightly lit and the most shadow you can get is a faint fog of war. That’s a bad departure from previous games. There is simply too much anbient light everywhere. Again, what kills me here is that it isn’t as though you can’t have bright areas. The key is you have to balance them with darker areas or you lose the dark and gothic feel of the game. Act II of Diablo II did this amazingly well, with the very bright desert contrasted by dark tombs that you had to light the way in.
Finally, there’s the cartoonish game play / board creation decisions that really kill it for me. The worst offender here are the boss ‘zones’ as it were, where you are locked in a room and have a villain pop out to fight you like they’re a WWE wrestler. The Butcher is the worst example, but there are plenty of others. Almost every act boss has a contrived final battle that completely breaks my immersion in the game. Too many enemies – even beyond act bosses – have abilities that are explicitly designed to be frustrating from a game play perspective, rather than a world perspective. Finally, the ‘enrage’ timers were just obnoxious and huge departures from part of what made the first couple games fun – in the ability to build whatever character you wanted. Everything is skewed towards DPS in a way that is just annoying. We’ll get to that more in a moment under gameplay.
The decision to have deaths not really hurt you or set you back was one of those other bad decisions that killed the atmosphere of the game. In the first two games dying was a giant pain in the you know what. Beyond lost gold and durability, you had to find your corpse and may your way back, and generally speaking lost a lot of time and effort. Reducing those penalties was not a good thing,, because it removed a game play motivation for an atmosphere building out of game feeling (fear, terror, caution, ect).
These games should be creepy and scary – Diablo III was not.
Gameplay
Much of the actual gameplay of Diablo III wasn’t bad in the general sense. The problem was that it in no way resembled what had come before. If it hadn’t been Diablo III it might have been a decent game, but as it was it barely resembled in any way that fans expected. That turned off a lot of fans, and no where was it any more evident than skills and stat generation for characters.
The game removed all elements of choice and specialization in character creation / play – key features of the first two games. The choice of where you put your ability points could let you generate vastly different characters even within the same class (for the first game), and with the option of where to put skills you could generate literally dozens of characters from every class in Diablo II that could all be tremendously effective in very different things. While I appreciate the reasoning behind removing specialization and moving to a more easily shifted level of specialization (e.g. away from dedicated skill points, towards selected skills at the moment) the result was the removal of a lot of the replay value of the game. The fact that my wizard could completely change focuses with a change of clothing and a slightly different selection of skills was a huge bummer compared to the very specialized and unique characters you could generate in Diablo II.
I appreciate that for some people the choices available in Diablo II could result in characters that were very ineffective – and then had to be rebuilt from scratch – but that was half of the fun of the game. Finding out what worked and what was effective for you was a huge part of the game. It kept it interesting long after you had tons of awesome swag and had beaten through the game numerous times. My most memorable experiences were of building melee sorceresses and spell focused paladins, trying to see if I could make it work even at the highest levels of the game (hint, the dream runeword was awesome for melee sorceresses). Playing through the game multiple times with new characters was awesome and fun, building each in a unique way. They removed all purpose to that with the ability to instantly and freely reset all skills. Lack of specialization resulted in bland characters.
The choice to move towards only having a maximum of 6 available skills was a terrible one, and a choice obviously made primarily so the game could be marketed / ported more easily to the consoles. Likewise, the removal of the ability to have crossover skills as existed in Diablo I & II was really frustrating. My magic using rogue and teleporting druid were both awesome and really fun.
A byproduct of shifting as they did towards more generic skills and powers that had no specialization (along with a maximum of 6 skills on tap) was a streamlining and simplification of both gear and skill based tactics. Instead of getting nuanced items that could be made to work in a specialized character we got nothing but a race to the top in terms of resistances and DPS (especially combined with things like enrage timers). No longer was their room to fit almost any item into the proper build – something that rendered even items statistically weaker in many ways still useful. Now it was all a race towards core stats, which crippled the fun in loot drops. While I always hoped for a Storm Shield drop while grinding, I was able to find a use for the lidless eye I got. Now every drop that isn’t a direct statistical improvement is a disappointment. That’s a really sad state of affairs for the game.
The other result was a hard cap on how far you could get in the game without very specific items. In earlier games for instance, Diablo II, a relatively new player with very little in terms of wealth could be highly successful using a skills focused character such as a sorceress or paladin to hunt for top level gear. Now effectively everyone is in the same boat – their gear determines everything about how effective they are. They’re also all hunting for gear that is more or less the same, which inflates the prices of things. The race towards DPS instead of a more diverse selection as in past games (such as characters focused on plus skills items or unique effects) makes item hunting extremely one dimensional.
A final byproduct of all of that, combined with the randomizing of even unique items, is that even the incredibly rare drops that should be a real prize (unique / set items) are often really bad or worse than conventional blue or yellow items for a given character, because randomized bonuses on them often generated things that were useless in the narrowly focused game Diablo III is.
As a final kick in the teeth to previous gamers, the game pretty much made it impossible to run bosses or just mow down enemies in the same way possible before. Now reverting to earlier portions of the game reverts you to the quests and forces you through that same dialogue. While I understand they wanted to make the game easier or more interesting for people that wanted to just progress through levels again, I think there were better options for that than removing things like teleport & leap (or putting them on huge timers). It smacks of lazy and frankly eccentric designers who are convinced their way to play is the best and only way anyone should be playing – especially when the neater solution would be to leave such skills intact while also implementing the valor system they used.
In many ways there’s actually an argument to be made about how Diablo II -> Diablo III resembles D&D 3.5 -> D&D 4th Edition. Both saw a serious streamlining of the options available and a focus on more ‘balanced’ play that is easier to design within the framework of, but I’ve gone on for more than long enough at this point.
Unaddressed
There are a final few things to be mentioned in the wrap up here, but I’ll be brief because this has already gone on much too long. The way that so much was promised in the demonstrations and commentary by designers that was never put into the game was also a huge negative for the game. There was so much talk about evolving and destructible environments, getting unique boons that lasted for a little while by killing an enemy (such as flaming weapons or frost weapons) and so forth that never made it into the game. That’s really disappointing. Stuff gets cut from every game, but the stuff cut here was really extreme in terms of finished product vs. what was presented at trade shows. The connection issues at release were a disaster that should never have happened, as was the always on DRM in general. More disastrous though in the long run is the way game making and lobbies were changed – especially the swap away from being able to team up with random guys to take down bosses and play through the game. The swap to a 4 player limit was also nonsensical and crap. Having a huge team together in Diablo II was one of the really awesome features.
In almost every way in that regard the game was a huge step backward.
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And that, my friends, is how you write your dissertation on an internet forum.
And that, my friends, is how you write your dissertation on an internet forum.
Nah. That's not even the longest thing I've ever posted on this forum, and it's in no way even close to graduate level stuff. Hell, my final papers in undergrad were both in the fifty-seventy page range. This clocked in at roughly ~9 in word.
And you wonder why newspapers are dying and bloggers are the new preferred source for nuggets of news/opinion...
Odd, isn't it, that in this climate Reader's Digest is virtually defunct... (irony at its sharpest)
Well I read the first part of that monster post so far and found it false and misinformed. YOU are the driving force from the very start of the game. Driven by your very personal destiny to stop Diablo when the only clue you have to go on is the fallen star, you charge to Tristram to find it and the answers it MUST hold. What you don't realize at the start is you have someone else looking for this harbinger of fate in order to stop a hero from rising up... Belial, the lord of lies. To be honest I would have been severely disappointed if deception wasn't used against me by a villain who specializes in it. In losing Cain you form a bond with Leah, she feels like a friend now through shared loss, Cain being the driving force behind your quest in D2 and the most useful ally in D1 makes it personal to YOU and obviously for Leah this is her adopted parent she just lost. This IS important when you at the end of the story lose Leah herself to Diablo's machinations, making it feel like you just lost a friend and making your quest against Diablo MORE than just personal destiny/storyline but also about personal loss. And unlike the ungainly, tacked on, and unsatisfactory last act of D2, D3 leaves you yearning to resolve this betrayal of Leah in some real way... which I imagine will be the perfect gateway into the expansion.
The fear of any of these bosses from either game came not from their story but from their lethal capabilities. You want to fear the game? Try hardcore mode... I do. I pause and gather my wits before each boss fight and face down my very real fear that this may be the end of my character. I go over my build and my gear, I come up with a strategy, and I commit it all on the big and very dangerous fight. In D2 the bosses were the weakest opponents in the game. I know someone who defeated Bhaal on the highest difficulty by starting the fight and letting his skeletons kill Bhaal while he went and made a sandwich. You can't do that in D3. The real fights in D2 were against the elites who if they got the right set of abilities made your life hell getting past them. This is the same for D3 BTW, if you fight in softcore mode then the elites are your real problem and the bosses become only moderately difficult speed bumps.
As for the inclusion of NPCs? Cain drove the storyline in D2 much as Tyreal drives it in D3 (as information givers) and although I didn't play D1 I hear it had little story beyond being a dungeon crawl.
I will post more when I get around to reading the rest of his big post.
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Because people are lazy and entitled and want anything in a digest version. Pro tip, some of the long stuff are really worth reading.
Yeah, read too much crap before that ends up being somebody's "my opinion is awesome, here's why in 4000+ words" that really isn't worth it. If you can't give a decent outline of an opinion in a fairly brief manner then my opinion is that you really aren't as good of a writer as you think you are. I have wasted too much time reading people's ego-stroking musing in my life and unless your forum name is some famous writer's name then I will pass on reading when I have 4 screens filled with text.
My opinion.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Because people are lazy and entitled and want anything in a digest version. Pro tip, some of the long stuff are really worth reading.Yeah, read too much crap before that ends up being somebody's "my opinion is awesome, here's why in 4000+ words" that really isn't worth it. If you can't give a decent outline of an opinion in a fairly brief manner then my opinion is that you really aren't as good of a writer as you think you are. I have wasted too much time reading people's ego-stroking musing in my life and unless your forum name is some famous writer's name then I will pass on reading when I have 4 screens filled with text.
My opinion.
Did someone piss in your cornflakes? What's up with the hostile response to a rather innocuous post that can be easily passed over?
Weird.
Nah. That's not even the longest thing I've ever posted on this forum, and it's in no way even close to graduate level stuff. Hell, my final papers in undergrad were both in the fifty-seventy page range. This clocked in at roughly ~9 in word.
It was a joke.
Because people are lazy and entitled and want anything in a digest version. Pro tip, some of the long stuff are really worth reading.Yeah, read too much crap before that ends up being somebody's "my opinion is awesome, here's why in 4000+ words" that really isn't worth it. If you can't give a decent outline of an opinion in a fairly brief manner then my opinion is that you really aren't as good of a writer as you think you are. I have wasted too much time reading people's ego-stroking musing in my life and unless your forum name is some famous writer's name then I will pass on reading when I have 4 screens filled with text.
My opinion.
Yah, well, yaknow, thats just like-aaa... your opinion, man.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
...unless your forum name is some famous writer's name then I will pass on reading when I have 4 screens filled with text.
So be it.
There are so many problems with this game from a gameplay, atmosphere, dialogue, and storytelling that it’s hard for many people I think to identify the worst offender. As a result, a lot of observations turn into sort of snowballs, with each complaint linked to the next. I’m going to try and identify each problem more or less on its own, starting with what I perceived as the worst.
Story
The backbreaker for me was the plot more than anything. It felt contrived and was blindingly obvious from the first act – at least for me. While the plot of Diablo I and Diablo II wasn’t Shakespeare it knew what it was, and did it very well. The first game was a struggle against a long buried and forgotten evil. It was fairly direct, but with magnificent lore surrounding it. If you still have a copy, go back and look at the original Diablo’s game book that came packaged with every copy. It was a magnificent piece of art that laid out tons of background information that helped set the stage for the game.
This world had once been rent by cosmic events, but had been at peace beyond memory. Men had forgotten the true horrors that lurked, and you alone as the hero were tasked with delving alone deep into the darkest horrors and nightmares of the past. You fight your way through the Monastery filled with petty demons and undead, but encounter more and more nightmarish beings the further you go. The entire time you are at the edge of your seat, because some new horror is just around the corner. Each boss battle is a terrifying thing. I distinctly remember my first battle against the Butcher – getting cut down in seconds – and sequent ones where each was a terror with looming death. I remember him chasing me through the lower levels and the horror of his room, with the piled and strung up corpses soaked in red – in contrast to the blacks and grays of the world. Everything was dark, the only light was cast by the rare light sources and the player themselves. In many ways this darkness was a psychological element to the game. You proceeded along a liner and direct, but detailed and believable story. Though isolated in design to a single location you proceed further and further into, there was an explanation for the depth of the location – why there seemed to be endless levels. The story wrapped up in a direct but satisfying way, with you confronting the Lord of Terror.
Cut to game two. Diablo II continues in the same direct way as the first game. You have clear goals that make sense. It isn’t super complicated, but the story moves logically from one place to the next. You start out in the rogue’s camp, where you discover the Dark Wanderer, your hero of days gone past, has passed through with hell following with him. The rogues – a character option from the past game – have been devastated and pushed back. Many of them have been corrupted into fiendish beings and their greatest hero – a character from the last game – has been risen as a dark terror you must overcome. Right away you are hit with the psychological terror. You discover that your past victory was a pyrrhic and question what the result of this one will be. It paints subtle nuances to an otherwise straight forward find and kill story. You clear the Cathedral and at the climax of the first act learn what it is to face down and defeat a lesser lord of the Burning Hells.
You proceed off to chase the wanderer, and immediately discover that here too has darkness followed him. You find another city under siege from within and without. There is here, as in Act I, a feeling of the world on the edge. You discover the Wanderer is trying to undo the great sacrifice of Tal Rasha – something you read about in the first game. You race through darkened crypts to stop him, along the way discovering the fate of the second of the three heroes from the first game – that of a depraved demon summoner who has all but lost his mind.
You fail to stop the release of Tal Rasha, and move to chase two of the three Prime Evils to prevent the release of their final brother into the world. You discover Kurast, once a beacon of righteousness, rotten from within. Here more than anywhere you see echoes of the first game’s story. You race to the climax and discover, in the depths of the Durance of Hate, the first of the Prime Evils, who you overcome in a brutal confrontation.
You travel form there through the very portal of Diablo and Baal to chase them into Hell itself, where you lay siege, with only the last redoubt of angels and heroes as your base of operations. You journey into the depths of Hell to kill the Lord of Terror forever. In so doing you slay the last hero of the first game, a mighty and good man driven made and transformed into a being of darkness.
Finally, you have to journey north in search of the last brother has he lays siege to the Barbarians and their sacred charge. You see the wreckage he has left his wake, stumble over the corpses of the barbarians who gave their lives to stop him, and see the hopelessness of your circumstance. You travel through endless fortifications that did nothing to stop him. Between this act and the last you feel mighty. You feel like you have grown from a simple neophyte into a mighty hero who can challenge the mightiest beings of hero. The game ends with the destruction of the World Stone – another pyrrhic victory.
Taking a step back, neither story is particularly original in its overarching themes, but it works together. There is psychological horror. There is victory but always at cost. There is the wreckage of bygone ages of man and a feeling of darkness to the world. In every game and every act the circumstances have grown more dire. Everywhere you go you find the great cities thrown down or besieged. You are the center of the story, the hero, undoing the mistakes of the past. You are growing as a character in power and driving things forward. The NPCs that show up are for the most part minor parts of the story that serve as bits of information, but not as the heroes themselves. You don’t have to take them along with you to do things, and if you check in with them it is only for side plots or information. There is no deception, no bait and switch, and no duplicity.
Now let’s look at Diablo III. From the very first act you have other characters – NPCs – at the center of the story. The entire thing is kicked off by Tyrael’s great fall, and the entire first act is a fight against a petty witch to recover him. You get deceived and run around by that witch the entire first act, with even the boss battle as a fight you walk into like an idiot. You recover Tyrael and have to go off with him, but he’s the one leading the story and driving it. It’s Tyrael that leads you everywhere and Tyrael who you respond to. You are not driving the story, you are riding along.
There is no real darkness here. New Tristam was growing and prosperous, and survives the attack largely unscathed (one blacksmith’s wife excepted). Caldeum is the greatest city in the world; one that may have a demon at its head, but shows no ill signs as a result. Incidentally, setting Act II in Caldeum and not letting you explore the city was, in my view, a mistake (but we’ll get back to that later). Even in Act III at the fortress you find not a fallen fortress, but one under siege. Throughout the siege you have NPC driven events like raising catapults and lighting fires, rather than PC driven events like crushing landings. You are helping toe defenders defendthe castle. There is never a feeling of desperation.
Back to the story though, we have Act II, were you are introduced to a blindly obvious traitor in Adria (if a non-sensibly traitorous one). You know there is something up with Leah, and that she is likely the daughter of the hero from the first game. Here both as a character and a player I can tell that I’m being manipulated and played. My in and out of game knowledge is letting me poke holes in the plot, rather than making it a richer thing as it did in the first two games. You are manipulated by the obvious Demon Lord the entire second act to get the ‘Black Soulstone’ and finally confront him in another ‘boss’ battle that feels contrived rather than difficult. As an aside, compare the Butcher (mark 2) and Belial to the original Butcher and Andariel. The Butcher and Belial may do more things, but the fights aren’t scarier for it, they’re just more annoying, more cartoonish and more obviously gamey. It has nothing to do with color or art and everything to do with presentation.
After defeating Belial you race to Bastion’s Keep to defend it and eventually push out to chase down the last of the minor evils, all the while the Blacksoul stone makes trouble for Leah, Adrea is obviously up to no good, and Tyrael is useless. You achieve your victory here at the end of a long grueling series of encounters and another ‘boss fight’ only to find out that Leah and Adrea are what as really important, and in a shock you are responsible for the fall of all of Heaven at the hands of a reborn Diablo who is mightier than ever before because of his Black Soulstone fusion. This leads to a truncated Act IV where you fight through heaven rescuing angels so you can finally fight and defeat Diablo in Heaven.
So, in comparison to the first two games, where you sought out and fight the great evils, in this one you are led around by an angel, fight some evils that don’t seem to be doing very much, are manipulated into helping give birth to a new Diablo, and then proceed to immediately defeat him after he wrecks heaven. Honestly, Diablo III didn’t feel like my hero’s story. It felt like Leah’s story. The plot centers around her as the rebirth of Diablo, not me as the hero stopping the forces of darkness. I’m the one being manipulated all game (quite obviously) into doing their bidding to achieve Leah’s destiny. If it isn’t Leah’s story it is probably Tyrael’s, as he’s the one who kicks everything off and leads you around. I’ve also got this weird and unrelated nephilim side story, and the off screen deaths of a bunch of heroes from the second game that never come up here.
Overall the story just isn’t interesting not only because the plot is contrived to bring back Diablo, but because it isn’t my story. I’m a passenger. Not only do I make no choices of my own (because it is a strict on the rails story), the choices that are made for me are ones that drive the tale of someone else. It is bad writing, even before we get to the incoherence of a bunch of the side stuff (the Black Soulstone, the nephilim, betrays, ect).
There are things that could have been done to fix those problems, both on a large and small scale. The problems in terms of plot and story start with the lack of a true driving force for your character. What drives you through the game at present is not an objective, but weak pushes from NPCs. In games past this would have been a villain, someone you might call an antagonist. Throughout Diablo III we are treated to one, pardon the expression, ‘limp dick’ villain after another. We have this weird evil fairy cult leader who shows up halfway through Act I, but mostly we’re just here poking around the area. We have a bunch of Diablo I villains recycled as mini-bosses without much explanation, but no focus of our hate. I think they wanted Maghda to serve in this role, but she doesn’t. Even when she kills Cain – which I think is supposed to be the turning point – she doesn’t feel powerful or scary. She’s a weak villain who killed a helpless old man. I’m mad that Cain dies, but more mad that he’s been killed pointlessly by a boring lame villain. The fact that she spends literally the entire act misleading and running from you doesn’t help in that regard. She exists as a high school bully; someone that you know doesn’t really mean anything in the scheme of things.
After her we get Belial and Azmodan, who both seem impotent and in no way terrifying. They both seem incompetent in their areas of expertise, and Belial seems outright harmless. Belial is ruling over a thriving city. He shows up (very obviously) trying to deceive you and later dies a punk. Azmodan feels compelled to taunt you throughout all of Act III even as every one of his little plots fail. When I finally killed him I didn’t have a sense of accomplishment, I had a sense of relief that this ‘great tactician’ would finally shut the hell up and stop telling me about his great plans. Diablo himself is simply not on screen long enough to have any form of attachment. There is no chance to rebuild the mythos before he falls again.
In the first game I hear about villains well in advance. I get to see their villainy and its results. The first thing that happens in the game before I make it into the Monastery is the discovery of a man on the verge of death who tells me about how treacherous Lazarus was and how an entire band of men were murdered by the Butcher. When I find these guys later the throw down has meaning. When I finally get all the way to Diablo it’s epic. The same is true of Diablo II. I hear about villains long before I see them, and get to see their victories long before I overcome them. Andariel succeeds in corrupting the vast majority of the rogues, routing them, and all but destroying the entire area while holding the gate to the next area against us. She doesn’t actually show up until you go find her, at which point you have a reason to want to kill her. You’ve seen what she’s done to the rogues and heard about her for an entire act. Duriel has less build up, but is a terrifying foe when he does up, and a real kick in the quad because his presence confirms you’ve failed. You see Meph’s actions in the form of the downfall of the greatest beacon of light in the world, and the corruption of an entire kingdom while he’s still trapped. Diablo you spend four acts chasing before you catch, and Baal you likewise have a ton of buildup to. These are powerful and terrifying villains not because they are phoning you every 5 minutes to taunt you, but because they are pursuing their own agendas. You aren’t even worth their notice for most of the game. I get to see that they are powerful and effective, not bad jokes.
First and easiest change to the plot to make it better? Give us a villain. Someone we can hate and want to chase down. Make it someone who scares us and is competent. For my money, if I’m working within the framework of the existing plot, I would have made it Leah. Instead of Leah as this poor innocent weak and pointless victim in everything, make Leah the driving force behind everything the bad guys are doing – and aware of it. How much if a kick in the balls would it have been if, when at the end of Act I you finally catch up to Maghda, you discover that Leah was the one masterminding everything? She was the one giving the orders. She was the one who had Cain, the man who raised her, killed. She has been with him for years trying to discover the hidden knowledge she needs to fulfill what she believes is her destiny, wields tremendous powers as the spawn of the Lord of Terror, and is now ready to put her plot in motion. This was all a plot to get some knowledge (perhaps about the shards of the World Stone) from Tyrael. You return to Tristam only to find most of it leveled, Tyrael slain or injured, and Leah racing off to Caldeum with the knowledge she needed to move forward. You now have an enemy you can hate and fear. You’ve still got the little twist the writers wanted but instead of leading you around for three acts like an idiot (despite being the most powerful person on the planet) it happens when you are still relatively fresh faced.
In Act II, continuing with this Leah as the villain, you arrive to find that Caldeum is in ruins. You discover she has Azmodan with her, and his armies have laid waste to the city. She (and they) is searching for something in the city.
Instead of running around the desert doing stupid things you are delving into Cadeum, the greatest city in the world, overrun with fiends of every kind. Instead of a city as this great thing talked about that you get to visit (but only 1 block of) you get to see the whole thing – and it is a disaster. Wow, now I start to get the feeling of darkness and evil growing. Things are really going downhill. Leah is here for something, and you don’t know what it is. Thousands are dying and demons are roaming the city. You make for the Mage Academy, which you discover barely stands behind the might of the sorcerers. You get a great opportunity to introduce us to the Vizjerei sorcerers, the only group we haven’t really seen from the first game. Wow, that’s cool. We meet Valthek and he reports that he suspects she is here for a shard of the World Stone that the Vizjerei recovered. He doesn’t know where it was stored, but perhaps the mad sorcerer Zoltun Kulle (who recovered it) does. He’s been living in the streets for years and hasn’t been seen. Now you get to poke around the city more. Eventually you find him and he relates to you the final resting place of the shard. You race towards it only to discover you are too late and, oh crap, Valthek is actually Belial. The real sorcerer never woke up form his duel with the wizard and the armies that Leah led here were led by Belial all along – the Azmodan story was a lie. They could never have convinced Kulle to reveal the location of the stone themselves, so they manipulated you. For an entire act you’ve been lied to! See how much more effective that is than telling you that Belial is here then immediately introducing only one new character who is clearly Belial?
Belial declares that your usefulness is at an end. Cue fight. You win and discover once more Leah has escaped, continuing her plan and carrying the world stone shard. But where is she going? What is she doing? Why not ask the half-mad Kulle who knows more about it than anyone? Yeah, you guessed it, he’s our new stand-in for Cain. He reveals that with the World Stone destroyed Leah can’t actually corrupt the entire world as Baal wished to, but that she could use it in a place of power to change some of the rules that govern reality. For instance, she could open gates between this world and the others – for instance she could open the gates of hell and allow an endless swarm of demons to pour into this world, drowning it and bringing on the apocalypse. The best place of power? The same place the World Stone itself once stood – the crater of Mount Arreat.
Now you have two choices as a writer. You can move forward with the same sort of plot as the main storyline – in this case Leah (truly her father’s daughter now) proceeds to Arreat. She succeeds in opening the gates of hell, but also a gate to the heavens. That’s been her plan all along! Her armies pour from hell to earth to heaven. You can stage Act III much the same way, and have Act 4 move to Heaven where you are trying to both save the Heavens from the army of demons, and also reach Leah so you can go back and close the open gates which one way or another spell doom for this world. Act III still involes the fight against Azmodan, who has been left to command the armies that defend the portals and which will conquer the world while Leah wages her war against the heavens. Alternatively you can go with a more straight forward fight against demons and a journey into hell to stop Leah.
In either case Leah is Diablo, his living breathing heir. There is no need to undo everything players did in the previous games to bring him back and add in stupid new things that don’t make sense with the existing lore like the ‘Black Soulstone’. The bad guys are pursuing their own objectives. They are successful and scary. You have a reason to chase them around and hate them. You still get manipulated, but you don’t see it coming for the entire duration of the game. You get the Lord of Lies to actually lie convincingly. You get Azmodan actually wagging a war with a purpose. You have a plot that reminds people of past games effectively. You have a chase, you have twists events that are similar but also distinct like the surprise villain at the end of Act 2. You get to see new parts of the world, and still touch on things from the first game (like the Vizjerei). You can even stick Adria in the game if you want. If you wanted to get really ambitious you could have Adria really be Lilith all along, and could probably work her in either as an act boss or a character that could be touched on in a later expression.
There are other issues with the plot – like the nonsensical return of many villains from past games (the Butcher/ Leoric), but they can be ignored if you get around the main plot’s lack of effective storytelling. If I’m caught up in the story I have less time to worry about why the Butcher is back and so forth.
Atmosphere
These games don’t feel like Diablo games of the past, and it isn’t simply because they ‘aren’t dark enough’ in terms of color use. Act II of Diablo II was plenty bright in color, but still felt like Diablo. Nor is the game ‘not dark enough’ because bad things don’t happen. The Blacksmith’s wife is a good example of a relatively dark event early on that had what should have been the right tone in the game. The problem is a combination of storytelling that does not evoke fear, graphical decision that seem slightly off, and cartoonish game play aspects that break immersion.
The first, storytelling, I touched on above. There are no real villains here, and the characters that are supposed to be villains are transparent, boring, or juvenile. They show up too often, taunt too frequently, and are easily seen through. There is no build up to confrontations with them. They don’t seem vile in the same way that Andariel in the depths of the Catacombs felt vile, nor are they wicked in the same way that Meph in the Durance of hate was, with his lake of blood and portal to the hells. Attached to that, there is no real existential threat personally or to the world. Tristram is never in real danger after the first couple minutes, Caldeum is almost idyllic for a city ruled by a demon lord, and even the Keep doesn’t feel particularly desperate in the way that Harrogath did. It is being attacked, but it is so comically massive that it doesn’t feel like it. Part of that is the size of the castle – it is hard to take seriously such a huge fortification – and part of it is that I genuinely don’t care about any of the soldiers dying here and don’t understand why Azmodan is wasting his time. There is no connection in the same way that there was with the Barbarians in Diablo II, whose tales you got to hear individually. There is no Qual-Kehk lamenting the loss of his warriors, no Anya tending to the wounded, nothing to connect you at all to the act. The entire castle is just a set-piece.
The dialogue is a huge part of that last problem. The swap from long monologues by characters into banter between your character and the NPCs was, frankly, stupid. There is no weight to the speeches of other characters with your character throwing quips into it. The breakup of lines is excessive. I understand the idea of giving more life and more realistic speech patterns, but it doesn’t work when the dialogue lacks depth and you have no input into it. What do I mean by that?
Basically the way dialogue works in many (most) decent games is that either the NPCs tell a story and I sit there and listen to it, or the NPCs tell their stories through interactions with my character that I have a variety of possible responses to – which produce slightly different outcomes or responses in turn and immerse me in what is going on. Generally speaking both have their merits and work well depending on the circumstance. The strength of long chunks of storytelling is that it allows a designer to give me a lot of information within the world that I can digest at once. I can then fill in my response outside the game (talking to my screen / self) to decide how I respond. I can also skip through the entire dialogue very quickly if I’ve heard it many times before and don’t wish to again. The strength of giving me dialogue options is that it makes me feel more autonomous and actively involves me in the storytelling process. I have to pay attention so I can respond. Diablo III chose a third option of short conversations occurring between NPCs and myself that I had no control over. My idiot character would make whatever response to whatever line the writers decided. It is not effective in terms of immersion or storytelling, and given the plot involves you being led around like a tool by the villains and manipulated the entire time it is particularly frustrating. I can’t even play the part of the cynical guy going along with it because my responses in the game make it clear that my character has the naivety of a six year old child.
Beyond that, the dialogue itself is poorly written, and worst of all I have to sit through it / click many times to get through it every single time I want to play. It’s obnoxious in every way and baffling to me. Did no one realize that this was a bad idea? Was there no quality control at all at Blizzard when the game was being developed?
My feeling is that, especially, moving away from the monologues / stories from NPCs really undermined the dark and goth feel of the game. In the past we usually heard full tales – usually of woe and darkness – from characters. Now we get quips and one liners (especially from PCs) that just don’t have the right tone.
Graphics do play a part in the darkness aspect, especially in decision to move away from any areas that are what I would really describe as dark. I’m amendable to the argument that your character should have a bright light source, and agree that there is not much use in beautiful textures if you never show them off, but they went a bridge too far here. Every area is brightly lit and the most shadow you can get is a faint fog of war. That’s a bad departure from previous games. There is simply too much anbient light everywhere. Again, what kills me here is that it isn’t as though you can’t have bright areas. The key is you have to balance them with darker areas or you lose the dark and gothic feel of the game. Act II of Diablo II did this amazingly well, with the very bright desert contrasted by dark tombs that you had to light the way in.
Finally, there’s the cartoonish game play / board creation decisions that really kill it for me. The worst offender here are the boss ‘zones’ as it were, where you are locked in a room and have a villain pop out to fight you like they’re a WWE wrestler. The Butcher is the worst example, but there are plenty of others. Almost every act boss has a contrived final battle that completely breaks my immersion in the game. Too many enemies – even beyond act bosses – have abilities that are explicitly designed to be frustrating from a game play perspective, rather than a world perspective. Finally, the ‘enrage’ timers were just obnoxious and huge departures from part of what made the first couple games fun – in the ability to build whatever character you wanted. Everything is skewed towards DPS in a way that is just annoying. We’ll get to that more in a moment under gameplay.
The decision to have deaths not really hurt you or set you back was one of those other bad decisions that killed the atmosphere of the game. In the first two games dying was a giant pain in the you know what. Beyond lost gold and durability, you had to find your corpse and may your way back, and generally speaking lost a lot of time and effort. Reducing those penalties was not a good thing,, because it removed a game play motivation for an atmosphere building out of game feeling (fear, terror, caution, ect).
These games should be creepy and scary – Diablo III was not.
Gameplay
Much of the actual gameplay of Diablo III wasn’t bad in the general sense. The problem was that it in no way resembled what had come before. If it hadn’t been Diablo III it might have been a decent game, but as it was it barely resembled in any way that fans expected. That turned off a lot of fans, and no where was it any more evident than skills and stat generation for characters.
The game removed all elements of choice and specialization in character creation / play – key features of the first two games. The choice of where you put your ability points could let you generate vastly different characters even within the same class (for the first game), and with the option of where to put skills you could generate literally dozens of characters from every class in Diablo II that could all be tremendously effective in very different things. While I appreciate the reasoning behind removing specialization and moving to a more easily shifted level of specialization (e.g. away from dedicated skill points, towards selected skills at the moment) the result was the removal of a lot of the replay value of the game. The fact that my wizard could completely change focuses with a change of clothing and a slightly different selection of skills was a huge bummer compared to the very specialized and unique characters you could generate in Diablo II.
I appreciate that for some people the choices available in Diablo II could result in characters that were very ineffective – and then had to be rebuilt from scratch – but that was half of the fun of the game. Finding out what worked and what was effective for you was a huge part of the game. It kept it interesting long after you had tons of awesome swag and had beaten through the game numerous times. My most memorable experiences were of building melee sorceresses and spell focused paladins, trying to see if I could make it work even at the highest levels of the game (hint, the dream runeword was awesome for melee sorceresses). Playing through the game multiple times with new characters was awesome and fun, building each in a unique way. They removed all purpose to that with the ability to instantly and freely reset all skills. Lack of specialization resulted in bland characters.
The choice to move towards only having a maximum of 6 available skills was a terrible one, and a choice obviously made primarily so the game could be marketed / ported more easily to the consoles. Likewise, the removal of the ability to have crossover skills as existed in Diablo I & II was really frustrating. My magic using rogue and teleporting druid were both awesome and really fun.
A byproduct of shifting as they did towards more generic skills and powers that had no specialization (along with a maximum of 6 skills on tap) was a streamlining and simplification of both gear and skill based tactics. Instead of getting nuanced items that could be made to work in a specialized character we got nothing but a race to the top in terms of resistances and DPS (especially combined with things like enrage timers). No longer was their room to fit almost any item into the proper build – something that rendered even items statistically weaker in many ways still useful. Now it was all a race towards core stats, which crippled the fun in loot drops. While I always hoped for a Storm Shield drop while grinding, I was able to find a use for the lidless eye I got. Now every drop that isn’t a direct statistical improvement is a disappointment. That’s a really sad state of affairs for the game.
The other result was a hard cap on how far you could get in the game without very specific items. In earlier games for instance, Diablo II, a relatively new player with very little in terms of wealth could be highly successful using a skills focused character such as a sorceress or paladin to hunt for top level gear. Now effectively everyone is in the same boat – their gear determines everything about how effective they are. They’re also all hunting for gear that is more or less the same, which inflates the prices of things. The race towards DPS instead of a more diverse selection as in past games (such as characters focused on plus skills items or unique effects) makes item hunting extremely one dimensional.
A final byproduct of all of that, combined with the randomizing of even unique items, is that even the incredibly rare drops that should be a real prize (unique / set items) are often really bad or worse than conventional blue or yellow items for a given character, because randomized bonuses on them often generated things that were useless in the narrowly focused game Diablo III is.
As a final kick in the teeth to previous gamers, the game pretty much made it impossible to run bosses or just mow down enemies in the same way possible before. Now reverting to earlier portions of the game reverts you to the quests and forces you through that same dialogue. While I understand they wanted to make the game easier or more interesting for people that wanted to just progress through levels again, I think there were better options for that than removing things like teleport & leap (or putting them on huge timers). It smacks of lazy and frankly eccentric designers who are convinced their way to play is the best and only way anyone should be playing – especially when the neater solution would be to leave such skills intact while also implementing the valor system they used.
In many ways there’s actually an argument to be made about how Diablo II -> Diablo III resembles D&D 3.5 -> D&D 4th Edition. Both saw a serious streamlining of the options available and a focus on more ‘balanced’ play that is easier to design within the framework of, but I’ve gone on for more than long enough at this point.
Unaddressed
There are a final few things to be mentioned in the wrap up here, but I’ll be brief because this has already gone on much too long. The way that so much was promised in the demonstrations and commentary by designers that was never put into the game was also a huge negative for the game. There was so much talk about evolving and destructible environments, getting unique boons that lasted for a little while by killing an enemy (such as flaming weapons or frost weapons) and so forth that never made it into the game. That’s really disappointing. Stuff gets cut from every game, but the stuff cut here was really extreme in terms of finished product vs. what was presented at trade shows. The connection issues at release were a disaster that should never have happened, as was the always on DRM in general. More disastrous though in the long run is the way game making and lobbies were changed – especially the swap away from being able to team up with random guys to take down bosses and play through the game. The swap to a 4 player limit was also nonsensical and crap. Having a huge team together in Diablo II was one of the really awesome features.
In almost every way in that regard the game was a huge step backward.
Flagged as "needs spoiler tag".
Never has that reason for Flagging been more appropriate.
Flagged as "needs spoiler tag".
Never has that reason for Flagging been more appropriate.
Oh, fine. You're no fun at all. 8}
and....not gonna waste part of my life reading something that long,... Most people like to have opinions and reviews in a short, concise version that is easily absorbed. Verbosity in the extreme is something for papers and articles and such, not interweb forums.
My opinion, broken down to its most basic part, can be found in the first paragraph of that rant.
"There are so many problems with this game from a gameplay, atmosphere, dialogue, and storytelling standpoint that it’s hard for many people I think to identify the worst offender. As a result, a lot of observations turn into sort of snowballs, with each complaint linked to the next."
The rest of the rant is expanding on each of these points and explaining why these are problems. If you simply wanted a sharp opinion, there you go. The thing is that opinion without any kind of backing has no more meaning than the next guy's who comes along and posts "nuh'uh". Hence the longer post.
Well I read the first part of that monster post so far and found it false and misinformed. YOU are the driving force from the very start of the game. Driven by your very personal destiny to stop Diablo when the only clue you have to go on is the fallen star, you charge to Tristram to find it and the answers it MUST hold.
Right. This is easy to disprove. You contend that the driving force behind the game is a personal destiny to stop Diablo. When is the return of Diablo mentioned for the very first time? The end of Act III. If this is supposed to be your driving force, then there is nothing driving you until the very end of the game.
That is not effective storytelling.
What you don't realize at the start is you have someone else looking for this harbinger of fate in order to stop a hero from rising up... Belial, the lord of lies. To be honest I would have been severely disappointed if deception wasn't used against me by a villain who specializes in it.
Deception by Belial isn't a problem, but lack of deception is. I found his lies incredibly obvious and transparent. The deception issue is in that we spend two acts with a clearly evil Adria who is up to no good and go along with her the entire way despite the fact that she is obviously going to screw us.
In losing Cain you form a bond with Leah, she feels like a friend now through shared loss, Cain being the driving force behind your quest in D2 and the most useful ally in D1 makes it personal to YOU and obviously for Leah this is her adopted parent she just lost. This IS important when you at the end of the story lose Leah herself to Diablo's machinations, making it feel like you just lost a friend and making your quest against Diablo MORE than just personal destiny/storyline but also about personal loss.
I understand that this was supposed to be the intent, but it didn't work. Cain's death was so comical and hamfisted that it had no meaning to me (or anyone else I've spoken with). He dies in an in-game cut scene in which my character stands there like an idiot to a stupid fairy witch that spends the rest of the gaming running around, taunting me, and telling me her plans so I can wreck them. It's bad storytelling. I think having Leah murder him - especially if it was done in a cinematic - would have been far more effective from a storytelling perspective and would have given us our villain from the very first act.
Take a moment to picture Cain, throughout the intros as a terrified old man. He's obviously frightened as he digs through every ancient library and bit of knowledge looking for something. His last days are spent not at peace, but almost as a man possessed. That's how you find him in Act I. In the middle of Act I you get a cut-scene, where you see him as a shivering old man get murdered by Leah, though it is pinned on the witch. By the end of the act you learn the truth. As the new Lord of Terror she has spent years terrorizing her mentor/father figure into doing her bidding. It has a lot more impact than the story we got. It's much darker, and fits better into the game.
And unlike the ungainly, tacked on, and unsatisfactory last act of D2, D3 leaves you yearning to resolve this betrayal of Leah in some real way... which I imagine will be the perfect gateway into the expansion.
The ungainly, tacked on, and unsatisfactory last act of Diablo II where you hunt down the last of the three prime evils - the one left unresolved - to stop him? The same guy you saw released in Act II? I'll be honest, I thought the plot of Act V fit in almost seamlessly with the rest of the game.
The fear of any of these bosses from either game came not from their story but from their lethal capabilities.
Thank you for making my point. There is no buildup around these guys. They are bad jokes within the story and plot. The only thing that makes them even remotely scary are contrived boss fights, and that is a completely different kind of fear.
You want to fear the game? Try hardcore mode... I do. I pause and gather my wits before each boss fight and face down my very real fear that this may be the end of my character. I go over my build and my gear, I come up with a strategy, and I commit it all on the big and very dangerous fight.
Right, so the only fear that comes from the game is a fear of gameplay mechanics. That's bad in a Diablo game. The first two games were creepy. They were dark and gothic, with foul evils lurking in the depths ready to kill you horribly. They were (often) dark, claustrophobic, and full of enemies that lurked right at the edge of your light radius. They had a similar type of psychological terror as the first Deadspace game.
In D2 the bosses were the weakest opponents in the game. I know someone who defeated Bhaal on the highest difficulty by starting the fight and letting his skeletons kill Bhaal while he went and made a sandwich. You can't do that in D3. The real fights in D2 were against the elites who if they got the right set of abilities made your life hell getting past them. This is the same for D3 BTW, if you fight in softcore mode then the elites are your real problem and the bosses become only moderately difficult speed bumps.
Fought at the levels you were intended to reach them at, with the gear you likely had from playing through the game, the boss fights of Diablo (especially in Nightmare & Hell) were incredibly difficult. Only after many playthroughs or acquisitions of extremely powerful items did you really start to make a joke of them. The one exception is the necromancer, who at higher levels after changes in the last major set of patches was capable of doing an awful lot with relatively little gear if he focused entirely on his minions (which is fine). I'd challenge you today to make a character and simply play through Diablo II again. See if you find your battles with the bosses to be super easy.
As for the inclusion of NPCs? Cain drove the storyline in D2 much as Tyreal drives it in D3 (as information givers) and although I didn't play D1 I hear it had little story beyond being a dungeon crawl.
You spent one quest recovering Cain. You spend an one act dealing with Tyrael. You could go to Cain to get lore & get items identified for free. You have Tyrael join you on more than one occassion our battling evils. Cain was a wise old man. Tyrael is an angel in human form. I don't really think there is much of a comparison to be made between them.
As for the story of Diablo I, I encourage you to take a look at the Diablo I Booklet. If you want a very brief intro to the kind of lore and plot associated with Diablo I, pick up at page 60 or page 69. If you get really excited go back and look at the beastiary and magic entries. The Lore surrounding Diablo I is as good as it gets, and most of this information is presented throughout the game. You discover much of it in the form of ancient tomes hidden in the Monastery.
The plot itself may have been simple and straightforward, but that did not mean that it wasn't there. The fact that it was more of a 'take it or leave it' is in many ways a dramatic improvement over the story of Diablo III which is crammed down your throat the entire time you play through in game cinematics every 10 minutes and long banter-filled dialogue.
Hey quick question for XBOx users. So i've created 4 characters under 1 xbox profile. I want my friends to play (at my house) as these 4 characters. How do i do this.
Um... each character has a special background which you apparently ignored than complained that you didn't get Peter... that's not the games fault it's yours. For example, the wizard has a prophecy stating she will kill Diablo; her mentors however doubt her and hold her back so she takes the insulting title of "wizard" and goes off on her own to prove herself armed only with the prophecy. Each character has a similar history with the storyline if you don't skip the short cut videos and actually read the background material you would know that you are flat wrong here. The thing I find amusing about your hypocrisy is that literally in D2 you just started following the dark wanderer on a whim one day. Yet you find THAT awesome story.
There is only one quest to free Tyreal. It's big and satisfying. One whole seamless story. Not the brief side quest to free Cain. Almost like he is some afterthought. To be frank I prefer D3.
As far as the first two games being creepy? I certainly didn't get that in D2. In fact D2 was no different than D3 in many respects here. If anything the setting is gloomier in D3. In fact I found it insulting that they expected me to buy that some possessed dude wanders past one day and now everyone is corrupted and evil... no way.
No one is saying D3 is perfect. BUT clearly you are looking at the old game through rose colored glasses.
Oh and as far as Leah is concerned I was shocked and surprised by what they did to her. I liked her. I knew Adria was going to pull something nefarious but had no idea how evil it was going to be. Contrast that with D2 where there are no surprises.
Hey quick question for XBOx users. So i've created 4 characters under 1 xbox profile. I want my friends to play (at my house) as these 4 characters. How do i do this.
The problem is that all characters under one profile share the same wealth and stash.
Um... each character has a special background which you apparently ignored than complained that you didn't get Peter... that's not the games fault it's yours.
Pretty sure I followed all game and character background that was released with the game and before the game on the blizzard sites. You are making a statement about me and my actions without an evidence to support it.
For example, the wizard has a prophecy stating she will kill Diablo;
Do you have a link to this prophesy? A page number in a game manual? A wiki page? Anything that supports this claim? This is the first I've heard of a prophesy that related to Diablo at all.
her mentors however doubt her and hold her back so she takes the insulting title of "wizard"
For someone lecturing others on the finer points of game lore, you don't seem to have a very good grasp of it yourself. The wizard explicitly claimed the title of wizard from the onset, from her earliest meetings with her mentors. They do not doubt her power, but rather her wisdom and temperance. Despite that, she is treated well and has the ear and tutelage of the two mightiest magi in the world. Link
and goes off on her own to prove herself armed only with the prophecy.
Prophecy speaking to the invasion from the Hells, not to her 'destiny' or of Diablo at all.
Each character has a similar history with the storyline if you don't skip the short cut videos and actually read the background material you would know that you are flat wrong here.
The irony of someone telling me that I'm 'flat wrong' about game lore that they can't even paraphrase accurately is overwhelming.
The thing I find amusing about your hypocrisy is that literally in D2 you just started following the dark wanderer on a whim one day. Yet you find THAT awesome story.
You should probably bone up on your lore a little bit Aranna. Each of the heroes from Diablo II set out explicitly to put an end to the Prime Evils. Their pursuit of the Wanderer was a direct extension of their goal "kill Diablo & Co).
There is only one quest to free Tyreal. It's big and satisfying.
My recollection here may be a little fuzzy, but as I remember it we have the following:
1. Quest to find the fallen star (Tyrael),
2. Quest to find the pieces of the star (x3),
3. Tyrael getting abducted,
4. Quest to go get Tyrael back to close out Act 1.
How exactly is that one quest? The entire first act is about recovering Tyrael and finding out who he is and why he is here.
One whole seamless story.
Right, one 'seamless' story that drives the entire act.
Not the brief side quest to free Cain. Almost like he is some afterthought. To be frank I prefer D3.
"Holy crap, we are facing more than just some commmon demon here. Lets go see if we can find anything out from the most learned scholar on the planet in these matters" is an afterthought?
As far as the first two games being creepy? I certainly didn't get that in D2. In fact D2 was no different than D3 in many respects here. If anything the setting is gloomier in D3. In fact I found it insulting that they expected me to buy that some possessed dude wanders past one day and now everyone is corrupted and evil... no way.
I think you are misrepresenting a lot of Diablo II, from the game world to the plot with this off hand write off. In terms of atmosphere (creepy), I touched on this in detail in my first post, and don't feel the need to re-craft an argument you did nothing to refute.
ITT: Opinions.
Diablo III tries for a more complex storyline. I understand why, the old felt ham handed and simplistic at the best of times. However, the advantage is that replay value is drastically increased, and making the storyline more complex, by contrast, lowers it. Still, Belial and Azmodan get a raw deal here. Belial doesn't manage to lie to anyone successfully, and Azmodan becomes a joke with all his threats and bragging. Adria is too obviously evil to function in her role, seriously, the only reason you didn't put the smackdown on her is that she is an NPC and you can't. The Diablo synthesized from Andariel, Duriel, Mephisto, Baal and Diablo himself is a very interesting concept that is not explored at all. The Butcher and the Skeleton King are included for questionable reasons, as is Izual. Remains Kulle, Leah and Maghda. Kulle and Maghda are pretty nondescript and archetypical, and feel like pretty cardboard characters. Leah is a real character, and they managed to make her feel relevant, but, well, Diablo. As for your companions, all three are decently written.
All in all, it is a decent game that came with some pretty sad decisions as baggage, and failed at making interesting villains. Had they managed to do this, it would have been an awesome game, regardless of colours.