Leo Tolstoy's page

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.