Delusion-Elle

I am done with Diablo III. No, I didn't completely finish the game, but I did return my copy of it a few days ago. Now, I know that I didn't express my excitement and anticipation in regards to playing this, but this was a game that I had been looking forward to. Previous to this latest instalment, I was not a big fan of the Diablo series, to be honest. My dad got us Diablo II years and years ago, and I played a bit of that, but I remember the game being quite difficult, and a bit scary, though both of these aspects may have stemmed directly from the fact that I was about 10 years old when I played it. But I digress. This isn't a blog post about Diablo II or even the Diablo franchise as a whole. This is about Diablo III.

It was as though the entire gaming world was holding its breath waiting for Diablo III's release. The anticipation and excitement was palpable at my work place, and to an extent, it was infectious. Diablo III was the only non-work-related thing anyone talked about for 2 weeks after its release. Even a few folks who hadn't intended on playing it got it, just so they could be a part of the culture and see for themselves what the fuss was about. I admit that the hype did contribute to my own desires and I ended up buying a digital copy of the game a few days after release.

3766 hours? Oh, no time at all, then! No problems detected here, for sure!

Installation was a bitch. It took me an entire night to get it downloaded, and then another hour or so to get it installed. It was disheartening (see screenshot above) to the point that I regretted buying the digital copy -- if I had gotten the physical copy, I wouldn't have had to waste time with downloading. But this was all just a matter of time, and after it all finished, I was excited. This was going to be a great game, nay, an EPIC game, I thought. I mean, two of my co-workers took a week off solely for the purpose of playing this game. They wouldn't do that for just any game. So I started the game up and, since I had played the open Beta, dove right into the game, picking up where I left off in Beta thanks to the help of my friend who got my character back to that point. Things went fairly hunky-dory, and sure, there were a few connection hiccups here and there, but I'm used to playing games where internet is required so I've come to accept that server disconnections are bound to happen. All in all, I really enjoyed the game.

"But wait!" you cry. "Didn't you say that you returned it? Why did you return it if you enjoyed it?"

"Let me finish," I say, frowning slightly, and wagging my finger.

I got through the game on Normal difficulty fairly easily. It took a few days of not-very-dedicated-at-all playing, but I did finish it in decent time. The cinematics are gorgeous, there's no denying that, and the graphics in general are a nice step up from those of Diablo II. However, aside from the aesthetics, there were a few things which irked me after this first playthrough. Deckard Cain's voice for one, and a bunch of game mechanics for two. The storyline was short, and for a game that took a decade to come out, it felt disappointingly so. I'm not even going to nitpick at the absolute cheesiness of all of the demons vs. angels business. In terms of actual game mechanics, the drops annoyed me greatly. Equips in Diablo III, as with any other RPG, come in a few different varieties of rarity. The logic is that the rarer the equip, the more powerful it is. In Diablo III, this was not the case at all, and it became extremely frustrating finding "rare" equips that were no better, and at times worse than the common ones. Yes, okay, this may be nitpicking again, but let's continue...

I finished Normal difficulty and this unlocked the next difficulty up, called Nightmare. I launched straight into Nightmare and found that enough time had passed since I had finished these quests on Normal that I wasn't too bored of them. It took another week or so to get through Hell what with the updates Blizzard threw at us -- changes to the Monk's abilities, changes to the Wizard's armour skills, etc. etc. There seemed to be updates being churned out at a surprising rate, which raised the question: How much testing had Blizzard done beforehand? One of my diehard Diablo fanboy co-workers had told me that Blizzard had not bothered testing their highest difficulty, Inferno. This seemed a bit suspect at the time that he told me, but I didn't give it much thought until now.

The character I played as mainly was a female wizard. I love magic, what can I say? I always gravitate towards mage characters/classes in every game I come across. The changes that Blizzard made to the wizard class with their patches made things much harder for me as I advanced in the game, and I found myself dying a lot more. I was pretty much forced to use a different build to compensate for my near-constant dying, and it was very frustrating at first. I got used to it after a while and just went along with it in the end. It wasn't as though I could change Blizzard's mind about it. Despite my dying, I beat Nightmare with my friend on her monk character. At this point, we had realized some very disenchanting things about Diablo III.

For starters, neither of us wanted to play through the storyline for the third time. Sure, it would be on the Hell setting, another giant step up in difficulty, but were there any changes in storyline with each successive difficulty? Nope. It was the same old, same old. There are only so many times that I can stomach killing giant spiders and seemingly endless amounts of demonesque critters. Just thinking of playing through Hell disgruntled me. Call me a casual gamer for not sticking it out and finishing all 4 difficulties, sure, but there are much better games out there that DON'T resort to re-using the same plot and essentially the same game in order to get enough content to actually call this a game.

Another point that irked us, as well as a few of my co-workers is that there is no end-game. When do you actually finish the game? When you finish Inferno? When you hit level 60? When you get all of the equips that you want? It's unclear, and sure, you might think that it's great that they don't force an end-game state upon you, but there is such a lack of direction that it makes the game pointless. There are no skill trees to follow or worry about so getting to 60 doesn't mean all that much -- chances are that by level 50 or even before that, you will have a go-to set of skills that works for you. And if you haven't, then I can guarantee that someone on the forums already has. In order to make any progress on the insanely difficult Inferno difficulty, your character must already be level 60 or damn well near it. So when you actually finish Inferno, what happens? The truth is... nothing. Granted, I never reached that, but beyond level 60 and finishing Inferno, there is no more point to playing Diablo III. You could say that about any game with a level cap, I suppose, but with most other games, there is still the "I want to get the perfect set of armour" aspect so "I can be the very best". In Diablo III, with the lousy drop system, this aspect is completely gone. There is no replay value in this game beyond level 60 and Inferno.

The thing is that even the most diehard Diablo fans -- guys who grew up with the first two instalments, bought the special collector's edition of this iteration right at midnight on release day, and took time off from work to play it -- are not happy with this product. I've talked to them about the game, glad to have something in common to discuss, but our conversations often turned to complaints about the game and "there are so many things wrong with this game that I don't want to talk about them all and ruin it for you". I mentioned that I was toying with the idea of returning my copy to one of my co-workers, and he urged me to do it -- it was past the 30-day period for himself, and he had put in so many hours already trying to get good equips that he figured that he could just sell them in the Real Money Auction House. Perhaps the expectations for this long-awaited title were just too high. Maybe we just wanted too much. Regardless, I returned my copy of Diablo III about a week ago, and although I felt a bit of emptiness after giving it up, I haven't looked back and I am more than okay with my decision to return it. The visuals are A+, but everything else about the game is just too lacking. The target audience is unclear: certain aspects of the game seem to target casual players -- such as the simplified skill builds -- but beyond that, the difficulties beyond Normal are suited to hardcore players. Yet, as I mentioned before, hardcore players get bored with the game quite easily. Sure, they'll go through and hit level 60 and complete Inferno, but beyond that...?