My critique of Diablo III.

[Beriallord]

For a game that was so hyped up, and probably the most hyped up game in the last 10 years, this game didn't deliver for me.

 

Lets cut to the bare bones of the gameplay. The gameplay is similar to diablo 2, you click on an enemy with a skill/attack and you kill it. The problem is the game gets incredibly dull just to the atmosphere and repetitiveness of the game. And this is coming from someone who is OCD, and usually doesn't mind a little bit of repetitiveness, but this is overboard. And its not fun enough to keep me interested. Diablo II had a different feel that I can't exactly put my finger on, that made the game more fun to play. I believe it was just the general atmosphere to the game of Diablo II that made me enjoy it more.

 

Lets get to the game design, the graphics, music, story, etc. I guess the graphics are OK, for as low as the system specs are to run it. I wasn't expecting something cutting edge, so I'm not gonna knock the graphics on Diablo III.

 

The story reeked of mediocre, and wasn't even as good as Diablo II. At no point in time was I ever the slightest bit interested to the storyline, I just wanted to go back to mouse clicking on mobs.

 

Now to the general game design. I think this is one of the worst features of the game. First of all you got some combinations of elite/champion packs that just cannot be killed in inferno. Some of the character skills/abilities are either overpowered or woefully inadequate. Barbarian for example is woefully inadequate in doing what he is supposed to be able to do well => tank. And Monk is basically in the same position. Basically not enough health, not enough passives/skills to mitigate damage, and not enough aggro management., Threatening shout has a rune that gives a 3 sec taunt, but has a 10 sec CD. Barbarian has the same health per vitality rating as any other class, considering barbarian needs to be in the middle of the action, they should have at least 2-3x more health than a wizard, right? Make sense? In any other game the tank/warrior types got more health than ranged/mages. Its just basic common sense that blizzard completely ignored.

 

Now you got the drop rates, set and legendary items. Most of the set and legendary items, for as rare as they are, suck. You figure a legendary should be better than a blue of the same level range no matter what right? Considering the 1 in 1 million drop rate? Makes sense right? I guess blizzard derped again! Because most of the set/legendary items get beaten by a good magical item, or a decent rare. I'd say half of the noobs that found one probably thought they hit a jackpot, w00t! I'm gonna make millions because I found a legendary! Nope! You are probably going to keep getting it returned at the AH until you finally say screw it and vendor it or put it up there for super cheap just to get rid of it. Basically they aren't even rewarding if you happen to get lucky enough to find one.

 

Now for the difficulty levels:

 

Normal => easy, Nightmare = tougher, Hell mode => challenging, Inferno => overboard. My problem was mostly with the later. One of the motivations for playing a game like this is gearing up, and they make it where you have to play an absolutely insanely broken game to get to that point. Most of the ones who even beat inferno did it by exploiting broken skills, most of which have already been nerfed by now, which is besides the point. Mostly the issue is with the extremely broken elite/champion mob affixes, many of which you will find yourself not able to beat no matter what and are forced to die 5-6+ times just to run around them. In fact some of the videos of people "soloing" inferno, avoided all the elite mobs and used the most broken skill combinations so they could at least solo the bosses, most of which were easier than your average champion pack. This is definitely not a game that just anyone can get into.

 

 

Lets cut to the "always online DRM". Now I wouldn't be knocking this as bad, if they actually kept their servers up 90% of the time with no issues. But it seemed like every other time I logged on either it was down for maintenance, or the AH didn't work, or they were having issues with one thing or another. They always had a box in the side thanking everyone for their patience. Anyone else notice how much blizzard keeps thanking everyone for their patience? In Blizzard's effort to keep people from cheating in single player, instead they expose a player who might not have traditionally played games online to getting their accounts hacked, or not being able to play a single player game, in single player due to the DRM.

 

Which comes to my next point, hackers. There is a flaw in battle.net that is allowing people to get session ID hacked, and its been happening since release date, and blizzard has straight up lied to the gaming community about the issue, and are incredibly defensive about it. Even though they vaguely admitted that some people with authenticators have been compromised, which is about the best admission we are going to get from blizzard about the true problems at hand. I believe it will be fixed, probably during a very large update in the future, and the problem will be put to rest, and they just won't post about it in the patch notes. But the best way to avoid getting session ID hacked is to NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER play public games, and you won't get session ID hacked. Nor team with strangers.

 

Also another concern of mine, the RMAH. Once this goes live, basically what is going to happen is you are going to have one class of gamers who struggle to find halfway decent gear, then another who just buys all their gear from from the Chinese farmers, and hackers. Prices on anything good in the regular gold AH will be super inflated, meaning the people who want to play the game without spending money are going to find themselves in an even tougher position than ever before once they get to inferno and hit a massive brick wall because of how much more difficult it is going to be to gear up due to most people not wanting to trade anything decent for anything other than real money.

 

I have personally lost items on the Auction house. For example I put 10 items up last week, log off, then log back on 2 hours later, to only find 3/10 of my items on the list, but they weren't purchased because I had no gold sitting there. Now I'm aware the AH can be laggy can sometimes it takes time, but even 2 days later I didn't see my gold or my items I put up there previously, they "poof" vanished.

 

If any of those things I noted concern you then I highly recommend not buying it because you will be just as disappointed as I was. First and foremost, I'm a casual gamer, and this game is absolutely not for the casual gamers. I might come back in a year or 2 after they tone this game down and fix most of the current major issues with things being unbalanced. Diablo II wasn't exactly a walk in the park, but Diablo III inferno difficulty is 5x harder, and I'd say 10x harder to actually find gear that can get you much past Act 2. In Diablo II if you had high health/armor/resists you wouldn't get killed very easy, in Diablo III inferno you get killed really easy no matter what. Those exploding pods in act 2, just casually sitting in the map, hit for like 40k if you got no resists, which is 1hko. Any enemy that dies and leaves a poison cloud will kill you in 2-3 secs even with 35k HP 8k armor and 800 resists.

[Vindekarr]

Excellent article. Well written and to the point.

 

My critque is that the Barbarian is really, pretty pointless. You just wouldn't want to play as one. They're dumb, ugly and when you factor in Inferno, they're dumb ugly AND dead. They're also soullessly boring-ugly gorillas stumping around with an axe that hits for about a tenth of what my DH can, jumping into combat, getting OHKO'ed, and then blaming the Monk for not healing. Many online games have a "dumb" class, the one everyone makes jokes about being always played by noobs. In SWTOR there's about five million jokes about Jedi Sentinels and the supposedly chimpanzee-like gamers who play them, in Diablo, it's the Barbarians. I'm yet to see one who wasn't a liability.

 

The always online-ness wouldn't be a problem if it was reliable but it just ain't. It crashes frequently, and the 1.02 patch completely crippled every client in Asia that wasn't running in Chinese. Which would be fine if you were in China/spoke Chinese(lots of people do, even in Australia it's usually the standard-issue second language) but it's TRADITIONAL Chinese, and supposedly, not a lot of people in China even speak that. I'm a forgiving sort of player, but I can only forgive so much, and Diablo has pushed me beyond what I can stand. Blizzard's really messed up this time. And no, it's not normal. I've been through some lousy launches before(LOTRO for example, was horrible) but this is just ridonculous. "Teething issues" is an early shutdown for maintaince each day for the first week. A disaster is ten emergency patches, rampant server issues, patch-looping, and the fact that all of Asia can't play it due to an issue with a rushed patch.

 

Ah well, Dragon's Dogma makes up for it IMO, atleast we have a new, good RPG to play with. And there's been some other fun launches lately too.

[Beriallord]

Excellent article. Well written and to the point.

 

My critque is that the Barbarian is really, pretty pointless. You just wouldn't want to play as one. They're dumb, ugly and when you factor in Inferno, they're dumb ugly AND dead. They're also soullessly boring-ugly gorillas stumping around with an axe that hits for about a tenth of what my DH can, jumping into combat, getting OHKO'ed, and then blaming the Monk for not healing. Many online games have a "dumb" class, the one everyone makes jokes about being always played by noobs. In SWTOR there's about five million jokes about Jedi Sentinels and the supposedly chimpanzee-like gamers who play them, in Diablo, it's the Barbarians. I'm yet to see one who wasn't a liability.

 

The always online-ness wouldn't be a problem if it was reliable but it just ain't. It crashes frequently, and the 1.02 patch completely crippled every client in Asia that wasn't running in Chinese. Which would be fine if you were in China/spoke Chinese(lots of people do, even in Australia it's usually the standard-issue second language) but it's TRADITIONAL Chinese, and supposedly, not a lot of people in China even speak that. I'm a forgiving sort of player, but I can only forgive so much, and Diablo has pushed me beyond what I can stand. Blizzard's really messed up this time. And no, it's not normal. I've been through some lousy launches before(LOTRO for example, was horrible) but this is just ridonculous. "Teething issues" is an early shutdown for maintaince each day for the first week. A disaster is ten emergency patches, rampant server issues, patch-looping, and the fact that all of Asia can't play it due to an issue with a rushed patch.

 

Ah well, Dragon's Dogma makes up for it IMO, atleast we have a new, good RPG to play with. And there's been some other fun launches lately too.

 

Actually Barbarian is fine up until Inferno. Up until that point a barb could survive with just high health + high armor and using skills like revenge and furious charge to heal. My barb had 15k DPS in hell + 45k health and about 5k armor, I was fine. I could pop wrath of the berserker and bump my DPS into the 45k range for about 15 secs. But when I took a step in Inferno with next to no resists, I got killed in 2 secs by any elite pack. So then I tried buying some resist all gear. The main problem was that pieces of equipment with STR + VIT + Resist all were super expensive, so I had to take cuts in both STR and VIT to get some resist all, otherwise I just couldn't afford the gear. But in doing so I lost almost all my critical hit % and critical hit damage % which lowered my DPS down to like 7500. That was dual wielding 2 500ish maces, but I needed a shield with resist all, so I went 1h mace + shield, then my DPS dropped to 6800. Found a 740ish axe, which cost me 1.5 mil, which had decent VIT gains, but no STR, and that got me back up to 7900. I managed to get 650-800 in resists, physical was closer to 800, but I also lost about 10k health. So 7900 DPS, 35k health, 650-800 resists and about 6k armor. Soon as I walk into act 2, I run into the same problems I had in act 1 before i even geared up. Basically I couldn't find a balance with gear that would allow me to survive but at the same time, do enough damage to where the fights weren't prolonged, or I was simply dead. I couldn't gear up for inferno. The pieces of gear I needed were 5m a piece. It took me 3 days of farming act 1 Inferno to accumulate just 1.5 mil, keep in mind, this wasn't efficient farming, there was a lot of hickups in the way, running into elite packs I couldn't kill, etc. Seems like 60% of them I just had to avoid at all costs. I managed to solo act 1, keep in mind, this wasn't easy, I estimate around 200 deaths. I got lucky on butcher, because right when the rage timer went on, he had 1/8th bar, and ignore pain + wrath of berserker was back up, so I was able to take that out before the fire finished me off. It wasn't skill, I got lucky that one of my CDs just happened to come off CD at exactly the right moment when I needed it. If I was to repeat the same fight with the same gear 100 times, I'm sure I would have lost 90/100 of them. But lucky for me it only took 6 attempts. I was able to tank the normal mobs in act 1 just fine. The elite/champion groups were where I was getting killed. Arcane + fire chain is rape for melee. The very best I could do vs dual elemental prefix mobs was pop wrath of berserker + dull pain then use earthquake and hack away at one of them, and hope I kill at least one before they get me, then rez, wait for my CDs to come back up and repeat for the others. Hell with that, I'd rater just avoid them, its not worth it.

 

As far as my skills/passives, I looked around, and copied some other peoples builds. The difference between them and me was still the gear. They had 55kHP 10k armor, 900-1100 resists and 18k DPS. Even then that will only get you to maybe the middle of act 3. The way armor/resists work, is you need extremely high numbers before damage starts getting mitigated down to somewhat sane levels. You would need to have 75-80%+ from armor, then another 75-80% + from resist all. So if something hits for 100k with 80% resist from armor = 20k, then if you got 80% physical it will reduce that to 4000, but that is still a TON of damage. If you got a group of mobs that can hit for those numbers you are still gonna get owned. And there is no shortage of mobs in act 3 and 4 that can hit for those numbers. Mallet lords in act 4 inferno can hit for like 150k vs someone with low armor/resits, like a Demon Hunter. And that is just the normal versions, the elite/champ versions of those probably hit for 2x that much.

 

 

My friend has a Demon hunter with 70k DPS, and he cannot solo Inferno Belial. Not because he sucks, but because 1hko and hes dead. Not one single iota of room for any error at all. Its possible but you would probably have to get lucky like I did with Butcher. He went full out Dex + crit %/Crit damage and att speed. He said when sharpshooter is up, he can drop most elites pretty quickly, but he said DH is crap for any fights that are prolonged, and there are quite a few that are gonna take a while no matter what. He said the add ons get him every time in the belial fight. Add ons would actually be a bonus for barbarian, because those are just extra mobs to drain health from with revenge/overpower, etc. One of my strategies for taking down some elites was to pull them into a group of normal mobs so I had something to drain health from. You can go cheaper on gear for DH, but you can't do that for melee characters, they need all round solid stat gains for both VIT + STR or DEX if a monk and resist all. With monk you could sub resist all for a single resist, then stack that resist type on every piece of gear then use "one with everything passive" and you might be able to go a little cheaper on gear, but that is pretty much it.

 

Inferno is hard, but not in a fun/challenging way, but more of a stupid/broken way.

 

I don't like ranged classes, I like playing as tanks/warriors in these kinds of games. I leveled up a monk to 45 or so, and honestly Monk isn't in any better position than Barbarian is, probably worse because they do even less damage, and Monk's heals don't scale well in Inferno. And most of Barb's health drains are based on a % of their health, which means barb can heal himself in inferno better than monk can. And Barb will always do more DPS when it counts if they got wrath of Berserker, which more or less triples your DPS, and buffs other stuff like move speed, immune to control effects, and dodge when its up. As much as people knock barbarian, they are still better than Monk.

 

Another friend of mine beat inferno with his wizard before they fixed the energy armor thing. It was a rune that made any damage over 35% of your health do 35%, which meant Wizards would make low VIT + high life on hit/regen builds and never get killed as long as they were attacking. But even worst case, it let you survive 3 hits from anything. Now it doesn't work because any attack that would 1hko you, still 1hkos you. Which makes that rune now worthless. I don't like all the hotfixes that are typical MMORPG crap. Its kinda dumb when someone figured out a build that can actually beat inferno, without having 100 mil + worth of gear, then they nerf it into being useless. People tried to pass that off as a glitch/exploit, and I'm like no? The rune did EXACTLY as it says it did, anything over 35% did 35% so I don't see how it was anything other than intentional.

Edited June 4, 2012 by Beriallord

[Vindekarr]

On the low dificulties the ranged classes are pretty fun. The DH, after being useless until level 20, suddenly becomes a monster-if you DPS spec it(a risky move, you'll be extremely flimsy even on Normal if you go all-out DPS, OHK-able) but it's FUN. And that's why I don't hate D3. It's seriously broken ATM, but there's still a good core if like me you're into ranged. Wizard is even better-you're low on survival type skills, with just a handful, but you've got a vast smorgasbord of ways to kill people, and DPS specced, you can cause mayhem. On Normal, the Wizard is literaly unstoppable. I've finished Normal playthroughs on both and not died even once, though with the DH that was good luck and good management, on the Wizard it was because I could merrily teleport around using Annihilate(a skill that lives up to it's name, it's comically effective on low dificulties. Literally vaporise people)

[hoofhearted4]

the RMAH + the DRM is a dumb idea. basically, now that its always online, blizzard cant make an on the spot patch to nerf any good legendary/rare items to make them worthless. they can either change the actual item or perhaps change the drop rate. what was once good and rare no longer is. but it sounds like they already made it so legendary items are crap to begin with....hell i think the AH in general is stupid. no casual player who hops into D3 (which, lets me honest, D3 was dumbed down so the casual player would play it) could afford anything good in the AH anyways.

 

i was always turned off at the lack of customization. no Skill or Stat points is a HUGE turn of for me, esp in an RPG, and esp in the predecessor to arguably one of the better RPGs to have ever come out, which id it all right. i honestly would have no desire to try it on Inferno. i only ever played D2 on normal (and even then only beat it once so far) but knowing that Inferno is broken, and that the one class i wanted to try (Monk) would suck on such difficulty, its even less of a reason to buy the game, knowing a whole section of the game, even if i didnt wanna play it, is broken, is still a turn off.

 

also knowing Blizzad is nerfing anything that actually works is pathetic too. treating this game like an MMO (always online, patches, nerfs, updates constantly) was just the most stupid decision possible. when D3 goes down to $40 and is the Battlechest with any and all expansions and whatnot, then ill probably get it. until then im sticking with the one thing they did right (recently that is) StarCraft 2. fingers crossed that they live up to their work with SC2 in its two future expansions. if they cop out and do what they did here with them, ill be one pissed MFer lol....what ironic is that SC2 doesnt have an always on DRM. when Bnet was downt he other day (i tried playing some D2) me and a friend went and played SC2 instead (obv not together since Bnet was down). oh well. as i said, fingers crossed they dont screw up the SC2 expansions, and even better that they hopefully dont screw up for any D3 expansions.

[Beriallord]

The thing about Diablo III is that the game is horribly addictive, but on the other hand I wasn't finding myself enjoying it. Part of the addiction came from the hope of finding a really good piece of gear, or etc. Similar reason to how people get addicted to gambling. And it wasn't addictive for its fun factor. You guys might think this is crazy, but I'm OCD, and I sometimes fall victim to games that are addictive, but not exactly fun. I could be playing a game, and be frustrated to the point where I'm ready to smash a keyboard or monitor, and I sometimes don't know when to quit. The difference between me and normal people, is normal people know when to quit far before they ever reach that point. And that leads to monitors/keyboards getting smashed sometimes. And Diablo III was the first game in 6 years that has drove me to that point. I deleted all my characters, and created a dummy which I deleted last just to make sure I deleted every bit of work I put in the game, which created a reason for me to not go back to the game. I uninstalled the game and deleted all the data. As well as got a refund on my digital copy. Games that are addictive, but not fun, are the reason I think about smashing PC monitors, and develop an incredibly sour attitude in general while playing the game. Games like this are just a complete downward spiral for me personality and attitude wise. I don't know if there are others out there similar to me who sometimes find themselves playing games they aren't enjoying because they are either bored, or addicted to the game play in some manner. If anyone out there is like me, you don't need to play this. Save yourself a monitor or keyboard. I'm lucky it was a $30 keyboard and not my $350 monitor. Edited June 4, 2012 by Beriallord

[Vindekarr]

The thing about Diablo III is that the game is horribly addictive, but on the other hand I wasn't finding myself enjoying it. Part of the addiction came from the hope of finding a really good piece of gear, or etc. Similar reason to how people get addicted to gambling. And it wasn't addictive for its fun factor. You guys might think this is crazy, but I'm OCD, and I sometimes fall victim to games that are addictive, but not exactly fun. I could be playing a game, and be frustrated to the point where I'm ready to smash a keyboard or monitor, and I sometimes don't know when to quit. The difference between me and normal people, is normal people know when to quit far before they ever reach that point. And that leads to monitors/keyboards getting smashed sometimes. And Diablo III was the first game in 6 years that has drove me to that point. I deleted all my characters, and created a dummy which I deleted last just to make sure I deleted every bit of work I put in the game, which created a reason for me to not go back to the game. I uninstalled the game and deleted all the data. As well as got a refund on my digital copy. Games that are addictive, but not fun, are the reason I think about smashing PC monitors, and develop an incredibly sour attitude in general while playing the game. Games like this are just a complete downward spiral for me personality and attitude wise. I don't know if there are others out there similar to me who sometimes find themselves playing games they aren't enjoying because they are either bored, or addicted to the game play in some manner. If anyone out there is like me, you don't need to play this. Save yourself a monitor or keyboard. I'm lucky it was a $30 keyboard and not my $350 monitor.

 

You might want to try a game called Torchlight. Don't let the lack of pedigree or bargain-basement pricetag put you off, it's a great little game... very similar to Diablo 3 but with fewer issues. It lacks the (faux) "dark" atmosphere completely, but you'll certainly get your ~ $10 worth. I personally, love it. Another game you might want to try is Dragon's Dogma... it's stupidly addictive-like salted peanuts. You'll eat one, then two, and then you'll glance down and realise you've eaten the whole pack. It's a properly good RPG, and interesting blend of Western CRPG and Japanese JRPG traits. I managed to scrounge a pre-owned for $30, best $30 I spent this year. I very rarely feel myself pulled away from being a wizard, but it somehow conned me into replaying as a Fighter... very few RPGs can do that, props to Capcom that they could-that I-normal normally not interested in this game style-am even playing a JRPG is some testiment to it's charm.

Edited June 4, 2012 by Vindekarr

[Beriallord]

The thing about Diablo III is that the game is horribly addictive, but on the other hand I wasn't finding myself enjoying it. Part of the addiction came from the hope of finding a really good piece of gear, or etc. Similar reason to how people get addicted to gambling. And it wasn't addictive for its fun factor. You guys might think this is crazy, but I'm OCD, and I sometimes fall victim to games that are addictive, but not exactly fun. I could be playing a game, and be frustrated to the point where I'm ready to smash a keyboard or monitor, and I sometimes don't know when to quit. The difference between me and normal people, is normal people know when to quit far before they ever reach that point. And that leads to monitors/keyboards getting smashed sometimes. And Diablo III was the first game in 6 years that has drove me to that point. I deleted all my characters, and created a dummy which I deleted last just to make sure I deleted every bit of work I put in the game, which created a reason for me to not go back to the game. I uninstalled the game and deleted all the data. As well as got a refund on my digital copy. Games that are addictive, but not fun, are the reason I think about smashing PC monitors, and develop an incredibly sour attitude in general while playing the game. Games like this are just a complete downward spiral for me personality and attitude wise. I don't know if there are others out there similar to me who sometimes find themselves playing games they aren't enjoying because they are either bored, or addicted to the game play in some manner. If anyone out there is like me, you don't need to play this. Save yourself a monitor or keyboard. I'm lucky it was a $30 keyboard and not my $350 monitor.

 

You might want to try a game called Torchlight. Don't let the lack of pedigree or bargain-basement pricetag put you off, it's a great little game... very similar to Diablo 3 but with fewer issues. It lacks the (faux) "dark" atmosphere completely, but you'll certainly get your ~ $10 worth. I personally, love it. Another game you might want to try is Dragon's Dogma... it's stupidly addictive-like salted peanuts. You'll eat one, then two, and then you'll glance down and realise you've eaten the whole pack. It's a properly good RPG, and interesting blend of Western CRPG and Japanese JRPG traits. I managed to scrounge a pre-owned for $30, best $30 I spent this year. I very rarely feel myself pulled away from being a wizard, but it somehow conned me into replaying as a Fighter... very few RPGs can do that, props to Capcom that they could-that I-normal normally not interested in this game style-am even playing a JRPG is some testiment to it's charm.

 

I already got torchlight. Played it for over 200 hours and got the game shortly after it was first released. Actually it was the example I was hoping Diablo III would follow. I hear Torchlight II is coming out soon.

 

There is a difference between me being addicted to a game that is challenging, and I'm actually having fun, than with a game that is addictive and challenging, but is no fun. Example, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Most would say both of those games are challenging, and they are, but I legitimately enjoyed playing both, so I was never driven to the point of complete frustration.

[hoofhearted4]

i gotta say im loving Dragons Dogma. ive only had it for a few days and have barely played it (im like level 18 i think) the only thing that bugs me is no fast travel. the fights are fun, an there is plenty of it, so as of now, i dont mind so much wandering around, but i can see that growing into a pain later in the game. we will see. im loving my bow/duel dagger rouge. extremely fun.

[Beriallord]

I've read several reviews about Dragon's Dogma, and I think I'm going to wait for the price to drop. I've seen a number of issues some of the "non fanboyish" reviewers have highlighted that sorta ring home to me Or maybe they will patch and fix some things. I'm sorta reluctant to pay top dollar for a game, unless it is really solid, and I know for a fact I'd enjoy it. In an open world game, lack of fast travel would certainly annoy me. I've been spoiled by games like Oblivion. I'm not one of those people who enjoyed the immersion of a game. Previous games in the past with open worlds + no fast travel I've been known to set auto run in a certain direction, then go afk for 5 mins, because I don't feel like sitting in front of a screen waiting. Edited June 5, 2012 by Beriallord