Diablo 3

Played it. Beat it (once, on Normal). It pretty much met my expectations. That is to say it's an okay action game. I might have been a little more fun to play through than I would have guessed, but only a little. If I'd had to pay, I probably would have skipped it without regret.

Gameplay is exactly what you expect. Lots of clicking and lot of collecting. Some usage of half a dozen abilities. The town portal ability is more convenient now, which makes me wonder why the bother with having to spend a few seconds identifying rare items before you can use them. Companions seem reasonably useful. Visuals aren't stunning, but they're in the realm of pretty good at least. I love the music and the audio in general except for the overdone "ka-chunk" of those hand crossbows and the faint vocal lore entries (I should see if there's a way to boost those). The story is... passable in that the plot always gives you something to do, but it's also got enough large holes that I with they had either pushed it less or developed it more. The online connection requirement is an annoyance, but a relatively minor one.

I'm still a little undecided on replayability.
Pros: Gold and stashed items are shared between characters. Items do not "bind" to characters, so you can use them and then pass them down (or sell them or whatever). Leveling of the blacksmith/jewelcrafter appears to be shared between characters.
Con: You have to clear each difficulty level to play the next, with each character.
So having a demon hunter with access to Nightmare now, I can either 1) continue playing that character, getting more gold and better stuff or 2) start another character on Normal with the advantage of shared goods, but having to play through the same (with some minor randomization along the way) content I just completed. I'd rather be able to work toward better stuff on Nightmare and try a new playstyle of a different class, but that's not an option.


I expected a click-fest. No surprises there. So...

Act I opens about as expected - getting feet wet and starting out around the area of Tristram as the previous games did. While D2 played up the fallen-good-guys approach with enemies like Blood Raven and Griswold, D3 harkens back to the first one, again bringing up faces like Leoric, the Skeleton King and the Butcher. I guess there's some setting establishment and fanservice there. There's an explanation at one point that Tyrael's energy brought back those unjustly slain by Diablo and his forces. I sort of get that with Leoric, though I'm a little confused by the Butcher and it seems a stretch. If they could be raised up again like that, are any of them truly dead even this time? The Prime (and presumably Lesser) Evils are generally said to reform after a time, but are any of the figures we've killed dead permanently? Coherent story has never been the main selling point of a Diablo game (though they seem to have made an effort to piece the lore together more with each installment), but this bugs me.

None of the fights were too hard on normal, even without hitting up the auction house for item upgrades. What I found/crafted served me just fine. While I can't claim to have known what the fallen star was immediately, I figured out who the amnesiac figure was right off, so I wasn't really suprised by much in the act. Even Cain's death, while not something I had consciously predicted, did not see startling, just a little sad.

Act II picks up in a distant land held under deceptive demon control. And through the entire act, I pretty much felt like I was being played. Adria seemed useful in Diablo, but since seeing her in D3, I didn't trust her. Kuule was obviously going to turn the moment he thought he had the upper hand - there's no way someone like that would give up his life's work.The emperor's involvement was way too convenient, and when my demon hunter finally called out Belial at the end of the act I was glad to see signs my character wasn't totally blind. But even most of the way through Act III, I kept coming back to Adria's input being almost as convenient, and she keeps pushing Leah to tap power that's probably founded in the infernal. No, I was just waiting for the witch to make her move too. How the black soulstone was supposed to allow any more final a victory over the Evils doesn't seem to have been explained anywhere I saw. It can contain them all. Okay. Then you shatter it? Uhh... but shattering the other soulstones on the Hellforge, no less, only temporarily killed/banished Mephisto and Diablo. Why is everyone talking like this would be different?

The fights were harder. The early monsters were immediately more dangerous to my demon hunter, being able to launch powerful attacks from range and/or close distance without being hit. I did find an equalibrium for most of the act, though Belial at the end also proved the most deadly encounter to me in the game up to that point (and some while beyond). I think it was simply because the fight involved having to dodge abilities more than previous. Even the earlier bosses just required me to get out of the way of one or two abilities and then resume playing ranged turrent. Belial had several abilities requiring quick responses and not much down time between them. Even so, I died probably three times before getting past him? Not a huge problem in the long run (unless I were playing Hardcore).

Act III returns to Mount Arreat and a castle there originally designed to hold against the barbarians. There's some pretty cool scenery, with the battle going on in the background, but the story mostly consisted of Azmodan appearing in visions to say just how he's going to beat you now and how your latest victory means nothing as you pursue him into the crater. After playing around with secondary abilities, I settled on the shock-augmented elemental arrow for doing ridiculous amounts of damage to groups. I "splurged" and spent about 5000 gold on a pair of hand crossbows from the auction house that were probably 50% better than any I had found, and proceeded to tear things up. The only real threats through most of the act were elite/rare mob spawns that got close and seemed to explode on death, killing me as I did them.

In one little moment that I liked, Azmodan's concubine showed up while I was trying to destroy some infernal power source, but it wasn't a full boss fight - I fought her a little bit befound she fell back and sent in minions. I expected her to return as a phase 2, but nope. And that was neat because it was a little different. You do fight her more fully later, but "teasing" that made it stand out. Of course, as I locked in my thoughts on Adria earlier, seeing her finally show her true colors at the end of the act was no surprise at all.

Act IV moves on to the High Heavens - which is actually a little bit neat, as it's a new environment even if it is overrun with demons. Freeing a couple of the Council archangels is nice. And everyone really pushes the "you are a powerful nephalem" thing at this point, not in the Archangel of Fate's scrolls, and thus the main source of hope. The story acknowledges the player as an unmitigated badass, not just some hero who walked into town. For all that, the gameplay doesn't change and there are no changes to what's going on and what you're doing save the appearance of your surroundings, initially. As the act wore on, though, there were some increasing amounts of environmental damage obstacles from summoners who could drop fireballs on my from off screen to rising walls of spikes and fissures that flare fire.

Izual proved tough for me because he (and the demon adds summoned partway through the fight) could do a charge at me was basically a one-hit kill (or stunned me long enough for a second hit). This is where I ended up enabling Elective Mode (which I only knew about from third-party sources) and set up my skills to include my evasive flip and immobilizing caltrops. The latter made a huge difference, helping me successfully kite him with time to turn around and shoot. Diablo, on the other hand, was a longer multi-phase encounter, but whether due to lessons learned on the way or objective difficulty, the fight wasn't altogether hard for me. I might argue it felt a little bit anticlimactic.

The story still leaves me utterly baffled as to why anyone (especially Tyrael as the new "Wisdom") would think any of this would be final. How did the earlier-defeated Evils get into the blast soulstone anyway? Would shattering it really have slain them permanently, and if so why? Why is Izual back as a demon when he was "freed" and angellic in D2? Why does Tyrael declare Diablo permanently dead when you defeat him this time around? The creators layered on more story this time around, but there's so much of it that doesn't seem to make sense. The presented ending has a tone of finality overall, though there are still potential threats out there - Adria (as was pointed out to me) and Malthael (the "insane" former Wisdom) are clear possibliities, and there's a whole world of people with nephalem superpower potential in them.


Decent actiony clickfest game. For me, though, that means it's something reasonably entertaining I can do in the background, not something I feel very invested in these days.