Nelson Schneider's Game Review of Diablo III

Not Enough Hatred
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/29/14

The console release of “Diablo 3” marks my first return to Blizzard’s archetypal Hack ‘n Slash series since the abject boredom of the PS1 version of the original “Diablo” scared me away from the sub-genre for a good many years. I am one of those few (so it seems) people who never got sucked into the loot-grinding addiction afforded by “Diablo 2,” yet I really don’t feel like I missed out on anything. I’ve played plenty of “Diablo’s” bastard children – Copycat Hack ‘n Slash games made to cash-in on “Diablo 2’s” inexplicable popularity – but have yet to find any of them to be particularly enjoyable, and have actually come to loathe the sub-genre’s reliance on randomness and procedural generation. Thus it was with reluctance that I let fellow MeltedJoystick writer Chris talk me into a participating in the new local co-op mode that Blizzard added to the console port of “Diablo 3.”

Presentation
While still in Beta testing on PC, “Diablo 3” received a lot of backlash from the fanatical worshippers of “Diablo 2” for DARING to include a few colors besides ‘grim’ and ‘dark,’ and for a somewhat cartoony character design mentality. “THESE COLORS AND CARTOONY CHARACTERS DON’T MESH WITH THE GRIMDARKEVIL TONE OF THE ‘DIABLO’ SERIES!!!!!” screamed the longtime fans. So Blizzard relented, and the final version of “Diablo 3” looks less like a new game released in 2012, and more like a poor-mans sprite-to-polygon conversion of a game made in 2000. Everything in the game is small, drab, lacking in detail, and lined with jagged edges. This is not what I would have expected after a 12-year development cycle!

The only parts of the game that reveal any particular artistry are, unsurprisingly, the pre-rendered cutscenes that play at the beginning of each Act. These cutscenes are a marvel to behold, as the quality of the animation and modeling are on par with – or even exceed – the typical CG animated feature film.

The sound in “Diablo 3” is completely mediocre and forgettable. I can’t say a single tune in the soundtrack stuck with me, and the voiceacting is filled with cheesy performances and badly faked accents. Even worse, most of the story is relayed purely via dialogs which skip forward whenever a player touches the basic attack button (X), resulting is large swaths of missed conversation if the player(s) aren’t standing stock still and listening. In my experience, when a game relays the story via audio, it makes the most sense to keep the audio going no matter what the player does, as it allows player(s) to do their between mission shopping, etc. while still listening to the narration.

Technically, “Diablo 3” is remarkably solid for a PC port. I only ran into one major glitch… but it was indeed MAJOR. After playing for 3-4 hours one week, I returned the following week to discover that the game hadn’t saved any of MY character’s progress. It had saved the other guys’ progress just fine, so they were a few levels ahead of me and I was without a few pieces of good loot. I have no idea how the game managed to NOT SAVE my progress at all that week, but it was an incredibly annoying experience to lose leveling progress and loot in a game that is largely about leveling progress and loot.

Story
Since I don’t know the ‘stories’ of “Diablo” and “Diablo 2,” I’m taking the game’s word for it (and Chris’) that “Diablo 3” is a direct sequential follow-up to the previous entry in the series. It seems that most of the Lords of Hell have been defeated in previous games and the few that remain are trying to take control of the Legions of Hell to conquer the world of mortals. The angels seem perfectly content to let all of this bad stuff happen, so long as Hell stays out of Heaven… except for one angel who descends to the mortal realm to help keep the forces of evil at bay.

There are a handful of important characters to meet throughout the story’s 4 Acts, and many of them are integral to the game’s events. But I never felt like any of them were particularly interesting, nor did I find the game’s linear chain of events to be particularly engaging or thought provoking. Indeed, the only thoughts the game’s story provoked from me were, ‘If there are Abrahamic Tradition angels and demons going at it, why is there an Eastern Tradition monk running around talking about gods who don’t seem to exist? And where the heck is THE God that supposedly created all this stuff, and why isn’t He doing anything about it?’ I don’t know if the poorly-conceptualized internal mythology of the ‘Diablo’ universe is due to a lack of Classics majors on the writing staff or due to the necessity to cleave to the mythology laid-out in the previous games in the series, which were made way back when most videogame writing was abysmal.

The player characters aren’t particularly interesting either, but they at least talk, which is a huge improvement over most games of this type, where Silent Heroes dominate.

In all, “Diablo 3’s” story isn’t going to win any awards for quality or creativity, but it does at least provide enough forward momentum to keep the characters moving from place to place, fighting one Demon Lord after the next. The ending even manages to pull off a bit of an unpredictable twist… though I can’t be sure if it was truly unpredictable, or simply unpredictable to ME based on my lack of familiarity with the previous games in the series.

Gameplay
Where “Diablo 3” stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of the sub-genre its franchise created is in the realm of gameplay. While I have been exposed to PC Master Race arguments for nearly two years about how much better “Torchlight 2” is than “Diablo 3,” the reality of the situation is that the PC Master Race is, as usual, WRONG.

Of course, comparing “Torchlight 2” on PC to “Diablo 3” on consoles is a bit like comparing apples to… slightly different colored apples. There is literally no reason that the improvements made to the console version of “Diablo 3” couldn’t be included in the PC version, yet, as far as I know, there is still no controller support, offline play, local co-op, or local save storage in the PC version of the game. Blizzard seems content to simply shutdown the Auction Houses and rejigger the loot drop algorithms in the PC version and call it done. Likewise, Runic seems perfectly happy to leave “Torchlight 2” without controller support and has placed the task of ‘improving’ the game in the hands of modders via Steam Workshop. Thus both games on PC suffer from obsolete PC game design mentalities that really have no place in the modern gaming ecosystem where PC and console are identical experiences.

“Diablo 3” on console controls like a dream. The Dual Shock 3 controller provides exactly enough buttons in just the right placement to make wading through hordes of monsters a pleasant experience. The ability to move with the left stick, roll with the right stick, and perform the game’s plethora of hotkeyed special moves with the controllers buttons is a huge improvement over any PC Hack ‘n Slash where clicking controls movement, attacks, target selection, and far too many other things, while mashing an ergonomically nightmarish set of hotkeys on the keyboard launches special attacks.

Of course, “Diablo 3’s” gameplay isn’t great solely because of the controller support. I’ve played plenty of other Hack ‘n Slashes on PS3, and they’ve all been pretty bland experiences. Where “Diablo 3” stands out – and this applies regardless of the control scheme used – is in its focus on special moves. Each character has a single default attack and a large number of special attacks. For most classes, the default attack generates a small amount of the character’s ‘resource’ (be it Mana, Hatred, Spirit, etc.), while the special attacks consume varying amounts of this resource. Thus combat becomes an almost Zen-like ebb and flow of consume-generate-consume, whereas most games in the sub-genre are just consume-and-wait or consume-and-guzzle-potions when it comes to special attacks.

Special attacks are further improved over other games in the sub-genre by the fact that they simply unlock as a character levels and are freely assignable to hotkeys (provided the player enables Elective Mode in the main option menu). There is no worrying about respeccing or accidentally choosing an ineffective special attack and being stuck with it. Moreover, each special attack gains unlockable runes as the player continues to level. Each special attack can only have one of its runes active at a time, but these can be swapped freely at any time, providing plenty of options to keep combat from becoming stale.

Then there’s the core mechanic in the Hack ‘n Slash sub-genre: Loot. “Diablo 3” on PC was harshly criticized for having some of the worst loot drops in the history of random loot. The necessity of chintzy loot drops was rationalized by Blizzard’s poorly-thought-out Auction House system, in which players could either sell items for in-game gold or real-world dollars. In order to prevent the Auction Houses from being absolutely flooded with merchandise, the game was forcibly turned into a cheapskate, and the few drops that did appear paid no heed to the player’s character class, since obtaining loot one couldn’t use would just encourage use of the Auction Houses.

The console version of “Diablo 3” never suffered under the taint of the Auction Houses, but instead served as the initial testbed for what Blizzard has dubbed ‘Loot 2.0.’ And it seems that the shuttering of the Auction Houses and the makeover of loot distribution has taken “Diablo 3” from the least generous game in its sub-genre to the most generous. Any new character starting out in the console version of the game is GIVEN a number of high-quality Legendary items that will last the player for quite a while. Furthermore, the game seems incredibly prone to dropping loot for the character classes currently in use, and generously gives up Rare and Legendary items after every conflict with an Elite enemy, Loot Goblin, or boss monster.

Even better, “Diablo 3” introduces a rather interesting crafting system to the Hack ‘n Slash subgenre that makes all those Uncommon loot drops actually useful. Every Uncommon (or better) item can be broken down into crafting materials that can be used by the game’s Blacksmith character to craft specific items of the player’s choosing. The Blacksmith must be trained (at the player’s cost) to learn how to craft higher-level items, but every item he crafts is virtually guaranteed to be high-quality and provide relevant bonuses to the character commissioning it. Sure, Common items are still trash, but I would absolutely love it if other loot-based games (*coughBorderlands2cough*) allowed the player to recycle underwhelming loot into something awesome. The Blacksmith proved so useful that none of the MeltedJoystick crew ended up using non-Legendary loot drops simply because crafted items were so much better… and all of those unused loot drops further fueled the Blacksmith’s forge.

Overall
“Diablo 3,” while lacking in wow-factor and storytelling, manages to feel completely different from every other Hack ‘n Slash on the market… and is a far better game for this difference. The elegant controls on the console version, combined with the flashy, special-attack centric combat makes wading through “Diablo 3’s” hordes of demons actually fun. To top it off, the Auction House-free version of the game’s loot distribution is generous and the Blacksmithing system only amplifies a player’s ability to acquire good loot without the egregious amounts of tedious grinding so typical to the sub-genre. “Diablo 3” might not scratch the itch for fans of “Diablo 2,” but as someone who never had that particular itch, I can confidently say that “Diablo 3” on consoles is about as good as the Hack ‘n Slash sub-genre gets.

Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5