I'm Done with Diablo III, and I'm Not Mad About It.

That’s right, I said it. Diablo 3 really is a great game, I've put over 100 hours into it, and now I’m done with it, and I’m not mad about it. The first 72 hours of this game after launch, playing co-op with my friends almost non-stop, having new experiences and getting extremely nostalgic was, to this day one of the best experiences I've had with ANY video game. But, when a game is the follow-up to such a fan favorite, and comes from such a prestigious company, a lot is expected. And in a lot of ways Diablo 3 lived up to the hype. Diablo 3 is an absolutely fantastic game. It’s graphically beautiful, literally years were poured into this game’s aesthetic and it shows. Every room you enter is like walking into a painting. I spent hours of extra time in this game just walking around experiencing what the game had to offer. In every room I explored off the beaten path, I discovered not only the typical monsters and loot, but also a new piece of artwork to spray zombified guts all over! An on the topic of said guts-spraying, the combat and gameplay itself is the spell spamming, undead undoing, creature crushing action that you fell in love with in titles past. The basic concept of click ability A onto monster B, rinse and repeat until all the monsters are dead is still the core of the game. If anything the changes to the skill system and loot drops only improved that. Gone are the days of tiered skill trees, and per-level skill points. Replacing it are skills, modifiable via another similar in game system, that you gain access to over time as you level up. Similarly, the per-level attribute points were removed in this iteration, making the lives of casuals and Min/Maxers alike a little simpler.  Not having to worry about math equations and what is the ‘right decision’ every few minutes felt good, and changed the game overall for the better.

That being said, this game is not flawless, far from it in fact. When a game has had so much hype behind it, and so many people expecting so much there was no way they could have made a game that truly lived up to all of the hype.  No matter what was changed or kept the same from the past titles, someone was upset. If you change it too much, people will complain that it “isn’t Diablo.” If you only make a few changes and update the graphics, the fans will leave their gaming experiences wanting more, and wanting to know why they just paid $60 to play the same game they’ve been playing for 10 years already. So, if it’s such a great game, and I played Diablo II for so many hours over so many years, why did I stop?  I think I’ve narrowed it down to three main reasons: Inferno Difficulty Implementation, The Auction House Mechanic, and the lack of a Ladder system.

Inferno Difficulty
When it was announced that there was an extra difficulty to be added after Hell in D3, I was nothing but excited.  I often find games that are too easy, or completely the opposite, so challenging that the time to reward ratio is completely unfavorable.  My faith in Blizzard led me to believe that it would be what equates to a proper hard-mode that only the most skilled of players would be able to navigate.  Then I got there, and much to my chagrin it was not that way at all.  It was implemented it a way where the difficulty was all over the place, which really threw off the pace of the game. I came into inferno and everything was just as I expected it, and it was good. It was a lot like hell but I enemies were more challenging and I had to change my strategy accordingly.  And then I got to a champion pack with 4 affixes, I remember the first group I found: Mortar, Waller, Vampuric, Fast.  And this is where the difficulty curve hit a brick wall. Even with the ability to change up my abilities, runes and equipment to suit the battle on the fly (which is very much discouraged by the nephelem valor buff mechanic), there was literally NOTHING I could have done to make this a fair fight. So, I was left with essentially three options, none of which creating anything that resembles compelling gameplay.  I could run past them, further into the area and hope that they stop pursuing me and just hope that I don’t die and have to run past them again. I could chip away at their life bars slowly by kiting them in circles until I died, and then doing it again and again until they died. This would of course, also take lots of time and money in repair costs. Or I could go back to hell difficulty and grind act 4 repeatedly to get better equipment; an act of the game that is the perfect combination of being too short, feeling too long, and ending with an extremely uninspired and anti-climactic boss fight ripped directly from World of Warcraft.  I eventually went and did exactly what blizzard told us we didn’t have to do: I looked up a build. I found a build that I never would have thought of and it made life in inferno a bit easier, but it still suffered from what I like to call Deus Ex: Human Revolution syndrome when it came to elite mobs and boss fights. I am not a game designer; I don’t have the answer as to how to fix Inferno. But, I will tell you one thing, there is nothing compelling about inferno difficulty. Either you grind and grind until you make progress, or you fork up many of your very real dollars to buy what you need to progress: a fundamental change to the Diablo equation that really subtracts from the game feel.

The Auction House
When the Real Money Auction House was announced, it was literally all anyone in the video games industry could talk about for a solid two weeks. Every blogger, every podcaster, every news site, even non-game related media covered it pretty extensively, and for good reason. It was new and crazy. The idea of paying real money for in game items was not a new one, it had been done by high school kids and Chinese gold farmers alike for many years. But for the first time ever, the company had taken control of the market and allowed the transaction’s through legal and regulated channels, that of course made them money. There were many good points made on both sides of the argument. Being able to buy power in game with real money was scary and offensive to many, allowing players with more real money to get a distinct in-game advantage that would normally only be earned through many hours of devoted farming. But on the other side, Blizzard wasn’t doing anything new, the same services existed in the backwater of the internet, and often ended in stolen identities and lost money, so why not regulate it? Well, as it turns out neither of those aforementioned ‘problems’ really are what happened.  I didn’t feel jealous of other players buying with cash, and I didn’t feel like Blizzard were money-grubbing either. The auction house just changed how people played. Trading items, a foundation of the economy of the other games, was essentially completely eliminated. The crafting systems, which many of us who played right at launch dumped all of our gold into, wound up being completely useless due to always being able to get better items at auction. It’s an addition that’s supposed to make it easier to gear your character, but all it did for me was turn a fun game into a gold grind. There exists means of combating this within Blizzard’s vast history: implementing a ladder season system.

Where’s my ladder?
It is my very unprofessional opinion that a lack of a ladder system will severely affect the long-term life of the game.  I am going to log back in on a whim six months from now, and all my characters and gear is going to still be relevant, no new content will be added, and I’m going to be just as bored as I was three weeks after launch.  The elimination of non-played characters and the regular reset of the ladder seasons kept me coming back at least once a year for the entire lifespan of Diablo 2. I know that idea borders on arbitrary game-lengthening mechanics, but if you are coming back, having fun and not regretting that you did, I cannot in my right mind say that that’s a bad thing. This could solve a few problems with the game: Items going back to non-ladder status would keep prices fluctuating, players would feel incentivized to come back regularly to start over with their friends when the ladder resets, and you could increase the item drop rate because there would be a set end date to the relevance of the items. For my money, adding a ladder system would be a win-win-win-win situation.

I really really want to absolutely adore this game, and in a lot of ways I do. I’m not looking forward to PvP patch that was promised. And the endgame content they promised is likely more than 8 months away, with Pandas coming in September and the next installment of Starcraft 2 long  after. There doesn’t look like there is much on the horizon that will keep me playing, but despite all that I said that seemed contrary, I am not really mad about it. If you are on the fence about getting the game still you should get it, you will not be disappointed.  If you still play it and you can look past the flaws and love the grind, keep on keepin’ on! But if you’re anything like me, you’ve loved what you had, and you’ve moved on until the next Chris Metzen redemption story, or in other words, the first x-pack!