A great standalone game, Diablo III is extremely fun and addicting, but not worth the title of the Diablo series in my eyes, for it has abandoned a lot of what made the past two games unique in favor of mass marketing and money-making. Three biggest complaints? The graphics are no longer gothic, the chat system encourages you to not talk to people, and the skill tree got a complete overhaul, making the game require much less skill and desire for originality.
Large issues with Diablo III:
Gameplay
- "200 hours of gameplay!" Yes, because you play the same game four times on different difficulty settings, unlike most reasonable games which allow you to pick the difficulty matching your skill level in the first place. Normal is a complete joke, but you have to spend hours going through it to get the game to start becoming even a mite challenging. Yes, Inferno is hard, but what about all that time I wasted getting to it when I know I'm a capable action RPG player that could've started at late Nightmare or Hell? Not an option, too bad, go waste some time now.
- Very stupid things that show Blizzard doesn't have any clue how to mix casual gamers with more involved ones. There's even an option called "elective mode" left on by default for some absolutely insane reason that only allows you to have one spell of each category hotkeyed at any time. Blizzard claims its "casual gamers have thanked them for implementing this useful feature." What? Forcibly restricting your skill selection is helpful? I could understand if skill selecting was confusing, but if clicking an arrow is too hard for them...then Blizzard is not marketing its game to the right people. Stopping trying to please both parties is what a lot of AAA game developers need to do. But since you're adamant that these kind of gamers need to be pleased too, how will your casual gamers fare in Hell or Inferno, Blizzard? No, don't change Hell or Inferno, change your target audience.
- Every class gets every skill available to that class. There is no more specializing. If that didn't remove the last traces of originality enough for you, consider:
- You can no longer allocate your own stats. Only items separate you from others your same class and level now. Why? Because then you're more likely to use the auction house, including the Real Money auction house, where 15% of the sale goes straight to Blizzard's greedy paws.
Graphics
- Needs more darkness. The graphics of Diablo and Diablo II made it feel like the world hated you, and it did. Why switch that out for generic action RPG graphics that a handful of other games in the past few years have taken on? (With studios dramatically less funded than their own, I might add, what with this being $60 and having the most pre-orders of any game to date.)
Online only
- The forced online mode is an absolute travesty, especially for people who like to solo (who, believe it or not, make up a huge percentage of the gaming community at almost half the population, including me). If their server has a problem or needs to update, I can't play my single-player game. If my Internet connection goes out, I can't play my single-player game. And if your player is hardcore and perma-dies due to a lag spike on their end? "Oh well!" -Blizzard
- I can never fully own the game. This alone would make me want my money back if I had bought the game, but thankfully a friend bought it for me. If Blizzard takes their servers offline, I can't legitimately play. If I do find a way to play, it'd be illegal. Here's to terrible customer service!
- The max number of players per game has been reduced from 8 to 4. Why? Server load. Patch the game so it can be offline and, with half of your users leaving the online mode, this problem is fixed, Blizzard.
- Where's the decent-sized text I see when others talk to me? Before it was instantly recognizable that someone is talking to you because there was a large but non-interfering message at the top of your screen. Now it's tucked away in the bottom left a la World of Warcraft and is only distinguishable if it's a whisper to you. I understand that with 99 people in each general chat, there could be a lot of distracting text on your screen, but this wouldn't be the case if there were a max of 8 people who could talk to you like this like there used to be. Once again, the simple solution is to have a lobbying system with whispering compatibilities, just as they always used to have.
- I enjoy talking to my friends while playing, but why not just make connecting to the server so you can chat while still playing alone in a game an option instead of a requirement? Also, there's no invisible mode among your friends. Don't want someone to know you're online? "Too bad!" -Blizzard
- The matchmaking service is embarrassingly badly executed. It regularly matches me with a single other player who half the time is either idle or rushes through everything while I want to check every nook and cranny. There is no way to name your game like "Trist runs" or anything of the sort, forcing you to find a friend who hopefully is at the exact same point in the game as you and that they want to do the same quest. Especially since I travel so much, it's extremely difficult to find people who fit this bill on my friends list at any given time since my characters are on the US server. Better matchmaking or actual game names would fix this, but Blizzard often doesn't want to pair you with more than one or two people because of server load (which could be quickly mitigated by not forcing everyone to be online to play the game). The most offensive thing about this is that Blizzard North had all of these problems sorted out and fixed with the original Battle.net and its lobbying system, but Blizzard Entertainment scrapped their work and took it upon themselves to cash the cow, milking the series of a lot of its goodness. Which brings me to:
Spam
- The spam problem is outRAGEous. Literally at least ten spammers in every general chat (which they force you into every time upon opening the game [edit: they have now made the General chat thankfully optional]). All of these spammers activate at the same time to compete with one another, which leaves you with a wall of text you can barely scroll back through. And if someone has said something before they started spamming? Forget it: their message is lost because Blizzard forces the chat down by however many new lines are typed, meaning that you have to wait for the spammers to stop before you can start scrolling back up and have a chance of finding what was said before (already very difficult in itself). The worst part is that there is an extremely simple solution to this problem: stripping chats of URLs (including alternatives like "[dot]" and commas instead of periods). Blizzard simply doesn't care enough to do this. Spammers are too difficult for their incompetence to handle, and this was a problem even with Diablo II.
Story
- Why did you have to kill the characters you did?!
- The story is haphazard and quickly put together, with two of the Lesser Evils telling you exactly what they're going to do before they do it. Diablo is also the lamest and sorest loser on the planet.
- And every time you get to a new difficulty setting, your character and followers act like everything you just spent hours going through is completely new to them. My character is still baffled by the mysteriousness of Act I when she just beat Diablo's ass in Act IV five minutes prior. A little bit of story progression in each new difficulty would be absolute boatloads better, Blizzard. I'm sure they know that and just don't care.
tl;dr:
This game IS a fun standalone game, but is the worst edition in the Diablo series by far due to extremely solvable problems that Blizzard Entertainment and their even less respectable partner in crime Activision don't care about. I don't blame the Blizzard North team for leaving them.