Short bus Diablo
Now the bad stuff..Well the graphics are undoubtedly dated, the world has this soft look to it that..its hard to tell if thats good or bad but the game will not get your attention with the graphics. My main gripe with the game is the lack of character customization. They totally threw away an attribute system, and a skill tree system which IMO totally sucks that they did that. Their rational was "well everyone just does the same build anyways" sure that might be true but what about maybe leaving that up to the player on how he wants to build his character that just takes away one more thing for us to do.
And sometimes the screen is so busy with effects and stuff that you cant tell wtf is happening you just hack away till stuff stops moving.
The skills are good but two things here, 1: an absolutely horrible hotkey system. While you can enable the ability to assign any skill to any key.....YOUR LIMITED TO 4...thats 4 numbered keys and your two mouse buttons WTF. No doubt when the expansion comes out they will let you buy those keys back on your keyboard for 30 bux.
The lack of a skill tree is sooooo, SOOOOOO disappointing. Again their rational was "oh everyone just does the same build" BUT....see now all you have done blizzard is make it even MORE cookie cutter because now you cant stray what so ever. You cant put X amount of points into Y skill to make that skill that much more awesome and then brag about having X skill at level 40 or something. Instead you unlock a pre determined skill at a predetermined level. Absolutely no choice at all and even worse once its unlocked you cant pump up the strength of that skill your forced to chose from a small choice of "runes" that add some twist to that skill. A way way worse decision IMO than just giving us a skill tree and letting us decide what and how we want our character to be. They have taken away the excitement of gaining a level, through out most of my play through i was largely oblivious that i had gained a level, it ultimately felt like no big deal to level up, in contrast in Diablo 2 gaining a level felt like you really accomplished something, you where given skill and stat points to spend TO YOUR CHOOSING, in diablo 3 hell you can pretty much ignore the fact that you leveled.
In their quest to streamline Diablo they have accomplished that in a lot of ways, and I am definitely enjoying the game but all they have done is made it an even worse cookie cutter character build and a quest to simply find the best loot (i know i know thats how d2 was also but at least you had control over how you made your guy), or even worse BUY the damn loot which most of us will probably do...kind of insidious now that i think about it....In getting rid of any variety in character builds they have made your character come down to getting the best loot to be any different from any other character, and they get their 15% off the top.
I dont know kind of a mixed bag here guys, its fun sure but its also a bit disappointing. Sorry if this bordered on a rant.