Overhyped and under-delivered
Diablo 3 sticks to its very core formula - point to move and click to attack and repeat ad nauseum. Loot falls, you spend time choosing your ideal equipment and you level up and repeat areas till your char gets stronger and stronger.
For all that is good about Diablo, it is severely marred by these bad decisions which adversely affected my experience -
1. always online single player - this alone is worth not considering the buy. Because the game is now after all, a long rental. When Blizzard servers go offline, so too does your gaming session.
2. online causes lag - I have Verizon Fios with 25Mbps/25Mbps and I STILL got lag consistently, because of servers being overloaded. This is not a network transport issue, purely a server side issue.
3. Graphics - the game looks like it was made for circa 2004. The palette is colorful but devoid of sharp details and level design is not very impressive. Titan Quest has the best level design here.
4. Skill tree completely removed - I was aghast when I first saw that I couldn't pick where to put my skill points. Over time, I am ok with it, but this really means my level 20 Wizard has the same exact stats as your Level 20 Wizard. Only separation are the active skill choices and gear. This leads to very poor char depth and experimentation
5. Auction house nonsense - I don't care about it. Stop making Diablo such a blatant cash grab.
6. Chat overlay - this is annoying me now. Go away chat window.
7. Only 5 classes - granted, this matches Diablo 2's, they had a dozen years to come up with more. A DOZEN. Titan Quest did it best here - by allowing you to combine 2 masteries to create 45 unique schools for your class. Nothing screams replayability like Titan Quest
8. Core gameplay - is still the same. Not much has changed. I expected Blizzard to experiment a little here. Still, not complaining as much because what is there is satisfying (after all it is the genre), but I would've loved to see what could've been.
9. Lame story and acting - I'm tired of the oft repeated lame evil has taken over, you have to stop it, blah blah. Something different for a change please? And the voice acting especially by Leah was abysmal. "He was my uncle. I searched for him. I loved him" repeated in a monotone with no emotion makes it sound like a cheesy B-movie. With such a budget, I feel more could've been done.
10. Much smaller game - this game can be completed in about 10-12 hours which is a shocker. With grinding, you can do it in about 30hrs, but what happened to the 100's of hours of gaming? I realize this point is nitpicking but it deserved a mention
11. So many options missing - lack of LAN, mods and overall feel for the game is that this is a cash grab makes me feel that Blizzard really focussed on generating more money rather than making a great game which causes money generation. They acted like the Activision capitalistic b*tches as I thought they would.
Overall, the game is not all it was cracked up to be. A passable 7/10 for me.