@ChiefFreeman You must be a 12 year old, or an adult moron. You only need a useful Master's degree in order to make plenty of money to afford custom high end equipment. Plus, not everyone on Gamespot sits on their parents' couch eating Cheetos and playing XBox all day. In cases like mine, I work with CAD, edit HD video, and work on photographs from high end camera equipment. I also work at home, so I use the same equipment for gaming in my spare time. High end equipment pays for itself pretty quickly for well educated grownups with jobs that rely on computing horsepower. You have a pretty limited view of the real world. Perhaps you should think before spouting off and showing your ignorance. My advice to you is to get a good education.
@stan_hg @petez34 Blame consoles. Console games require very little thought to play. That's great for couch zombies, but those of us who have played PC games for several decades expect a lot more from a game.
After a month in D3, I had several maxed out characters who had all beaten the game and was bored out of my skull. I had no interest in farming items to sell, so there was no reason to keep playing. Those of us who despise the game, in its current form, are likely old enough to have played its predecessor - Diablo II Lords of Destruction. That game was epic and kept you coming back for literally YEARS. We all had expectations that the sequel would actually be a step up, rather than three steps down. Our severe disappointment in this console-level, amateur (but pretty) design is what fuels our bitterness. The crew who made D3 obviously had no clue about what made D2LoD so incredible. If I was running that company, I would not have allowed a single person on that design team who hadn't played and loved D2LoD for at least a year. Instead, D3 looks like the designers were shown old videos of D2LoD and told "make the sequel look like this."
Sure, not everyone hates D3. Those who grew up on consoles probably think it's great. For a console game, it's above average. But we're PC gamers and we're accustomed to a much higher level of depth, detail, planning, and strategy in our games. We also expect sequels to be an improvement to the original. D3 was not.
"Wish this guy was the man on the scene and not Wilson when they were creating it, because that is the way the game was meant to work... Not use this unwanted whorechild auction house to make money for ActiBlizzion..."
Amen! Elaborate loot customization should have been there from the start, as that was one of the best features of D2LoD. The intricacies of the Horradric Cube, rune words, jewels, and gems were the keys to why that game was so addictive. That was true crafting, not the lame excuse for crafting they currently have in D3. Customizing legendaries and set pieces to enhance your own play style was really satisfying and worth the time spent farming for specific ingredients.
I have a $12,000 PC rig with 3 x 30" computer monitors (not cheap, low-resolution HDTVs,) so I could easily afford all of the consoles. I've spent more on a single software program than it would cost to own all of the consoles plus a bunch of games. I see no reason to own them.
I don't like the lack of depth, long-term planning, and strategy in console games. They're geared for folks with short attention spans and no desire to challenge their minds. In a nutshell, consoles are for twitch gamers. The focus is on short-term tactical responses rather than long-term strategic play. I much prefer old-school PC games. They were for thinking people.
This latest trend to limit PC games to the capabilities of consoles is ruining PC gaming for those of us who've played complex computer games for decades. That's why I preferred D2LoD over D3. I played through the entire length of both, in all difficulty modes, with multiple characters and gave up on D3. There is no real crafting in the game. There is no ability to truly customize your gear, so there is no long-term planning involved. It's a twitch game, plain and simple. The rewards are minimal. Even the missions are short and not very challenging. There is no "epic" feel to D3, like there was with D2LoD.
It's no surprise that D3 will run on a console. It was designed within the limitations of a console to begin with. There is no depth or complexity. It's several steps backward from D2LoD in those respects.
Since you can't transfer your characters from the PC version, I see no reason to buy it.
There were tens of millions of people looking forward to D3. As soon as it appeared, word got out that they gutted real crafting from the game and millions said forget it. Drastically customizing your gear by learning the intricacies of the Horadric Cube and farming the various rare drop ingredients was the one thing that kept people coming back to D2LoD for a decade. Yet, they removed real crafting from D3 in favor of a more-complicated version of the Gamble function from D2LoD. Crafting should take planning and give you nearly complete control over the outcome within small tolerances. Knowing what we'd get at the end is what made the countless farming hours more fun and exciting in D2LoD. Crafting should never be a random number generator that creates random quality output. That's not crafting. It's gambling. The D2LoD designers were far more intelligent and realized this distinction.
They also created the most anti-climactic series of quests ever. Each of the Acts should have been progressively longer and more grueling with truly epic cinematic payoffs, like D2LoD. Instead, the last couple Acts were incredibly short and not very rewarding. And come on guys - scrolling over a hand drawn image is NOT a reward for finishing a major task, much less an entire Act! Those lengthy beautiful cut scenes were a worthy payoff when you finished each Act in D2LoD. Here's a tip for Blizzard's designers. When making a sequel to an epic game, make the sequel MORE epic, not less. D3 has the depth of a twitch shooter and was very disappointing. The only reason some are still playing it is to make real cash selling to noobs.
In a nutshell, I believe they could have doubled their sales if they had simply expanded on all of the elements of D2LoD. Retaining and expanding the Horadric Cube, in particular, would have made this game addictive for the very long time. Instead, they dumbed it down into oblivion. This game is Diablo For Dummies.
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