Diablo III takes place twenty years after the events of Diablo II and its expansion "Lord of Destruction" in the world of Sanctuary. After picking one of the five classes (I'll touch on those later) you start your journey off in "New Tristram" which is not too far from the original Tristram (which you will be visiting in Act 1). Your character is in search of "The Fallen Star" which happened to crash into the Tristram cathedral. We soon find out that Decard Cain and his niece Leah were in the cathedral at the time, and Leah gives us the task to find her uncle and save Tristram from the living dead (who happened to rise again due to the power of the fallen star).
I will admit that Act 1 and most of Act 2 are slow. It was not until the end of Act 2 and onwards that I felt a change of pace as things became more urgent. The downtime between quests simply disappeared for me. Especially in Act 4 which felt like a race against time.
Adding achievements into Diablo III definitely adds a lot of replay-ability. Especially when a bunch of those achievements can only be completed on Hell difficulty or higher. I found myself going back to previous acts and searching for "Events," lore books and hidden conversations between the main characters and I still haven't found all of them.
The classes in Diablo III are all pretty fun. My favorite was a tie between the Witch Doctor and the Barbarian. The talents and skills are somewhat limited and will more than likely result in "cookie cutter" builds as well as "Area of Effect" and "Boss" builds. Each class has their own set of achievements (Achievements are account-wide now, thankfully) as well as certain weapons only they are able to equip.
With the standard Blizzard user interface there are six buttons / skills you need to worry about: Left click (Your main attack), Right Click (Your stronger main attack), 1, 2, 3 and the 4 number keys. All of which can be mapped to certain abilities. There is also the option to completely customize your key bindings. For me, Barbarian, I had the following skills:
- Left Click: Cleave
- Right Click: Siesmic Slam
- 1: Ground Stomp
- 2: Furious Charge
- 3: Battle Cry
- 4: Earthquake
All abilities, aside from the passive abilities, have five runes that are unlocked as you level up. These runes add different stats and abilities to your skills. For instance, a Barbarian's Earthquake is naturally an Area of Effect of fire where the Barbarian is standing, but with a certain rune, it can become Ice and slow down enemies. Other runes can increase the overall damage of an ability or make it do other things such as stunning enemies or healing you.
The new physics engine and graphics in Diablo III are amazing. Sadly, I was not able to experience the game at its full potential due to a mediocre laptop. The weather effects and scenery are fantastic. Hitting an enemy with a fire based weapon and watching them explode into a crimson shower of gore is always a pleasure, especially when chunks go flying towards the screen.
The music and voice overs in Diablo III are top notch, especially Diablo's voice, which sent chills down my spine. The cinematics at the end of each act are gorgeous and highly detailed.
The only downside I can see with Diablo III is its "online-only" single player, which forces you to constantly be online while you play. This is a hassle for anyone who doesn't have top notch internet. Especially with the checkpoint system. Imagine going through a huge dungeon and finally getting to the boss room, only to get disconnected right before the checkpoint and thus forcing you to need to do the entire thing over again.
I really don't understand this checkpoint system. It seems outdated, especially when World Of Warcraft has a constantly updating system. It feels as if Blizzard took a step back with this.
The Artisans, jewel crafting and blacksmithing, are good. Well actually, not really. Jewel crafting gets really expensive and blacksmithing is just a waste. I say blacksmithing is a waste because of the "Random Magic Properties." There is simply nothing random about them. Every piece of gear I have made has given me Intelligence and Dexterity; I'm a Barbarian whose main stat is Strength. Maybe I should have rolled a Witch Doctor or a Wizard?
I found that I'm better off simply "farming" for better gear, because making my gear via the blacksmith is a waste of resources and gold, especially when one piece of gear is 15,000 gold.
Player vs. Player and the "Real Money Auction House" has yet to be implemented into the game. I guess we'll just have to wait. There are also four difficulty levels: Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno and also the current level cap is level 60.There are legendary weapons in the game but they are weak in comparison to the weapons you already have equipped. Sadly there is no cow level; instead there is a "pony" level. Getting to it will require a lot of patience and money.
I guess the main issue I have with Diablo III is that there really is not big reward for your efforts. So far loot has been quite crappy. I'm level 54 and I'm still using a level 20 amulet simply because out of all the other amulets that have dropped they have not been better; even the level 53 amulets. In the harder difficulties you would think that this would change, but sadly it doesn't. You'll find yourself grinding the same act over and over again trying in vain to get better gear. What really is backwards is Blizzard saying that the best items in the game were going to be of "Blue/Magic" quality. This is extremely confusing to me. Why make rare or even legendary quality items if they are just going to be crap? It's not like World of Warcraft where you can get a cool looking item and make your epic item look like it. Instead it's just a space waster or, if you're lucky, you can sell it on the Auction House for an insane amount of money and hope that some poor sap buys it.
Overall Diablo III is a great game with some flaws that are holding it back from perfection. The story is amazing, the graphics are good and the music is top notch. But the rewards for dungeon crawling and level grinding have yet to be seen.
Diablo III was developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment for PC and Mac on May 15th, 2012. A copy for review was personally purchased. I played a barbarian on normal and nightmare for about fifty hours. Currently I am playing on Hell difficulty.
