If all you play of Diablo III is
its no-cutting-in-line “normal” mode, you haven’t played the better game
Blizzard wants you to. That one involves epic boss fights, crafting killer
gear, questing for legendary item sets and plying your wares on a stock
market-like auction house. It’s like World of Warcraft stripped to the
frame — just the pruning and dress-up parts. You’ll get there shortly after
Blizzard unlocks “nightmare” mode, blinking you back to the starting line with
all of your skills and loot intact.
But until then — it’ll take most
players a dozen hours their first time to finish all four story acts — you’ll
have to slog through a functionally dull, much-too-easy game, schlepping
impotent gear and whacking away at stuff that arrows toward you like the robots
in Stern Electronics’ 1980 coin-op Berzerk. For all the talk about games
like Moria and Angband, that’s Diablo’s pedigree, and
the nitty-gritty hasn’t changed much three decades on (it’s alternately like Asteroids,
only you can build a better ship and the stuff barreling toward
you doesn’t break into smaller chunks). And when you die, you don’t
really, your gear just loses a fraction of its durability, which if you
biff it often (you won’t) only means you have to teleport back to town and pay
a craftsman pennies on the dollar to insta-fix everything. It’s a polite
little slap on the hand, a not-really penalty Blizzard asks you to pay as if to
wink and say “Remember when games used to be hard?”
Asking non-Diablo-wonks to spam mouse
buttons for a dozen hours is, given Blizzard’s reputation for exhaustively
over-thinking everything it does, an exhaustively over-thought
mistake, and apologists won’t win arguments dismissing complaints about
the game’s start-up simplicity as “playing the game wrong” (maybe if we use the
house rule “play with both eyes closed”?). Even the learning curve is like
riding a golf cart down a 10-degree incline. Clearing a path through each
of the acts and taking out the area and final bosses, whether playing as a
tank, nuke or hybrid class (you can pick from five total, as in Diablo II),
is all but effortless the first time around. It doesn’t help that at the
outset, Blizzard picks your skills for you each time you level, and the
only optional buffs — runes and passive skills — unlock at the speed of a ride
line at Disneyworld.
Stick with Diablo III, however,
and you’ll discover it’s morphed into another game around the time you hit
level 40, after you’ve unlocked most of the skills and runes and the game’s enemies
are actually trying to kill you in tactically interesting ways. In fact
that’s one of the most important iterative wrinkles: Enemies don’t just spawn
with more health points on the higher difficulty settings, they also manifest
more devastating abilities. For instance, taking out Dune Stingers — desert
bugs that spit mini-wasp projectiles — is a snap the first time through, but
when they’re elite-spawning at level 31 or higher and combining random traits
like “Vampiric” (converts damage to you into health for them) and “Fire Chains”
(ropes of fire linking multiple enemies that do heavy damage if you get near),
they can be incredibly hard to put down. Sussing higher-level enemies like
these, whether on your own or playing with others, is where Diablo III
starts to become the tactical game it should have been from the start.
The same principle applies to
cooperative play, where skill restrictions at first forces parties to follow
near/far role conventions. Thirty or 40 levels in, however, you’re playing a
completely different game — one that’s much more WoW-like — as
characters swap roles on the fly, bringing specializations to bear on
random-spawned creatures with surprise ability combos. Blizzard also
wisely tossed old-school roleplaying cliches to increase character build
flexibility, so you’ll spy Wizards wearing plate armor and Monks wielding
swords. Only class-specific items like the Witch Doctor’s masks, the Monk’s
fist weapons and the Wizard’s wands are restricted. It’s hard to say which
class works best for a given play-style — hardcore players already disagree
about this vigorously, which is probably a sign Blizzard got that much right.
Once the loot game picks up toward the
first run-through’s end, Diablo III becomes like any other
vanity game, where you’re tweaking your character’s prowess by whittling away
at equipment slots. As in WoW, you’ll be focused
on building the best character, looting the best equipment set, and
eventually unlocking all the game’s achievements (a daunting list). The
latter’s why I plan to keep playing the game long after I’ve soloed “Hell” mode
or stormed the final act on “Inferno,” to see if I can do stuff like
complete each act in under an hour, or kill the final boss on “Nightmare”
difficulty without using health globes or healing wells, or make it to level 60
on “Hardcore” mode, where character death and equipment loss are irrevocable.
But it’s not as simple as calling Diablo
III a mediocre action-RPG that eventually turns into a good and sometimes
even great one. There’s the always-on requirement to consider, which – never
mind the glitchy launch — sometimes “teleports” my character back a dozen
yards as whatever client-server algorithm struggles behind the scenes to
sort some lag issue. Or take level randomization, one of the Blizzard’s
ballyhooed features designed to make repeat play less repetitive — in
actuality, areas and locales are far less pliable than Diablo II‘s,
give or take a few mutable mini-dungeons (finding them all requires tediously
reloading a chapter until you get what you need to check off an achievement
list). And the item economy feels off-kilter at this point: Good luck rolling
“legendary” items that aren’t routinely outclassed by less expensive “rare” or
even “magic” ones.
You can wave some of that off to “work
in progress” (with all the tweaks Blizzard makes to its games, the phrase could
be the company’s tagline) and this review may have little to do with what the
game becomes in a year or five. Consider how much both Diablo II
and World of Warcraft changed over the past decade, and if you haven’t
already picked up the game, factor that into your buying decision. At this
point, Diablo III is clearly a mixed bag of a game, but with PvP and the
real money auction house in the offing, player feedback-based fine-tuning and
all the expansions and downloadable content you can pretty much bet the farm on
happening, Diablo III stands a more-than-average chance of becoming
the better-than-average game so many hoped it would.
Score: 4 out of 5
