I’ve had some fun with D3 with two characters just over level 10, but it has problems, problems that might be OK if it were an MMO and I liked MMO’s. It’s not an MMO and the problems with latency, the rubberbanding and error 33, patching errors are just ridiculous, especially in (drum roll) single player. Your mileage varies I’m sure but to put it bluntly, D3 is not a very good single player game. It’s linear, it’s pretty boring so far except for the boss fights and seeing all the stuff in the environment you can blow up. This is par for the course with the Diablo series: they are not that great single player games– the Zyel mod was created specifically to give players that wanted a good single player experience a better one than could be gotten off vanilla Diablo 2. And, please, go back and try to play Diablo 1 without falling asleep in your chair.
Multiplayer– that’s where the game shines and while it’s been fun it’s been marred, of course, by lag– maybe acceptable in this early stage if the two core things people want out of the game are fulfilled: fun combat and fun item management. The former is OK. I’m still on the fence about it. The concept I want to talk around with D3 is the idea of RELATIVE fun. On it’s own, D3 is good, it’s not great, but when you put it up against Torchlight 2 it falls completely flat.
I reiterate some of my earlier posts– once you play Torchlight 2, it’s really tough to go back to Diablo 3’s slow, ponderous gameplay. It feels like going from fast paced hyper Gauntlet madness with craziness at every turn in Torchlight 2 to slow, static and, while visually appealing, fairly stagnant fighting in Diablo 3. The second point of fun, item management, is a fucking chore in D3. While I’m still low level, drops are shit and from what I’ve read and heard– it doesn’t get much better. The items so far are bland and overall the crafting really feels like a combination of Hellgate London and Titan Quest with all the breaking apart of items into more crap and crafting into….yay more of the same crap you picked up! Basically you take all your blue items and yellows you do not want, throw away the white items (they are totally useless in the game–and the grey items? what in the flying fuck are they doing in the game?), break the rest of them apart because they don’t fit your character and then take the sub items ( like subtle essence) to create some type of item with a reroll on the effects— in turn this item may not work out for your character so you break the produced item apart and when you have enough sub items again, you get another reroll which may or may not work out for you. There’s no way to influence the reroll (like a cube lock for example) There’s no path of crafting other than this that I’ve seen (sockets and jewels– though no runes or rune words). From what I’ve seen so far, it’s quite tedious. I made 11 or so belts and they all had almost exactly the same powers– nothing special, nothing that gives your character access to anything outside of his set of attacks (like a summon power for a barbarian).
Act 1? Nothing compared to D2’s act 1. It’s very short– it’s got one big boss at the end and that’s it (the Butcher). The fight is boring.
So now I sit waiting for a patch that looks like it’s going to take an hour to download and I’m thinking:
