Kill all the things
This game is all about pitting you up against the forces of hell — it’s one (or several) heroes against an entire army.
The game regularly throws tens, if not hundreds, of enemies at you all at once. The odds are rarely in your favor, but luckily Blizzard Entertainment gives you plenty of tools to take out several enemies at once. The wizard, for example, can freeze all the enemies that are nearby or send them flying across the screen if he gets surrounded. Nearly every ability is designed to hit more than one enemy at once.
The result is a visceral experience that rewards you for massacring everything on the screen. You get experience bonuses for killing several enemies all at once. Your character shouts at enemies and jeers at them as he plows through a dozen skeletons all at once or fires a bolt of lightning into a pack of zombies. Each time I blasted through a new pack of enemies I felt that same “hell yeah” feeling that you might get after your favorite football team scores a touchdown or when you get a giant tax refund in the mail.
It’s still a challenging game, and it will get even more challenging as time goes on. You can’t run in and blindly mash your chain lightning or rush buttons, because eventually the enemies will figure out not to stand next to each other or try to flank you. Typically the only way to heal yourself is to kill other enemies and pick up health orbs that they drop. So there’s a little bit of finesse that goes into fighting off a few dozen creatures, like deciding when to knock them away and when to charge in with swords flying.
Diablo 3 also hooks you from the very start, and keeps you motivated with frequent rewards. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Bing Gordon — an investor in social gaming company Zynga and longtime video games industry veteran — has said that if a game hasn’t rewarded a player within the first 10 minutes of playing the game, the developer has done something wrong. That kind of development style has popped up in a lot of games recently, including World of Warcraft and recent hit Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Diablo 3 keeps the streak going with Blizzard Entertainment, where you get some kind of reward for playing well once every few minutes.
The whole experience is very fast paced. Fights against even a dozen bad dudes from hell will last only a few seconds. If you aren’t careful, you will be swarmed and dropped within those same few seconds. But if you exercise your brain a little bit, the payoff is enormous.
Get all the things
The Diablo games have always been about finding the best loot. That can be a piece of armor that turns you into a walking tank or a bow that makes you an unstoppable killing machine. Or you can try to find a piece of equipment that you end up trading for a better piece of equipment. Loot was such an important part of the game that one of the game’s items, the Stone of Jordan, became the game’s de facto trading currency, so new pieces of equipment were measured by how many Stone of Jordans they were worth.
The same is true in Diablo 3, although it’ a little less competitive than it was back in 2000. When you killed a leader or boss in Diablo 2, it would drop loot that anyone could pick up. The result was up to eight people rushing to the corpse of a boss and madly grabbing equipment as soon as it dropped. When loot drops in Diablo 3, it’s specific to each player, so only you can see that sword that the Skeleton King dropped, and only you can pick it up.
The quest for loot has always been a core driver in online games like the Diablo and World of Warcraft franchises. It introduces a random element to the game that’s akin to gambling. You are taking a chance with your time when you decide to go and complete a quest that it will reward you with the kind of loot you’re looking for. Of course, gambling has proved to be a multi-billion dollar business. It works, and it works even better with games, where the only lost currency is a few minutes rather than actual dollars.