Diablo 3 was a disappointment. Not simply because it failed to provide the re-playability that Diablo 2 and its expansion offered, but because it was like watching a car filled with my loved ones zoom past me, as I saw it barreling down towards a brick wall at full speed, with plenty of time to stop or change direction, but knowing that it would stay its course and crash and burn, with no way for me to stop it. From the outset, announcement after announcement about the game assured me that Diablo 3 would not be what so many of us expected. Allowing only 4 players per game, the introduction of the real money auction house (and even the gold auction house for that matter), the horrid class cut scenes that Blizzard used to announce each character class which surely stand as the worst cinamatics Blizzard has ever made, the way skills can be changed on the fly with no real punishment, all were signs to me that the Diablo 3 team was making something that would be playable for a few weeks, rather than the years of play I had hoped for.
What hurts me the most is that I feel Blizzard was just negligent in creating this game. Granted, I don’t know what the game development process is like on the inside of such a big company, but I do have common sense, and it shocks me that Blizzard was not able to see some of the problems before the game was released. The best example of this is the increased attack speed stat. Shortly after the game was released, Blizzard announced that they would be nerfing this stat, as it was more powerful then they had intended and it had become the most important stat in the game. What was so annoying about this was that I discovered the complete over-powered nature of the IAS stat literally the first time I equipped an item with it in the game. I compared my damage output before I had it to after, and the difference was night and day. It took me just a few days to realize that IAS was the be all end all stat in the game. Blizzard had been making the game for years and apparently never picked up on it. It was just evidence to me that the company had no idea what it was doing.
Its unfortunate that the game sold as well as it did. Blizzard is a business with shareholders, and for sure those shareholders will be pleased with the fiscal success of the game, meaning more of the same is likely to come. Blizzard is a great hype machine, and obviously the people who bought the game in the first week all did so based on what they thought they were getting, so it is no real indication of the merits and quality of this game. But shareholders don’t really care about all that.
Diablo 3 feels empty. There is no sense of community. No need it interact with anyone outside of those on your Real ID friends list. It is virtually impossible to find any items that benefit your character directly. Instead you are forced to find a good item for someone else, put it on the auction house, and use that gold to buy what you really need. It is a completely unsatisfying system. Again, Blizzard is now acknowledging this, but somehow missed it in the years it took to develop the game.
Many people on the Diablo 3 forums seem upset about a lack of end game. I do not fully agree with this. The Diablo 2 end game consisted of nothing more than doing Baal and Cow level runs, and for some of us countless hours of some of the funnest PVP I have ever played. The difference is that the items that Baal dropped were very likely to be upgrades for my character, and if they were not, I could go into a trade channel or room and barter. It is not nearly as easy to trade an item when there is no auction house, but it was 100 times more fun spending entire days in the chat rooms and trade games trying to find the right buyer for my goods.
Diablo 2’s economy in the early days was based on Stone of Jordan rings (SOJs). What was amazing about this was that Blizzard did nothing to create this economy. The community just figured out that it had a rarity level that made it perfect as the basis of the economy. It was all user driver, and it was amazingly fun to be a part of. The Diablo 3 gold economy is bland and got extremely boring immediately.
I want to wrap up by addressing a quote from Jay Wilson, the lead designer of Diablo 3. He stated that people’s memories of Diablo 2 are better than the game actually was. I understand the sentiment he is getting at here, and if this argument was to be made about certain other games that were released over a decade ago, I might believe that argument. For example, when I think about the original Half-Life game, or Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I remember them as some of the best single player video games ever made. I remember Counter-Strike as the best multi-player FPS ever made. But I have not played any of those games in several years. It has been over 10 years since I last played Pokemon Snap, so if someone were to tell me that the game doesn’t hold up nearly as well as my memory believes it would, I might be inclined to believe them. After all, nostalgia is a powerful thing, and I am fully prepared to admit that sometime it clouds judgement when thinking about games I spent so many hours playing as a kid. But Diablo 2 is a game I have gone back to literally every year since it was released. When I talk about my memories of Diablo 2, I am not recalling memories from a decade ago. I am thinking about the fun I had just a few short months ago. I don’t remember Diablo 2 as the best game I have ever played because of the experience I had with it long ago, but rather because of the experiences I continue to have with it every single year. So Jay’s statement is completely wrong…my memory of Diablo 2 and its greatness is very accurate, of this I have no doubt.
Perhaps my frustration can be summed up by a quote Jay Wilson, where he said that his team was making Diablo 3, not Diablo 2.5. Maybe Blizzard will learn from its mistake, and Diablo 4 will be a proper follow up to the greatest game I have ever played. Please Blizzard, just give me Diablo 2.5.