Diablo III review

To each their own, I guess. Diablo II is the reason I failed college, and Diablo III is equally incredible. I also have low standards with story, inherited from my unrivalled love for action films.

I'm really enjoying the game so fare, but yaeh, the single-player lag is stupidity incarnate.

Anyone contemplating Diablo III, just go buy Titan Quest and its expansion for $10. Then, get Grim Dawn next year.

Really good review. Also, I'm a huge fan of your style Hollander..."The gameplay – that’s the 'clicking on stuff until it dies, then leveling' part" made me choke on my coffee.

Prime example of how if you wait 10+ years for a game it'll probably be disappointing

Totally untrue, just look at Duke Nukem Forever...

which was disappointing...

DNF is a bad example. Uh...Look at...Starcraft...Two?

StarCraft II is probably the only game I can think of that actually was NOT disappointing with that long of a dev time. I mean sure it wasn't as good as Brood War but not many games are.

Or the Syndicate reboot! Wait...

You're assuming that Diablo 3 was in development for all of those 10 years. Same goes for Starcraft 2. DNF is the only REAL example cause we actually KNOW that it was in development for that long. Assuming that just because there's a 10 year gap between sequels means it's been in development for that long is both naive and wrong. That said, Diablo 3 does have it's flaws, I'll agree with that. It's still a good game though ;)

I was interested in this game until it came out and I discovered that it had DRM. I refuse to be playing a single player game that I (in this hypothetical situation) PAY $63 FOR, and then boot up a single player game to find NOTHING. Dear god, what if Call of Duty pulled this crap? There would be blood running through the streets!

I may get this, when the price drops. It is still a decent game, but it wont have the impact of Diablo 2. Also the DRM on this game is unacceptable. I'll definitely get Torchlight 2 first. Cheaper, no god forsaken DRM and there is LAN play. It's what the paying costumers deserve.

The price will never drop, or it will drop in somewhere along the lines of five years from now. Blizz believes they can charge 60 for this game then why bother making it less. I do agree with you on Torchlight though, the actual Diablo III

Hah, if you think about it, if you're going to spend $60 you might as well buy 3 copies of Torchlight and gift the other two to play together.

Actually my mistake. Torchlight is being sold for FOUR copies for $60 on steam. What a steal.

so if none of your friends get it just gift it to them so you have four out of eight people in your coop game, interesting fact, you can only have four people in a Diablo game, hm, the more you know.

I gotta say, the story/writing is definitely my biggest beef with the game. It seems like, somewhere around the release of World of Warcraft, Blizzard just lost all their ability to tell good stories - or at least, tell them in a manner that actually shows some level of restraint. I mean, compare Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 to the originals - hell, even Warcraft 3 had better writing, as I could actually take the fall of Arthas seriously! There's just no build-up in Diablo 3; it's just a rapid-fire machinegun of events that hold no meaning to the player as there is absolutely no time given for the implications to percolate properly, not to mention they have a serious inability to withhold themselves from just dumping in more and more and more dialogue into the game. The demons do NOT need to be talking to the PC more than twice a damn game! They lose all their mystique that way! Hell, in Diablo and Diablo 2, Diablo himself never uttered more than two lines throughout the entire game, and that made the fucker MENACING. You had no idea what he was capable of, no idea what his plans were, all you knew was that he was badass, he was evil, and he needed to be fucked up quick or he'd fuck YOU. So in a nutshell: Poor dialogue, too much of that dialogue, no restraint, treating big bad demon lords like cliche cartoon villains, and not enough grimdark all contribute to the game's lousy, terrible, awful storytelling. It's a damn shame, too, because the rest of the game is pure excellence. (Minus the graphics, but I can live with that.) I guess I really shouldn't expect decent storytelling from Blizzard anymore. They just... whoever's at the helm, just doesn't know how to do it.

I agreed with you with how scary and menacing Diablo was in the first two game. Heck, when I watched the cinematics in Diablo 2 I was at the edge of my seat engrossed with the great voice acting of the narrator. Now you have 'demon diaries' to pick up, a joke on the letters you pick up in-game where they are talking to someone about something. I just roll my eyes and say "really?"

Definitely not feeling it this time around. Just doesnt seem to have the same thing as D2 had for me. Its entertaining in small doses but I haven't had the urge to play for hours on end. Think I'd give it a 7 myself, wish I had waited for a price drop now :/