Diablo III review

While looting still works as it does in most games (save for player-specific drops negating the mad rush to pick up items before your teammates), and players can now craft their own gear (though it’s not much different from the ability to buy unidentified items in Diablo II), the ability to sell and buy items on a game-wide Auction House has a fairly large impact. Within hours of the Diablo III’s launch, the AH was already full to the brim with gear for all levels, and as time goes on, it behaves as auction houses behave, with people racing to put up the best gear for the lowest prices.

And though this might sound like an incredibly useful feature, it’s, as of review time, possibly the largest threat to Diablo III’s long-term success. Purchasing items off the AH is quick and simple, and, in a way, makes finding loot meaningless. Every item we picked up from enemies we’d slain was insufficient to the one we nicked off the AH for ten minutes worth of gold. It threatens to break the genre, and unless the economy stabilizes completely we worry that the loot might remain somewhat unexciting. The obvious solution is “don’t use it,” but its effects are much larger than temptation – it creates an imbalance in the economy that we seriously worry could cripple the game’s long life, and that’s without the inclusion of real-money transactions.

One of the reasons the Auction House is available is because of the game’s switch to being online-only. Online multiplayer is an even larger component in Diablo III than it was in the others, so much that Blizzard opted to cut out the option for a traditional offline single-player campaign entirely. You can still play alone, but you’re forced to do so on Blizzard’s servers, which, so far, have been incredibly unstable. Even when playing alone, we were kicked offline on several occasions, and hit with random lag spikes that would often result in our character standing still while enemies from all sides beat us to death.

We’re not against the idea of mandatory server-based DRM in all cases, but for us to agree to “always-on DRM,” we need the servers to be “always on.” Lag hasn't been a serious issue for years, and it's distressful to see it being such a problem with such an important game - the second that a server issue kills off your single-player game (which should be playable offline) is the second it's officially unacceptable, and we're still having these issues at review time.

But with these caveats comes a benefit to the updated online infrastructure that makes playing with others easier than it ever was. You’re able to search for people on the same quest as you and join them instantaneously, which makes it a breeze to find groups for difficult sections; even playing with friends has been streamlined and simplified. Those who want to play alone can do so with no pressure to join with others, but it’s just as easy to make sure you’re always running around with two or three partymates. Since the game scales amazingly well to the number of players in a game, it means that online multiplayer will always provide an adequately awesome challenge for everyone involved, especially on the harder difficulties (and in the secret world of Whimsyshire).

Diablo II has been successful for years, but that’s because players had a reason to keep playing. Looting items and trading them with friends was fun, and charging towards level 99 (which took hundreds of hours) created the necessary excuse to jump back in time and time again. Diablo III’s level cap can be hit in a few dozen hours, which is still lengthy, but nowhere near long enough to give players incentive to continue playing after completing the four difficulty modes. If loot can just be bought for a few hours worth of gold grinding, and the level cap isn’t far away, the romantic notion of losing months and months into Diablo is shattered.

Once you beat the last act, you’ll progress to the next difficulty and begin hacking and slashing your way through the game’s four acts again, and you’ll likely find it just as gleefully habit-forming and fulfilling as we all hoped it’d be. Though it might lose the long life that the previous Diablo had due to missteps with new features, it’s still an extremely fun game, and a worthy successor to the Diablo throne. Just keep the caveats in mind as you click through the hordes to scoop up those loot drops.