My impressions of Diablo 3

Apr 22 2012 Tags: , , , , , ,

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Shiny Diablo 3 is shiny

Shiny Diablo 3 is shiny

Diablo 3 open beta weekend is happening right now! Since Friday evening everyone has been invited to help Blizzard stress test their servers and let nostalgia rip through their brain with massively sexy graphics and cool sound effects.

Especially the sound effects! It almost feels like they used the exact same sound files from Diablo 2 and Diablo 1 for opening a book, thrashing a barrel etc.

It. Is. Magnificent.

Maybe I’m biased since I’ve been waiting for Diablo 3 to come out for the last … oh I don’t know, about ten years?

I was a huge fan of Diablo 1 back in primary school, finished that game about three or four times. Getting a ripped CD with that game has probably been one of the best birthday gifts a friend’s ever given me. Yes, we used to do that. Hand drawn covers and everything.

Diablo 2, I never managed to finish. The original was floating around my social circles this time. Not sure where it ended up, might have been me … last played the game on Wine a couple years ago. In all its glorious 800×600 screen size in the midst of my 2560×1080 screen real-estate.

I didn’t finish because of a bug with the random map generator  … didn’t create a way to get to the next level. Ooops.

Oh glorious Diablo 3

Luckily Diablo 3 works on a Mac and I have one of those Mac laptop thingies. I’ve heard people have huge problems trying to run the beta on Wine. This is one of those times I’m super happy I don’t religiously go for open source stuff. :P

Vomiting rainbows

Unfortunately my poor laptop is a bit old and while the game runs mostly fine, the physics are a bit … slow. Despite what I used to think in primary school, no this does not give you more time to think about your actions.

In a word, Diablo 3 is FUN! And when I say fun, I mean vomiting rainbows and farting daisies fun.

My favorite new feature is definitely that you can use the dungeon itself to kill monsters. Pull a lever and a chandelier falls down on a group. Marvelous!

The experience is in fact so awesome I will probably buy this game. Then crawl into a hole for a week and shut everything down. No Twitter. No facebook. No school. Nothing. Just Diablo 3.

Hell, I’ve never even bought a game before if it wasn’t by an indie developer. And even that I only ever bought World of Goo and Machinarium.

Not all is perfect :(

There are two things I don’t like about Diablo 3 though.

It’s too easy.

Might be nostalgia talking, but I remember the game used to be pretty challenging. Even at the very beginning. You had to stock up on health potions and make sure your inventory was empty before setting out from town.

The Diablo 2 skill tree

The Diablo 2 skill tree

Nowadays monsters drop some sort of magical healing crystals. I mean, I managed to clean out a whole dungeon on three or four health potions … as a weakling necromancer. Oh sorry, a necromancer is a Witchdoctor now.

The skill system is kind of lame, too.

Sure, this is very related to the being too easy part, they wanted to make it super simple. Having played a lot of RPG’s in the past, it just seems confusing to me. It’s too easy to understand.

Instead of a huge skill tree where plenty of choices need to be made, there’s just five or six tracks of linearly progressing skills. No choice, no exciting tactification, nothing. Just “Yeah, sure, upgrade my skill”. The only choice you really have is whether you’re going to set the next skill level as the one you actually use or not.

That’s it.

As a necromancerwitchdoctor once you take on a secondary skill you even lose the ability to do melee attacks, which is silly. Even ganked from all sides I have to resort to casting range spells … everyone is an inch away and even as a weakling I could kill them with a dagger blow.

Maybe I’m missing something.

But! The game is super fun. The hours fly by and in a stroke of pure brilliance Blizzard was nice enough to include a clock in the game interface to make sure I, you know, remember to feed myself and stuff.

Oh and the characters are reset before official launch. I also suck at taking screenshots so no interesting battle scenes in the following pics.

Even the login screen looks good

Even the login screen looks good

Gets messy

Gets messy

You even get to see into the next levels

You even get to see into the next levels

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4 responses so far

  • http://twitter.com/zidarsk8 Miha Zidar

    Screenshots look dark. Why is it that all new games are like “oh I know how to make awesome graphics… let’s make everything black!” 

  • http://swizec.com Swizec

    You need to calibrate your monitor mate. They’re very nice and bright on my hardware calibrated laptop.

    Very dark and gloomy and completely useless on my noncalibrated desktop though.

    Also, most of these are in a dungeon. You know, with bad light conditions. Also also, it’s supposed to be a horror game. It was dark and gloomy even in Diablo 1 back in 1997. It’s not a “new game” thing, it’s a part of this genre.

  • http://twitter.com/jhartikainen Jani Hartikainen

    I had a pretty similar experience. Such a fun game and yeah the sounds sound very familiar to how I recall some things sounding like in Diablo 2 which I played a lot, Diablo 1 not that much.

    Agreed on the issues of it as well. I’m slightly disappointed in the skill system’s simplicity, but at least there seems to be much variety with the runes and such.

    The difficult is apparently a bit easy on purpose in the Act 1. There was some commentary from the devs that the normal mode in general is apparently not that hard, but once you get to Nightmare and the rest of the higher levels, then it becomes harder than in say Diablo 2.

  • Evankimball

    Most logical comments I’ve heard yet.  Game is way too easy.  Why should we have to beat a game once just to be able to play it at a harder level.  Bad idea in D2, bad idea again.  This game is rated Mature, so make it for Mature players.   Also the skill thing is lame, now runes are part of leveling up to, why even chose which to use?  They claim 5 trillion choices, but that sounds ridiculous considering everything is just leveling up and items.  D1 was simple though, just attributes and spells, so if its fun its fun.

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