Game Pile: Diablo III

I have had Diablo III for some years now – years! – and literally never played it after the initial release. A friend bought it for me, a beloved friend, a dear friend, and it was a birthday gift, a special edition with fancy extra bits and all sorts of wonderful, wonderful intentions behind it, and I just didn’t play it. I didn’t play it because it didn’t feel like Diablo 2 to me, it didn’t have my Druid, it didn’t work. Also there’s few things as irritating as playing alongside people who Care A Great Deal about doing things in a particular way that you don’t really mind or care about.

Well, this week – well, not this week, a few weeks ago because I write in advance but the magic of scheduling – I randomly got a hair to try it out. I don’t honestly know why – perhaps someone mentioned it to me or I overheard something about the necromancer class or whatever. Whatever. I went down to the devil’s larder and I busted out some magnificently stinky Blizzard cheese.

Let’s see how it tastes.

#fff, 1px -1px 0 , -1px 1px 0 , 1px 1px 0 ; -webkit-text-stroke: 1px white; padding: 30px;">The Comfortable Slush

First of all, Diablo III is a pretty brainless game right now.

I picked it up with a level 6 Witch Doctor and proceeded to play to level 45 in two nights on my own, on the easy difficulty. During this time I did not die. In fact, I was so grotesquely incandescent, when I looped back around to start the game again, after turning the difficulty up as high as I could make it, it wasn’t until halfway through the first act that I took damage.

Blizzard are this weird company that made their money off long, slow grinds, realised they suck, and decided the solution was to make the grinds faster rather than shorter. I’m not sure I’m mad about it, but it’s definitely odd to notice. I’m sure the reason I flew through things so easily was because of an explicit desire to keep players in and get them to the end game quickly.

One thing Diablo III reminds me of, in a very strange way, is of Magic The Gathering. There’s execution to the game, yes, but more than that for the most part, is your build. You construct a character out of pieces, then as you progress through the game your control over that construction gets finer, your results get larger. The game is less about playing your character as much as it is about building that character to make the playing easy.

What strikes me about the game as I slip through it, as I open it up and consume more of it, before throwing it away without really thinking about what I’m doing is that the bulk of the game is empty consumable. I can barely remember the plot of this game I’ve run through, and not because it’s bad or badly presented or anything, but because I’m that checked out of it as I play it. I understand Deckard Cain is dead, and that Leah girl I met is dead too, I think.

The strange thing about this game is that for all it frames itself as having multiple difficulty levels and a huge range of content, the bulk of my experience with it so far – which has only been a few hours – has been unchallenging fun. I’m not actually trying very hard to level up quickly, I’m just having fun moving into areas of unchecked map and trying for massacre bonuses. I like the way my Witch Doctor plays, and that means the game is less about big achievements or impressive things, but rather moving from place to place trying to find the next pile of enemies to vaporise, to push my massacre numbers higher and higher (130 so far! Woo!).

I’m really not sure about this game. It strikes me as really interesting interface for listening to podcasts, though.

In the end, though if you want something to do in Diablo III, if you want the end point of the funnel the game seems to push you towards, you head towards Seasons and Ladder and Rifts. Right now I’m not interested in that – they seem like one of those treadmills you get onto and keep going as long as you can find something personally rewarding. It’s a thing for a community to share and care about, but not something that you necessarily dive into without a want for that kind of thing in your life.

Right now I’m mostly happy running around, cursing people, and dropping giant bombs of acid on them, then seeing what a big pile of bodies of bad people I can make.

That’s all, and right now for me, in my life, that’s enough.

#fff, 1px -1px 0 , -1px 1px 0 , 1px 1px 0 ; -webkit-text-stroke: 1px white; padding: 30px;">Verdict

It’s Diablo III so there’s an obligatory content warning of deaths, Satanic imagery and the plot is probably super misogynistic and gross because that’s how the other Diablos were. But I can’t tell you for sure, because the plot and content of this game glanced off me that hard.

Really nice watching the numbers go up tho’.

You can get Diablo III at Blizzard’s Official Store.

Verdict

Get it if:

  • You want to play something that makes you feel overpowered
  • You want a big game with a lot of repeatable interactions
  • You want to play something big but don’t feel obligated to experience its bigness
  • You have a friend playing it

Avoid it if:

  • You need to feel mastery of a system
  • You have very limited play time