So I wrote briefly last night about why Diablo 3 sucks after a certain point. Here, I will elaborateon why Diablo feels more like a game from ten years ago than one that took ten years to make.
More eloquent bloggers then me have broken down the main areas in which the game is lacking. My biggest problem is that eventually the game simply becomes a sequence of corpse runs, slowly whittling down Elite mobs, before getting to some really hard boss fights.
Take the session I played this morning. I was in a group of three -my level 55 witch doctor,a wizard and a barbarian - slogging through the desert, looking for the constituent parts of Zoltan Kulle.
On our way to the first cave with the first part inside, we encountered three different Elites and their associated mobs of demons. We each died half a dozen times on each encounter. Each death required a corpse run back from the last checkpoint - a minimum of twenty seconds for each run. Eventually the last screaming beastie would be vaporised and we would collect our loot, get repaired if necessary, then move on. To the next sequence of deaths and reincarnations.
The fact is that death, for most of the game, is nothing more than an inconvenience, a waste of time and an inconsequential amount of gold. Maybe we died a lot because we sucked, didn't know the best way to beat the mobs or play or classes. But, even if that is true, it doesn't matter. Blizzard wants you to win - eventually -and, most importantly, keep playing.
Sometimes these little battles become farcical.
After a while the wizard got tired of the cycle of dying, running, and repairing, and left me and the barbarian in a cave with a spider mini-boss. This thing and it's minions were vampiric and molten, meaning they dropped piles of magma on the ground and regenerated health. So we had to kite them a lot, to the point where they were all the way back at the entrance of the cave, waiting for us each time we reincarnated. And so they then had to be kitted all the way back into the cave so wet could at least get into it safely.
So, not only are these fights are not only boring, repetitive cycles, with no real incentive to learn or change ones's approach, they are often frustrating and nonsensical (don't even get me started on 'arcane sentries' - why on Sanctuary would spiders have the ability to summon magical laser orbs?).
The really weird thing is these mini-bosses are actually intended as the main draw to keep people playing the game. Blizzard has stated that 'this is our game', that loot will often be better from these random spawns than from the scripted Boss encounters because they don't want players such in a loop of just killing Diablo again and again in the hopes of getting good loot.
So Blizzard does note want players to come up with the best groups and strategies to defeat the toughest noses in the game. They just want us to endlessly grind through random spawn after random spawn, dying and whittling, dying and whittling, again and again - for what? To do the whole thing at a higher difficulty setting.
This whole set up reminds me of the endless loop World of Warcraft has become since its first expansion. Skills, both gaming and social, used to be necessary to get the best gear, are the most exciting content. Then these things were phased out in favour of grinding currency and random groups where noone speaks to each other. But at least WoW fights still require a rudimentary understanding of your class and the enemy, rather than a willingness to just keep running back into the encounter and do enough incremental damage to eventually kill something.
WoW, it seems, has reached its peak and shown us the limits of popularity for a game structured that way. Its as if the development team for Diablo 3 had not paid any attention to lessons WoW's subscribers are offering.
In todays gaming world you just cannot expect to put costumers on an endless treadmill of gaming and expect them to keep on grinding through the same content again and again in the hopes of getting that piece of loot that had slightly better stats or is slightly more interesting to look at. It is no longer a novel experience - Everquest, WoW, and so many other games have been experienced and played and written about. A lot. And there are so many other competing games and experiences on the market today that just didn't exist in the heyday of Diablo 2 and WoW. Blizzard, it seems, has failed to adapt.
Blizzard would not be the first giant of the business world to be sunk simply because of an inability to change with the times and adapt to new ones and it surely wouldn't be the last.
All of this is, of course, just my opinion of a game that had only been out for two weeks. There are still features, notably pvp arenas, to be added. Expansion packs with whole new levels of content are not inconceivable and might include bosses it its actually worth fighting. Even the current content could be tweaked onto a more worthwhile and meaningful experience.
But, for now, Diablo 3, a game ten years in the making, feels like one that has ignored gaming for the last decade. It is a relic of another era, where grinding for loot and online play was novel. Its structure, the cental mechanic of the game, repeated play for better gear, just leaves players feeling used and bored and wondering what else they could be doing with their time and money.
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