Diablo 3 review!

Hello there people. Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted up articles, but I’ve been busy with home life / TAFE assignments…. And the Diablo demons caught me. Which is exactly what I’m here to talk to you about. The Diablo demons.

Blizzard managed to nail it fairly hard even after changing the development team of the series. It still has that replay value that we all like so much, so I’m sure we’ll be slaughtering demons for another 12 years… though let’s hope it doesn’t come to that either.

So to start we have four difficulties this time instead of only three: Normal, Nightmare, Hell, Inferno.

Normal difficulty has a few advantages, especially for new players that are starting out on the Diablo franchise, namely the first time a character kills a boss in normal, they have a 500% magic find bonus added to them, to help them get geared up to fight the demonic hordes in nightmare.

Nightmare difficulty has taken a step up from what it was in Diablo 2, with mob packs that can tear through even a reasonably tanky character if you Rambo into them. That being said, it’s exactly what you expect being the second difficulty setting, and having a level requirement of 25 to enter.

Once you get to hell difficulty, suddenly you realise that you need a lot more HP. You will have a reasonable health pool thanks to your vitality giving you more hp per point the higher level you are, and having to be a minimum of level 50. But what you should be expecting from hell is a grand, massive, hugely painful kick in the nards. Elite / Champion packs with 3-4 special abilities on them, one of which can be invulnerable minions, with bosses with 1-2million hp so far. Yeah, that means you have a bunch of minions you can’t do anything about wailing on your ass while you try to take down the big guy with a slew of other special abilities. That being said, that’s EXACTLY what we expect of hell difficulty isn’t it? To get shredded at times with 40k hp.

And inferno difficulty, certainly last on the list, but we’re using ascending order of pain here. I have yet to enter inferno needing a level 60 character (I’m 52 at the moment on my barbarian), but I have been keeping tabs on the videos of some of the really dedicated Diablo gamers (Method EU being the first to beat inferno difficulty Diablo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyAPdEB2tk8)) and I’m impressed of what I can see of the difficulty, if I take it as just a simple upscaling on what I’m fighting in hell, and it seems like a hell of a lot of fun.  Being one shotted for not moving out of the way of a projectile seems amusing, with a mix of frustrating in on the side.

Enough about the difficulties, there is a lot more to Diablo than that, though they are kind of the heart of the game. The storyline was amazing, and it really shows some backstory on Diablo / Diablo II, which gives me the distinct impression that this design team paid a good amount of attention to the lore in those games, and translated it forward. I’m not going to talk too much about the storyline, for the sake of those that have yet to play the game / play up to the end of Act 4. All I can say is that a lot of it kept me on the edge of my seat.  GG Blizzard.

Next feature: the amazing graphics behind the game. Certainly a leap forward from what I’ve been playing for the last 10 years or so, it substantially raises the bar for game graphics, with the actual cinematics being nothing short of amazing either, I would love to see movies made with those computer-genned graphics. The areas as you walk through them perfectly encase the mood of the storyline, and with perfectly suited sound to match, for those that don’t have a friend yelling at them on skype to get the minions off them…. It’s a pleasant experience.

Now regrettably I have to move to any downsides I found with the game, and there were one or two of those. Firstly on release, the player-base was severely underestimated I expect, since a great many players were lucky to even get on for a fair portion of the night, myself being one of them.

It was fairly disappointing, and there were plenty of disconnect issues to go alongside it (the dreaded error 37) but it seems for the most part these issues have been fixed now, so we can quite consistently go slaughtering the minions of hell. Thank you Blizzard.

My final issue with the game is the fact there is no offline play. If you want to play single player or co-op, it HAS to be online, so for those that do not have a stable internet connection, or your internet might be down for a while, you’re **** out of luck. While I do encourage the leap towards co-operative gameplay, I discourage the leap to a purely online game knowing as I do that there is always the chance for your connection to fail, whether it’s your fault or not, and if you get disconnected right at the end of a fight with say Inferno difficulty Diablo, you’re probably going to get fairly angry. Though I admit that fight would take quite the while, I’m confident that it is soloable once you learn Diablo’s attack patterns.

So, to the final score, I give it an 8.5 at this point in time. That I think would get bumped to a full 10 if Blizzard offered an offline single player/LAN set like what was offered in Diablo 2.