As I mentioned previously, another big change that’s been added to Diablo III is that you now must be online the entire time you’re playing, whether you’re playing the single-player campaign alone or not. The masses revolted against this announcement when it was first made, and with good reason: it made the game nearly unplayable for the first week it was out. More than half the attempts I made to play resulted in error messages about the server being down for maintenance. You would think that the company that runs World of Warcraft would know how to handle millions of people playing online simultaneously, but apparently, the guys who run those servers were home trying to play Diablo III as well.
Another new feature that can be annoying is that when you die, you restart at your last checkpoint with 10% damage to all of your equipment. Gone is the long, painful, naked battle back to your corpse to reclaim your body and gear. Now you just pop back into play, slightly worse for the wear… but nothing the blacksmith can’t fix for you with some gold pieces. It’s great that you don’t have to do that walk of shame anymore, but terrible when the checkpoint is in the exact spot where you died, meaning you respawn right in the center of a glob of enemies, who then pummel you to death again. Sure, you can run away and use a Town Portal (no longer a scroll you must collect, now just a power you have that needs to recharge), but you still have to go back and face that horde of monsters all over again. I’ve gotten up and walked away from the game after being slaughtered ten times in a row by the same gang of monsters. It was not pleasant.
Alternately, this whole respawning-at-your-last-checkpoint thing seems to have taken some of the challenge out of Diablo III. There was some amount of skill to going back and picking up your corpse and all your stuff, and there was that looming threat of losing everything if you couldn’t. And you can always just go in, do some damage, die, go back in, do some damage, die – lather, rinse, and repeat as needed. You can’t do this on the major bosses, but you can do it just about everywhere else. Is it ironic that the very company that spawned the concept of “Zerging” has now implemented that very feature into their game?
Additionally, your stash can now be accessed by all characters on your account. Before, if you wanted to swap items between characters, you had to jump through hoops to do it. Now you simply stick something in your stash and voila! Your other characters can snatch it up and equip it. If you’ve got a high level character who finds something for your lower level character, it’s a cinch to hand it over. While I know that you could do it in Diablo II, this still seems like it’s breaking the game. I understand the idea of making Diablo III accessible for newcomers, but this is making it so that people don’t even have to try. It’s one of the laziest changes they’ve made to the game yet, and again, it goes against the idea of working for your loot.
Other than that, there isn’t really much that has changed from Diablo II to Diablo III. Even the length of the acts are similar to how they were in the previous game. There are many repeat characters as well, like the aforementioned Deckard Cain and the archangel Tyrael… and, of course, Diablo. Much has changed in the background and the settings, but all in all, this just feels like more Diablo II – like an expansion that took a very, very long time to come out.
So then the question remains: was Diablo III worth the wait? If all you wanted was Diablo II with updated graphics, then yes, it was absolutely worth it. If you were looking for any type of innovation, the game will be a disappointment. Blizzard has completely dropped the ball and done nothing to improve what some might argue is a game they already perfected ten years ago. The similarities far outweigh the differences, and most of what’s changed has taken the challenge out of the game completely.
That being said, I did dump my fair share of time into it, and will likely play it through again with another character class. But – unsurprisingly – Diablo III actually made me want to play Diablo II again. It says a lot that the old game calls to me now that I’ve finished the new one – it tells me that, while the new game is good, the old game is still better. It’s possible that without the original team, there’s just no life left in the game, and that the real winner here could be the upcoming Torchlight II. But until that game comes out, all I can do is recommend this game to those of you who simply want more Diablo-style role-playing and are burnt out on the first two games.
Review Disclosure: A retail copy of Diablo III was purchased by Warp Zoned for the purposes of this review.
