First impressions of Blizzard's polarizing new game

Saying first impressions is a bit deceptive because I have actually beaten Diablo III on normal already, but I'm not in the mindset to review the game. I'm moving through nightmare difficulty with my first character, a demon hunter, and going through it the first time with my second character, a wizard. I've certainly been enjoying D3, but it has some flaws. Knowing Blizzard, they'll be updating the game bit by bit for years to come alongside an inevitable expansion pack or two, but saying this does not negate any current problems.

For now I'll briefly mention some of the main things that stood out to me. I think the game's interface has been improved and streamlined considerably from D2's, making for a smoother experience while removing some annoyances that just plain weren't fun. Health globes and more readily available resources to use skills keep the action flowing much more so than the game's predecessors. I like that I can customize my characters' skills anytime, allowing me to try new things and find combinations that work well rather than feeling nervous about every precious point I received to allocate in D2. My characters feel like they're powerful, able to handle the onslaught of foes before them, and this is a good feeling.

Now for a few things I don't care so much for. I don't particularly like that D3 is even more gear dependent than D2, although this isn't as big of hit against the game as it would be if this is something I'd merely heard before actually playing it. The auction house is certainly something I'm ambivalent to at best. What really annoys me though is that it must be played online even if I'm playing single player (which is how I play it), although this is something I knew about well in advance and prepared myself for.

Those are my first impressions in short. I have more I could add on what has been mentioned so far, but I'm holding off at least for now. Overall though I definitely like the game, but I am beginning to see why it has become very polarizing among its' players. I've heard from many people who really like the game and probably from even more who definitely do not. With the fame of D2 to live up to, it's understandable how the game is bringing out strong feelings.

A Diablo of a finer vintage

I admit I was pretty hard on Diablo (henceforth D1 with similar abbreviations, etc.) in my earlier post on it, especially because it was a game that very adeptly mixed many different types of gameplay for its time. The main thing I was getting at was despite this the game has not aged well and the biggest reason why is its sequel did so much to improve the formula that it made it difficult to go back to its predecessor. High praise for Diablo II actually. A more factual tidbit to support this praise is that to this day D2 remains on many top 10 lists for PC games and after 12 years it is still readily available pretty much anywhere that sells computer games. Outside of another of Blizzard's prize stallions, Starcraft, this is unprecedented.

It maintains the addictive mix of exploring, killing evil things and finding loot that D1 had and improves substantially on the formula. In D1, there's one small town and one very deep dungeon (essentially), but D2 is composed of four acts plus a fifth with an expansion and besides Act IV they are each individually larger in scope than the entire first game. The first major addition is the over world of large open areas to venture into the countryside, finding both essential and optional dungeons to explore along the way. Instead of painfully plodding along you can now run, moving faster from place to place and in combat situations. While I normally wouldn't count running as a big advancement for a game (I would think it'd be a given actually), it does wonders to improve upon D1. D2's predecessor, as I mention in my overview of it, was not only slow but extremely restrictive to move around in and this hampered gameplay significantly. No longer are enemies that can teleport or run away the bane of my character's existence; yes they still exist and are annoying, but they don't stop the game from being fun.

On the topic of fun, another big difference is the diverse number of ways the game can be played. In D1, the classes respectively specialized in melee combat, ranged combat and magic, but basically they could all do the same things (a warrior could use magic, a sorcerer could wield swords). The main thing separating them was their attributes affecting how well they could do various actions. D2 vastly improves on this by offering five classes, plus two with the expansion, that are vastly different from each other. Each have their own unique abilities and beyond that, their skills can individually be customized in many different ways. The sorceress for example has skill trees for fire, ice and lightning spells and generally players who use her will want to focus on specific spells within two of the three skill trees, but if you want to be creative it's possible to use all three or just specialize in one (although I wouldn't recommend it for higher difficulties).

I chose barbarian this time around because it's the only class I haven't bothered to go through the game with. Now having done so, I can't say I regret my decision to ignore him. It wasn't difficult to take him through normal, but I found him very dull compared to the other classes. His is a very gear-dependent class and one problem I have with D2 is when the right gear becomes necessary for a character to advance. Now when I say the right gear I don't mean the crap the NPC merchants sell or the majority of what enemies you kill drop, I mean stuff you have to be very vigilant or lucky to find. I don't want to run a section of the game ad nauseam, fighting other players on who can click on the good loot drops first (if playing with others), to advance. Now my barbarian had a bit of an inferiority complex to my Act II mercenary for most of the game and even though completing the game wasn't really a problem, I felt weaker than I should have for most of it. I'm not sure how many other players share my feelings on this, but as someone who has only intermittently played the game I've often felt very outclassed when it comes to gear. Even though it's meant to be a loot-driven game, there's something about how the formula actually works that I've never been happy about.

Like D1, D2 certainly looked good for its time and to this day its' relatively detailed sprites give it strong visuals and art direction. I'm not the biggest fan of rendered graphics, which is what Blizzard used for both D1 and D2 along with Starcraft. For those who don't know, rendered graphics involves first making a 3D model of something like a character and then creating a 2D sprite of that model. It allows the game to display an approximation of the 3D model without causing the demand to actually render it. Rare of old had considerable success with this for the Donkey Kong Country games on the Super Nintendo. The Golden Sun games on the Game Boy Advance also made passable use of the technique. Although as I said I'm not big on this method in general, Blizzard is certainly experienced at rendered graphics and D2 may be the game that used them best.

When it comes to sound, D2 is again very similar to D1 with largely atmospheric background noise and music belittled by the number of whacks, spell flinging and groans you are more likely to hear. The amount of character dialogue is considerably increased and this is welcome. Besides Deckard Cain and very occasionally the witch Adria, nobody in D1 had much that was terribly interesting to hear. Plenty of new characters occupy D2's few safe havens and most have remarks to pass on about the world and the story, although I imagine most people completely bypass this section of the game.

Despite all the good, I'll admit I've grown a little tired with the game. I've played through it about four times with my favorite class, necromancer, and at least once now with all the others. However, the game has amazing replayability and even now I would still like to try out some of the available characters in different ways. It's just that I have to be in the right mood to play (same as everything really) and these moods are becoming more infrequent.

I am somewhat disappointed in Blizzard's present lack of support for the game on modern operating systems like Vista and Windows 7. Yes, the game is 12 years old and normally I'd give a developer a pass for not keeping a game up after so long, but D2 is still widely available in a battle chest where computer games are sold as I mentioned previously. I don't understand how they can continue to keep the game in stores but leave it a nightmare to get to work correctly on modern computers. Choosing to run it in compatibility mode didn't even begin to fix it for me or for many from what I've read. It took quite a bit of research to find a solution after going through multiple ways others used with the same operating system version as me.

Now that I'm finally finished with D2 I'll at long last be getting Diablo III. Hopefully my computer will be able to handle it well enough. I've been a bit torn between choosing the demon hunter or the wizard as my first character, so depending on how things go I'll post next weekend on my first impressions of the game.

Update on this blog thing

So it has been about a month and a half since I started 8-bit Smirk. I think it's been working out alright, although it feels like there's always so much I have to do and so much else I want to do. That's pretty typical though. I started the blog to essentially be a journal of sorts and in this respect it's been a success. Not so very long ago I had a friend tell me he wanted to start cutting gaming out of his life to focus on other pursuits, not least of all the noble goal of improving himself to be a more well rounded and knowledgeable person. I respect that decision, but it's not one I would ever see myself making. If this makes sense, removing gaming from my life would amount of removing much of me from myself. Gaming is more than just a hobby, it's one of the few things I have passion for and gives me motivation to deal with the things I don't want to be bothered with. More than that though, it is one of the things that defines me as a person. I am a writer, I am an outsider, and I am a gamer. For a more general defense of gaming, refer to my introductory post.

It often feels like there are so many games and so little time, especially when I think of big series I've yet to really explore like Mass Effect and Persona, and when it comes to writing this blog it seems like I'm always getting behind on what I'd like to get posted. That has particularly been the case for about a month now due to some major disruptions in my life. I had to change apartments and I have also been undergoing what I would term epic computer problems. Due to these things I was a bit scattered in what I felt like playing while my Diablo project fell by the wayside.

Recently I started a third character, a mage, in the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While I liked playing from a new perspective, the character has been the most difficult to play as and so far the least enjoyable. I've played and beaten all the main Elder Scrolls games and I've never really enjoyed magic-using characters in the series, so it's nothing new for me. Eventually I want to do a whole writeup on Skyrim and really get into some details, but that time is not now. Perhaps sometime around when the first DLC, Dawnguard, is released. I will say at this time that the game will be a strong contender for one of my top favorite games ever, although that's a decision for after some time has passed.

When I am out and about on the weekend I typically like to keep a pick up and play sort of game with me, and for the last couple weeks that game has been Castlevania: Circle of the Moon in my trusty Game Boy Advance SP. Sometime I'd like to really write on the Castlevania series, which has many games that rank highly with me. Circle of the Moon is among this number and it's position has considerably improved over time. When it came out alongside the Game Boy Advance, the system it was designed for, played it in a way that was just barely visible. Every other system afterward that could play GBA games has been an improvement on visibility and this has helped the game greatly. It also has great replayability: I'm currently toward the end of my fourth playthrough. How the different unlocked modes switch up how the game plays offers some good variety. The player character, Nathan Graves, is also among my favorites of the series' vampire hunters. He has a great name, great look and he pretty much ignores the game's annoying rival character who eventually just ends up embarrassing himself basically. Anyway, great game.

I mentioned my Diablo project a bit ago, which I will be resuming where I left off at now that I have a computer I can use for it. First I will be completing Diablo 2, which I stopped playing shortly after the end of Act I when the epic problems began more than a month ago, and write a similar overview of my thoughts on it that I did for the first game. Don't worry, it'll be quite a bit more positive. The idea of the project was I fully go through D1 and D2 before finally getting to Diablo III. I'd intended to be ready for this eagerly anticipated game when it was released May 15, not a month later, but as Philip J. Fry once said: time makes fools of us all.

The Diablo that didn't age like fine wine

Diablo III is very nearly here with its' May 15 release date. Blizzard has a tendency to release its games only when they're ready. I think that's commendable personally and I'd much rather wait for a great game than see something released before it's ready. Two weeks ago I started up the first Diablo (hereafter referred to as D1 with similar abbreviations for the sequels) with the idea of going from beginning to end of the games in anticipation of D3. I completed D1 a bit ago and I have recently started D2. For now I wanted to give some impressions of the game I've finished and then do D2 later. Once D3 arrives I'll certainly be writing about it to some degree.

When D1 first came out I thought it was great. My first experience was playing the demo which only had some of the monastery to explore and the warrior was the only available character. I wouldn't say it blew me away (I'd certainly played better games by that point, with Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Final Fantasy VI coming easily to mind), but it was still pretty fun. One thing about me is I tend to like games that keep it simple, and D1 easily achieves simplicity. While I'm not a game developer, from my experience in other areas it seems like simplicity is hard to achieve - not easy. You have to trim all unnecessary elements yet maintain the delicious creamy center. For its time I think D1 was certainly a yummy treat, but to me it has grown stale since then.

I found it repetitive, monotonousness and plodding. Yes, D2 could probably be described as repetitive too, but D2 is still fun for me as I'll talk about more when I do a post dedicated to it. The slow walking speed in D1 makes it excruciatingly slow. In dungeons it is more forgivable because positioning is a large part of strategy in the game, but moving around town is a pain especially when it comes to visiting the witch on the opposite side of the area everything else is in. Since I did a run through the games primarily to refresh myself of the lore and setting, I chose to go through D1 as the warrior (for reasons obvious to anyone who paid even slight attention to D2's story). I'm thinking I might have had more fun if I'd played the rogue or sorcerer, but it's hard to say for sure. Back in the game's day I played through them all and I recall each had their areas of difficulties. My first full run through the game as a sorcerer took some creativity on my part to kill Diablo at the end. In comparison, it was a grueling slog through hell (literally) for my warrior to reach Diablo, but when I finally reached the big bad it was almost laughable for all the resistance he presented. I pretty much used my weapon with knock-back effect to push him against a wall and I then systematically sliced and diced without allowing him barely any openings to get a hit in. As a final boss he's certainly odd in that it's much more dangerous to be at a distance than right in front of him. I had no reason to stay away, but in the time it took to approach him he used his Armageddon spell repeatedly to lower my health enough to almost warrant the use of a single health potion. I had more trouble with going one-on-one with some of his mooks on his level, let alone the groups of 10 or so they like to come in. One particular bitch of an advocate made me chase him literally across the entire level teleporting around.

That brings me to a rant on ranged attackers in D1, who I think deserve a very special, apparently lengthy mention. I dislike them very, very, very much. Now I was moving along through the game at a good pace through the monastery, it wasn't particularly fun but it was smooth sailing, and then I got to a level of the catacombs where two thirds of the enemies were goat men with bows. Partly it was my fault because I was using a strong two-handed weapon and they made baby swiss cheese out of me almost instantly. I nearly gave up, but then I discovered (probably rediscovered) that having a shield is a much, much better idea for a warrior despite any drop in attack strength. I went from dying nearly instantly to being able to stand in a room with more than a dozen of the goat men, still chugging health potions at a modest rate but able to survive. So I could stay alive, but I still wanted to be able to kill things I came across so I could explore. I've come back again to the slow movement speed and while I said I didn't mind so much in dungeons, this instance is the exception. It seems no matter what I could barely get a single attack (note, attack not a hit) in before whatever one I was aiming at would move away. Repeat as necessary until all will to play the game has gone is essentially what the game became for me. The only way I could reliably kill them is to chase them carefully and trap them in a corner. If that were a routine occasionally encountered than okay, but generally I was dealing with rooms of 10 or more of these guys and while I slowly eliminated them one by one the rest were pelting me with arrows. While my shield blocked nearly all of them, my movement was extremely choppy from doing so. It was extraordinarily not fun. Somehow I did make it through that level and continued on with the game, and I at least did get some reward because the caves that came afterward were by far my favorite part of the game.

While the caves still had ranged attackers, they were of the sort that don't run away and generally just threw out some attacks while closing to melee range. Between the less-claustrophobic areas and being able to handle large groups of enemies without having to micro manage every action, the game actually became fun for three levels. When I reached level four of the caves I found the floor flooded with succubi and it was the bow-goat men all over again except now my shield was useless due to their magic attacks and my resistances didn't help. Very fortunately, I found the stairs down quickly and just bypassed most of the area. The hell levels were very dangerous, but manageable. By the time I reached the inevitable floor full of more succubi-type enemies (blood witches?) I was lucky enough to have equipment to provide the max level of magic resistance. Tracking them down carefully one-by-one was still unpleasant, but manageable.

So I proceeded until I reached Diablo's level and then came the ultimate slap. I was extremely dangerous and well protected by this point, all my resistances were maxed and I had made duplicitous use of elixirs, and yet for all my trouble I still had a horrible time clearing out all the advocates in the area. It didn't matter they could barely hurt me, it didn't matter I could badly hurt them, because having a swarm of presumably powerful magicians teleporting around like gnats often before I could land a single hit was miserable. My dexterity was maxed by this point and my weapon greatly increased accuracy, and still. When it comes to expressing how 'fun' it is to chase down all the various ranged enemies, I feel I need to use a colorful sentence along the lines of what Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee often uses, to the effect of: "Expletive buggery cripes expletive." All I can say it no, no this is not good game design and no this is not fun.

Some content in this post is being used under the fair use exception of copyright law. Diablo is copyright of Blizzard Entertainment.