| Title | All new ways to love and hate Diablo III |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | September 9, 2013 |
Are you sure you're in the right place? The Diablo III Haters Club is three web sites over and down the forum to your right..
Read the full articleI'm really happy with havingit on console. Diablo is one of the few game series that my wife can/ is willing to play, and it's a joy to get her sitting with a controller in hand, gleefully hacking up monsters with me. Since my crappy laptop can't run D3 I don't have the pc version to compare the graphics to, so I'm satisfied with how it looks on my Ps3.
I can't say anything about the PC version (because I couldn't play it) but this is a genuinely good game. It doesn't look bad at all (at least on PS3) aside from some minor screen tearing, though if you're coming from the PC version and have a great rig then you might have a valid counterpoint (I will say that the video quality of the CG scenes is worse than I expected). Load times were beautiful, the controls work well (there's a lock-on that they NEVER tell you about mapped to L2), and it's compulsive.
There are two things I want to say. First, the loot is kind of "meh." Crafting was really important all through Normal, since it gave me better gear than just about any drop, but so far there's really nothing unusual or particularly fun; no meteors dropping down, no floating skulls summoned, nothing. Maybe in higher difficulties? Furthermore, sometimes the rewards they give you for completing quests are truly terrible. Defeating Azmodan earned me an item that would've been useful for a level 1 character (4 armor and four single-digit enchantments)!
Second, the balance is a little out of whack. I mentioned this in the last diary as a critique of risk v. reward, but it's really a matter of some sections of the game being very different from others in terms of difficulty. The end of Act III was so hard I dropped the difficulty down rather than up and still had problems (those damned worms in particular). Act IV, on the same difficulty, was a cakewalk where death was never a problem. Diablo himself was almost laughably easy. I decided to give my Demon Hunter a break and try out the Witch Doctor, and I'm finding the game considerably more difficult all around, so class balance may be an issue as well.
I really hope they get rid of the auction house with the expansion - the incoming loot changes seem to be a strong indicator - until either the patch or the expansion drops, I don't think I'll touch D3 again - and I'm not even in the haters club!
Oooh. I like the little trading card review thing at the end where you put the stars. NICE !
I've found that since they tuck the auction house away in some barely noticeable thing on the main menu on PC and not in game (as far as I know) I never so much as think about it while I'm playing. It's pretty clearly a big part of the reason for the always-online stuff, though, which is enough to make me hate it. If I gamed on console at all anymore I might well have held out for this version.
I think they're cool too, but it looks like there's a problem in the Diablo 3 card:
"a wizard’s magic beams"
Reading all these Diablo 3 articles is giving me the itch to slay mobs and take their stuff, but I think I might redirect the urge towards Borderlands 2...
Corrections:
"and how unfair [it] is."