Seriously though, this time, it's for real. I am going to review this game one last time in a somewhat lengthy detailed analysis and then I am going to stop talking about it on my Blog for the sake of sanity.
But before I get to the game itself, I want to talk about cycles and how they apply to all sorts of aspects of life.
For example, there have been countless studies done on Empires, how they start, how they grow, how they decay and how they die. Countless examples throughout history suggest that this cycle is largely consistent and that in many cases the same thing happens again and again and again.
The empire cycle can be studied elsewhere with much greater detail than here, but I will gloss over some of their aspects so as to later draw some parallels.
And empire is usually built out of some change, a rebellion, a catalysing event, some major movement. The empire grows and builds great wealth, enters its prime and eventually due to over-stretching its bounds via imperialism and placating its populace through bread and circuses, decays and eventually is overrun by an outside force, and then the cycle continues.
A brief example of this is the American empire, that rebelled from the British empire in the 18th century because the British Government was large and corrupt. The founding fathers rebelled from England, established a small and effective government and experienced the largest growth in wealth any empire has ever recorded in history. America was filled with great workers, great minds and industry kept exploding. Fast forward and the Government is essentially a re-creation of the large bloated corrupt entity it was escaping in the first place. It's tax code is 16000 pages long, it has corrupted its people and is overstretched...you get the point. This empire is experiencing the end of its cycle.
Now lets move back to our topic of discussion, Diablo and more importantly, Blizzard, which itself can be likened to an Empire that has grown big and bloated.
You see, when I play Diablo 3, I feel as though I am engaging in a very beautiful very polished simulation that on the surface, appears to offer me a wide variety of choices and interesting things to do. Imagine you are in a room with clean white walls and a bunch of buttons on a gorgeous central panel made of polished glass. Each button has a very distinctive icon on it, like the pommel of a sword. One of them has the semblance of an elephant on it. You press the button and it sinks into the panel with a satisfying click. Seconds later the walls display an African savannah and you can smell the greenery and the mud around you. You are in the midst of a herd of Elephants! Rumbling through the wilderness, heck the ground in the room is even trembling! After a minute or so, the scenery dissipates and the vibrating stops and you find yourself back in the room. The next button is that of a whale. You press that one and the room is transformed into a section of ocean deep under the surface. You see whales as big as basketball court swimming by.
Then a third button has lions on it. You press that one and...the wall displays a 2d image of a lion and it roars at you then disappears. You think something is wrong so you press the button again only to replay the same dull animation, again and again and again, until you almost go mad. The panel is made of material and craftsmanship so great, it must be VERY expensive. The way they made the floor vibrate and all the amazing effects, why go to all the trouble to make such a quality simulation and leave so much of it unfinished?! It makes no sense!
This is how I feel when I play Diablo 3. A lot of it just doesn't make any sense, at ALL.
Their budget was bigger than any budget. Their team worked on the game for a DECADE.
I played two classes primarily during my experience of this game, a Wizard and a Barbarian. I played from 2.1.1 to 2.1.2 post ROS release. I did not play prior to this, I did not see the RMAH or any of the problems players used to have back in INFERNO or whatever you call it.
My experience as the mage was pretty fun initially. The combat in diablo 3 is TOP quality. The simulation is great, the effects are great, the physics are brilliant, the animations are perfect. Every interaction you see on screen is brilliant. These are well designed SYSTEMS. A SYSTEM is a set of rules that define an interaction. For example, we have a leveling SYSTEM. You gain XP and get to the next level which gives you more stats and opens up new skills.
Design within a system is not just fine tuning math, but making sure as well that some events and experiences happen at regular intervals or happen at all, to ensure the player gets to experience these things. An example of design is for example the careful coding and design of the camera controls in God of War. If you've played God of War, you would know the way in which the camera displays things to you plays a big part in framing the action, in suggesting to you where to go next, and in subtly hinting to you special areas that contain valuable power ups.
Back on topic, what I see in Diablo 3 is a game whose systems are in place, but whose game is not yet designed. To use a metaphor, its like mixing the best ingredients known to man into a dish and half cooking it. You can still sense the quality of the components, but because it has not properly meshed together, you find it somewhat lacking in several respects.
You see, once I hit max level on the Wizard, I began to acquire the best end game set for the Wizard, firebird. Eventually I had a ring of royal grandeur and enough pieces to enjoy the six piece set bonus. Suddenly I found myself doing way more damage than before and was able to clear up to GR 35!! I felt GREAT, I was mastering my class and the style of play, AND I was progressing and learning.
Along the way lots of items were dropping that were interesting for other potential builds, but because there was no set with a super powered six piece bonus to fit those items (that suggested playing a cold Wizard), those choices were severely sub optimal and basically useless. In other words, if you are playing a Wizard and want to progress and enjoy the end game, you are going to play a Firebird Wizard or you are going to have difficulty clearing content and progressing at all.
Further, you need a weapon in this game that has good damage (physical dps) to deal good spell damage, a role playing purist would find this abhorrent to say the least. Back to the loot for another second, you see because the firebird set is top, you have to mostly wear those pieces, and your OFF pieces are mostly going to be those that provide +% to elite damage, because all other mods are worthless compared to this, causing the pool of items you actually want to be very small.
Most of the items that drop are very very generic and do not feel legendary, have basically no flavour at all.
My experience with the barbarian was worse, because while I enjoyed playing the Raekor set, I am an old school player who loves whirlwind. What I would frequently do when an item dropped that was good for whirlwind is I would try the build out, then after 10-15 minutes of seeing my kill speed cut to 1/3, I would go back to using Furious charge and the raekor set.
Essentially, Diablo 3 is unfinished. 3 years later, millions of dollars later, the game is largely unpolished and lacking in actual design outside of the SYSTEMS. The items need to be designed, they are NOT. The builds need to be designed, they are NOT. The end game content needs to be DESIGNED, instead they have automated systems that generate random dungeons.
I decided to do what I used to do in Diablo 2, which is BOSS runs. So in adventure mode I went ahead and killed Diablo and then Malthiel or whatever his name is. They dropped crap loot, I got no bonus experience and the entire experience felt pointless, like I had pressed the lion button but the developers had left an IOU or TODO sign there instead of actual content.
If I had to compare Diablo 3 to a dish of food, it would be sweet and delicious pork ribs that were mishandled during cooking and as such not enough meat was left on the bones, so Im sitting there sucking at these bones for scraps of meat and occasionally getting a nugget in my mouth, but mostly just hoping there was more meat on the bones.
There isn't enough to do, the items are not well designed, build diversity was killed by set bonuses (Which could be solved if they had actually shipped with sets for a wide variety of builds that were all endgame viable, but that did not happen). And the endgame consists of doing the same thing over and over. Why not just let the player go to a particular dungeon or environment they LIKE with a specific set of monsters they LIKE and let them grind for loot there? There is no CHOICE, there is no DESIGN, there are only systems that you must accept, its quite brutal.
The Greater rift system for example is quite stupid in its design. Eventually the monsters deal so much damage that you have to have a tank and CC and dps to clear, in other words solo is impossible beyond a certain point unless you spec a VERY limited and stringent way. The game essentially forces you to play a certain way. While I would love to play whirlwind, not only is the damage far too low, but the survivability sucks. Furious charge continuously stuns all the enemies around you, and without constantly stunning them in greater rifts, you would die over and over VERY quickly.
In other words, the game systems were put in place and no design or attention to detail was put into ensuring the player could try to solve the problem in different ways. There is often only one way to try and overcome the challenge. All that money you guys paid went to shareholders and Bobby Kotick's fat ass. Attention to detail an quality design are not the concern of a multi billion dollar company, they know you will buy their game on reputation alone, so they don't even need to deliver you the good shit anymore.
Funny thing is, the game itself is classical conditioning and it is no different than buying the game. You kill monsters and get upgrades over and over until eventually even if you don't get upgrades, you keep killing the monsters HOPING to get upgrades.
You play blizzard games over and over because theyre good, and eventually, you keep playing and buying them HOPING they're going to be good.
And now we come back full circle to the empire analogy I started with. Blizzard got too big, too bloated, so successful it things it doesn't even need to finish its games anymore before releasing them. The indie developer it once was, with attention to detail and quality has become the very thing it was running from, big corporate and unpolished.
I would wager they are at the end of their cycle as the tier 1 developer. Some barbarian horde is ready and waiting to take their territory.
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