Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A lot of noise has been made about the time it took for this game to be developed and released, and I was just as anxious as anybody. What a letdown. Firstly, people should know that Diablo 1 & 2 were NOT made by Blizzard, but rather by a different group of developers that Blizzard bought out and called "Blizzard North". Those guys started working on Diablo 3 shortly after the D2 expansion was released, but Blizzard's owner, Vivendi, wanted something less dark/gothic and more marketable. So they pretty much forced Blizzard North to scrap several years worth of progress on D3. As a result, most of the developers at Blizzard North left the company. Blizzard essentially started over on D3. And it shows. The game is still a bit dark, but also wildly colorful. Enemies and scenery glow with all colors of the rainbow. If you liked the dark, grimy, visceral feel of Diablo 2, this isn't the game for you. If you liked the feel of character progression you got from choosing allocating skill and stat points whenever you leveled up in D2, this isn't the game for you. In D3 the game automatically allocates your stat points and gives you pre-set abilities every few levels. You'll be able to select a handfull of skills that will be active at any given time, but two different characters of the same class and level will always have exactly the same skills available with the same level of power. You can't for example, focus on building up your favorite summoning skill while a different character focuses on building up his fire skills. Skill power scales automatically, the same for everyone at that level. Furthermore, the game's story and characters are just pretty terrible. There's absolutely nothing original or interesting about this game's plot or characters. There's a surprise about two thirds of the way through, but anyone intelligent enough to comprehend a coloring book will see it coming. The dialogue is embarrassingly stupid, and it's dismally clear that the Blizzard team cares absolutely nothing for the characters in this "story", or the intelligence of the players following it. This brings me to what seems to me to be the real, fundamental purpose of this game; the Real Money Auction House. Diablo 2 generated a vibrant and lucrative market for the trade and sale of items outside of them game itself. One could argue that the main draw of Diablo 2 was the constant hunt for better items to either trade or sell. Blizzard seems to have embraced this idea, but in the worst way possible. Blizzard has set up its own Auction House for the buying and selling of game items using real money. Of course, the will be taking a cut of each transaction between players. This in itself wouldn't be such a bad thing, but Blizzard has designed the game in such a way that a player, by Blizzard's own admission, will not be able to feasibly progress through the later stages of the game without obtaining items from the Auction House. In fact, they've engineered the loot mechanics of the game with this in mind, making it so that an individual player on his or her own will most likely never obtain the items that he or she needs through playing the game alone. "But isn't there also an Auction House where you can buy items with in-game gold?" you might ask. Indeed there is, BUT Blizzard has implemented a severe gold sink in the form of repairs. As Blizzard has stated, this cost becomes prohibitively substantial later in the game, to the point where it becomes much more viable to keep buying new items as opposed to trying to repair. Of course, this leaves one with a choice between farming for many hours to get enough gold to buy an item, or spending $5 for the item on the Real Money Auction House, of which Blizzard will get a cut. For me, at least, this kind of defeats the incentive of playing the game. The fun of Diablo, the thing that makes you want to keep playing, is the drive to keep killing monsters so that you can find better items and become more powerful. But Blizzard has designed the game so that you're almost guaranteed to not find the stuff you really want unless you just go buy it off of the Auction House. So why even bother with killing the monsters? And then, why even bother playing the game? The story blows, and you'll finish the game's "normal" mode in a few hours. You can keep playing on harder difficulties, and you might hear a lot about how each level is randomly generated every time you play and so it's different every time, but that's really a dramatic exaggeration. The specific layout of the levels is randomly generated each time you play, but it's the exact same scenery with the exact same monsters and you'll be doing the exact same thing, so this really isn't a big deal. And in an effort to ensure that the demand for game items stays high, Blizzard has made it impossible to mod Diablo 3, which is particularly obnoxious considering that's one of the biggest pros for games on PC. If this game felt like a real successor to Diablo 2, it would be spectacular. It doesn't, and it's not. Sorry.