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Cross another winner of multiple Vaporware Awards off the list: After many long years, Diablo III is finally available.
Blizzard has clearly aimed to capture everything people loved about Diablo III's 12-year-old predecessor, the addictive dungeon-raiding gameplay that made them crave a sequel so badly, and update it for modern times. This is reflected in the cinematics, soundtrack and game design. Everything is snappier, more intuitive and all presented in high definition. Picking up the explosions of loot that enemies drop like grotesque pinatas is much easier on the ol' clicking finger.
Before you even start to appreciate the smoothness of Diablo III's gameplay, you'll be blown away by the sights and sounds. The cinematic scenes are so gorgeous that I spent more time looking at the pores on the characters' faces than I did paying attention to what was happening in them. The soundtrack, for my money, is the best I've heard in a videogame in at least five years. It was composed by seven different musicians: Russel Brower, Derek Duke, Glenn Stafford, Joseph Lawrence, Neal Acree, Laurence Juber and Edo Guidotti. Other game music composers need to find out what these guys put in their coffee, because they're making everybody else look like hacks.
The cutting-edge graphics make the game's writing, in comparison, seem a bit behind the times. Diablo III's approach to storytelling makes you wonder if somehow the writing team at Blizzard is trapped in a time warp, permanently stuck working with storytelling tools from 1999. The writing is dry at best, with ambitions that avoid rising above telling a run-of-the-mill dark fantasy story. The main story beats told in the epic cut-scenes are fine, but NPCs function as little more than generic fantasy text generators and the in-engine scenes have all the kinetic energy and narrative punch of a middle school play.
Blizzard tried to spruce things up by adding in lots of diaries lying throughout the game that function like the audio logs in BioShock, but this feature is handled clumsily. Once I helped this necromancer-type guy activate some magical totems, and, after thanking me, his diary flew out of his pants and landed at my feet. He didn't hand it to me; it emerged, as if of its own free will, from his boxers. So instead of just talking to this guy to learn about his past, I took his crotch-book and listened to an audio reading of his personal logs, performed by him. This is all while he’s standing in front of me. Again: The word is clumsy.
I complained about Blizzard’s difficulties merging story, dialogue and game mechanics in my first impressions piece last week, and I ran into more of that while playing through the game's full 20-hour campaign. My favorite example happens every time my character runs out of "hatred," an expendable energy used to fuel special attacks for the Demon Hunter class. Right-clicking to use the attack while I'm low on hatred prompts Demon Hunters to holler out the sort of ridiculous phrase you would only ever hear in a videogame: "I need more hatred to do that!"
Diablo III can be played entirely alone, although you can invite other players at any time. I played through the second of the game's four acts alongside a really great group of random people I met by making my game "open to the public." Some cool cat playing as a Witch Doctor (read: Necromancer) popped in and invited two of his friends, and together we embarked on a four-hour rampage that killed thousands of inherently deserving immigrants from hell.
We fought in a pack, warped to town together and even waited for each other when one member of the group had to leave his keyboard for a minute or two. We crushed our enemies with relative ease, left-clicking demons out of existence just as quickly as they appeared.
By nature, playing with others in Diablo games always results in a fast-paced experience. Everybody constantly surges forward, taking out waves of enemies and picking up loot as quickly as possible. After all, moving fast means getting more goodies and XP in less time, exactly the sort of optimized path that RPGs like this train people to want. That's no different in Diablo III, but things have been refined to make cooperative play more harmonious. Loot drops are now unique to each player, meaning you can always pick up all the items you see on the screen without fear of raising a pal's ire by taking something they wanted.
Whereas most battles in Diablo III boil down to click-fests with occasional strategic skill usage, the game's boss fights are puzzles that require pattern recognition and careful maneuvering. So, when my lineup of loot-lusting companions sauntered into the Act II boss fight, we got creamed. That particular boss likes to summon pools of life-sucking green gooeyness, and within 15 seconds of encountering that, all four of us were dead.
We warp to outside the boss room. Profanities appeared in the party chat box. Slightly embarrassed by our failure, we rushed back in.
Fifteen seconds later, we're back outside. Both times, we've failed to get the boss in question's health bar below 90%. This time, the party chat filled up with observations from each of the members of my party.
"I think we should spread out more."
"My zombie dogs are obviously useless against this guy."
"We've all gotta move quickly once the green stuff shows up."
"We should go back to town and repair weapons."
Third time’s the charm – especially when you’re actually communicating. We peppered the boss down to 80% of its health before the goo killed the first of us, an unlucky Barbarian. I was clear across the battlefield at this point, but I knew that we needed that Barbarian if we were to have any chance of winning. With the towering boss flailing and spewing stuff around us, I used my Demon Hunter vault skill to quickly close the gap. I crouched down and rapidly clicked the “revive” key on my mouse, watching as the game’s life-giving blue meter slowly filled up. Just seconds before a green pool appeared beneath us, I managed to haul the Barbarian to his feet and out of the mess.
In between hurling knives at the demon boss and sucking down health potions, I got knocked out three times over the course of that long and terrible battle. All three times, that same Barbarian player dropped whatever barbaric thing he was doing and ran over to assist me. In the end, we killed the boss with all four players left standing.
It was one of the best cooperative experiences I've ever had in a video game, and I don't even know who those people were. I've made my concerns about the storytelling in this game clear, but maybe that's not as big of an issue. I came away from Diablo III with a great story to tell, one of my own making.
No review of Diablo III would be complete without some mention of the game's anti-piracy scheme, which requires players to be constantly connected to the internet as they play.
I can see why Blizzard would want to protect sales of its game. No company wants its game to be pirated, and I get personal enjoyment from the fact that, at least for now, the pirates have been left out in the cold. That said, DRM like this doesn't do anything good for users. Diablo III, unlike World of Warcraft, is a game that would play perfectly fine offline, and everybody knows it.
Like many others, I got booted off the game shortly after logging in for the first time. It came as a warning: "SYSTEM: Server shutting down in 4 minutes." In the middle of my game, Blizzard's servers shut down and I was locked out for a few hours.
I was pretty upset when that happened, but I haven't run into any issues since and I can't muster up the energy to sustain my anger over it. Diablo III somehow manages to make 12 years seem worth the wait. As someone who played and loved the first two games, I'm not at all disappointed.
WIRED Perfectly tuned dungeon-crawler gameplay with a killer audio/visual presentation. Exactly what Diablo fans always wanted.
TIRED Always-online DRM is mildly annoying, story content and delivery is weak.
Rating: 
$60, Blizzard
