A day with Diablo 3

Diablo III, early test build.

So after my weird psudo-rant about watching the Diablo III launch week from the outside, I ended up with a copy of it yesterday (unexpectedly but not unwelcome, mind you).  So I put aside my normal MMO lineup for the evening and spent several hours getting acquainted with the latest in a series that I remember playing when I first moved to Michigan.  In 2000.

Honestly, it’s a pretty strong but not terribly revolutionary action RPG, and it goes down smoothly.  If you like killing lots of things quickly, watching big numbers happen, getting tons of lot, and exploring a haunted house of a world, then it’s right up your alley.  It’s got the trademark Blizzard polish, so everything handles nicely.  There was about a ten-second learning curve on all of the features, and that says something good about how intuitive the design is.  Even the new skill/rune setup is really simple to grasp, although I spent some time initially trying to figure out where the complexity came in (more on that in a bit).

I rolled a Witch Doctor (because zombies) and enjoyed the play while disliking the look of the character.  It’s interesting to me how unconventional most of the classes are in D3 versus most fantasy titles, and I appreciate that Blizzard was willing to at least make an attempt at providing something other than knight/ranger/priest, if only in name and outfit design.

Little touches improve D3 over what I remember of D2.  For instance, no more town portal scrolls (you just get a permanent skill) or identify scrolls (just right-click on unidentified objects).  The crafting system makes more sense to me than the weird cube thing of D2, you don’t have to click to pick up gold (just run near it), and the areas are pretty straight-forward to navigate.   Click click click, loot loot loot, level up.

I’ve heard people call it “kiddy WoW” (which is amusing as an oxymoron), and I can see that.  It feels like a stripped-down version of World of Warcraft, from the interface to the stats (should I feel insulted that the weapon DPS number is font size 96 so that I don’t miss it?) to the skillbar.

Initially, I really thought that there was no customization to be had apart from gear.  The game automatically grants you skills as you level up, and you can choose just one skill per category at any given time.  Later on, you start to get runes, which allow you to choose a skill variant, but again, only one of each.  Finally, there are passives, which is the closest thing the game has to a talent tree.  Taken separately, it feels like hand-holding, but all together it does have the promise of some interesting builds and combinations.  It made me think of League of Legends, how characters there only have a small handful of skills and yet that game is able to offer a huge amount of variety and complexity within that framework.

I do have two big complaints from the get-go.  The first is — as everyone else is saying — the sheer stupidity of not offering a non-DRM offline mode for a single-player game.  If Blizzard’s servers are down, and they were twice during the short time I was playing, you simply can’t play the game.  Blizzard’s taking a ton of heat over this and yet I can’t see the company admitting that this is a bad idea or that it should listen to its customers.  Nay, you’ll buy your Diablo III and then shut it while we count your cash!

“Requiring that players be online is one thing – but we are!  We’re online right now!  They’re the ones who aren’t online.  Who watches the watchmen?!?!” (Penny Arcade)

I hate DRM.  So much.

The second complaint came at the end of the night.  I was trying to be outgoing and jumped into a couple of groups with fellow bloggers B.J. and Tipa.  The multiplayer does work surprisingly well, it’s very pain-free to engage in, and I enjoyed it.  The problem came when I joined Tipa’s party, as the game sent me over to help her out with a quest I’d yet to do.  Fair enough, kill kill, I died a lot since I was underlevel for the area, but oh well.  But when I left, I noticed that the game “saved” my progress to her quest — I couldn’t go back to do the one I was working on originally.  I looked everywhere for a way to do this, but nothing doing.

Now, if this was my tenth playthrough or something, it wouldn’t be a problem.  But it was my first time through the game, and I wanted to actually see it all from the start to the end, including what little story there was.  I did not want the game to trick me into leapfrogging content just because I was grouping up.  So now I’m faced with either pretending as though my character got amnesia for three levels or rerolling.  I guess I’ll reroll; it was only three hours in, after all.

Update: Rohan was kind enough to inform me that I *can* roll back my quest progress, but I have to do so on the character login screen.  Big button and all that.  Thanks!

Anyway, I don’t see this taking the place of my MMOs, but it certainly is a nice distraction for when I want something more basic and simple.