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Honestly, I couldn't care less about the RMAH, what killed D3 for me was how open the classes were. My favorite thing in those types of games are to have multiple builds of one class, but in D3 that was absolutely pointless since you could pull out every single different ability on the class.

It's kinda what killed GW and GW2 in the long run with me.

 Ahtman wrote:


That is a fair criticism, but without more to back it up, it is at best a possibility. Are their follow up reviews where the writers retracted their statements?

I referred to video games having changed a LOT since we grew up with them. They no longer are niche hobby, but a really huge and profitable market and thus, amendmends were made. A lot of people call it "dumbed-down" and it's a fitting term. If you want to express it in a positive way, games were made more accessible to a broader market...games are different nowadays, but a lot of people still use their very own personal view of what a game should look like...and those can hardly hold up anymore.

If I, personally, should rate D3, I'd give it a solid 70-ish. If I, as a professional reviewer, would have to review the game, I'd rate it 85-ish. "But why? It's your opinion on the game why different ratings?!"...because professional reviews should rate a game based on its current (!) competitors not based on the nostalgic idea of what a game should look like.

I had a lot more fun with the Spiderweb Games than I had with Diablo 3. I played Diablo 3 as a Sorc, Barb and Necromancer and everytime, in mid game, I got bored. Path of Exile is, to me, superior to Diablo 3, but I got bored of it as well in the high level area. I might have simply grown out of such a type of a game...and I simply do not have as much as time as I had back when I was young. I can't play for the entire night again, I got a job with a lot of responsibility and I have to lead by example - and how could I do so when I show up unshaved, with sunken-in eyes because I played video games all night. And really, I'd piss of my gf as well. I did that in Diablo 2, but I was way younger back then and seriously, it was school. You could do anything back then.

That's what I am talking about though. When people say "OMG DIABLO 3 IS SO BAD DIABLO 2 WAS SO MUCH BETTER LOL", they mostly look at it through their nostalgia glasses, which just isn't fair. I recently (well...more or less) picked up Diablo 2 again and yes, it still is a lot of fun. Really, try it. But at the same time, I often caught myself being motivated because of memories coming back to my mind instead of being actually motivated by the game itself.

That's what I mean with "Zeitgeist". You cannot criticize games reviews by applying your own standards to it...the standards have changed. Deal with it

What, to me, is an absolute no-go, however, is being forced to permanently online. I am very glad that it's possible to crack the game in order to remove this and have used such a crack ever since I played the game and never looked back.

I thought you were saying that the massive amount of positive reviews (an aggregate of 88% is fairly positive after all) were becuase they were caught up in the excitement of the moment; i.e. 'New Diablo yay!'.

I just take issue with using the same language one would use to describe Superman 64 to describe Diablo 3.

Well, objectively, what did Diablo III wrong?

Highest difficulty was an issue, sure, but that got fixed. The RMAC isn't an issue as it isn't mandatory, perma-online shouldn't affect ratings either, the greed for items still worked, the classes are interesting and different to some degree....after all, it's a modern game. It's Diablo 2 changed to fit the current Zeitgeist.

I was disappointed, yes, but that's because I liked Diablo 2 so much, not because D3 was a bad game.

As someone who could never bother to get past the halfway point in Diablo 2 (I'd just get bored and start a new character), and someone who made it all the way to the highest difficulty in Diablo 3, I'd still have to say that 3 is an awful game, based on a single principle:

The game was designed specifically around the RMAH in order to exploit it as a source of money, even at the cost of quality to the core game itself.
By time I was nearing the end of Hell difficulty, it was literally impossible for me to progress as the gear I was getting made it impossible for me to do damage to enemies above the double (and in some cases, single) digits. It was obvious that this was done in a move to encourage people to use the RMAH.

Granted, the issue may have been fixed, but it's too late now. Diablo 3 has left an awful taste in my mouth, and I'm not going back.

It's a shame too, since I really did like quite a few of the alterations they made. The new skill hotkeys were great, I enjoyed being able to respec freely, and the general gameplay itself did manage to be satisfying. The RMAH just killed everything.

Many people hate the game
Many people like the game

I personally feel that it's pretty terrible, way beneath what blizzard is capable of. Boring story, not nearly enough randomization within the game (which is what I think kills replayability for me. I was sick of looking at the same exact designs on my second play through), the RMAH, and so on and so forth.

What really rustles my jimmies though, is the people that claim d3 doesn't have to be as good as d2 because d2 was bad when it came out. Ok, let's think about that for a second. D2 vanilla made many improvements over D1. From there, they just kept including more and more stuff. For better or worse, the game expanded. Going from D2 to D3 though, it feels like they scaled back a great deal. Truly, if they made a clone of D2 with different classes and better graphics I would have been happy, so would many many people.

 Fafnir wrote:
As someone who could never bother to get past the halfway point in Diablo 2 (I'd just get bored and start a new character), and someone who made it all the way to the highest difficulty in Diablo 3

I still think 'awful' isn't the right word, as it is far to harsh. No one in their right mind plays an awful game through all that. I agree that the RMAH was a terrible, and it's integration sullied the game, but the gameplay is still fundamentally solid, or you would have said 'screw this' and stopped playing long before finishing even the normal difficulty level. The chocolate is fine, it is the candy coating they forced around it that screws up the candy, so to speak. It should have been a better game, and you can see where the suits tried to find ways to wring more money out of it at its expense, but it still can be a fun romp through a dungeon with friends, and is easy to control. As I've said before though, I am not judging it based on getting to level cap and just grinding away like a sweatshop for gear, which seems to be the thing for many.

Hmm. Never visited the RMAH. Never played online with other players. Never played into the higher levels.


Thought it was just fine. You can't expect to kill the three prime evils every game. And I do like my Witch Doctor.