Diablo III
Platforms	Windows, OSX
Genre	World of Diablo-craft
Score	6
Buy from Amazon

The Diablo series is the most important series in my life. While I missed Diablo, I caught its sequel by the throat on release day and was hooked for a good…well, I’m still off-and-on addicted. So sue me. Diablo II was everything I wanted. It was fast paced, exciting, the gathering of objects was awesome, leveling was fun, playing through the game more than once was fun.

I love the Diablo series so much, that when Diablo III was announced, I called every friend I knew that ever played it and told them to check the website so they could experience the surprise. I was SO happy.

I waited 12 years for Diablo III. I got it at the midnight prerelease and tried playing the game, and we all know of the infamous Error 37. I thought about writing a first hour review of just “error 37” every minute for an hour. But anyway…

But I expected servers to be destroyed…I mean, it IS battle.net. But you know what? Despite being more than happy to wait for the servers to be available to me: I wish I had never bought it.

The truth is, this game disappointed me in almost every way possible. Let’s talk about why and what.

This feels like World of Warcraft. It does, it really does. It feels so much like World of Warcraft, that it hurts. The character selection screen, the naming screen, the menus…it feels like WoW a lot of the time. But that was fine with me. What bothered me most are the cooldowns. I can’t stand them. I loved WoW, but I can’t stand this. This isn’t what I want to do in the Diablo universe. I want to attack all I want. I want to select any skills at any time I want. This restrictiveness feels like a dumbed down version of Diablo and that’s what it is.

The replayability is harshly destroyed by simple maps and gameplay. Remember that it actually took LOOKING to find the den of evil for the first quest in Diablo II? Not anymore, baby, just move around and wait for the gold dot on the map to guide you. Of course, you probably won’t need to because the maps are so miniscule, how could you not get to your goal in a few minutes?

Why is it becoming so popular for games that were classically intricate to become so elementary? Morrowind versus Skyrim? All of the Fable games were simple compared to games like Morrowind…I mean…OH MY GOD -

Games are dumbing down because we are dumbing down. This is the fast food generation, the internet generation. I know kids that swear that getting 1 Mbps is terribly slow, even for simply surfing. People my age say that. I know I sound like an old coot (I’m 24), but try 28.8k, and play Quake on it. Somehow it managed, but you’re complaining about download speeds that still remain over a kb/s. HA! People don’t want to wait, they want their shit now. I don’t exactly blame them, I like it when I get things quickly, but I don’t expect it that way. Most do.

That’s why mobile, casual gaming is becoming the new fad, and those “hardcore” gaming individuals are finding themselves unable to have the patience to explore a game.

There is certainly some good to all of this, the game’s combat is fun, it is exciting to get loot (thank god they saved that.) and I am very pleased that Gold is the main currency, instead of SOJs or High Runes. Also, the looting system itself is good in many ways. While it does get rid of some competition, it overall just saves you from arguing with friends. I liked the map system, and enjoyed the story enough that it drove me through normal. At the same time, I don’t care to play through it again. I saw what happened. That’s good enough for me.

Unfortunately, none of these things were good enough for me….

Overall: 6

Diablo III is an example of a game that is meant for anyone to pick up, play, then throw away and get back to paying for their World of Warcraft subscription. Activision/Blizzard have bills to pay! They have the 4th World of Warcraft Expansion and the 9th Call of Duty to make!