I was planning on writing a First Impressions article for Diablo III, but then I just kept playing and before I knew it, I had 25-30 hours clocked in and I was in Act IV of the game on my way to facing the lord of Hell. So now here I am, having beaten the monstrosity of Diablo himself, talking about my experience playing this six year old video game, but only a month old game on the Nintendo Switch. And despite how much time and the frequency I spent playing, I feel like my ultimate takeaway from Diablo III is that it is kind of a silly game.
Well, before I am eviscerated by hard core gamers who are offended at my declaration and will/may/might accuse me of my n00b-ness, let me break down my street-cred just a bit. My introduction to the Diablo franchise was sometime in 1996-97 when I watched Dellaños play it on his computer at some low frame rate that allowed his fight with The Butcher to take about 30% longer than it should have and allowed enough time for him to plan out his moves between clicks. Later when he got the game running faster than 5 fps, he said how much harder the fight was when the game was running at speed. He later gave me a copy of the game which I played until my computer died and I lost the .iso file. I also played a fair amount of Diablo II (single player mostly) in the mid-late 2000's, although I never finished because my netbook crapped out after having a pint of stout dumped on the keyboard. So, I may not be a hardcore Diablo gamer, but I am still fairly familiar with the franchise as a whole. Just do not ask me all about the lore.
When I booted up Diablo III on the Switch, I decided that I would forgo my usual Frost Mage play style that I fell in love with in Diablo II (and that I later used in Torchlight II) or Fighter that I nearly always use in Diablo (when I can get the game running), and I decided to play as a Monk. My thought going into the game, was that I my weapon choice was going to be heavily limited to knuckle-style weapons, maybe a kama, staves, or other similar weapons. Armor too would be limited to light-type such as cloth, hide, and/or leather. What I was not prepared for was at level 30 having my Monk doning what looked like a mish-mash of medium and heavy armor while wielding a massive glowing two handed sword*. I also liked the mention that the Monk has some level of healing abilities.
Long gone now are the days of delving into a dungeon or scouring a field killing a handful of enemies with individual clicks of the mouse. In Diablo III, I now only have to hold down the A button while wave after wave of demons break upon my walled fists of destruction. There were even times while while fighting in Act IV (having bumped up the difficulty level in the game from Hard to Expert) that I started falling dozing off, but still holding down that A button and apparently randomly pressing one of the other skill buttons, and I was still very much alive after opening my eyes. Early in Act I, I came to realize that Diablo III seemed to be mainly about fighting as many monsters on screen at a time, and linking together attacks to kill as many demons at a time. thereby increasing your experience modifier. Sure, I felt that there was some level of exploration involved in the game, and I did my best to reveal as much of the map as possible, but the main reason to do that was to discover more enemies to kill.
You know, let us talk about the difficulty, which I think couples well with my assertion that the game still manages to be a bit silly. Now, I have only played as the Monk class so all of my views are based on that playthrough experience. According to Blizzard's online guide, Monks are designed to "emphasize high maneuverability over staying power, darting in and out of melees and avoiding protracted slugfests." If you were to ask me, I would say that Monks are very well designed to engage in slugfests. Maybe it was the way I equipped my Monk, but I would try to have at no fewer than three pieces of equipment that had allowed me to gain health either per second, per hit, and/or per kill. By the end game, I had items that had +5285 health per second, +3550 per hit, +825 per hit, +2750 per kill, along with an armor rating of 1511k. That's right, 1,511,000 was my armor. My modified damage was 46.0k, which probably is not too high when compared to other classes that focus on reeeeeaaaalllly high dps. And I was only at level 62 when I beat the game. And here is the real shocking bit for people who have played the first two Diablo games but not the third: I used my one health potion (because you only have one that has a recharge timer) maybe fewer than 20 times the entire game. This is not supposed to come across as horn tooting, but more of a critique about the way the game was constructed.
 |
| What Even and Why!? |
Speaking of construction, I do not think I fully understood all of the emphasis the developers took to being able to customize your character. One of the sellers/artificers in the game had the ability to change the appearance and color of your gear. Don't like the look of your sword, change it to look like that other sword. Want to wear red armor instead of blue, pay 5,000 gp to do that, but hope that on your next excursion you don't get some legendary loot dropz. I also did not see the benefit of making every single piece of your characters armor to look like rags. Is it to give the impression to other players that you are weaker than you really are? Is there even a PvP area in Diablo III? And lastly on the cosmetics train are the banner, wings and pets that you can tack onto your character for no other reason than because they are there. You can even equip your character with Mercy's wings from Overwatch, because to hell with any sense of lore continuity right!? All of this genuinely felt like it was integrated to make Diablo III more appealing to an MMORPG crowd. Actually, a lot of what makes Diablo III Diablo III feels like it was to attract the WoW base. The only real benefit I can see for all of this fanciness is to make your character more visible when you are playing co-op and you both are surrounded by 75+ demons with 35 more coming in from the surrounding areas.
I realize that I have spent the greater part of this article harping on a game that I put in 35+ hours into and that for the most part, had a fun time playing, and there was plenty that was actually very well done in the game, especially for the Switch port. Everything was very smooth in both docked and handheld mode, and I never noticed any stuttering, even that one time I racked up 100+ kills, although there were a handful of times that sound effects were either cut out entirely or were a second behind whatever action I had just performed. The voice acting was as good as I was expecting it to be, which has always been of high quality since the first game.
I will most likely talk more about the Diablo III DLC, Reaper of Souls (which came pre-packaged with the Switch port, hence the "Eternal Collection" subtitle) as well now that Season 16 has started, but I wanted to give myself some time away from the Nephalem to play another game I have sitting in my queue.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental
*P.S.
 |
| Not very Monk like if you ask me. |
No comments:
Post a Comment