I
have to start this with a warning, then a little tantrum, a few insults
and a dash of paranoia. Apologies to those of you who already know what
I’m going to say and are either fine with it or all raged out – you
guys can skip this section.
Diablo 3 can only be played online. You can play it on your own or
co-operatively, but neither mode works when Blizzard’s servers are down,
and neither mode is fun when Blizzard’s servers are slow. In my six
days of playing it, I got disconnected twice and experienced unplayable
lag five times, each time when my own internet connection was working
fine. At times, the servers were down for hours.
That’s pathetic. There are valid reasons for forcing multiplayer
characters to play online, but none for excluding an entirely offline
single player mode. If you don’t have a connection you can reliably play
multiplayer games on, don’t buy Diablo 3. Skip the rest of this review.
Blizzard have chosen to exclude you completely, and I’m genuinely
pissed off by the hostility and callousness of that decision.
For the rest of us, it’s worth knowing that the £35 price for Diablo 3
doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to play it. The game itself would
have to be phenomenally good for all this to be worth putting up with.
The Diablo games are simplified top-down RPGs: you click on a
monster, and your guy hits him with a satisfying thwunk. If you’d asked
me what made the repetition compulsive beyond that, I’d have said two
things: the agonisingly tough choices in which skills to pick each time
you level up, and the excitement of finding a fantastic rare item.
In Diablo 3, both those things are gone.
You never make any permanent choices about your character. Each time
you level up, you get access to a new skill, and you fit these into an
increasing number of slots. Eventually you can have six equipped at a
time, and between fights you can put any of 20-odd skills in those
slots. Every level 30 Wizard has access to the same skills as every
other level 30 Wizard, the differences are just a question of what they
currently have equipped.
It takes a while for your range of possible skill combinations to get
interesting, particularly if you don’t realise there’s a hidden option
to remove some of the baffling restrictions on what you can combine. But
when it does, about two hours in, it gets
really interesting.
Every level up brings a new skill or two, and every new skill can be
the foundation of dozens of different character builds. Experimenting
with new abilities, and strategising about how to combine them with the
others,
is the game. A seemingly feeble skill sometimes spurs
you to try it with others you’ve shelved, and discover an entirely
different playstyle that works in its own way. And a powerful one
sometimes mixes with something you’ve been using for hours to create a
spectacular new tactic.
As the Wizard, I liked to stick with a set of area-effect spells that
freeze and shatter huge mobs. But once I got Disintegrate, a magic
death ray that cuts through whole ranks of enemies at once, I was able
to ditch some of the others to focus on survivability: teleportation,
invulnerability and reactive ice-armour to chill attackers. It’s
incredibly satisfying when a new tweak like that turns out to be
effective, and your playstyle ends up feeling like an invention.
Part of the reason for that, and a lot of the meat and complexity of
this system, is in the runes. Like skills, they unlock at predetermined
levels. But they offer an optional modification to a skill you already
have. I can tweak Disintegrate to fire from both hands at once, hitting a
wider path of targets, or channel it into one beam while smaller rays
zap anything that gets close to me while I fire. Both are magnificently
powerful in different situations, and I loved figuring out which one
gelled well with other skills.
By a certain point, the difference between your Wizard and mine isn’t
your Wizard, it’s you. The skill/rune combinations you’ve picked from
the billions of possibilities are an expression of something very
personal about the way you like to play, and that makes it easy to get
attached.
It’s a fascinating test lab for skill combos, but what makes it more
than an intellectual exercise is the sense of power. I said the Diablo
games are about hitting a monster with a satisfying thwunk – the rest of
the series, the rest of the genre, has now been utterly out-thwunked.
Each Diablo 3 class has an astonishing tactile pleasure to it.
The Barbarian is convincingly physical: all his attacks involve
massive effort and ground-shaking impact. When they connect, monsters
aren’t just toppled: they’re cannoned, decapitated, torn apart.
The Wizard feels like an electric detonation: every crackling blast
of energy has the sense of something pent up being released, into
enemies that spasm, blacken and split.
The Demon Hunter is a backflipping tactician, forcibly rearranging
the battlefield to leave everything trapped in a dazed clump, to be
butchered with a spluttering stream of fire.
The Monk is a human projectile, appearing at each enemy with a fist
already in their flesh, then snapping through the rest of the mob in a
rhythmic strobe of precision blows and showers of blood.
And the Witch Doctor spits flaming bats.
It’s as much the noise as the look: the sound for each attack is
perfectly judged to suggest something excitingly potent. They even
change depending on the Rune modifying them: an explosive one for the
Wizard’s Shock Pulse adds a quiet charging noise before each release,
suggesting an unseen payload of power.
And the feel is more than aesthetic. Most of Diablo 3′s skills are
very specialised, useless in some situations but devastating in others.
Apply four or five of them to the right kind of enemy in the right
order, and the effect is more spectacularly destructive than anything
I’ve seen in a game like this.
Armies are ripped apart, whole
ranks explode, blood fills the air, the earth shakes. When a sight like
that is the result of a build you’ve personally designed, it’s a
satisfaction like nothing else.
Weirdly, only a handful of these skills actually use the weapon in
your hand. In designing these intricately configurable storms of damage,
Blizzard didn’t have room to incorporate what you’re holding. Three of
the classes never even swing their weapon – it exists only as an
abstract damage number to multiply their effectiveness. To a wizard, a
bow is the same thing as a staff.
For other items, too, it’s hard to care about the banal stats they
offer. You do find incrementally better kit, and there’s an inherent
addictiveness to that, but the excitement of finding something truly
remarkable is almost gone. There’s not nearly enough variety in either
the type or effectiveness of what you find, and the significance of
stats is fussily abstract: +93 strength has no effect on a Monk’s
punching damage, because that’s not her ‘primary attribute’.
The only place I found dramatically better items was on the new
auction house, which also seems custom-built to destroy the thrill of
finding anything good in-game. With such a vast playerbase, of course
hundreds of people have found the absolute best item for someone of your
class and level, and of course that flood of supply has made it all
affordable. At every level, pocket change could buy me a weapon twice as
powerful as the best I’d found. And the one time I did it, it rendered
loot irrelevant for hours.
Blizzard plan to let you buy and sell items for real money soon, but
that feature’s not in yet. I’m no longer worried that it’ll undermine
the excitement of finding your own loot – there’s not much left to
undermine. It just isn’t the core appeal of Diablo any more. But
luckily, there’s plenty to replace it.
Beyond levelling up, there
is a sense of discovery and
reward as you play through Diablo 3. It comes from the world. Each of
its four acts is a new land to explore, and each land is made up of
sprawling, beautiful places.
The soft-focus textures and scribbly detailing often make it feel
like you’re walking through concept art, in the best possible way. Each
region throbs with a new colour: autumnal fields, dazzling sands,
burning pits, and more exotic themes I can’t spoil.
Any time there’s a drop, the view below is staggering. Sometime’s
it’s just a gorgeous landscape, but later there are sprawling cities and
backdrops of action and violence that show more going on in the world
than your own quest. It’s a constant pleasure for the digital tourist,
and these jaw-dropping settings give your journey a sense of drama and
adventure the series hasn’t always had.
Adding to that feeling, there’s a range of interesting scenes you can
stumble upon between objectives. A conspicuous corpse, a cryptic note, a
lone tombstone, or a land-locked shipwreck can lead to an Event: a
small isolated story that usually ends in a horrific onslaught of
creatures.
Diablo 3 never runs out of hideous things to throw at you, and the
variety is amazing. Each act, and sometimes each zone, is dominated by
several species of creature you’ve never seen before, all horrible and
entertaining to fight in a different way. It’s not hard to make a
monster look ‘hellish’, but it’s impressive how many new and
increasingly freaky ways Diablo 3 pulls it off.
However spiky, vicious and tough the horrors get, they’re always
satisfying to kill. And some have neat little tricks. Giant vultures
circle, refusing to swoop within attacking range until you’re busy
fighting something else. Giant wasps spit streams of their young at you,
slow but unstoppable, forcing you to dodge. Boss creatures can summon
walls of rock wherever they like, blocking your attacks and sometimes
intentionally penning the two of you in, mano-a-bosso. They’re varied
further by mobs of Champions and Minibosses, Diablo staples that provide
walking difficulty spikes.
But what makes them really extraordinary, and the perfect foil to
your ridiculously powerful character, is the scale. Some are so big it
takes a moment to register that they’re even attackable, and others
swarm in numbers that fill the screen. Smashing through these skittering
hordes in a spray of rent meat and chitin is exhilarating, spectacular,
gruesomely heroic.
Even the boss fights aren’t awful – a genre first, as far as I can
recall. Rather than simply being absurdly tough, each is properly
dangerous. The challenge isn’t to tank their damage while you chew
through a towering health bar, it’s to move quickly enough to dodge
certain death.
Those particular fights are better with friends, and co-op is
beautifully seamless: it’s one click to join someone who’s currently
playing, and one more to teleport to their side, mid-fight. You can also
revive each other when down, which leads to some dramatic rescues –
despite the negligible penalty for respawning instead.
But in longer sessions, co-op sometimes feels like an awkward fit.
There’s a very intentional focus on story this time, but almost no
systems to make that work with more than one player. If one person skips
in-game dialogue, it’s skipped for everyone with no warning, and often
no way to get it back. Even with cut-scenes, there’s no way to vote on
whether to skip them, and no voice-comms to discuss it. All of which
makes the online-only thing more baffling.
It’s a phenomenally good game, immediately fun to play and enduringly
compulsive, albeit for very different reasons than the rest of the
series. But it comes shackled to this pointless, damaging restriction.
Should I give it a punitive 0% for that? That’s not terribly helpful
if you want to know how good the game itself is. Should I ignore it
completely and give the game the score it would otherwise deserve? I
can’t quite do that. I’m just less excited about owning Diablo 3 when it
lags out and kicks me off from time to time.
There’s an easy way to resolve these dilemmas. If you’re a friend,
and you ask me whether you should get it, I’d ask if you have a fast and
reliable connection. I’d make you aware of the problems beyond that,
slander Blizzard a bit, then say this: God yes.
Last week we spoke to Relic Entertainment’s Jacen Torres about upcoming RTS Company of Heroes 2, which we’re more than a little bit excited about.
