Diablo III Expansion Reaps Praise, but Cannot Redeem Soul of Diablo

Diablo III expansion reaps praise, but cannot redeem soul of Diablo

or, I Remember Diablo II

My rose-tinted glasses

It turns out that Diablo II is the game I remember playing.  It's hard not to clearly remember when one has hundreds of hours under one's belt, spanning multiple playthroughs of Normal and a few playthroughs of Nightmare (and a few ill-fated run-ins with Hell).  I remember the mediocre story, which I'd give maybe a 6.5 out of 10.  I remember the unwieldy potion-juggling minigame, where the player trades half the screen space for godly amounts of sustain.  I remember Energy, the noob trap junk stat, and tons of junk skills.  I remember Identify and Town Portal scrolls sort of taking up space in the inventory without really adding any gameplay.   I remember the tedious manual gold pickups which always led to a useless Flamberge sneaking its way into a 2x4 block of my inventory.  I remember over a dozen fetch quests.  I remember a somewhat tedious third act which, even worse, featured racist caricatures of the Pygmy people as enemies.  I remember a short and equally non-varied fourth act.  I remember helpers who were a bit too fond of getting themselves killed rather than truly putting their gear to "good use".  I remember chill attacks being a bit more effective than necessary, all but invalidating the option to tank through it in any situation whatsoever. I remember Hell spamming immunities as if it were the only way to balance a hard mode, and as if only Hammerdins deserved bragging rights.

And recently, I remember Blizzard changing the Diablo II Battle Chest to no longer include the original Diablo, running away from the fan base cultivated by Blizzard North in pursuit greener pastures.

So naturally I was insulted by Jay Wilson's attitude when he claimed that players like me see Diablo II with rose-tinted retrovision.  And when he told one of the fathers of the series what to do with himself, it was clear that it was Wilson and Blizzard who did not remember what Diablo II was – or worse, remembered, but didn't care.  And when Blizzard moved Wilson to a new project rather than outright fire him, it should have been clear to the entire world of gaming journalism that Blizzard had not changed at all, but had merely shuffled its cogs around for the sake of PR.

But everything's better now, right?

It would be difficult to argue that the removal of the Auction House wasn't a step in the right direction (even if the exact timing was a bit convenient). The replacement director, Josh Mosqueira, was absolutely correct to make it a priority to improve Legendary items so that they stand a fighting chance of being usable, as well as endowing them with unique twists absent from the bland release-date legendary items.

And from the start, Diablo III had all the markings of an adequate PC action game. It had a smooth and responsive engine – once enough players quit in digust to get your ping under 500 milliseconds, anyway. The Monk and the Witch Doctor even had some interesting mechanics and visual style which hadn't really been seen before in the series. The game is arguably worth the $20 Blizzard is currently charging for it.

So is everything better now?   In a word, no.   For this gamer there remains a problem that is too big to solve with mere expansions and patches, and that problem is this: I remember Diablo II.   And worse, some of the latest changes in Loot 2.0, which paved the way for the Reaper of Souls expansion, distance Diablo III farther from its roots than ever before.

Loss of identity - taking the RP out of ARPG

Both the Diablo franchise and the individual player character lost their respective identities with the launch of vanilla Diablo III.  Players of Diablo III make no lasting choices in how to differentiate their character from other possible “builds” of that character's class.  Take, for example, the Diablo II Necromancer, and its closest Diablo III analogue, the Witch Doctor.

A Necromancer could play it classical, raising a dozen or more skeletons to do his bidding as he sits ducks around behind his ranks and curses enemies.   He could specialize as a “Bone Mage”, walling away those who would wish to harm him and filling the screen with projectiles late-game.  Or he could choose a Poison build, spending the early game relying on his hireling and risky hit-and-run tactics to bring down his foes before later learning to spread poison from the corpses of his enemies to those still standing in a sadistic chain reaction.  He starts off shooting only a bone sliver or two, or summoning a lowly skeleton or two, or having to resort to melee combat to inflict poison damage before the skills ramp up in power not just numerically, but visibly and viscerally.  Most importantly, he could pick any combination of the above builds (though most skills were either one-point wonders, mere pre-requisites, or all-or-nothing skills – the game wasn't perfect).

If you play one of the above strategies, you might run into problems later on.   In particular, the Bone Mage has the easiest time soloing act bosses, but that just comes with the territory of choosing your identity – living with the consequences, learning to leverage your strengths and cover your weaknesses, and maybe even grinding a bit extra when the burden is at its greatest.  And if you re-roll a new character and start over, you get to watch your new skill of choice gradually mount in strength in satisfying ways.  New to the game? You can one-point everything to get a feel for the class as a whole, have some points left over for your favorites, and still finish Normal in a reasonable amount of time, despite not being as powerful as you could have been – and if I remember anything about Diablo II, it's that I wanted to play through a second time after the first.

By contrast, a Diablo III Witch Doctor automatically learns the skill Zombie Dogs and can summon four of them, period.  He or she has the option of blowing them up for area of effect damage with another hotkey. He or she can fire Poison Darts that are mostly spammable from a safe distance.  He or she is a jack of all trades, capable of doing any of dozens of things equally as well as any other Witch Doctor on the server, but inexplicably can only remember how to do six of them (and three passives) at any given moment (because in D3, so much is balanced around cooldowns, and it's necessary to elbow skills that your character “knows” out of the game somehow when all skills are always at “max level”).  After one playthrough, I would feel disinclined to play the class ever again – that is definitely the case with my Wizard, the only character I ever got to 60 (and even then, only because the 50% experience buff made it bearable, and I wanted to see what the buzz was about Loot 2.0 and Paragon levels).

In Diablo II, you can only gain skills at levels that are multiples of six, and you build up toward them by at least one-pointing the prerequisites to tide over your damage output.  The character was becoming a certain variation on its class, and the player was looking forward to that next multiple of six at all times.  By contrast, Diablo III keeps unlocking skills and modifiers for you, inflicting a sort of scatter-brained mania on characters levels 1-59 by forcing them to change entire builds around every time a new skill or skill rune one-ups what they had before.  I grew to dread the level-up notice before I even hit level 30 on my first play-through.  First Ice does the most damage, and then fire, and then Arcane does the most damage and also does crowd control, and then suddenly Ice has these synergy passives and runes that make it do the most damage while still doing its usual crowd control, and... etc. etc.

Ultimately Diablo III permits the player to choose one of five totally pre-defined “roles” to play, and all of them are polymaths in their broader fields of study.  A master in Diablo III is never a specialist with his or her own style – only a typical general education student with bigger numbers.

As this pattern is deeply entrenched in the game, I imagine that it would almost be easier to simply start making a new game than to overhaul character building in this game, doubtlessly causing a huge controversy among players who either didn't play Diablo II or didn't value the depth of its customization options the way that I did.

Loot 2.0 - Your dude got buffs

It is rather quick and easy to summarize what life is currently like for those playing Diablo III with characters below the level cap after the Loot 2.0 patch – your dude got buffs.  Loot drops are less frequent, but way more powerful than ever before, and the stat points on your drops are automatically configured to have the only two primary stats your character could conceivably ever use.  All changes to skills have been major buffs – mostly by factors of 1.5 or so, but often by factors of 2-3 and sometimes as high as 10 or 12, giving Loot 2.0 all the look of a fan patch rather than that of a late-iteration tune-up for a years-old game from a AAA developer.  The only changes with any real depth and personality have been to Legendary items, which in addition to the usual across-the-board buffs have received some cool and unique special effects more in line with the Unique item drops of Diablo II.

Some of these buffs were needed because the PC version of the game had previously been balanced around having to buy everything at the Gold or Real Money Auction House, which led to item drops being consistently underwhelming for the sake of fighting against deflation in the Gold Auction House (and by corollary, deliciously inflating the almighty USD in the Real Money Auction House).  Aside from the neat unique effects on legendary items, and the partially necessary buffs here and there, the remainder is dripping with greasy excess.  Lead Content Designer Kevin Martens (perhaps unintentionally) drives home the tawdry excess of the Loot 2.0 patch by promising gamers metaphorical “Lambourghinis” by the hour, like a Californication version of Oprah Winfrey's Everyone Gets A Car: the ARPG.  Why should you come back to Diablo III?  Because your dude got buffs.

I find it remarkable that these changes have been more than enough to garner near-universal praise from the gaming media.  Yes, the Auction House was a cynical abomination.  But Loot 2.0 didn't give player characters a sense of identity, and even worse, it reinforces existing problems with Diablo III and introduces new ones.

Level scaling and Paragon levels – because life begins at 60

A sometimes-hated innovation in the world of RPGs is level scaling.  This current trend in RPGs is intended to open up the world, making it more attractive to explore and re-visit areas by having enemies level up along with the player rather than become obsolete.  “Soft” versions like in Grim Dawn, which nudge monsters away from their “base” level gently, can smooth out the challenge curve a little, but when level scaling is used in its extreme one-to-one form, as in Oblivion or Sacred, the end result is a never-ending limbo in which a character can supposedly “level up” while in reality, they are leveling down relative to their foes, who don't have to procure new level-appropriate gear.  Finding replacement gear, then, is the ebb balancing the flow of leveling up.  The ARPG ceases to be a journey of advancement and instead becomes the lowly existence of a shipwrecked sailor on a raft, wobbling endlessly in an infinite sea and given the meaningless option of grinding all the way to level 60 in the first act if he feels like it, without ever feeling any more or less powerful from one level to the next.

Diablo II was sometimes quite hard, if the player wanted it to be.  By skipping randomly-generated minor sub-dungeons, the player was allowed to willingly take on greater challenges with less preparation than may be advisable.  Diablo III was, until Loot 2.0, much the same way.  However, Diablo III added level scaling to Loot 2.0 and replaced the natural-feeling choice to rush onward to bigger challenges with a simple slider bar.  But this is merely a slider bar that changes the weather pattern of the shipwrecked sailor's particular ocean, not a satisfying set of milestones one journeys past at one's own pace.

Even worse, the Master difficulty is easy.  It is easier than trying to play through pre-Loot 2.0 Diablo III without stopping to grind.  To unlock Torment difficulties, the player must level up to 60, and only then can the player (slowly) progress in a way that is not in lockstep with enemies through the use of account-wide bonuses known as “Paragon levels”.

If you want to have a difficult game, or if you want to grow stronger than your foes at all, then life begins at 60.  Those wanting to play the expansion can look forward to instead having life begin at 70.  When you do get to Torment I, it isn't as fun as it should be, either.  While normal mobs were often dangerous in Diablo II, they are consistently a joke in Diablo III, even at Torment I difficulty.  Aside from act bosses, the only challenge I found in Torment I was in the form of Elite (“yellow”) monsters.  They had tremendous damage coming from affix sets like Frozen Mortar Desecrator, but this damage is more or less trivial to side-step.  But other affixes grant the ability to instantly grab you and put you in a box from an entire screen away, namely Waller and Vortex – and the result when a single monster has all five of these affixes is a frustrating, artificial-feeling difficulty spike with little counterplay in the middle of an otherwise easy and mindless grind.  There is probably a way to win this by playing “find the exploit”, but that is a metagame unworthy of further resurrections.

I understand that level scaling is supposed to pave the way to Adventure Mode, but frankly, I think they are breaking something that used to work with this change.  My suggestion would be to re-implement the old Normal-Nightmare-Hell-Inferno progression for Campaign mode with no level scaling, and open up Adventure Mode as an optional way to level up on the side, possibly even earning the right to skip chapters/acts if one skips ahead enough levels.  Perhaps having one version of each Adventure Mode side-quest that is static, but has selectable versions staggered out 5 levels or so apart could re-introduce the feeling of progress to this mode as well.

All in all, one-to-one level scaling is a blow to the role-playing experience, and Diablo III's post-60 balance is anchored to over-cheesed monster affixes.  These problems should be relatively easy to fix, but even if this were to be done, there would still lurk one more demon in the bowels of Diablo III.

The Journey

"[K]nowing that you don't have to play story mode over and over again allows people to relax and just enjoy Act V for what it is; and they may or may not come back to it after that, but they don't have to. It doesn't feel as onerous to sit through those things."

- Kevin Martens, Lead Content Designer

Diablo II may have had its Act III, but “onerous to sit through” is far from the language that fans of Diablo II would have used to describe it, let alone the campaign as a whole.  Bear in mind that Martens touted Adventure Mode as “the main selling point” of Reaper of Souls in the same interview.  Again, I am not at all opposed to having more side-content for the purpose of variety, but it's hard to mistake this admission of failure on behalf of Diablo III's writing and exposition team for anything other than what it is.

There is at least one review which adequately takes Diablo III's completely immersion-breaking campaign to task:

"Blizzard also does an excellent job of integrating their awful storytelling into gameplay; dialogue from idiotic demon lords and cheesy secondary do a great job of highlighting just how actively and egregiously bad it all is while you’re in the middle of the action, so all of Diablo III‘s storytelling failings are very, very hard to simply ignore. The lore also plays off like audio logs, as you pick them up, and they expand the world in ways that just make it far less interesting. Less is more. The less I know that the demon lords were just a bunch of quarreling and bickering politicians of Hell, the more I believe that they just are and are going to skin everything alive, because they’re just evil bastards like that."

Leoric the now-Skeleton King spends most of Act I rounding up his ghost buddies and re-telling his life story in little intermissions everywhere you go.  Maghda stalks you through most of Acts I and II and won't ever shut up; she always throws a few minions at you and then teleports away, but inexplicably doesn't do so when it's time for her to be a boss fight.  Then Zoltan Koole follows you around mid-to-late Act II and won't shut up.  Then in Act III, the role is taken over by Azmodan, who repeatedly tells you his plan and dares you to stop him like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, and is replaced in this capacity by Diablo himself in Act IV.  All of Hell got video-enabled Twitter accounts, your iPhone is welded to your face, and you can't unsubscribe. “Onerous” is an understatement.

In Diablo II, the title character had only eight words to say in the entire game, and it was horrifying to behold.

“Not even death can save you from me.”

- the complete script for Diablo, the Lord of Terror, in Diablo II

As I said at the beginning, Diablo II's plot gets a 6.5 from me. But it was a brilliantly-employed 6.5 of a plot that knew its place – a humble guide on the outskirts of the vast ruins of a civilization at war with the forces of Hell.  This war with Hell was a literal war, complete with mutilated bodies.  I was a young man, maturing like many other 80's kids side-by-side with a gaming industry that was just beginning to include such content in its digital “toys” assumed to be the domain of children.  The shock and scandal of seeing the first few dismembered bodies soon gave way to a somber realization that this was a world where Terror, Death, and Destruction were a unified, powerful, and mobilized force at war with humanity.  The quantity of dreadful things depicted in Act I is such that it's hard to speculate whether a high-fidelity remake would even make it past the ratings board.

Despite early claims that Blizzard was paying careful attention to the difference between “motivated gore versus unmotivated gore”, the dead of Diablo III are mostly of the living kind and look fit to play a role in Plants vs Zombies.  Humans are kept in cages to be rescued X times to unlock achievement Y.  The gore in Diablo III comes mostly in the form of giant monsters exploding like piñatas (and as of Loot 2.0, guaranteed to drop a plethora of blood-soaked Lambourghinis).  Another example of “motivated gore” is the last level of Act I, in which enormous mechanized cleavers rhythmically slam the ground in a way invokes about as much pathos as a Mario platformer with extra marinara and a propensity for shouting, “I amma M for mature, wahee!” every so often.  Death is not a plague sweeping across the land – it only comes for named characters, like the ghosts of the Skeleton King and his wife, and for Deckard Cain - and in Diablo III, death is never bloody for people.  Blood is merely the paint on the wall, the confetti in the parade, and the candy in the piñatas.

Breaking immersion left and right with endless chatter from every NPC from Azmodan to Zoltan Koole, and celebrating endless violence against toothless foes, Diablo III does not present a journey into darkness.  Diablo III marks the game in the franchise which stopped believing that a game can be art, instead believing that the purpose of art is to sell games.

Having made the plot unbearable, the way has been paved for Adventure Mode – a convenient vehicle which could be used to deliver DLCs in the near future as Diablo III scrambles to find a new business model for microtransactions.

If you enjoy some good, mindless action, then I do not intend to stand in your way.  If it were its own game and had no legacy to live up to, Diablo III would be just another AAA title worth picking up from a bargain bin some time in the future.

But I remember Diablo II, and this is no worthy successor.  It is merely another M-for-mature game which is neither for children, nor for truly mature audiences.  I can only dream of what could have been if the intellectual property and financial resources behind Diablo III had been placed in worthier hands a dozen or so years ago.

Some bloody glorious D3-related forum posts

Inheriting the goose who laid the golden egg

Diablo 3 as an overblown comeback tour

Miraculously, the only informative D3 thread I've ever seen not get deleted:

Belial and Azmodan fanfic alternate plot blows Blizzard's writing out of the water - an example of what might have been

An article about a forum slip-up by a Blizzard employee; said thread has since been deleted (predictably)
(If Diablo III is Signs, then Kormac the Templar has to be Mel Gibson, the pious dullard whose faith is stretched to the limits when he reads something for the first time in gods know how long.  Amazingly, Bashiok still seems to have a job after that.)

A wonderful review that highlights some of the atmosphere and storytelling failings of Diablo III brilliantly and concisely (on a tip from the forum, not deleted yet).

Blizzard paves road to Hell with bribery and double-talk

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Sadly, I have to admit that I was foolish enough to pre-order Diablo 3 a couple years ago, so it's possible that others exist who are even more gullible than me.  But it's hard to imagine the experience being anything but a splash of DRM-laden cold water that's un-dodgeable because of latency issues.  How could anyone not have learned the lesson by now?

Speaking as an outsider, it's hard for me to say whether professional game critics are as gullible as they appear, or if they're simply forced to march in lockstep with the industry consensus for the sake of their careers.  I'm trying as hard as I can not to be cynical about this, but neither of the aforementioned options readily affords the luxury of optimism -  one must look elsewhere altogether for that.

Take this interview from a couple weeks back.  A couple weeks ago, PC Gamer climbed to the top of Bullshit Mountain to have a chat with Kevin Martens, Blizzard's current lead content designer for Diablo 3, and came back with a tablet on which were carved The Ten Juicy Sound Bites of Our Lord And Master, Blizzard Entertainment.  The media has been uncritically serving this up as evidence that Loot 2.0 and Reaper of Souls is about to make right all that had been wrong.

Let's give this interview the analysis it deserves.

PC Gamer: Diablo III obviously took kind of a beating out of the gate back at launch. How did you feel about that? 

Martens: Well "bad" is the short answer. We felt terrible about the connection issue stuff. I know people that sent their families out of town on vacation so that they could sit down and play the game, and they couldn't connect. So that stuff was terrible and I think we've spent an incredible amount of time ensuring that kind of stuff doesn't happen again. We took that very seriously and certainly feel bad about that.

Clearly not bad enough.  More on this later.

I think we did eight major patches on the game. We did many months of support, we added new content, we did big tuning passes. Like anything, best laid plans meeting 15 million people usually means that you're going to learn a few things... or a lot of things in this case. That's what I think I like about expansion development. It's kind of our second at-bat and we know a lot of things about what's actually fun about the game. And we don't have to fight against player instincts or make guesses. We can do what people do; we can see what people like to do, we can read on the forums, and we can interact with them at BlizzCon and other events, and we can make a game that closely matches what people want out of a Diablo game.

 The boldfaced parts are either blatant lies, or at best clever misdirections.  They CAN read on the forums and make a game that closely matches what people want out of a Diablo game, but they emphatically choose not to.  They pay their moderators to treat criticism on the forums the way a toddler treats mechanized and padded pressure plates in a game of whack-a-mole.  Their policy is to tune out all criticism until their approval rating makes George W. Bush look like Moose Tracks ice cream and then gratuitously pat themselves on the back for capitulating just in time for the press conference for their upcoming overpriced DLC.

PC Gamer: Do you guys continue to stand by the decision to require an internet connection to play Diablo III? Is there any chance at all of that changing in the future? 

Martens: Yes, we stand by it. Diablo III is a co-op game from the ground up, so having the social stuff be there at your fingertips whenever you want it is integral to the experience.

Christ, Marty, you walked right into that one.  It was literally the last thing you said, mate!  What happened to the line about pulling your head out of your goddamned ass and paying attention to what people want?  To the imaginary person who's reading this and is actually taking this douche at face value: it's the DRM, stupid.  (A secondary concern is that the game was originally built around the RMAH, and it would probably take a lot of work to enable offline play, but that's just jumping back one link in the causal chain.  It's the DRM, stupid.)

This is one of the most pathetically transparent sophist douchebag moves I have seen in some time.  How many ways are you inconsistent with your stated motive?  Let me count the ways:

1.  The PC game is playable in single-player.  They could have forced you to wait for four-man queues, but that would piss people the fuck off and make people hate the game even more.  Martens just wants them to be forced into a situation where the option to co-op is slightly more readily at their fingertips, but he stops short of going the whole way?  Not bloodly likely.
2.  Followers are only enabled in single-player.  They went to a lot of fucking trouble to implement a system specifically designed for a game mode they're going out of their way not to support.  The consistent thing would be to remove them from the game.
3.  Console users aren't forced to play online anytime they fail to assemble a four-man local team.

I guess it's better to piss on me and tell me it's raining than to actually hook up a firehose to the local sewer and fill the skies with piss for the sake of consistency.  Or not - I don't know; it's a toss-up because I won't be playing the game anyway when alternatives exist that are actually fun.

You want to know what online co-op is like?  Well, if you're in a popular grind area like the start of Act 3, it's almost fun, but it's not like you really have a team half the time.  If you go to any other place in the game, you wait forever and maybe get one guy to join.  A Demon Hunter a few levels higher than you with tons of movement speed and fully decked out with level-appropriate gear from the auction house.  He runs way ahead of you and blasts the mobs to pieces, and it takes you a while just to kill the 2-3 survivors from each pack.  He's a whole map ahead of you in no time.  Then he gets to the boss and drops a portal and he's like, "u coming?", and... are you having fun yet?  I would think not, but Blizzard thinks that I subconsciously prefer this to single-player - so much that I'll tolerate ping and server downtime for it.

Do you know the only time I had fun in online multiplayer more often than not with a Diablo game?  The motherfucking cow level.  You could usually find a game to join on Battlenet to commemorate someone's latest playthrough of Normal difficulty.  The level had delivered the simple shoot-em-up bliss of facing a huge, fast horde of stupid melee-range enemies.  If you were at the appropriate level or below, you were in mortal danger, and it was a blast watching people teleport in, run for their lives, and scramble to get to their previous corpse to get their gear back.

With Diablo 3, Blizzard took an absolute fan-favorite feature out of the game and in its place erected a big gaudy monument to their own hubris and contempt for their fan base in the form of the giant rainbow-colored "fuck you" sign known as Whimsyshire.  The way you get to Whimsyshire is by replaying the same 5 maps 80 fucking times each until rare component items drop, and then you grind Whimsyshire by your fucking self a hundred times or so hoping that the motherfucking rainbow sword drops before you die of the monotony.

It appears that they're putting the cow level in Reaper of Souls, but that's a slap in the face, really. Hopefully they add it to the base game, because it's pretty damned close to being the least they could do.  My list of demands remains unchanged.

PC Gamer: Not too long ago, Blizzard announced that it was shutting down the auction house. Is it fair to characterize it as a failure at this point? 

Martens: It did what it was intended to do in one way, which was to make trading a safe place to happen without trading scams and other ripoffs. However, it had a very bad unintended consequence of making trading the best way to get items in the game. The fact is that the most fun way for the vast majority of people is to kill monsters and take gears from their cold, dead claws. Trading became very easy. The auction house lowered the barrier of entry so much that it became the best way to get items, and ultimately players will do whatever is smartest. They will find the golden path and do what is most efficient.
You should play the game to get gear to kill the monsters. You shouldn't get gear to kill monsters because you will get bored too quickly. It stole people's reward curve is essentially what it did; it made it very easy for them to do it. So trading isn't a bad way to get items, but if it negates playing the game, then we've made a huge mistake. And we did, which is why we're shutting down the auction house.

WOO WOOOOOO!!! Here comes the clue train, last stop: you!   Zero bonus points.

Blizzard didn't invent the RMAH because they wanted the game to be more fun.  They invented it because some Blizzard executive was butthurt that someone somewhere was making money off of Diablo 2 and it wasn't him.  Since Blizzard's horrible RMAH-centric game balance totally broke the economy of the game and the spirits of most of the people who played it, they're finally removing it - but they're also all but removing in-game trading from the game altogether by "soulbinding" anything that's of any value whatsoever.  Yep, they're taking their ball and going home.

I don't know about you guys, but I never had a Diablo 2 game ruined because someone, somewhere was trading haX3d l007.  Maybe if you're some basement dweller who grinds in D2 not because it's fun but because you think it's something to brag about, you shed tears over that, but us healthy-minded people?  Not so much.  Leave the super-hardcore Libertarian mode for special ladder events with periodic resets or something and let the rest of us awkwardly attempt to trade for set items or whatever.  Most of us just wanted you to make gear drops not perpetually be 5-10 levels obsolete all game every game because Blizzard was more worried about the deflation of gold in the auction house than all else.

PC Gamer: Sounds like the majority of your efforts since launch have been based around responding to fan feedback. 

Martens: Yeah. And the auction house decision didn't come easy. It's not like the day we realized it was a mistake was when we could shut it down. A lot of things had to come together for us to get to that point. And honestly, what the console build did with their loot system... what we have now we call "Loot 2.0," what they did I would call "Loot 1.5." They had no auction house inherently, more because they couldn't than anything else.
So it's been a learning process for us as well. And finally as the loot stuff came together; as the enchanting system was dialed in; as our new legendaries were coming online, we realized that we could get rid of the auction house and get rid of that reward curve problem without causing new problems of people going back to trade scams or people feeling like they couldn't have any fun gear. Now we can give it away like candy, along with all of these ways that people can upgrade it, and all these crazy powers. And you can get it the way you're supposed to, which is by killing a monster and taking it from them.

Whatever you say, Oprah.  You know what else you could do?  Make a proper fucking Diablo 2 successor.  But sure, free candy.

PC Gamer: What else have you learned since the launch of Diablo III? 

Martens: I think the randomness thing. We should have made everything random from the start. So the reason we didn't have random exterior zones was because we wanted the game to have more of that real RPG feel; that the world was real and had a sense of place. And like the loot problem, until Loot 2.0 was really dialing in, it was hard for us to figure out what to do with the auction house; it was the same with the randomness. Until the other aspects that made the game more RPG and more connected to the world were dialed in... you know, we've gotten better at storytelling since Diablo III; the world map that comes with Adventure Mode makes Sanctuary feel a lot more real just because you have a map of it, if nothing else, and that's a relatively simple solution to the problem. All of that made us comfortable with introducing randomized exterior zones as well.

I seriously doubt that they've gotten better at it.  The whole premise of Adventure Mode is that they let you opt out of having every NPC in the game from Azmodan to Zoltan Koole chew your fucking ear off.  You're charging $40 to turn off your obnoxious and shitty content?  Christ, give me a fucking break.  Maybe I should uninstall the game now before they come up with a way to charge for that, too...

Paolilli: Yeah, and that's actually one of my favorite things that we've done. With the map you have that sense of place, whereas before I think the environments looked great, but you didn't really have that sense of how everything is connected. And I think the map and the ability to go anywhere and do anything helps. 

Martens: Dynamic Difficulty is another great example of that. We had our old-school linear difficulty that was inherited from the past, where you had to play through normal, nightmare, and so on. Dynamic Difficulty, which we made for Adventure Mode, allowed us to break that dichotomy for the game as well because otherwise we would have had to have a version of a monster for every possible level. So if you played Act II, we would have to have a Level 31, 32, 33... all the way up to 70 version of every monster for it to be fun. The overall Dynamic Difficulty system removed that burden and let us focus on a grander vision for our gameplay.

Dynamic Difficulty is a great example of how Blizzard Entertainment sucks balls.  It's what lots of people hated about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and they're implementing it across the board for Diablo 3 with no opt-out why?  Because balancing the game twice would be hard. Well, they're kind of right, in that they can't even be bothered to balance the game once, Waller Vortex Frozen Mortar Desecrator, WTFBBQGLBTQLOLOL.

Here's the current state of game balance:  Playing on Normal is like playing Torchlight 1 on Easy.  Playing on Master, the highest difficulty available before level 60, feels like having good gear and being a little overleveled in Nightmare in Diablo 2.  You know what's harder than that?  Skipping side-quests and taking on challenges before you're properly leveled in any Diablo game at any time in history before this goddamned patch.  And you have to hit the level cap before you can have any challenge.  Just go ahead replace the playable characters by the cast of The Golden Girls, because at Blizzard, life begins at 60.

(Or 70, after the expansion.  But fuck that.)

PC Gamer: On that note, it seems like Adventure Mode is kind of the main selling point of Reaper of Souls. Is that fair to say?Martens: Yeah, I would say that's it. I would call Adventure Mode the primary feature of the expansion. That said, I think Act V is our best act, so we did take everything we learned there. And you do have to kill Malthael once with one character before Adventure Mode is unlocked. But knowing that you don't have to play story mode over and over again allows people to relax and just enjoy Act V for what it is; and they may or may not come back to it after that, but they don't have to. It doesn't feel as onerous to sit through those things. 

PC Gamer: There have been some fans on the internet who have expressed concern that Reaper of Souls may be a bit pricey for the content that it delivers. What are you feelings on that? 

Martens: I don't know about pricing as such, but I would say that the Adventure Mode changes the game pretty much completely. It's totally different. And it's not like a linear thing anymore. You don't just kill Malthael anymore and the game is done. And I think that was a little too much the case, unfortunately, in Diablo III. That's not the case anymore. When you kill Malthael, now you're finally starting Reaper of Souls. As good as Act V is, once you get into Adventure Mode and you see the promise of everything random that Diablo does; that makes replayability the point of the game. It's not linear anymore so you're experience is different everytime you come in.

I already addressed this, see: $40, getting Azmodan to shut the fuck up.  It's nice that they've finally woken up and smelled the spunkgargleweewee, though.  I think.

PC Gamer: Are you happy with the state of PVP as it is right now?Martens: Well, [Brawling Mode] is okay, and it can be really fun if you've got two people of similar level. PVP is still something we talk about a lot. [Former Diablo III director] Jay Wilson wrote a long blog post a couple Decembers or Januarys ago explaining why what we tried didn't work out. And that stuff is still the case. 

Mostly IDGAF because I came for the PvE, but PvP will probably have game-wide consequences, which I'll get to later.

PC Gamer: What would you say to the players who felt turned off by Diablo III at launch and gave up? 

Martens: It's crazy awesome now (laughs). You're going to get the keys to the Ferrari. I use the car metaphor deliberately. If you had a Corolla before and you're watching people swing by in their Lamborghini all the time; well, everyone gets a Lamborghini now. Everyone gets a shot at it now. Legendaries are dropping now from Level 10 onward, and we have put code in to ensure that everyone gets some legendaries, and a chance at the wacky powers as well.

So the promise of what Diablo can give you, everyone gets a taste of it. And there's still lots to earn for the people who put in the time; they're still going to get better things and more things. But everybody gets some of it. Our game director called that philosophy "endgame for everybody," and he didn't mean that you have to get to Level 70 to start earning Paragon Points to get the endgame. He wanted to take that stuff and move it earlier in the game so people wouldn't have to put in hundreds of hours. However, if you put in hundreds of hours, you still get more. 

Paolilli: Yeah, we've done a lot of work to make sure that no matter how much time you put in, whether you're having a short play session or going for a lot longer that you're going to get rewarded for that amount of time. We want to give that sense of infinite possibility where the more time you put in the more you will get, but you don't have to play like an endgame player would in order to get rewarded.

 Jesus, you're thick.  Slap them with DRM with one hand, and 2-second pings with the other, and with your third hand, slap them with the RMAH game balance.  And then turn around and bribe everyone with free Lambourghinis and a pre-launch 50% experience buff.  And while you're at it, pick a random number between 2 and 12, and multiply your damage by that number.

Handing out Lamborghinis?  You need to get the fuck out of California, dude.  What kind of mouthbreather plays Diablo 3 wanting to rack up five Legendaries before the end of Act 1?  It would be one thing if this were just the pendulum swinging a bit too far after they removed the RMAH, and even then, that's the sort of thing that should get sorted out in Beta.  But this goes way beyond all that.  This is just an old-fashioned transparent bribe, and it would take a delusional nitwit to expect this state of affairs to persist for long.

I predict that a few months after Reaper of Souls comes out, they're going to wring their hands and nerf the crap out of everything as a part of their "PvP balance" patch.  They might also make a hat tip to some l33t g4m3rz who get butthurt that "casual" players are able to obtain the same gear as they are.

Diablo 2 didn't thrust guaranteed legendaries in your face.  That's because it didn't have to, because Diablo 2 was a goddamned good game that was worth playing.  You didn't want to play the endgame at level one because you were in it for the fucking journey.  You got to the endgame when you were damned well built up for it, and not a moment sooner.  The skills you opted into at level 6 anticipated what you were going to do at 18 and at 30, and you were hungry for that next multiple of 6.  You weren't finding yourself sighing and groaning every time you gained a level because LOLOL YOU JUST GAINED A COUPLE RUNES AND NOW THESE TWO SKILLS ARE BETTER THAN THE ONES YOU HAVE NOW, TIME TO RESPEC.

Yeah, Diablo 3 is so totally awesome now.  Try convincing your friends of that now, with your account at Paragon Level 50 and holding onto big fat wad of cash you're not allowed to share with them.  Deck yourself out in full gear and run around one-shotting everything with your character who's effectively 10 levels higher than they are.

No, Blizzard has no fucking clue what Diablo 2 fans liked about Diablo 2, and they don't give a rat's ass.  But they do know that everyone likes Ferraris!  So now they're injecting little hits of Level 70 power surges throughout the game in the form of Lamborghinis that go obsolete after an hour or so, just in time for the 2015 Lamborghini to drop.

Anyway... stay the fuck away from Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls.  Blizzard has to fail for the benefit of PC gaming as a whole.

This isn't a call for a boycott.  A boycott is when you don't buy a shampoo because they test it on dogs and that upsets you.  This is a simple case of not buying a turd sandwich with extra spunkgargleweewee because it's a goddamned turd sandwich with extra spunkgargleweewee, for fuck's sake.

Blizzard Entertainment lightbulb joke

How many Blizzard employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

All of them, and it takes them ten years to so so. They charge 60-80 dollars, and you have to re-enter the password every day to keep using it. The lightbulb's response to lightswitches is delayed by 1500 milliseconds, and it goes offline for maintenance for a few hours every week, and the wattage and lumens might vary by a factor of ten from one week to the next.

When they're done installing your new lightbulb, they change the locks on your house. Three years later, they come back wanting to sell you a lampshade for 40-60 dollars.

What it would take for me to even consider purchasing the Diablo 3 expansion - List of demands

As a fan of Diablo 2, and as a disgruntled would-be fan of Diablo 3, let me spell out where Diablo 3 went horribly wrong.  Blizzard obviously is unwilling to consider doing anything of the sort just because it would make gamers happy, and money talks.  So I'm counting on you, denizens of the internet, to starve the demons of hubris infecting the once-loved Blizzard Entertainment.

0. Get rid of the Auction House and rebalance the game so that you can actually find usable gear from time to time

This has already been done.  Thanks.  However, it's easily possible that Blizzard may choose to release a patch nerfing loot drops back into the abyss once they've fleeced all the expansion purchases.

At the moment, though, it's hilarious. If, like millions of people, you pre-ordered Diablo 3 but haven't played it in a year, log in.  Play for a few hours. Watch in awe as you effortlessly replace all of the l33t gear you bought from the AH with stuff you actually found yourself.  It's almost like the game isn't drowning you in a sea of inferior pants and seeing how long you can last before you give in to Auction House temptation.  You get fewer drops, but the best drops are consistently better than the best drops you used to get.  You just have 1/4 as many to sift through.

My cynical side really is flaring up, though.  I strongly suspect that this balance state is only temporary.  To really drive home how temporary this heroin shot of raw player power probably is, Blizzard went ahead and gave everyone 50% bonus experience points for the next three weeks.

I'm fairly confident that seven days after Reaper of Souls comes out, someone will already be level 70 with God knows how many Paragon levels and every complete gear set, and then anyone using any other build or any play style other than the optimized power build will get nerfed into oblivion again.

1. Enable offline and LAN play and uninstall your DRM from my bumhole.

Even when there was an auction house, there wasn't sufficient reason to deny us this.  The current online mode could still exist as a secure, super-legit mode where all player progress was constantly validated by the servers, and the rest of us could have enjoyed the goddamned game without 1500 ms latencies killing us all the damn time.

Diablo 2 had this right (well, almost - more later). Single player mode, LAN play, open battle.net play, and ladder play for "srs biznis xhardcorex" online-only mode.

Blizzard's apologetics on the matter are laughable, transparent, and offensive.  Just read the comments and/or just think about it for five minutes.

Even worse, Blizzard loves to flip out over fabricated "suspicious activity" warnings and lock you out of your own account for the game that you bought with your own money.  Lost access to your old email address and/or forgot the answer to your security question?  That's ok, for another sixty bucks, you can rent Diablo 3 for another couple of years.  What a deal.

I haven't even begun to do this topic justice.  I have more to say, and I will.

2. Cut the price in half and add at least one more class

The bonus content is a joke.  They're charging $40 for one new character class (in addition to the previous 5), one new act (in addition to the previous 4), and Adventure Mode, a.k.a., the Shut The Fuck Up, Azmodan toggle button.  It speaks volumes that they claim that Adventure Mode is the biggest draw for buying the expansion.  They're charging the majority of $40 just to remove obnoxious content that wasn't even entertaining the first time through.

Kind of makes them wish they'd though to include in-game pop-up ads in vanilla D3, huh?  Hey Blizzard, how about I PayPal you three dollars so the Templar won't crawl up my ass every time I manage my equipment between grinds?  Pretty please?  I'm only half-joking right now.

3. Make enemy level scaling optional.  Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno wasn't broken.

This is only #3 because it is a point where I could respectfully disagree with someone else.  If you didn't know, the latest Diablo 3 patch makes it so that enemies in the main plot of the game don't have a fixed power level.  Instead, they level up whenever you do, rendering the entire concept of experience levels irrelevant.

YMMV, but I also find that rushing through the game on the highest initially available difficulty level is actually easier than it used to be to try to rush through Normal.  Why?  Because trying to rush used to bring you face-to-face with the brick wall that is an enemy of a higher level than you.  You could look forward to growing strong enough to win if you backtracked just a little.  Now, you just steamroll everything, and if it's too easy, you raise the difficulty and reload, and if it's too hard, you lower the difficulty and reload again.

Which I guess is fine, but that should at most be reserved for the open-world, plot-free extravaganza of Adventure Mode.  People hated when Elder Scrolls: Oblivion did it, and IMO, they should hate Blizzard for doing it now.

At the very least, I think this should be implemented as another game mode, called something like "Legacy Campaign Mode" or something.  I also think that it would be cool to have a mode where you play a character with no shared stash, as if you had to play a brand new account with no leg up for the first time.  Currently, you can't do this.  You can walk right into Tristram and buy a full set of gear.  This kind of sucks if you actually want to play the game, but it's peachy if you just want to grind five characters up to 60 as quickly as possible.  No, thanks.  :(


4. Give us skill trees and real choices.  Give each character an identity.

I would rank this higher, but this would probably be the hardest thing to implement, and it would rock the boat the hardest.  Some people might even like the runes or whatever.  Not me.

I remember Diablo 2.  Choices stuck.  How you spent skill points determined how you could play for the whole game.  Seeing how far you could get with a less-than-optimal build path was often the most fun in the game - Echant Sorceress or Poison Necromancer, for example.  Not that Diablo 2 was perfect - There were too many noob traps, but I still remember that game as a success.

5. Stop fucking up your plots.  Listen to your fans and/or hire people who know what the hell they're doing in the first place (from a perspective of making fun games, not from a perspective of making money and safeguarding your monies)

The damage is already done, and I doubt that it would even be possible to revert a fraction of the dumbfuckery that is the ear-chewingly horrible D3 campaign.

I'll just leave this here, though.  Food for thought, if they ever want to stop sucking on the plot front:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5150111877

FFS, Blizzard.  In the future, hire someone who worked on Dragon Age or something, if you can still find anyone with a soul still willing to work for you.

By contrast, Torchlight 2 kind of sucked at plot too, but god damn, they knew how to get the fuck out of your face and let you play your goddamned game.  It was sort of a sprawling clusterfuck, but they didn't try to force you to care about it with piles of cutscenes, endless hireling chatter, and rampant inconsistency.  Mathematically, less isn't more, but when we're talking about raging ass-suckery, less IS better.

In Diablo 2, Diablo said a total of 8 words, and it was awesome.

What it would take for me to even consider purchasing the Diablo 3 expansion - prelude

The other day, I was curious about how Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls pre-order sales were going. So naturally, I Googled "diablo 3 expansion sales" (those words without quotes).  What follows is hilarity.

At the time, the 3rd hit was a forum thread on the D3 forums written by one of millions of disenchanted Diablo 2 fans.  Like many of us, this player felt that that the failure of the Reaper of Souls would be good for gaming as a whole.  Somewhere on page 20 or so, I agreed and threw in my two cents about it.  A couple hours later, I was curious how the thread I was going, so I reloaded the page.

Or rather, I tried to.

You have to get a cached version to see the OP, and AFAIK the full set of comments only exist in a vault jealously guarded by Blizzard.  (If you can find a cache of all of the comments, let me know.  It's probably a blast to read)

Here's the OP:

12 million and then 120K. I'm actually hoping sales takes a drastic dive; lower sales and contempt are the best way to get a message across. Despite loving Diablo, I am actually cynical and bitter enough at this point to hope any related product in the future bombs simply because I can't stand the developer's cluelessness and lack of respect to not only this franchise's rich history but its fanbase. I mean, a YEAR later and everyone from intelligent forum posters to dedicated fan sites/forums have more clever ideas on how this game should be, EVERYONE but the devs. 

Time to take an overdose of commercial failure to set this right. 

And no, I am not suggesting any type of boycott, just pointing out my personal feelings and curiosities for the future :) 

Best of luck!

How does Blizzard respond to this expression of frustration at "the developer's cluelessness and lack of respect to not only this franchise's rich history but its fanbase"? By deleting the forum thread from the internet.

Blizzard, you wouldn't be in the position of having to play forum deletion whack-a-mole if you hadn't sold your soul ten years ago and transformed into the world's most hated PC gaming company.

So, what will it take to get me to buy Reaper of Souls?  First I'll give my list of demands.  Some of them are more negotiable than others, in my view, and I'll try to be clear about that.  This mess is so tangled that each point, I feel, deserves a post of its own.  If I'm feeling up to it, that's exactly what you'll get.

For a sneak preview of my thoughts, read some of my comments that I made as Disqus user CountBuffon.