Diablo iii review update#
Diablo iii review series#

Okay. So what have we learned? We’ve learned that Diablo III was a product of its era and hard proof that, from time to time, even Blizzard can get it wrong. A lot of it feels like placeholder material that somehow made it into the final game. If the characters in the game aren’t taking the Primevals seriously, why should the player? The dialogue runs the gamut from serviceable to “beaten over the head with the exposition hammer” and almost every voiced line is delivered in the winking, noblebright spirit of World of Warcraft. None of the dialogue properly communicates a world in peril or a crisis in progress. It doesn’t feel like anyone’s terribly worried about the Lord of Terror’s machinations, someone will get around to dealing with it. Decisions like these rob the game of any stakes it might have had. At one point, the guy who played the dad in Kung Fu Panda shows up to get some goofy jokes in.

In Diablo III, you run into people in the wilderness all the time, people who are surrounded by demons all day long and are a) somehow alive and b) bafflingly chill about the situation. Demons wandered the landscape, tearing to shreds anyone foolish enough to venture forth. In Diablo II, players rarely met anyone outside of heavily fortified camps because to go beyond those walls was incredibly dangerous. It makes a number of truly bizarre decisions like killing franchise favourite Deckard Cain to give his adopted niece a Leah (a character the audience have never met before and know nothing about) a kind of half-baked Luke Skywalker arc, Tyrael cops a dire amnesia subplot that feels like its straight out of a soap opera and no-one seems especially perturbed by the fact that almost all the Primevals appear to be stirring. The story is bad, and it can’t seem to settle on the tone it wants to strike. From a narrative perspective, Diablo III still feels like a relic of the MMO era.

Diablo iii review update#

There are, of course, plenty of things that the 2.0 update couldn’t fix. Why bother playing the game at all if you can just buy great gear? This was something Blizzard later moved to rectify with the Diablo III 2.0 update, an unprecedented and wholesale rebuild of the game that attempted to remove much of that MMO-infused connective tissue and replace it with something that felt more authentically Diablo. The Auction House was a source of huge irritation among the Diablo community, who felt it undermined the very essence of the ARPG as a genre.

And so Diablo III was remoulded to feel a little less dark, a little more heroic and a lot more like an MMO.Īn Auction House was introduced, an in-game location where accrued currency and real money could be used to purchase high tier gear, a move that negated much of the grind of Diablo II. It would have made sense for Blizzard to try to guide some of that gigantic audience over to what had been their most niche franchise. World of Warcraft had conquered the world, boasting a player count that still beggars the imagination to this day. This, in hindsight, must have made sense within Blizzard Entertainment at the time.

Diablo iii review series#

It launched on Windows and Mac platformers back in May 2012 and quickly dismayed fans of Diablo II by realigning the series to feel less like an ARPG and more like an MMORPG. Diablo III has been around for a while now. To understand why Eternal Collection works as well as it does, we have to go back for a bit. This shouldn’t surprise many long-time fans - Diablo 3 is widely regarded as the most palatable entry in the series, a swerving away from the grimdark atmosphere established by the first two entries.

For comparison’s sake, it would be easy to say Diablo III: Eternal Collection has more in common with something like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance than with Grim Dawn. For those unfamiliar with the way the game has been altered in the move from the PC, the console version of Diablo 3 feels much more like a co-operative action game than it does an ARPG. While Diablo 3 has been available on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 for some time, this is the game’s first appearance on the Nintendo Switch or, indeed, any Nintendo platform. And now, a take that may be controversial: Diablo 3 is way better on console than it is on PC.