Thoughts about games and the gaming world

Blizzard has been dominating the PC gaming for years and they are definitely on a roll right now considering the chain of successes Blizzard has done in the last 18 years since 1994 Warcraft: Orcs and humans. Now considering that the company has been on a spree of success with such games as Warcraft, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft does Diablo 3 live up to the standard that Blizzard has set?

Let me start off from the beginning of the game’s character selection. I say character selection instead of character creation because rather than making a character, you select one out of five heroes. I can understand Blizzard wanting to stay in the old roots that both predecessors had, but I find it rather outdated if not lazy. I don’t mean to beat on it too much but one of the greatest things about playing any online game, especially a role playing game is having a unique look. Blizzard also decided to lower the amount of heroes to choose from. In Diablo 2 it was originally 7 and now it has been dropped down to 5. There will most likely be expansions that will include other classes but as of now its 5.

The heroes in this game are the Barbarian, Demon hunter, Monk, Witch doctor, and the Wizard. I mainly played the Wizard but I did play with a few friends and got to hear and examine their abilities. I will only review the one I played cause it is only fair that I do it that way and not pass judgement on things that I do not know clearly. The Wizard hero is the basic casting type, he shoots projectiles and does a lot of AOEs (Area of Effects). I did enjoy playing this character due to the fact that he can keep a good distance and has a lot of crowd control abilities like frost ray and frost wave, which either slow down enemies or freeze them in their place. This hero’s abilities revolve around his arcane power (mana). Now the issue with some games is that if you run out of mana, your casting hero would probably use melee attacks to finish off the enemies. Which I found in most cases pretty stupid and very ineffective. However, with Diablo 3 you basically get a primary ability which is interchangeable with other primary skills. The ability reusable even with no mana even considering you regenerate mana faster than your primary skills can use. I was able to keep up the damage without the need for wasting a mana potion. The beta was very limited with the skills so I can’t go really in depth with abilities since the future spells could possibly change the hero’s gameplay completely.

After you create your hero you get to watch some cinematic scenes and listen to some lore. The first thing you will notice about Diable 3 once the game starts is that it will remind you about the predecessors pretty fast. Its dark, gloomy, and full of monsters roaming the earth. The graphics for the game are pretty good although I had low frames per second compare to other games with a 3d world. I play a lot of different computer games and I found this to be a rather big issue to start with. Maybe it is just a beta issue and can be fixed later on. The first change that I caught rather quick was that your hero actually talks now. In the older Diablo games your hero was a silent protagonist. The voice acting is pretty good and there isn’t a lot of it to the point that it is annoying you but also not very little so you would not feel like their isn’t a story. The game sticks to its roots pretty well by making everything destructible such as barrels graves and certain spots like chandeliers. Questing in this game is the same as every other action rpg. Its mainly pick up quest and do as quest says. Most likely the quests will be either find X person or kill X monster. As for the other features of the game such as crafting its very simple and direct. All you have to do is get gold and upgrade the blacksmith crafting spot and he will unlock more schematics. Then you give him X item and he creates the item for you. As for socketing gems in armor it wasn’t implemented in the beta and I will get back to it when it does become implemented. The auction house feature is like any other auction house in other games, you put up the item for real money or game currency then the consumer will either bid or buy item depending on what options the seller put in.

This game so far seems like the old Diablo games with better graphics and some slight tweaks, this game won’t be out until May 15th and I will be able to give a real review on it when it does release.