Thoughts about games and the gaming world

Diablo 3 is a really marvelous game that is flawed in some areas. It tries so hard to be better than it’s predecessors and on most account achieves it but there are other areas where they shouldn’t have touched. There are many changes that anyone who has played any previous Diablo games will see when they start playing Diablo 3. Skill trees are gone and replaced with rune systems. Special monsters with abilities are of more importance than bosses now. And most importantly the sense of item hunt has disappear and replaced by an Auction House.

Just to start things off, I really do not like the idea of the Auction House. As I said before, it takes away the item hunts and sense of achievement when you get something better than your items. I understand that Blizzard had to add the auction house but I’m not sure if it was really there for gamers in mind. From what I understand, the auction house main purpose is to fight against gold farmers. You are allowed to either use in-game gold or real money to buy items in the auction house. The latter being not available currently but I would like to know how the situation of the auction house changes with real money involved. As of right now, you can get most of your character’s items from the auction house for really cheap. Sure you still have to play the game to level up your character and progress through each of the game’s four difficulty but you don’t have to worry about getting items. The strange thing is that you can buy the item, say a chest armor, for 10,000 gold. Then after you wear it and you level up with it, you find another chest armor with better stats for your current level for 10,000. Well you can buy it and then sell off the old chest armor for 10,000. Someone else is bound to buy it again from you. This continues the forever trend of the auction house that I came to notice. It is cheating using the auction house but I feel that Blizzard has the auction house for a reason. There are times when you feel super powerful because you just bought two brand new powerful axes from the auction house. The sense of power you get from using the new items are amazing. One moment you may be struggling with a boss or a special enemy and another moment you’re blasting through them with full health. The thing that I really miss is that this eliminates the feeling of an achievement when you buy these items. You didn’t get these items, someone else did. The items you find seem meaningless to the items you bought. Sure I may find a Legendary item or some powerful rare item but those are very rare chances. Why play through the same areas hoping to get a specific armor or weapon when you can look specifically for the item you want in the auction house? This is one of the main reasons why I haven’t played as much as I use to.

The eliminations of the skill tree system is a pretty risky idea that Blizzard has played. At first it is very strange that you can pick different skills anytime. It makes you wonder if you’re even getting more powerful with the skills. In theory you aren’t getting more powerful. The skills you unlocked in the later levels may be weaker to you than the skills you already had when you started the game. This new system gives the player choices. You pick what you want to use for a certain situation and test out if it is a good pick. It is similar to load outs in that each boss or special enemy is a match that you need to figure out. You may need to use a health healing attack, one that increases your attack speed, or one that slows down enemies. It is all different for different kind of situations. On the easier difficulties it doesn’t matter what skills you use as you’ll mostly be using skills that you’re comfortable with. On harder difficulties however, you need to pick certain skills that makes sense for those situations. It gives a sense of strategy that is balanced out by the aforementioned auction house item buying.

The last thing that I notice that is changed in Diablo 3 is the way how special monsters are handled. For every step up in difficulty, they have an additional new ability they can use. On Inferno, they have four abilities that can all be used at once. Abilities are most likely chosen random for every special monsters which means every special monsters may have a way to kill you quickly. It makes these monsters harder than most of the bosses in Diablo 3. I believe that is why Blizzard has put more emphasis on these special monsters than the bosses. Sure with bosses you’re still bound to get better items or rarer items. However in Inferno, killing these special monsters gives you a boost that will help you get better items. This boost lasts for 30 minutes and it can be stacked. So you can theoretically kill multiple special monsters before going to a boss and killing him. Though it is possible, Inferno is a pain in the ass to even fight a special monster.

Anyways, Diablo 3 is an awesome game. The changes that Blizzard made helped introduce Diablo to a new generation and a wider audience. However I feel that some of the changes made Diablo 3 lose some of its charms. The sense of gratification that is received from an item hunt is now gone in place of an Auction House. Because of that, I keep wondering why I keep playing the game. It is fun to level up and kill a room full of monsters but I’m not sure how much it could last. I’m hoping Blizzard may patch something that will make it stand out more but as of now I haven’t gone back to Diablo 3 in a while. I don’t think I will until I hear some changes are made or the economy of the auction house is balanced when the paid auction house is released. So this game is worth a try but it is not worth hyping about as I thought it was before release.