i finally did get around to playing diablo 3. its funny reading through all these earlier posts since the game has almost no resemblance to what it once was. through events not completely my fault i own it for both pc and console
the game is very much meant to give the best action dungeon crawl experience possible. this frequently comes at the cost of things making 0 sense -- at one point you're standing on top of a huuuge battering ram fighting off waves of enemies. the catch is that the battering ram is currently, you know, battering down an equally giant gate. i have no idea why youre standing on top of the ram, since you could just be off to the side of the ram, but i guess its okay since every time it slams into the gate it just makes your character do a cute little jump
in fact, the game as a whole is way more enjoyable if you just put aside the story and focus on the visuals and the actual gameplay. combat is always fun, but you can definitely tell the attention to playability in dungeons drops off as the game goes on. not to say the dungeons are at all bad, but the fact that the first big one is above the rest really highlights it. the boss fights are very well scripted and are fun but hard. individual mobs are also more interesting than d2, many have behaviors and a more complex set of moves than i was expecting out of fodder
a little different from d2, your first play through can be on normal or hard but you might as well do hard. the level requirement for each area is higher in hard, but the bonus xp from the difficulty puts you exactly on par. advancing into even harder difficulties makes the game waaaay more difficult, but you dont need to be perfectly geared and spec'd the way you did in d2 (except for the harder torments). skill with your abilities as well as which abilities you chose (as in how well they work with eachother / other players abils / against what you're fighting) play a much greater role in your success than your items. think of normal difficulty as "none of you have ever played a game before"
like d2, the world is fairly open with lots of little side dungeons that you can explore. many of these dungeons had fun little mini quests in them
the characters themselves are constrained into roles. in d2 you could make a pretty solid pvp melee sorc if you spec'd your stats, skills and items for it, but its much harder to make a character have a different role than intended in d3. this is mostly due to how much more simplified the various systems are. not necessarily a bad thing, but i like it a lot less. on the other hand, how you fulfill your role has a lot more room for choice than it did in d2. the rune system alters skills in an interesting and often meaningful way, and the fact that you have so many more skills going at once is huge and offers way more complexity than d2 active skill combo's
items are still a huge part of the game, but the way loot is rolled is completely different. the game rolls ~90% of drops based on what your character archetype uses as its primary stat. i thought i wouldnt like this, but i ended up loving it just bc of how the game is. the only drawback is that you cant really twink out your other characters. i liked how in d2 you could get one bamf char and then quickly have 3 more pretty good chars just off of that alone. there's a way around this suited loot (horadric caches) but its much slower than completely random loot
d3 makes a distinction between story mode and adventure mode. story mode is exactly what it sounds like. adventure mode is a good addition and pretty much just represents the idea of item farming / power leveling. instead of just replaying the same dungeons over and over you are given (fairly vanilla) quests, called bounties, that innately grant xp/loot rewards just for completing them. adventure mode also adds rifts, which are sort of like mega dungeons, that you can access after completing enough of these bounties
the game is way better on console, so much so that its almost a pity the skills werent designed for a gamepad
same console co-op is amazing. the screen is shared, which might make you run for the hills remembering old dnd type games like that, but they really nailed the idea of a shared screen game:
if a player stops doing anything for ~10s then their character will start auto following w/e active char is closest. if they get stuck following them, theyll just tele over. experience and gold is completely shared which really cuts down on that competitive feeling. building on the smart loot thing, the game auto assigns drops to whoever its best for, and then when you pick up the item it just goes to that player. this might sound bad, but if you give it a try youll almost definitely love it. im also simplifying it a lot, the point is that finding relevant items is fun, frequent and even. the ui is completely unintrusive but manages to also fit the only minimap youd want on screen.
as i see it, there are 3 downsides to same console coop: going into your inventory to change items / skills is a one at a time deal and stops the game. same console coop is perfect for the story line, but less ideal/efficient for farming since youre constricted to the same area. the way gamepad targeting works is based off the left thumbstick, selecting w/e enemy is in that direction. this might seem way worse than it is (its actually perfect to me) since the game is so simple thats all you really ever want anyways. the only time it's actually bad is for skills that are highly delayed between cast and activation (the wizard's meteor is basically the whole list). every character has the ability to roll (only on console) by pushing the right thumbstick in a direction. i think rolling is a really fun addition to the game and it made me pay more attention in a good way -- skill has a much greater role in survivability than it otherwise would
essentially think of diablo 3 as a way updated, way improved Gauntlet game set in the diablo universe. it's especially perfect for parties with people who dont really play games. you all will enjoy it equally and them being bad wont be frustrating for either them or you
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Subject: Re: Diablo 3 
