So up to Diablo 3 I believe I played Diablo 2 for about fifteen minutes. It was back when gaming centers were more popular. For those of you who don’t know, that’s where nerds like me would go to play multiplayer games with our friends. I would occasionally get bored and look to see what else was on the computers there, and I thought Diablo was pretty cool. My cousin explained the plot to me.
Diablo is about the battling forces of heaven and hell. The player is a hero trying to save the world from Diablo. Diablo 3 is pretty good. Not great, but my judgement is partially skewed. You see, I’m playing on my Xbox, and console is not ideal for this game type. A controller lacks the targeting precision of a mouse, and you must build your character around this, which is a little frustrating. It is also a little boring. You find skills that work, and kind of have to stick to them. Not experimenting with other powers or setups. In Act 4 out of 5 I learned any spell can be assigned to any slot, which was a bit mind-blowing as they appear to be categorized to special binds. This is not so.
Toward the end of act 2, a friend joined my game. Something I certainly didn’t think would happen with a game this old. But the friend is a huge fan of the game, and knows all the ins and outs. When he met me, I was playing on the easiest difficulty because I had never played a Diablo game before, I’m not especially good at these types of games, and I knew console targeting was going to be a problem. My friend convinced me to ratchet up the difficulty as far as it could go. He was level 70, and me about 30, but when playing in another’s game, you are buffed to the high level player’s level. Which is nice, and I wish more games would do it. The difficulty adjustment was not nearly as drastic as I thought. I was still able . Not terribly difficult most of the time.
I played Diablo 3 mostly for the story, and was a little disappointed. Sure there were some finer points about why we shouldn’t adhere to dogma because reason is what truly protects us from evil. A point I very much like. But most of Diablo’s minions were a little lame. The giant with nipple rings was a little questionable. Like, who pierced those? Are nipple rings evil?
I may give Diablo another playthrough to try a different character, but that may be a series of exploratory game sessions just to test them out. Something that if I was smart, I would’ve done in the beginning. I got a chance to see some other characters in action when I took my game over to a friends and played split-screen with him and his son. We played for a few hours and got to sample some different characters.
Although I’m much more likely to return to Overwatch than keep playing Diablo.
HereticDerek 