New Gaming Computer and Diablo 3

Well I said I wanted to keep up with this blog this time around so here goes.

About two weeks ago I ordered a gaming PC from Alienware and it fainlyl arrived two days ago.

I spent the last two days installing every game I own on the thing, I have a huge list of them but that's for another time, suffice to say it took a total of three days to get every game installed and updated, since I still have to work and sleep. While all that was going on I finished up Fallout New Vegas for the third time (with Yes Man this time) and once I finished it I finalyl decided to give Diablo 3 a shot.

So, comparing Diablo 3 to both its predecessor and WoW, but first impressiosn are good.

The game's intro is certainly much mroe detailed than its predecessor and overall it sets the tone quite well, the gender choice for each class is nice but that's mostly superficial. I chose to play as a female monk named Cassandra.

Now onto the important thing, gameplay. The gameplay is much more stimulating that Diablo II, the punches and later kicks are very bright and exciting, seeing zombies go flying when I finish them off with a roundhouse kick is very satisfying compared to how every zombie just fell apart and collapsed when they died in Diablo II. Combat is overall much improved; I recall many sessions of Diablo II just hearing the sound of *whack* *zap* or *boom* over and over to the point where it got monotonous and as mentioned before the always the same death animations didn't give me much of a sense of force, it didn't help that the death animations in D2 were so bland to begin with. Compared to WoW is also feels better because so little reaction was in that game, plus the auto-attack made battles feel monotonous.

Stat wise the game feels very much like WoW as all the stats are pre-assigned rather than controlled like in D2, but in all honesty I prefer that, since it means no looking up builds or hearing peopel tell you "No no! This is how you build that character." and with each of three different stats controlling a different character's damage it's certianly more diverse and anti min-maxing, which I appreciate.

Now skills, this is where things are so different. With the monk at least I started witha basic attack skill and gained a secondary area attack at level 2 which were my two mouse buttons; it seems like just "attack" doesn't really exist in the game anymore which feel a bit odd since you're always using skills, maybe the other classes are different but I'll find out later. In general the game seems to have done away with skill building and trees and isntead just gives you skills that unlock as you play, letting you swap out as you go on and jstu set a total of 6 skills to use as you play: primary attack, secondary skill, and four abilities. While this is a neat set up it does seem kinda odd that none of your skills can improve. I thought, from what I read in the pre-release news, that there would be skill trees and skill building but I guess this way allows any player to test out all the abilities without having to create "test" characters to see which skills they use the most before picking. However all this might just be a result of the monk class I chose, but I don't know why they would have the interface so different for different classes.

Progression, oi now this is something I have an issue with. While I can't fault such an action heavy game for being linear, Diablo III seems to have very little exploration early on, compared to both previous diablo games and especially WoW. While I can't fault the game for this, because it keeps the action going, I do feel kina odd that I keep running into locked doors in one form or another and have to keep going back to quest givers to unlock the way. The leveling experience seems very directed compared to Diablo 2 and it definately feels mroe like WoW with quest EXP awards and gold awards too. The inclusion of health drops just seems odd to me, since it kinda renders the old "regeneration" equipment redundant. It seems like a forced attempt to keep the flow going by giving you health for battling instead of stopping to heal each time. Regardless, after I got to the third major quest in the first questline I was already feeling kinda dulled by the game, though it did start to open up the lack of the ability to grind at all kinda makes the game feel very restricted even compared to D2 and WoW.

I'd talk about the auction house, but I haven't played long enough to even begin to talk about that, but I will say that I'm happy that there's a gold auction house, not sure how long it will last though.

Overall while D3 is very stimulating it feels kinda directed and restrictive compared to D2 and WoW, that may change as I get farther in the game but for now I'm not impressed. I'm by no means saying it's a bad game nor do I feel like I wasted my money but for the moment I will say that I am not as invested in completing this first major quest as I was with D2 or WoW.

Over the next few days I'm going to create and test each of the cahracter classes in single player for a while until I figure out which one I prefer. I'll make a post again after I try all of them to add to my impressions.

I hope no one minds if my blog becomes more a place for me to chat about my video game exploits instead of my stories, but don't worry I'm still writing.