Reviews// Diablo III

We played until the early hours of the morning and after exchanging a few items of loot we bid each other “Goodnight”. Two of the people I played with have been added to my friends list and we have played together since – and despite the language barrier we have continued to play well together.

The whole experience of Diablo III has been outstanding, simple to play but hard to master gameplay. Graphically the game is smooth and beautiful, everything is slightly stylised and bold in colour and tone which make it refreshing to look at. Even in the deepest dungeons where darkness reigns supreme there is still a brightness that somehow helps the game's dark and foreboding undercurrent without making it gaudy and cartoonish.

Everything from character dialogue to the countless lore entries are fully voiced, and for the vast majority it is really well done. There is just enough weight added to the vocal performances to help get invested in the story with a general helping of camp comedy to prevent things from getting too depressing. Each class has its own individual interactions with the NPCs, which adds yet another reason to play through the game with other characters.

Add to all the other brilliant ingredients a massive achievements section that covers pretty much every aspect of the game and you have a recipe for one of the most highly re-playable games of this generation.

The community for the first two games in the series is still active - and rampantly so - today, and there is no reason why Diablo III won’t still be played 15 years from now.

Bitter Pills
So far I have sung the game's praises, but it is not all milk and honey. There is a bitter side that must be addressed, namely the notion of a primarily single-player game requiring a constant internet connection and server log-in to play, no matter if you want to play co-op or by your lonesome, you are subject to Blizzards server status.

As you must surely be aware, Diablo III was unplayable for most consumers during the first 24 hours after its release. Even as I write this, there are still problems being encountered by fans almost a week later. Also bear in mind that during server maintenance the game is unavailable; a problem familiar to anyone who plays an MMO.

The simple truth is that you do not own the game you paid for. Apparently, we only own the right to use the game at the owner's (Blizzard's) discretion. This is an incredibly effective form of DRM (Digital Rights Management) which, if implemented in any other game would have caused an utter uproar from the gaming community. You only have to look to Ubisoft and EA for the blasting they have taken over their use of invasive DRM software in various games to gauge the lack of popularity of any “Internet Always On” system.

Whilst it may seem like a petty complaint it has already affected me during play. Either my internet dropped out or the Blizzard servers had a spasm and I was booted back to the main menu. When I logged back in, my game restarted at the nearest checkpoint; the whole map I had uncovered was once again shrouded in fog and I had lost some items of loot including a very nice hat that increased my damage dealing significantly.

Because the game randomly generates many of its environments, loot never drops in the same place twice and so that lovely bit of headgear has been lost to the vagaries of the Internet and DRM.

All this speaks darkly of the foreboding shadow of server outages and even the eventual termination hanging over this brilliant entry to the series and genre as a whole.

In short, with Diablo III, If you don’t have your computer hooked up to the internet then you are plain out of luck and cannot play this game. If, however, you are hooked up like the majority of the modern world then I cannot recommend this game highly enough. If you were already considering buying it then go on and do so, if you are new to the top-down-pointy-clicky type of game then this is a perfect entry point - you don’t need to have played the originals to fully enjoy this dark tale of good versus evil and its game mechanics are easily accessible to anyone wanting to join in.

Pros
+ Beautiful visuals and a compelling world
+ Easy to pick up, hard to master gameplay
+ Loads of lore to flesh out an already expansive story

Cons
- Loss of progress/ loot during server or internet hiccups.
- DRM

SPOnG Score: 9/10