Diablo III: demon-cleaving, refined

Let's draw a distinction between a “sequel to a game” and an “installment in a franchise.” In a sequel, the developers examine what made the original game work and then expand on those ideas. Sometimes that work produces stark differences. The near-decade between Fallout II and Fallout III, for example, saw that game switch the perspective from isometric to first-person, the combat change from turn-based to real-time with pauses, and the setting move from California to Washington, DC. In other cases, a decade of work results in an installment that is much more about incremental refinement.

The original 1996 Diablo was a successful, simple title—a real-time, single-player role-playing game with randomly generated dungeons and loot along with minimal plot and character development. You clicked on things to kill them while delving deeper into a dungeon until you arrived at the very gates of Hell and found the titular villain Diablo.

The 2000 sequel, Diablo II, made everything about its source material bigger and better. The core concept of clicking on bad guys until they died remained intact, but very little else stayed the same. Instead of a single setting, the town of Tristram, Diablo II took players across its world both above and below ground, from the European-like forests and fortresses of the first act to Arabian-style deserts in the second, etc. The plot was detailed in a series of cutscenes, where a witness to the game’s events recounted the key moments from an insane asylum.

Perhaps most importantly, the game’s class and skill system added a huge amount of variety to each style of character. The Paladin, with his auras and different attacks, was roughly as complex as the Sorceress, with her spells of different elements. This wasn’t true of their equivalents in the first game, where Sorcerers had different spells to pick from, but Warriors could only attack and occasionally heal themselves. Diablo II marked a major change in the way that RPGs were played, and it proved tremendously influential on the massively multiplayer role-playing games that followed (specifically World Of Warcraft), which then fed back into single-player games like Dragon Age.

Such genre-defining changes aren’t found in Diablo III, which is clearly an installment in what has become the hugely successful Diablo franchise. Most every aspect of Diablo III is either identical to Diablo II or comes with a slight tweak of that formula. This isn’t a bad thing. Diablo II was a Hall of Fame-worthy game, and an updated, graphically enhanced version of its mechanics can hardly be a bad thing, even 12 years later. Those looking for more dramatic changes may feel a bit of disappointment at seeing the series settle into a comfortable middle age. On the other hand, the mistakes and passions of youth can be exhausting; Blizzard's developers have clearly learned what works and are determined to refine it here.

Much like Diablo II—not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Diablo III offers little novelty in its storytelling; almost every component of the plot references something that took place in previous games. The villains at the start are the two demon lords that you didn’t defeat in Diablo II, Azmodan and Belial, with the big guy himself making an unsurprising return at the end of the game. The major non-demonic characters are also related to Diablo I and II: Deckard Cain, the voice of the two previous games; Adria, the witch from the first; her daughter Leah, adopted by Cain after Adria’s disappearance; and finally Tyrael, the Angel of Justice who starred in Diablo II. There’s much more story in Diablo III than in its predecessors, but “more” is not necessarily “better” in this case.

The setting is equally repetitive. The first act takes place in Tristram, just like the start of Diablo II. It’s followed by a trip to a desert city, where you follow in the footsteps of a powerful ancient mage—again, just as in Diablo II. In Act III, you travel to the barbarian mountain for a siege, which was the fifth (expansion) act in Diablo II. It’s tough to understand why Diablo III recycled the settings of its predecessors when there are dozens of new alternatives, unless we frame Diablo III as an installment in a series that now has its own genre conventions. It’s the rough equivalent of a Metroid game having a lava area and an ice area—it’s just the way things are done.

Fortunately, narrative and setting aren’t the main draw of the game, which is the moment-to-moment action of the combat system.

Pretty, but we've seen it before. 

The click-click-click, kill-kill-kill gameplay of the Diablo series has always been strangely satisfying, and Diablo III maintains the responsiveness of the series. It’s still a blast to wade into an group of enemies, launching your best attacks before they they can hit you, desperately gulping potions when things go awry, running back to a doorway to choke the hordes of enemies who would otherwise overwhelm you. That chaos is what separates Diablo from most massively-multiplayer RPGs, which are almost always more controlled and less intense.

Diablo III uses the technological advances of the past 12 years to improve the feel of the game. I played primarily as a Barbarian, whose powerful melee attacks seem even stronger thanks to the revamped animation and sound effects. The “Cleave” skill is a slashing attack that hits multiple monsters at once; if it kills one, it may decapitate it, sending the monster head flying. But if you switch to “Bash,” a more powerful single-enemy attack, you can hit a creature so hard that its skeleton flies out of its skin with a very satisfying “ka-THUNK.”

Another technical change that I enjoyed tremendously: holding down a mouse button strings together a series of attacks, which is quite nice for those of us who got repetitive stress from the constant clicking of Diablo.

Killing demonic butchers now takes less clicks. 

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