The population seems divided. Some people like the game, some people think it's a piece of trash. Let's try to see some numbers on that (vote above *edit: 6 means "there's a lot of things wrong with the game").
I have my personal review now, after about 100 hours of playing. I have to admit that my initial impressions don't seem to be the same anymore. Let's start with positives and negatives:
Negatives:
- Online only is truly breaking my heart. Not everyone has a stable internet connection and it sucks that some of us have to deal with disconnections when it's essentially a single player game.
- The story is just sooooo cheesy and the dialogue and voice acting are just sooooo stupid. "WELCOME TO MY RAIN OF TERROOOARRRR", "JONDAARRRRRR", "I EAT YOU NOW" (well that was eerie)... Well, some parts of the story are ok, but overall, it feels like it was done by a high school kid. It doesn't really have anything interesting and the bad guys are just so idiotic. Azmodan kept on yelling "that stuff was useless" right after I destroy something he had, all the way until I killed him he kept yelling "YOU HAVE FAILED". Really?
- The auction house, personally, is a very unnecessary concept. Diablo has always been about personal gain, personal reward. The AH just makes gamers lazy and since everything can be bought, all you gotta do is just farm the same spots over and over again for gold and repeat. Worse yet, the Real Money Auction House enables gamers to just skip over all the work and just buy their way to content. This makes itemization unimportant and the feeling of getting a good item disappears since you can just buy anything. I'm never going to use the AH for any reason.
- Melee is gimped man........ It's so hard as a barbarian :(
Positives:
+ The chaos on screen thrives, even with problems in the game. I still get lost in the action in the heat of battle even after playing as much as I have. I doubt there's any game out there that can replicate the same feeling of overwhelming madness occuring all at the same time.
+ Initially, I thought that the mood was too lighthearted and colorful. I've changed my mind on this subject after really taking a look and listen at the many environments stylistically. Heaven looked really good and it was a strange feeling to see half of it so corrupted. Bastion's keep areas also looked pretty epic, with battles occuring everywhere. The sound is what really drives this game. It gets in your face a lot.
+ Inferno is tough, and toughness is what I wanted. The fact that it's taking me forever to beat the game is a great and rare achievement. Too often, games come and go too easily without any real challenge to look forward to. Some people claim that it isn't hard, it's just cheap. I disagree. These people die to enemies that have arcane enchant, desecrator, or frozen because they simply don't run when they have to. It's all about gear + skill + strategy. I believe that if you become good enough, you can overcome the difficulty. I like the fact that the game has a difficulty setting that "seems" impossible, but little by little, I feel I'm getting progress.
+ The skill system is very positive for me. Most people hate it but I like the fact that I can focus on my game instead of worrying about theorycrafting skills. I never liked having to respec and stuff because Ifound that I spent too much time trying to get "perfect" builds. This time around, I can just focus on enjoying the game without having to think about specs because I can change anytime I want.
+ There are lots of little things that make the game much more streamlined than Diablo 2. No need to pick up gold, health globes, auto calculated statistics, town portal as a default spell, and a whole lot of other things are there to make the game more intuitive. The biggest and best change for me is the health potion cooldown. I've always thought it was stupid to take so many potions during battle.
+ Open ends make you anticipate for more. Despite the inherent stupidity of the bad guys, there were a lot of loose ends unearthed in the game that I'm eager to learn more about and play through. Blizzard's track record shows that they've never been cheap with content. They're one of the best companies at providing game support and they continue to update even years after the game's release. At the moment there are a lot of bugs and stuff but I find that these things will be ironed out in the future, so I'm not worried.
Overall, I think that the game is good but it can get much much better than now. Blizzard has never let me down before and I doubt that they will let this game down. It's just that our expectations were unreasonably high. We just need to be a little more realistic.
9/10
