World of Diablocraft.
review by
chaosblade02
For a game that was so hyped up, and probably the most hyped up game in the last 10 years, this game didn't deliver for me.
Lets cut to the bare bones of the gameplay. The gameplay is similar to diablo 2, you click on an enemy with a skill/attack and you kill it. The problem is the game gets incredibly dull just to the atmosphere and repetitiveness of the game. And this is coming from someone who is OCD, and usually doesn't mind a little bit of repetitiveness, but this is overboard. And its not fun enough to keep me interested. Diablo II had a different feel that I can't exactly put my finger on, that made the game more fun to play.
Lets get to the game design, the graphics, music, story, etc. I guess the graphics are OK, for as low as the system specs are to run it. I wasn't expecting something cutting edge, so I'm not gonna knock the graphics on Diablo III.
The story reeked of mediocre, and wasn't even as Diablo II. At no point in time was I ever the slightest bit interested to the storyline, I just wanted to go back to mouse clicking on mobs.
Now to the general game design. I think this is one of the worst features of the game. First of all you got some combinations of elite/champion packs that just cannot be killed in inferno. Some of the character skills/abilities are either overpowered or woefully inadequate. Barbarian for example is woefully inadequate in doing what he is supposed to be able to do well => tank. Basically not enough health, not enough passives/skills to mitigate damage, and not enough aggro management., Threatening shout has a rune that gives a 3 sec taunt, but has a 10 sec CD. Barbarian has the same health per vitality rating as any other class, considering barbarian needs to be in the middle of the action, they should have at least 2-3x more health than a wizard, right? Make sense? In any other game the tank/warrior types got more health than ranged/mages. Its just basic common sense that blizzard completely ignored.
Now you got the drop rates, set and legendary items. Most of the set and legendary items, for as rare as they are, suck. You figure a legendary should be better than a blue of the same level range no matter what right? Considering the 1 in 1 million drop rate? Makes sense right? I guess blizzard derped again! Because most of the set/legendary items get beaten by a good magical item, or a decent rare. I'd say half of the noobs that found one probably thought they hit a jackpot, w00t! I'm gonna make millions because I found a legendary! Nope! You are probably going to keep getting it returned at the AH until you finally say screw it and vendor it or put it up there for super cheap just to get rid of it. Basically they aren't even rewarding if you happen to get lucky enough to find one.
Now for the difficulty levels:
Normal => easy, Nightmare = tougher, Hell mode => challenging, Inferno => overboard. My problem was mostly with the later. One of the motivations for playing a game like this is gearing up, and they make it where you have to play an absolutely insanely broken game to get to that point. Most of the ones who even beat inferno did it by exploiting broken skills, most of which have already been nerfed by now, which is besides the point. Mostly the issue is with the extremely broken elite/champion mob affixes, many of which you will find yourself not able to beat no matter what and are forced to die 5-6+ times just to run around them. In fact some of the videos of people "soloing" inferno, avoided all the elite mobs and used the most broken skill combinations so they could at least solo the bosses, most of which were easier than your average champion pack. This is definitely not a game that just anyone can get into.
Lets cut to the "always online DRM". Now I wouldn't be knocking this as bad, if they actually kept their servers up 90% of the time with no issues. But it seemed like every other time I logged on either it was down for maintenance, or the AH didn't work, or they were having issues with one thing or another. They always had a box in the side thanking everyone for their patience. Anyone else notice how much blizzard keeps thanking everyone for their patience? In Blizzard's effort to keep people from cheating in single player, instead they expose a player who might not have traditionally played games online to getting their accounts hacked, or not being able to play a single player game, in single player due to the DRM.
Which comes to my next point, hackers. There is a flaw in battle.net that is allowing people to get session ID hacked, and its been happening since release date, and blizzard has straight up lied to the gaming community about the issue, and are incredibly defensive about it. Even though they vaguely admitted that some people with authenticators have been compromised, which is about the best admission we are going to get from blizzard about the true problems at hand. I believe it will be fixed, probably during a very large update in the future, and the problem will be put to rest, and they just won't post about it in the patch notes. But the best way to avoid getting session ID hacked is to NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER play public games, and you won't get session ID hacked. Nor team with strangers.
Also another concern of mine, the RMAH. Once this goes live, basically what is going to happen is you are going to have one class of gamers who struggle to find halfway decent gear, then another who just buys all their gear from from the Chinese farmers, and hackers. Prices on anything good in the regular gold AH will be super inflated, meaning the people who want to play the game without spending money are going to find themselves in an even tougher position than ever before once they get to inferno and hit a massive brick wall because of how much more difficult it is going to be to gear up due to most people not wanting to trade anything decent for anything other than real money.
Pros | Cons |
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Runs on a low end PC. | General gameplay/design, always online DRM, frequent downtime. |
Ratings