Blizzard used the Blizzcon opening ceremony to announce a bunch of new stuff for Diablo III. The biggest news is that the fan-favorite Necromancer will be added to the game as a special DLC pack, but there will also be a number of smaller additions as well, including two new areas and some quality-of-life improvements to the UI. Initially, I was excited by this news. The Necromancer was one of my favorite characters in Diablo II, and I’d love to have a chance to play him again. But my excitement was short lived, and I’ve been trying to figure out why that is.
I think the bottom line is that there’s nothing left for me to do in D3 now that I’ve reached level 70 with almost every character. I could keep going in order to rack up paragon points, but that whole system feels bland. The points themselves feel like naked game mechanics, and it’s hard to see them as achievements when they’re shared among all your characters. I don’t particularly enjoy doing rifts or even bounties. They both feel pointless after a while. In Campaign Mode, you have a purpose; in Adventure Mode, you’re just grinding for the sake of grinding. It’s bearable when you’re leveling and getting new abilities, but once you’ve unlocked everything, it becomes tedious. I’d probably enjoy it more if I were more invested in the loot hunt. This isn’t because I think the items are bad or uninteresting. I’m just reluctant to spend hours and hours and hours killing monsters in the hope that I’ll be favored by the RNG. The investment is too steep, and the reward too nebulous.
This isn’t to say that D3 is a bad game. Far from it. I’ve spent over 430 hours in Sanctuary, and I enjoyed every minute. But my taste in games has changed since D3’s release. My focus now is on story-driven games where the replayability comes from your choices rather than your loot. That’s why I love Pillars of Eternity, Planescape: Torment, and Skyrim and I’m stoked for Torment: Tides of Numenera and Tyranny. Part of the fun of rolling a new character in those games is being able to make a different set of choices and seeing how they play out in the gameworld.
Unfortunately, D3 is severely lacking in the story department. The plot itself is nothing spectacular, but there are ways to compensate for that. After all, Skyrim has a rather generic plot, too. But it’s less of an issue because there’s so much else to do. I’ve played Skyrim with five different characters, and each playthrough has felt different from the others. Sometimes, it feels like I’m playing completely different games. In D3 on the other hand, every playthrough is more or less the same. Sure, you might get different random events, but there will be no meaningful differences between each playthough. Obviously, D3 is not going to have as much content as an open-world game like Skyrim, but Blizzard could have added a lot more plot-related diversity. Looking back at the developers’ pre-release comments, it seems they were originally planning to include a lot more story content, but those ambitions went unrealized. Without more story options, there’s not much to keep me invested in the game given my antipathy toward grinding.
Despite my bellyaching, I’ll almost certainly buy the Necromancer pack when it comes out. It’ll give me an opportunity to reach level 70 with a new character, and The Physicist and I can have some fun with him in multiplayer. I’ll probably try Campaign Mode again as well just so I can have a sense of purpose. But that may be my last visit to Sanctuary for a while.
Codex Lochianus 