Diablo III - The first eight hours

Have you played Diablo III yet?  Spoiler Alert - It's apparently pretty good.  But you don't have to take my word for it, just read Nik's review for yourself.

            Nothing could have been more convenient than the fact that I had Tuesday, May 15th off from work, and Diablo III was released that Tuesday. Raven and I prepared ourselves. We bought the game from Blizzard early. We downloaded and installed as soon as we could. The download was an easy two hours the week earlier, the actual install we were able to do Monday afternoon. We were so ready for midnight to roll around so that we could instantly hop on and pull an all nighter. No dice.

            We forgot, Blizzard is based in California. That means, sure, they launch the servers at midnight. Midnight PDT. Meaning us New Yorkians had to wait for the 3am launch. We had a serious debate on our hands. Do we stay up until 3? I played Rage on the xbox until about 11. At that point Raven and I looked at each other, damn near asleep. We had two options: go to sleep, or go to the diner and drink coffee until 3. But, at 11pm, we still had four more hours. We opted just to sleep. There was no guarantee that the servers would be up and smooth for us at 3 on the nose anyway. So rather than be exhausted all day, we decided on getting up early the next morning.

            We were up and ready to go by 8am, which is actually sleeping in for us, anyway. We had already discussed what classes we'd create, so we dove right in. Raven created a female Demon Hunter (think a cooler version of the Amazon from previous Diablo incarnations), and I made a rickety old Witch Doctor (slightly similar to Diablo II's expansion character, the Necromancer). We started it up and were immediately blown away by our first cinematic.

            Before the game came out, we never went out of our way to see much of the game (to the point where I chose not to participate in the beta even after I was chosen), we wanted to be awed as we experienced it for the first time. We watched the occasional class video, but not much more. The cut scenes and cinematics in this game are absolutely stunning. They are by far the best in computer graphics that I've seen to date. I mean, the detail just on the character's faces alone is remarkable.Regardless, again, the cut scenes are crisp and beautiful.

            The game starts essentially as any other Diablo. You start in town, talking to the various townsfolk, learning about the storyline. I'm not going to get into specifics here, because it's still so fresh, and frankly, you should be playing this game. But, the story that they have so far is quite good. I know that I and II had stories, but I never felt invested in any of the characters or the story. Blizzard has remedied that, and I care for NPCs and my character as well. Along the same lines, the more immersive story has made questing far less of the grind I've grown accustomed to from previous games. It's no longer "breeze through quest exposition - go kill something - pick up whatever - bring it back - start over". I'm actually paying attention to how the quests fit into the story, and while scooting into dungeons and killing things is still similar, the delivery and execution make it far less monotonous.

            The in-game graphics are up to par with the cinematics. Being a dungeon crawler, there's nothing so close up as you would be seeing in a first person shooter, but you still get detail. The environments are stunning. The depths present in some of the dungeons, the cliff drops and even the towns are something I've never really seen in video game graphics before. It's clear that Blizzard spent as much time on the stuff that's literally in the background as that on which we were meant to focus. The monsters and the characters are all crisp and clear, with a great deal of realism mixed with just the tiniest bit of cartoon feeling to it. The cartoony, I think, stems from the vivid popping color, which makes the graphics better; that is certainly not a complaint. Now, when I say cartoony, don't think Blizzard's other top-seller, World of Warcraft. It's nowhere near as toony.

            The mechanics are a refreshing update while still playing to the originals. There is a lot of point and click, slash-shoot-stab-kill. But, this is a dungeon crawler. That's what we expect. It's the leveling and skills that offer a very interesting, new and exciting game play. Say goodbye to skill trees and point allocation every time you level. Instead, you unlock a handful of abilities each time you level. You are limited with the number of usable skills throughout the game. You have a left click, a right click, and eventually hotkeys 1-4 open up to you as well. But that's it. Six skills to use at any one time, tops. Each slot has four or five skills that become available to you over time, and each skill has a variety of runes that open up as well, as you level. For example, as the witch doctor, for my left click, I start with a Poison Dart. In a few levels I open Spider Jar, and then a few more has gotten me Poison Toads. So I get to choose from the list what I want my right click to be. In between these levels, I've unlocked a rune for Poison Dart that allows me to shoot four darts at a time; or another that I can choose which slows down the target. There are still three more runes to unlock for the darts, and plenty of others for all of my other skills. So, even though you're slightly limited with your skill selection compared to prior Diablos (there are no quick hotkeys to jump between nine separate skills (i.e. the F keys in II) the varieties and the options available are quite extensive, leaving each individual player the option to really customize what he or she thinks is the most effective/most fun.

            Now, the complaints. The first is really just a statement of fact. I'm not going to complain about the game, or Blizzard in general, that they had to take the servers down a few times during the day. It's launch day. As far as I'm concerned, there will never be a perfect launch for a game that requires an online server. Never. So when people flood Twitter bitching about it dropping or not connecting or not flowing as smoothly as they'd like, they need to get the hell (Diablo pun?) over themselves. Shit's gonna happen. Get off your ass and go breathe some fresh air until the server's back up.

            The complaint that stems from that, however: after they did the reset, Raven and I lost all of our achievements. Even though we were at the same place in the game, at the same level that we stopped, when we started it back up, we had a blank slate for achievements. Now, I don't really care that much, honestly. But I know there are a ton of achievement hounds out there who were probably very upset about it. It's just slightly frustrating to see that some of things that you got credit for were gone.

            Now, this could be considered a spoiler, so be warned. It has nothing to do with story, but gameplay mechanics. There are some things that got only partially carried over from the originals.

            Scroll of Town Portal: no scrolls anymore. You just know the spell. And there's no cooldown on it at all. No cost. You can use it, return, then go right back to town over and over if you want. Even though Waypoints are still readily available (maybe even moreso than in Diablo II), the infinite TP makes them really quite unneeded.

            Scroll of Identify: absent. The very rare times that you do find something that requires identification, you just right click on it, it takes three seconds and then it's identified. You don't even bring it to someone in town to pay to ID. So why bother having things to identify in the first place?

            Environment: There is so much that is smashable and crashable in this game. Raven and I spend as much time questing as we spend just breaking shit. There is even some cool stuff that you can hit in the surrounding environment that triggers stuff to fall onto enemies, stunning or hurting them. My biggest complaint? Players can casually walk right through it. No consequences. There's even a spot with tripwires set up by the Goatmen (yes, they return!), that trigger what look like some pretty nasty traps. But when the spiked logs fall on you, they pass right through. Nothing more. No damage. Now, I'm all for not being killed in a video game, but this could be a great touch to make it as much a help as a hindrance.

            At the start up screen, when you choose your character, there's a little timer telling you how long you've played. Rae and I clocked in at just over 8 hours of play on Tuesday with Rallah the Demon Hunter and Ugzugg the Witch Doctor (we chose our own names). In that time, we got about half-way through level 16 and had just finished Act I. There are plenty of levels, quests, Acts and adventures waiting for us when we pick it up again in the coming days. I'm super excited to see the rest of the story and even experience the other classes. If anything crazy pops up, I'm sure I'll tell you about it. And who knows, I'll probably do a final review once Raven and I beat it.