Game Review- Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

NOTE: Contains spoilers.  You’ve been warned and shit.  Don’t come crying.

Prelude: On Dinner Porn and Sexy Assassins

I couldn’t even tell you how old I was when Diablo came out.  Sometime in my high school career, I know that.  It was somewhere between Guild Wars and bingeing on story porn.  (Not like that silly “word porn” thing going around, that’s just poetry basically.  No, actual graphic stories about people having sex.  I dug up a surprising number in there about dinner parties.  I don’t know what that means.)  Somewhere in all that, I spent roughly eight trillion hours murdering the shit out of demons playing first Diablo, then Diablo II, moving from the rogue to the necromancer without batting an eyelash.

I actually want to mention DII‘s expansion quick, Lord of Destruction.

This expansion was brilliantly put together.  They added a two highly versatile classes: the delightfully under-dressed assassin, and the jack-of-all-lycanthropy druid.  One could choose between sick martial arts combos and finishers, or just detonate demons with traps; the other could throw around nature magic from afar, or just turn into a bear and fucking eat them.

Most important about LoD is that it drove the story somewhere interesting.  Baal, the last Prime Evil not sucked into a Soulstone, assaulted Mount Arreat to corrupt the Worldstone that first made Sanctuary (the planet you’ve been running around on, merckin’ the shit out of monsters).  You stop him, and then destroy the corrupted Worldstone.  The Worldstone wasn’t just a pretty rock; it also kept the armies of Heaven and Hell from invading Sanctuary en masse.

As you can see, I was a pretty big fan of DII‘s expansion.  I had high expectations of Reaper of Souls for this very reason.  Unfortunately, the first thing RoS had to do was address some glaring problems with the core game.

I: Dealing With Doldrum

First off, Diablo III has significantly less replay value than its predecessors.  I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is.  Maybe now that I’m older, the idea of clicking on the same six buttons over and over for hundreds of hours of my life no longer holds appeal.  That’s an issue with any game, really, so maybe that’s all it is.

To its credit, Reaper of Souls made a valiant effort to address replay value with the well-designed Adventure Mode.  The entirety of the game’s five Acts become open to your character, and each Act has five Bounties.  They’re usually mini-quests that popped up during the Campaign Mode (cleansing cursed shrines and chests, for example), or some variation on “Kill Bob The Meat Fucker and X of His Bitches,” but it’s at least a new take on things.  Once the five bounties in an Act are complete, you get some XP, gold, and a Horadric Cache that gives you a bunch of loot and several Rift Fragments to open up Nephalem Rifts.

A Nephalem Rift is basically a quick run through a randomly generated mini-realm where you murder hordes of monsters until the Rift Guardian shows up, a named elite with scary ass-kicking capacity.  These drop Keystones of Trials, which open up Greater Rifts.  Greater Rifts are the same thing but with a timer; if you beat the timer, you can upgrade the Keystone to fight harder Greater Rifts and get even better stuff.  The difficulty settings have been also been overhauled, and the new Torment setting, scaled between Torment I and VI, allow increased XP and loot drops at the cost of significantly tougher enemies.  The two combined have made loot grinding, if not less tedious, at least less time-consuming.

Another implement to increase replay value is the Season.  Currently on Season 3, you can make a Seasonal character and grind on bounties, rifts, and greater rifts, as well as gain season-specific items and achievements, and compare your progress on the leaderboards.  Clans have also been added, allowing you to have multiple people to jump in and play with.  There are even clans dedicated specifically to seasonal content.

II: Where The Fuck Is My Meat Shield?

The second issue in DIII, though exclusively a multiplayer issue, is the lack of a tank.  Sure, barbarians could tank, but only if they used very specific passive skills and Ability runes that didn’t unlock until late game.  The monk could do the same, but it severely limited your options to a handful of specific passive skills and Abilities, and you still end up more as a super-healer than a classic meat-shield build.  Since you couldn’t use the AI-controlled Followers during multiplayer, you had no Templar to save your wizard’s ass if she started taking a bunch of Fallen scimitars up her butt.

Then RoS came along, with its tall, sexy crusader, who said, “Nay, m’lady!  I shall take those scimitars in mine own butt for thee!”  Or something.  Anyway, the crusader is a fucking tank, almost in the literal sense.  The later armor sets are so over-the-top, they make you look like a goddamn iron golem.

Now, if tanking is your thing, the crusader is your bitch.  It has ridiculous amounts of crowd-control and damage mitigation, with a few very key Ability runes to draw enemy attention.  Unfortunately, it takes some doing to build the crusader into a straight damage-dealer, so if if big flashy damage is your thing, you’re probably still better off with the demon hunter or wizard. Few things say “overcompensation” than sucking all the enemies on-screen into a supermassive black hole, then hitting said black hole with a giant goddamn meteor.

III: And You Shall Know The Plot Is Rubbish

So we’ve covered the two glaring holes in the core game that the expansion addressed very admirably.  So, it’s super-awesome-sex-robot-perfect, yeah?

Ooh, honey.  Not even close.

Reaper of Souls has two fatal flaws. The first, and unfortunately the easiest to get past, is the god-awful story. The villain is a character only mentioned in passing in the core game: the original Angel of Wisdom, Malthael. The one Tyrael took over for on the Angiris Council? Yeah? Yeah, you don’t remember, and no one can blame you. He is literally mentioned in passing during conversation with Tyrael. Optional conversation. I didn’t even know this motherfucker existed until my second full campaign play-through after RoS came out. He gets all crazy For Some Reason and decides humans are bad because demons and shit. Aaaaand go. Seriously, every human has a little angel and demon in them, but he can only see humans’ capacity for evil, and this sudden psychosis is never really explained. Maybe he had to sit through a Uwe Boll movie. That’d do it.

While the plot for Lord of Destruction wasn’t exactly complex and nuanced, it at least made sense.  Ever since the creation of Sanctuary, Hell has been trying to get its blood-stained murder claws on the Worldstone, to corrupt humans and use them as more fodder in the eternal war against the High Heavens.  Baal almost did it, if the heroes of DII hadn’t intervened and Tyrael hadn’t shattered that bitch.  It was intense, and Baal was an imposing final enemy.

Malthael, on the other hand, is a hooded guy wielding glorified farming utensils as weapons.  Also, his boss battle was unbelievably easy.  I had WAY more headaches fighting Diablo than Malthael.  It also ends by undoing everything you did in the game.  So, yay.  You win but not really because fuck you.  In Lord of Destruction, your victory was still a victory, but it was balanced by the consequences of your actions.  In Reaper of Souls, your victory is simply hollow.  It is one of the most un-gratifying endings to a game I’ve ever seen.

IV: Servers?  More Like Droppers!  Amirite?

Finally, and most damning, is the issue with Battle.net.  Battle.net has never, ever been known for its reliability.  Any long-time player of World of Warcraft can attest to the countless client drops in the middle of a raid or just traipsing along the Barrens, bombing chat with Chuck Norris jokes.  The servers for DIII are no better.  Client drops seem to happen most often when loading areas, such as when teleporting back to town to get rid of loot.  Which you do A LOT.

The final nail in the coffin for me came when I was dropped, for the third time that day, when I had collected four of the five bounties in an Act.  That doesn’t get saved, by the way.  When you jump back in, you have to start ALL YOUR BOUNTIES OVER, and it is not a quick process when you’re doing it alone (as I was stuck doing).  I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  Don’t even try to make a Hardcore character in Diablo III, regardless of whether you have the expansion.  The spotty servers will cause your death; it’s not an assumption, it’s just a matter of time.

V: So Is It Worth It?

I struggled not to hate this expansion.  I wanted to like it.  It has great panache, and its new class actually fits a badly-needed niche and has a very fun and unique style.  But the flat storyline and unreliable client servers make this game not even close to worth shelling out forty bucks.  If you can get it on sale (I snagged mine when it was half off on Blizzard’s website), it’s worth picking up to have a few new adventures with your old characters and try out the crusader.  Otherwise, you can certainly find better uses for your money.

Hopefully Blizzard will learn their lesson when Diablo IV inevitably arrives, but I find it doubtful.  They’ll probably just make another DIII expansion instead and jerk each other off in congratulations.  Then the semen pools will congeal into the next World of Warcraft expansion.