Diablo III first impressions review

So you may have heard of this little independent game that came out called Diablo III. I guess it’s a sequel to a game that came out 12 years ago? Diablo II was the name I believe. I’d never heard of it before. This new game is pretty sweet though.

All kidding aside, the Diablo series is one of my favorite video game series of all time, with Diablo II easily being in my top 3 favorite video games. Diablo III stays true to the formula of the previous games while also changing things up enough to either piss people off or make them cheer.

First things first, gone are attribute points and skill trees/points. Instead of distributing points at your own liking, it’s more like JRPGs where your attributes go up a predetermined amount each time you level up. Skills are automatically unlocked at certain levels and scale with your level. You have skill “categories” instead of trees. Two mouse skills, 4 action bar, and 3 passive abilities. There are individual skills that you can switch between under each category, but you can only have one active at a time, per category. THEN, there are runes that unlock as you level up that add different effects to your skills. There are 6 runes per skill and you can only have one of these active, per skill, at a time. For example, with the barbarian, he has an ability called Cleave. One of the runes may add a bleed effect to the skill. It may sound confusing, but it’s actually pretty simple when you see it in action.

Secondly, there is no “single player mode.” You are always online. You can play alone, but you’re still online. It’s not quite an MMO, but it’s close. This is good and bad. It’s good because your character is saved on the server so no matter where you log in from, you’ll always have access to the same characters. It’s bad because if the servers are undergoing maintenance or just overloaded, you can’t play. Blizzard has a pretty damn good reputation for keeping their servers up so this shouldn’t be a HUGE deal, but the possibility is still there.

There are other differences too like identification scrolls are gone. To identify the items, you just right click on them. Town portal scrolls are gone also. It’s now an ability that you cast over a few seconds. Potions are changed as well. You heal two different ways. Enemies will either drop health orbs that refill your health a little bit or you can use potions. When you use a potion though, there is a cooldown so you can’t just spam them like you could in previous Diablo games. Mercenaries are changed a bit too. They are able to learn 1 of 2 skills at certain levels. A few new classes show up. Two are similar to previous ones and one is a bit more different. Demon hunter is pretty much an amazon/assassin and the witch doctor is a sort of necromancer. The monk is the new class but does use a combo system like the assassin. Instead of mana like in previous games, each class has their own pool of “energy” to use. I don’t want to go in to it too much, but it’s nice to not have to carry around mana potions.

Other than that, it basically plays like the other Diablo games. Kill enemies, get loot, level up, do quests. Rinse and repeat. Somehow, more than any other action RPG, Diablo just gets the formula perfect to keep you coming back for more and more. I give Diablo III a 4.5/5.