This will probably read more negatively than one who has played Diablo 2 might expect it to be.\u00a0 I should probably start out with my background with Diablo 2.\u00a0 Diablo 2 was my pre-WoW time sink.\u00a0 I spent hours upon hours playing it.\u00a0 I had a whirlwind barb, fury barb, firewall sorc, strafe zon, fury zon, some kind of horrible non-hammerdin pally, shapeshifting druid, the list could go on.\u00a0 I had tons of items that I sold on ebay for a good chunk of change.\u00a0 So needless to say, I was very familiar with the game sans-cheating.\u00a0 I could have probably played the game blindfolded.\u00a0 I knew what items were before they were identified and knew the range of values that would make the item good or bad.\u00a0 I almost knew the rune system by heart.\u00a0 It was gross.\u00a0 So going to play Diablo 3, you sort of expect a sort of familiarity.\u00a0 A sense of easing right in.\u00a0 That is actually not what playing Diablo 3 is like from the keyboard\/mouse perspective.\u00a0 Read on to find out why!<\/p>\n
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The interface changes were very WoW-ish.\u00a0 1-4 used to be my potion chugging hotkeys, are now ability keys.\u00a0 Which is peculiar when the game used to be so heavily mouse driven.\u00a0 Aim the ability with the mouse and press mouse 2.\u00a0 Now it’s somewhat jarring to have the regular mouse abilities AND THEN have 1-4 being skills as well that sort of discombobulate you from the norm.\u00a0 Pressing 3 and aiming or aiming and then pressing 2 wasn’t as familiar as point mouse + click.<\/p>\n
Tab now let you bind two actions to the right mouse button and switched between the two.\u00a0 The map has been miniaturized and shown in the top right section which again is similar to WoW.\u00a0 I used to be a frentic tabber for some reason.\u00a0 I couldn’t tolerate the map being up when I needed to kill things but I couldn’t navigate without it.\u00a0 Now tab does this really funky thing that I’m completely unfamiliar with.<\/p>\n
Ok so those are the main things.\u00a0 Here’s how the game played.\u00a0 I played a wizard, which is actually a witch since it was a girl right?, in a 4 man team.\u00a0 While playing it took quite a few hits to kill monsters.\u00a0 This is strike one against the game.\u00a0 However in retrospect I realize that we were 4 manning it so the monsters had 4x health or whatever and we were geared like complete noobs.\u00a0 But still, the sense of complete dominance and mowing wave after wave of monster was gone.\u00a0 But anway, back to the wizard.\u00a0 She runs out of mana non stop.\u00a0 I picked up the beam of death skill and had fun with it, but it drained me quickly killing just 1 monster.\u00a0 Very discouraging.\u00a0 She had a charged bolt like ability and some kind of strange magic infused melee attack.\u00a0 Oh yeah finally a fireball ability or maybe it was magic missile.\u00a0 Most of the abilities were very familiar from other games except the death ray.\u00a0 Playing her was alright, it was very sorceress from D2.\u00a0 They said they don’t want to bring back old classes yet what I played was exactly a renamed sorceress.<\/p>\n
We mowed down this dungeon and made our way to the Skeleton King boss.\u00a0 The graphics are lush and beautiful and the game was silky smooth in frames.\u00a0 The art style is so incredible it’s as though the game programmers create this environment for the artists where at other game companies it feels as though art is tacked in supplementally to the programmers code.\u00a0 There were a few cool things in terms of UI that were notable.\u00a0 When you walk over money you auto-loot it.\u00a0 You can only see your own drops for a period of time so that you don’t have this mad scramblefest for thievery.\u00a0 Bags items only take up one slot.\u00a0 Socketing abilities was cool, but the skill system didn’t seem very well laid out.\u00a0 You have these tiers you go down in to acquire new skills and secondary abilities show up beside them on that tier.\u00a0 Since we were so low level it was hard to see how they worked out because we had so few skill points to spend.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, I’d say after playing D3, I wanted to play D2.\u00a0 Which I imagine the point of playing it would have been wanting to play more of D3, like how after SC2, I can’t even think to go back to SC1 and I just want to play more SC2.\u00a0 That’s the experience I had.\u00a0 I know most other places are gushing about how great D3 is and how they had a blast, but my opinion is that the game has a long way to go.\u00a0 They’re trying out a lot of new things at the expense of familiarity.\u00a0 I’m a total fanboy of the series, but this didn’t leave me wanting more, it just left me scratching my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This will probably read more negatively than one who has played Diablo 2 might expect it to be.\u00a0 I should probably start out with my background with Diablo 2.\u00a0 Diablo 2 was my pre-WoW time sink.\u00a0 I spent hours upon hours playing it.\u00a0 I had a whirlwind barb, fury barb, firewall sorc, strafe zon, fury […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}