I have been playing this game for a month or so now, whenever there is a weekend, I do put in my 4-5 hours in this game. Some of the features in this game absolutely drive me nuts! Here are 10 reasons why Diablo drives me nuts!
- No offline single-player mode. Which means, my internet connection HAS to be available. Plus for slower internet connections (which is common in India), the game is virtually unplayable. Not to mention the regular scheduled maintenance downtime on Tuesdays, meaning for 1 day a week I cannot play the game I own.
- Limited Video card ranges. I would think that a company as big and experienced as Blizzard would not make this mistake, however they have. The video cards with which D3 can run is limited to a handful, which means the bulk of their loyal following from D2 will either have to buy a new computer (which I did) or watch the screencasts on youtube.
- Real Money Auction House effectively means that to play in the higher tougher modes, you have to fork out more cash for items. Although I will not stoop so low, but it’s a possibility that many players are facing.
- D3 as a product is not fully ready, they have released the product into the market to ship it first. This could be done to simply beat other games which are coming out and slowly eating at the games market share. Games such as Torchlight II (which went in Beta last month), Star Wars, Amalur, Rift (which has a major upgrade lined up to be released in front of WoW: MoP). When you ship an incomplete product, bugs are bound to rise. The good thing about Blizzard that bug resolutions come quickly through patches, but each time a patch is rolled out, that means further downtime. Blizzard, do you want your paying customers to play the game or just sit by grumbling while you patch things? The amount of threads and trolls that I have seen on the Blizzard forums shoot up whenever a new patch comes out. I mean, go ahead and admit it that the architecture of the game has not been thought out properly.
- The game is geared to be played on higher and higher difficulty modes. So when you ultimately kill Diablo in Normal mode, you move on to the Nightmare mode. Now, the drops given by Diablo are so mediocre that they quickly become unusable in the next difficulty mode. Now, this can be a minor technicality, but then the only time I would keep the drops that Diablo gives me is when I defeat the game in Inferno mode and wait for the PVP season to begin.
- Every RPG these days turns into a farming and grinding game. There are some crazy farming videos that I am seeing these days, heres one. Well, if the game turns into one GearQuest, then I the facebook game GearQuest is better, eh? And free t boot!
- Now this is petty, but I have to bring this up! My favourite class, the Paladin has been nerfed.
- For each class there are two types of weapons, a 1-handed weapon which can be dual-wielded and a 2-handed weapon which requires both the slots. Now, the benefits of the 2-handed weapon are not as great as having two 1-handed weapons. What that means, that I will never use a 2-handed weapon for any of my characters because I am not using the stat-gains from one of my item slots (the other hand which is now stuck with carrying the 2-hand weapon). This seems to be a problem in game design. At least make the stat gains from 2-handed weapons worth the trouble damn it!
- With the Auction House, come the hordes of gold farmers and gold vendors on each game. WIth them comes incessant spamming on general chat about different websites offering the cheapest gold. I had earlier blogged about the Economics of Gold Farming in World of Warcraft … I guess D3 also is relegated to the same fate.
- Each of my characters are stuck on their own servers. So when the Americas’ server is down, I can’t play with my Level 35 Barbarian, if the Asia’s server is down, I can’t play with my Level 15 Demonhunter, and so on. Which means that I am stuck with one server (unless I power level all my characters)
One of the main reasons of me loving Diablo II so much was its great replay value. But what D3 has done is forced me to replay this game even when I do not want to!