To be fair, I did not play this very long. I was expecting it to be extremely corporate and predatory, which it is. What I did not expect was for it to be very poorly made, which it also is. It crashed within the first 30 minutes. Character models are unreadable, homogenous blobs. Action animations look incredibly stiff and artificial. Environments are drab gray smears. The cutscenes... oh my god the cutscenes are SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. The characters are so torpid they make Geralt of Riviera look like Sonic the Hedgehog. It's like they inserted a 5 second pause before every line to give it dramatic weight. The actual result is that this action game simply has no energy; the whole thing seems like it's on the verge of a heroin overdose. Combine that with all the on-screen movement consisting of these blobby characters shuffling randomly back and forth, and the writing and voice acting being bottom of the barrel bad, and this whole package looks incredibly amateurish.
Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.
I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.
Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.
I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.
FallenGrace
24 days ago