My problems with Diablo III

So without going into the labyrinth that is Diablo lore, I feel like I’ve got a few genuine gripes with the story’s continuation in Diablo III.

Diablo I’s story basically says that in this war for humanity, Diablo and his minions were emerging from beneath this cathedral.  Ultimately a warrior hero eradicates Diablo from the mortal realm and sacrifices himself by housing his soulstone within himself.  

Diablo II follows up with the warrior and a guy named Marius, who unwittingly helps nearly undo all that the Horadrim had done to keep Sanctuary secure.  Thankfully for everybody a hero thwarts their plans and Diablo’s soulstone is destroyed, along with that of some of his brethren.  The Lord of Destruction expansion has the last brother Baal nearly making all of humanity warp to the powers of hell, but not before Tyrael destroys the Worldstone.

Now we fast forward twenty years to Diablo III, where Tyrael leaves Heaven over a conflict of interests.  The primary crux of the game is regarding the Black Soulstone, which is yet another stone that can apparently contain all the lords of hell, thus rendering them vulnerable to all be defeated simultaneously.  The Lord of Sin, Azmodan (who is voiced by Dr. Claw, or so it sounds), wages war on Sanctuary to prevent them getting the stone, but fails.  Just when things seem set to go, turns out Leah (the niece of Deckard Cain) was sired by The Wanderer and turns double agent for Diablo.  With the black soulstone containing all the powers of hell, the reborn Diablo becomes the most powerful demon to ever manifest, powerful enough to march on heaven itself.

As always, Diablo is defeated and the heavens/Tyrael are restored.  This game differs from previous titles, as it finally looks like Diablo won’t ever be coming back.

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So what do I have a problem with?  It took me several read-throughs of various wikis and watching/re-watching the D3 cutscenes to grasp just what the hell was going on.  A lot of the in-game story is so lost on me because it happens right in the middle of all the fighting.  Plus it’s not as fluid as the way the D2 story was told, but let me explain.

I don’t want you to think that I’m a D2 nut job who hates D3 because it’s not D2, and irrationally dismisses the game simply because it’s not an expansion to a game that came out over a decade ago.  Diablo III has been, and still is, great fun for me, but the story itself is a lot more murky than Diablo II’s simply because of how the story was told.

D2 has your hero seemingly hours behind The Wanderer/Diablo and Marius as they push east to set the plot in motion.  Your character learns more of the story via the artifacts collected and Cain/Tyrael’s counsel, but are never directly involved with the antagonists until that act’s conclusion.  The amazing cutscenes get you caught up in detail as to what you’re chasing, only making you anticipate more what you’re ultimately seeking - a final showdown.

Diablo III, on the other hand, puts you right there in the mix of things.  As you’re playing through the story the plot is unfolding.  Your hero accompanies Leah/etc through every twist and turn, and pretty enormous lumps of plot data are dumped in your lap right in the midst of an orgy of battle.  

This gets very frustrating.

I’m madly clicking and smashing my keyboard’s number pad to fight off these countless mobs, and then in the middle of it I’m supposed to slow down to TL;DR the long-winded and confusing story?  Fuck that, I’m in the zone, dammit!  You can’t just keep slamming on the brakes in this hack-and-slash melee.  

Then there’s these numerous mini-story-scenes that help guide you along the way just in case you forgot what it is you’re supposed to be doing, but it doesn’t feel cohesive so much as clunky and forced.

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To tie in my problems with the story, here’s my problems with the game itself.

Keep in mind, I’ve only played through normal with a barbarian and a wizard, but this isn’t so much about difficulty as it is expectations.  The acts in Diablo III don’t feel nearly as defined as in it’s predecessor.  New Tristram’s map is a windy mess that’s a pain in the ass to navigate, then once you get out in the forests and dank dungeons it becomes somewhat tedious without much of a payoff.  A lot of the bullet-points for the bosses seem very much to be adhering to the fanboys of various blizzard message boards, and/or patched together to give kudos to the players who worship Diablo II.  Hey it’s the Skeleton King and The Butcher.  Cool.

Haven’t we fought those guys already?

Okay, shit, the Obligatory Tristram shit in Act I’s overwith, here we go to … the desert?  Again?  

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Lut Gohlein.  That world/act was very much unique and full of flavor, especially after the ominous world surrounding Tristram.  The bright hot sands and appropriate demonspawn of the deserts/sewers all felt very appropriate.  It wasn’t just re-coloring the enemies from one act to the next, you’re only going to find some of these mobs in Act II.  

It’s all-rehashed as Caldeum, virtually the same city in the same place, only the circumstances are different.  Once again it’s another map that’s over-large and ponderous at times to get from one merchant to the next, and the outlying badlands all feel like re-imagined spins on the same deserts from D2.  The boss fight of Act 2 is satisfyingly difficult and the palace provides kind of a neat theater for fighting mobs, and once it’s done are we off to the swamp?

No, we’re going to the coolest part of Diablo III, Bastion’s Keep.  It’s basically the final bastion (see what they did there?) between the forces of Dr. Claw/Azmodan and Sanctuary.  This act feels like a wonderfully structured re-hashing of the Bloody Foothills, where the map is fairly straightforward and the mobs are innumerable and swarming.  The goals are pleasantly outlined and the blizzard team did a great job of cultivating the environment with numerous mob-vomiting megabeasts and crumbling structures everywhere you look.  As I was playing I felt the sense of urgency, it was a refreshing change of pace.  

Azmodan himself is a bullshit boss, and the main reason it was nice to kill him was knowing I’d never have to hear his annoying goddamn voice again.  

Finally we enter Act IV, the High Heavens.  

*insert giant fart sound*

The High Heavens isn’t so much an act as it is a staggered series of mini-bosses just before you fight Mrs. Diablo.  You can breeze through it all fairly quickly (in the first two difficulties, anyway), but that’s not so much what bothers me about it.  

It bothers me because we’re here in the high heavens buttfucking around fighting all these demons.  The venue itself feels implausible, as the entire basis of Diablo’s storyline was to harness Sanctuary’s power of humanity to rise agains the Heavens, yet here Diablo gets power-hungry and decides to go it alone as a super-demon.

What?  

Plus we don’t even get to fight any angels/archangels.  It’s simply a shiny place that Diablo’s pooped minions all over and we’re the janitor in charge of cleaning it all up.  Plus there’s all these weapon racks and vases everywhere, it just all doesn’t feel right.  The High Heavens I would expect to have almost nothing at all, the whole point of it is some semblance of clean purity.  Why have Armor Stands?  Especially Armor Stands that drop low-quality greaves?

The various corrupt growth that’s infected the heavens makes sense, but the rest of it all feels like forced accoutrements.  Then when we finally get to She-ablo, we have to defeat her three times (once in the ever-stupid Terror World, which is just as retarded as it sounds.  It’s not so much hard as tedious, but what bothers me is that I didn’t feel like I had to work for any of it.

Diablo II was long, or at least it felt long (that’s what she said).  The dungeons would go sometimes 3 or 4 floors deep, oftentimes being annoyingly labyrinthine in nature, but the payoff of actually finding where you needed to go/thanking god for finding a waypoint was fantastic.  The maps were shaken up constantly, and the bosses you fought felt important.  In diablo 3 the bosses are simply there to feed a flimsy story and can all be defeated virtually the same way.  Belial is the only one that requires any sort of strategy, otherwise most classes can simply shake up their runes and outlast the bosses without a problem.  

One of the primary reasons I hated/loved Diablo II was that when you got to hell, it sucked ass.  There were arcane mages galore that would nullify everything you’d done and I’d die constantly by their hand, losing oodles of gold and experience.  I’d shout at my computer and rage quit simply because it got exhausting fighting through these cocksuckers, but then I’d finally get to Diablo himself.  

His cage attacks are a massive pain in my sack, and the firebeam shit he would shoot out of his mouth was virtually instant death.  It was goddamn hard.  

In Diablo III I simply have to make sure to hit 1, 2, 3, 4, and left/right click as many times as possible until she’s dead.  

That’s not a knock on the game’s combat system at all (I actually really love that), it’s just ….. this is fucking Diablo.  This is probably the last time we’re going to see Diablo as a boss, and….this is it?  

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On a side note with the story, another thing that bothers me is that there’s no loose ends with which to forge a followup story.  The obvious hole from D2 was Baal, which worked out magnificiently.  Here it’s not quite so clear.

Also the voice acting all felt fucking atrocious.  I told my buddy it felt like they gathered up all the Lionhead guys who voice-acted Fable and put them to work.  The scripts were corny and cliche and the voice-acting was derped and herped.  

In their defense, I do enjoy having some sense of humor in there.  The Scoundrel in particular is a lot of fun to listen to as you’re playing your way through the game.  

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Anyways, Diablo III is a great game in it’s own right.  Comparing it to one of the best pc games ever made isn’t really fair, but to say it’s a worse game without acknowledging that it’s still a great game would be wrong.   

A weird night.

So it was a pretty unexceptional day.  I went down to Charleston to hang out with my buddies, and after we spent the evening down in Effingham checking out a boat, we ended up back at my pal Kevin’s place.  On my advice we watched “Dear Zachary”, a.k.a. The Most Depressing Documentary of All Time.  Afterwards it sparked a convo about the weird cruel things people do to others, etc.  

As I walk out the door I get a text from this girl I went on a couple dates with.  She has spent the better part of 3 days ignoring me and finally admitted via text she isn’t ready to date.  Well no shit.  I wasn’t really upset so much as frustrated.  I have no doubts she was lying or at least buttering it up to make it sound gentler when a more honest admission would’ve been, “I have met people more interesting who live closer who that I would rather fuck now, but thanks for amusing me for a few days.”  

Skank, basically.

Anywho as I’m letting that sink over me on the dark drive back from Charleston the first song to come up on my mp3 player is the Cake song “Tougher Than It Is,” which has a simple chorus tagline of “Some people like to make life a little tougher than it is.”  It was a pretty comforting notion that set my mind at ease that we all tread the same river of bullshit, but some of us prefer to wallow in it rather than float along.  

Moving right along.

While this other relationship has been disintegrating I met this other girl just yesterday and we’ve texted a bit but nothing really personal beyond getting to know you shit.  I decided to take a gamble and leave her a voicemail basically saying hi and a few things about myself.  Nothing creepy at all, mind you, just introductory and certainly random.  Who knows what will become of that.

Moving right along.

I’m nearly to the adjoining of Rt. 130 with Highway 36 near Tuscola and let me tell you it’s pitch fucking black even with the moon, and my mp3 player starts to bug out.  It’s never done this before.  One whole side of the audio goes out and it sounds tinny and has no vocals, just an isolated backing track.  I presume that the cable to the headphone jack had a wire finally break, but either way I angrily ripped the adapter out of my cassette player and threw it on the passenger-side floor.  

I turn onto Highway 36 going towards Tuscola and am going a solid 60 when in the dead of night, no lights of any kind except the ones coming from my car and the ones far, far off in the distance, I see something.

A guy.

A guy standing in the middle of the fucking road.  Like something you’d see out of a horror movie, staring straight at me.  I immediately freak out and swerve out of the way, narrowly avoiding a completely life altering disaster.  I called 911 and told them that they need to have a cop pick this guy up before he gets killed.

While this all is washing over me I realized two weird things:

1. The song that was playing when my mp3 player fucked up was called “Don’t Let Me Die Still Wondering” by Flogging Molly
2. If my mp3 player/cassette adapter hadn’t fucked up, chances are excellent I would’ve struck and potentially killed that guy/myself.

A terrible habit I have is pressing “next” on my mp3 player and looking from the screen to the road, over and over until I find a song I like.  It’s kind of an irresponsible staple I have, especially driving the monotonous and uneventful roads between Champaign and Charleston.  If I hadn’t turned it off, I may have had my eyes off the road when that weird potentially suicidal guy had crossed my path.  

I don’t necessarily have any sort of faith or am devout, but this was one of the first times in my life where I felt some sort of odd fate or blatant coincidence that didn’t feel like coincidence.  Gave me chills.

…….

That being said, get the fuck out of the road, you stupid asshole.  

Something I’m trying to change.

I was talking to this girl recently who told me that I have a very hypersensitive way of reading what people are thinking and worrying about it too much.  In so many words she told me I was being an emotional pussy, but at the same time she wasn’t being mean about it.  

The thing is she’s not wrong.

Since the divorce I’ve personally felt like not a whole lot has changed about me, I don’t do things much differently than before.  My personality feels pretty much like it was.  However since she’s pointed this out, I’ve recognized it in myself.  It bothers me.  I need to, in a sense, not give a fuck about things or people.  I need to just let people do whatever and not read into it.  I’m working on this.