I break the self-imposed silence with quick impressions after a few hours of gameplay (as said earlier, I pre-ordered D3 weeks ago because it's the only game I will get to play with my siblings in years).
Art style, you say? This game is an eyesore. Literally, I have chronic dry eye syndrome, and it was starting to make my eyes hurt, trying to focus on the blurred outlines of shit.
I would even be fine with it if it had WoW art style, but it has none. WoW had environments that weren't blurry and murky. It had a sharp cartoon look (ironically more like Torchlight 2).
D3's environments are but a texture covering the barren gameplay grid underneath - both visually and in terms of layout. Half of Diablo is the presence of the environment, but Jay Wilson's "artistic vision" involved blurrying shit out so characters "stand out more".
I installed darkd3.com filter, which is a MUST for retaining a semblance of sanity, but there are two problems:
1) Sharpening unsharpened images is like zooming into a police photo expecting CSI-like enhancement. It works better than I thought, actually, but there's no free lunch.
2) When you're running through a monochromatic dungeon and your character is lit up with the dungeon's "color theme" (SICKLY GREEN), no post-processor will fix it. This is why I signed the color petition in 2008, among 64000 others to be summarily laughed at and dismissed by Jay Wilson and the rest of "NU DIABLO" team. If character are to "stand out more", why is my screen all green? Why is my character green as I run through the dungeon? Am I running this on a monochrome monitor from the 70's?
Remember when I said that Torchlight 2, a low-budget indie game will be able to compete with Diablo3 graphics-wise? Well, from the latest videos of T2, it looks exactly that way. Not only it has environments that actually come together as a whole, it has a dungeon generator that is more expansive, it has skill trees, it has characters that don't look like ass.
My male Wizard looks like an Elf of ambiguous gender, by the way. His voice is what I'd expect from a mage, and it completely mismatches his appearance.
The attacks... feel passable (better than Titan Quest, which was awful), and look mediocre. Demon Hunter has a chaingun at level 6 or something, and Wizard has a spell which looks like a bitmap of THE UNIVERSE, rotating and expanding. And a giant laser. There seems little rhyme or reason to the nature of these attacks. Like the game's dungeons, they're a thin overlay over DPS mechanics, designed to make you feel like you're doing something important, rather than having any semblance of strategic weight. Or just plain old "oomph" for that matter. None of my attacks match the Sorceress' fireball in pure feel. Instead, it feels like using an overpowered wand in WoW.
This feeling of immediate feedback between what you do and what happens to enemies, is crippled by the obvious use of WoW engine, in a lazy way. Major parts of code had to be rewritten for it to work as a Diablo game.
They clearly weren't changed enough.
The WoW stench is all over the game - from hearthstone, to the spell bar, to strangely instanced bosses, to the lack of single-player mechanics (why did you think they left them out? Because WoW had none to port over).
When my cousin Barbarian runs, his animation doesn't finish before looping. If the animation is X frames, it goes somewhere to X*0.7, then back to the first frame. That's right, the animation/network engine is doing that in a Blizzard game in 2012.
With all their focus on coop mechanics and simplicity (they removed distance limit for party XP gain, after all), Blizzard somehow managed to fuck that up anyway by introducing items which boost XP gain. Eventually this is bound to unhinge the progress of various party members from one another, and I have no idea of how the game will handle a level 30 fighting alongside a level 36. Blizzard completely ignored the ingenious party scaling "sidekick" mode from City of Heroes (2004), and somehow I don't think it's in Diablo 3. It sure as hell wasn't in WoW. Pun intended.
The game looks like something terrible happened in 2008-2010, and they restarted completely from scratch, in emergency mode. Or maybe they just wasted a lot of time. They took code from WoW team, used Raven Cemetery and Darkshire as template, combined it with Warcraft3's "in-game storytelling mission cutscene corridor design", and off they went.
Jay Wilson is the Blizzard's version of George Lucas. Destroying a franchise for money, by trying to appeal to lowest common denominator, which, luckily, happens to align with the apex of his own imagination and taste.
Diablo 3 is not a "bad" game. It's better than many Diablo-alikes out there (like Titan Quest). But, whatever the reason, there's no "Blizzard touch" to be felt. Not even close. The sanctity of the franchise has been fouled.
