When I first started playing Diablo III, I genuinely enjoyed it. I still enjoy it, and I continue to play it every once in a while. There's plenty to do in the game, from hunting for loot to running the auction house to grinding for achievements.
Why am I so bored?
I was talking to a friend of mine recently about how I became bored with D3, and he told me that the game may not have been the exact type of game to satisfy your time-sink needs. While that may partially be true (I like to spend loads of time in other games as well), I have to mostly disagree. The loot hunt was nothing new to me because I can compare it to being similar as the loot hunt in WoW. As you defeat harder foes, they drop higher quality loot to help you kill even harder foes which will drop even higher loot and so on. However, WoW separates it's leveling experience from it's loot hunt experience, while D3 does both at the same time. I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but we must as a result play through the story multiple times in order to reach level 60 on separate difficulty levels. Not that big of a deal to some, but by the time you reach that maximum level, you're grinding on Inferno difficulty for the best loot through parts of the game you've been through several times before, so not only is it repetitively boring, but it's ridiculously hard too, so you're going to be going even slower through parts you've already been through.
Players on the forums and everywhere else have been citing problems too, ranging from the auction house to the story itself. For me personally, I enjoyed the story, but that might be because I hadn't played a Diablo game before this one, and while it was all intriguing, I can see where people are coming from. They say the beginning is nice at reintroducing us to the realm of Sanctuary, and there aren't a whole lot of complaints other than some digressions that don't make sense, like the part where the sword piece just so happened to be making the goatmen go mad ("Of course!" Deckard Cain exclaims). By the time you reach Act III though, the story is stagnating to your long trips across ramparts and battlefields, and Act IV has you just clicking through some hollow text spoken by ghosts and a few lame minibosses because you want to get to Diablo already.
At the same time, the auction house is there to help you retrieve loot for money or gold to help you get that item that just won't drop, but then the "item hunt end game" becomes pointless because you can just buy everything by earning all the gold necessary. The personally acquired item drops are more than enough for you to complete Normal, but you better have saved some dough for Nightmare, because continuing on through the new difficulty will prove difficult without grandfather Auction House's core advice and assistance.
My point is this: It's not that I'm bored with the vast amount of things that I have available to do in front of me. I am bored with how the game is more about the calculation-heavy meta involving the auction house and it's almost-necessary use for higher difficulty. I've heard from friends that previous Diablo games were fun because finding that one item you've been searching for forever was a wonderful experience. Now, we can just look up the closest thing in the auction house, and most of the items we actually find ourselves either end up being not worth wearing or vendored, with a select few being good enough to auction off.
The game is no longer about the fun of dungeon crawling for awesome items. It's more about thinking and bartering and making gold. Color me disappointed for wanting to go on an adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment