This Diablo III madness has no end. 140 hours have passed and I don’t even feel it. It is like that one scene in Twilight whereby Bella sits by the window observing the change of seasons in one minute. There are four levels of difficulty in this video game. It takes me 140 hours to clear the second difficulty level – Nightmare – for all my five classes. My next milestone is to complete the third difficulty level – Hell – and call it a day. Inferno difficulty could well be too brutal for me.
Or maybe not. We shall see.
I will not repeat what has already been said in my last post “Diablo III – First 80 Hours“. What I said back then is still valid today. Instead, I will share my experience with the game as I progress through different difficulty levels. And a short recap on news surrounding the Diablo community from launch till now.
At launch, Diablo III smashed records, sold more than 6 millions copies excluding the 1 million World of Warcraft annual pass subscribers who got the game free. Due to this unexpected sales record, a game that requires constant connection to the servers became unplayable as the servers were brought down time and time again by the surge in demand. Onto then second week, when the US servers finally gained stability, reports started to come in as players’ accounts were compromised, in-game progress was lost. The solution is to use a physical or mobile authenticator that provides an extra layer of protection like how Internet Banking tackles security. On top of that, Blizzard gives us an option to enable SMS alert whenever account information is modified. I do not know of any video gaming company that goes into this level of security to protect our accounts. That could be due to the Real Money Auction House (RMAH) that I will talk about in just a bit. Back to the first month after launch, the ride was bumpy.
Meanwhile, while the US region cried about the rumored hacks, Blizzard‘s office in Korea responsible in hosting the Asia servers was raided by the local government that sought evidence against Blizzard in their denial of refund requests. Asia region has its own controversy. Koreans were given more quotas in accessing the Asian game servers while other locations such as China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong needed to queue for hours just to get into the game. In-game exploitation also ran wild in the Asian servers causing long extended maintenance that denied people from playing the game. Players in Asia were as unhappy as the US counterparts. I have no idea how the European players were coping. I suspect they would have faced similar issues.
RMAH was launched in June. Those who had high end in-game items made profits due to the initial craze. One item could be sold for US$250 up. While minority made money out of playing a game, the community overall appeared to view RMAH as the unnecessary evil. Couple that with the fact that the game had been exploited by some and the economy imbalance that persists till today, RMAH has become a messy business. However, if we are to take a step back, with or without RMAH, people trade items – items that they do not create – using real money. While RMAH provides a safer environment for trading, it also encourages those who would not have traded trade.
To add onto this drama, Blizzard has decided that one of the gear attribute – attack speed – was too high. Balancing the game means that all in-game items – past and future – have to be adjusted. To compensate, Blizzard also makes Diablo III‘s inferno difficulty more manageable. The net result was that those who have spend hundreds of dollars buying gears from RMAH suddenly woke up to the new reality that their gears were less powerful than before. This seems to have put a brake to RMAH sales. Are you willing to buy in-game items using real money only to find that one day, the items may be no longer what you wanted them to be?
Tricky situation.
If you read the online professional reviews, Diablo III has done pretty well. If you crosscheck the scores with user reviews, the two do not tally. User reviews from Metacritic to Amazon slam down the score to the lowest possible. Some players from US demanded a full refund after beating the game and strangely, Blizzard has granted their requests. Official forums continue to be on fire citing Diablo III as the worst game Blizzard has ever produced. Participation in public games seems to dwindle. The community seems to thin out. Perhaps the end game is not quite there yet as we are still waiting for a future patch to address this issue. Or perhaps action hack-and-slash genre is not something some would enjoy doing for hours.
What about me?
I love it. My friends seem to love it too. Day in day out, I play with my friends online, overcoming challenges. The contents may be the same. It is Act One through Act Four. The story is linear. But different classes play differently. Different difficulty levels play differently. After we have cleared Nightmare difficulty (the second level), Hell plays like a whole new different game. The challenge requires me to pay attention to mechanics I may have overlooked in the previous difficulty levels. To me, Diablo III is like Tetris. The framework and the pieces do not change over different levels. But the fun stacks up as the pace increases.
How long will I stay with this game? I am not too sure. Maybe till the new World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria is out?