Diablo 3 gets my vote for sure.
Where to start. I guess first off the story had gotten so far up its ass with its own importance that every line of dialogue was like someone was standing on a stage delivering it to an audience, panning to the crowd for a reaction. And I imagine that's exactly what happened for the voice actors. Every line is so overacted (dripping with character) that listening to NPCs talk became something to laugh about rather than pay attention to. ("I promised I'd protect Marco....AND NOW HE'S DEAD" will live forever in my memory as a line dropped by a game intended to make me feel one way but that just made my laugh my ass off.) Act 4 was so completely over the top in cinematic epicness that it made you look at the actual game you were playing and go "Wut?"
Second the atmosphere. Diablo 3 exists in the era of "Blizzard color theory" and so every area glowed with its own "special" light. Yeah it was dank and gothic and there are crows cawing and mist and impaled people and corpses exploding wetly. One thing I can't really fault is Blizzard's audio engineering and sound effects. But it was also like playing in a techno dance club half the time because of the neon light effects and hyper saturation of colors. Everything was bright and colorful to the point it felt like you were playing a kid's game that, when you peeled away the special effects and lighting revealed something trying very hard to seem adult. The "heroes must save the world" trope ending up seeming overblown and somewhat preposterous in this kind of environment. You felt it trying too hard in every area. Caught between the voice acting and Blizzard's need for an eeeppppppiiiiccccc story and the aesthetics, it really felt like the game was an edgy Saturday morning cartoon compared to the staid, measured and timed execution of Diablo 2's story. The atmosphere was also deeply hurt by...
The pacing. They made the normal difficulty so easy that you face rolled through all the content, both mechanical and thematic. You'd end up skipping through dialog, especially when it was so overwrought, because you just needed to get back to clicking. You took no time to stop and smell the roses because it was obvious they wanted you through normal difficulty ASAP. As such most of your first playthrough felt trivial and the gameplay itself quickly became mindnumbing. If you weren't on board with the story or the aesthetics, gameplay itself made sure your urge to just CLICK THE FUCK THROUGH EVERYTHING would keep you playing. I'm generally the kind of person that will always try to give a game the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their stories. I'll read shit, listen to shit, let NPCs say their piece. But even Diablo 3 had me going "Yep, yep, uh huh, click click click" because everything would just be reduced down to the bullet point quest objectives on the right of your screen anyways, just like it was with WoW. Now, today, the speed of gameplay is so jacked that if you're not moving through a level non-stop, exploding every enemy on the screen in a couple seconds, you're not playing Diablo as intended. It's just kind of turned into a high-speed clusterfuck of an aRPG. (The real irony is that as soon as you got out of normal the difficulty sky-rocketed. This was back when there was actually an economy for yellows, and you got drops for all classes (i.e. your drop pool for your own class gear was greatly diluted.) And where were you supposed to get the gear you needed to survive your next playthrough? Well the real money auction house of course...Guess what changed because no one was putting up with that shit? Fucking everything.)
Mechanics. Blizzard ensured you had to do little to no thinking about how to play the game due to how characters were set up. They trickle out skills to you for use, most of which sucked without runes, which they also slowly handed out over the whole first playthrough. The result was I didn't really care about my skills and I was forced to use a lot of skills I didn't want to use because I had no options otherwise. Sure they looked flash, but there was no diversity to your choices. You felt like you were playing a pre-programmed build rather than something you organically arrived at. (The removal of spending points on stats also contributed to this.) The original rune system was supposed to give you a reason to play to see what other runes you could find and how they modified your abilities. Then Blizzard decided that wasn't a scaleable solution, and just made a handful of runes for each ability instead and balanced around those. So there wasn't a lot of surprise or evolution of your play. Blizzard EVENTUALLY figured out how to do what they originally planned to, by creating Unique gear items that radically modified how skills worked.....but that was like a year or two after release, and by then the damage had been done because no one really cared anymore except the hardcore D3 fans, and it required you to farm for specific pieces of gear. That then evolved into "let's make the game about farming for set pieces" which further upped build power to stupid heights while also effectively hardcoding what builds were worth a damn, because the whole game scaled up to these set piece builds with broken uniques. This was all compounded by Blizzard adding torment and rift challenge levels....it's pretty obvious they were struggling to keep up with the playerbase and constantly crank out new shit to keep them engaged, which meant you got a lot of low quality updates that were mostly about raising the scaling bar. I just can't run in a hamster wheel like that for eternity, especially when I'm not in love with the base game and all it's offering is "play long enough to get these set pieces so you too can shoot lazers like the rest of the playerbase." Level and tileset reuse was the name of the game, and even with random color palettes thrown in there it just felt like you were doing the same shit over and over again. Reusing the same monsters and bosses over and over again and giving them different names rather than, I dunno, making some new goddamn bosses? Oh the game's not challenging enough? How about TWO BOSSES AT ONCE! Blizzard's whole plan for Diablo 3's post release life span seemed poorly thought out, and it stank of "what's the most cost-effective way to keep supporting our flagship title that totally failed everyone's expectations?"
And then all the extras. The real money auction house. Letting uniques dominate the economy so yellows and blues literally only become useful for crafting kruft to roll yet more Uniques or re-roll your uniques, and you ignore 94% of the loot that drops. (It got to the point they'd exhausted the pool of unique drops because people were getting 3 and 4 every couple of hours that they had to add a SECOND LEVEL OF UNIQUE. Not just Legendary, but Ancient Legendary versions of the same item with even higher stats.) The gold economy was so broken at one point people were sitting on trillions of gold. Devaluing their own mechanics with those Damage/Survivability gear comparisons where something dumb like "Increase Health Orb pickup radius by 50%" vastly increased numbers despite not really being that useful, or crit chance/damage basically becoming more important to the calculation than anything else. Rather than adequately summarizing stat changes between gear and having players figure it out, they just crammed all their mechanics into 3 meta-stat line changes and aimed their development at that. Paragon levels, both as a "Oh fuck we have to come up with something to keep player's attention after they beat the game, and we have to do it quick" system and as a soft admission they should have fucking listening to the fanbase in the first place about stat and points spending. How weapons were basically irrelevant to how your character's combat worked because the entire game was based around special abilities. So like, the monk never actually hit things with his weapons, he only did flashy, colorful punch and kick attacks. They belatedly put actual weapons in the monk's hands when he attacks later, but it was both too little too late and pointed to how Blizzard just didn't think through what people actually liked about Diablo before they streamlined the fuck out of everything, even down to weapon attack animations. I mean, why bother showing the weapon if they don't actually swing it, they just use all these fruity abilities we thought up, right? That was a huge logical disconnect I never got over, and was my first real indication that someone had fucked with the formula for pragmatic efficiency reasons rather than what was actually fun or cool.
Diablo 3 just felt like an overly managed continuation of the series, something designed by committee and mercilessly iterated on until it was stripped down to its bare essentials, then dog-piled on post-release with a lot of microimprovement side-systems. Straightforward, safe, easy to scale up. As a result when you finally beat it you didn't really feel like you'd accomplished anything, and you'd done it on a character you didn't really feel like you owned. You got more personalized build attention later in the game's life, but at the cost of the aforementioned "gear set build" problem and just an endless treadmill of busy work. Blizzard wanted to make a game for the ages that people would play for years....and I think they seriously did not think through what that requires from a basic level of game design. Blizzard loves their boxes of cleanly organized, level-scaled content and discovered that it does not take long before players get bored as shit of it, and you can tack on as many difficulty levels, grindable goal posts as you want and it still doesn't make for a deeper or more lasting game experience. (Gems and gem improvement is like the nth level of grinding. It used to be you grinded adventure challenges, to get rift shards, to get rift crystals, to run rifts, to shoot for ever better times on ever hard levels of rifts, to get gems with special cray cray stat effects on them, to level up gems and their effects up once you beat the rift, to the point once the gem had leveled up far enough that it was random chance whether the gem leveled up further or just did nothing at the end of the rift. I mean, holy fucking grind Batman! Even Blizzard realized that had become too much busy work and has since refined a couple steps out of the process.)
I think Blizzard's hope of wedding an eSports game to a cash machine like a Real Money Auction House did significant damage to the game during development and beyond. So many of the game's problems stem from those two desires. From the very flat and level playing field nature of character growth (no stats, and a well controlled list of abilities, runes for those abilities and passive slots, so the only real variable is gear which they oh so dearly hoped you'd spend real money for on the auction house so your e-peen could shine like a beacon of light in a dark sea of scrubitude), to itemization, to how trivial the first playthrough felt, to the post game scramble for a plan, to the stupidly lavish but essentially empty story, so much of the game can be explained for me by what Blizzard was actually trying to accomplish. All the baffling choices, subtractions from the formula, the simplicity and grossly slick way the game played....what they wanted out of Diablo 3 is what they eventually got out of stuff like Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm I guess?, and now Overwatch. A low-maintenance cash cow versus something like World of Warcraft, that is easy to play and represents the kind of aesthetic Blizzard has been trending toward since WoW. Diablo 3 was supposed to be the crown jewel in their recurring revenue stream to supplant WoW, but they mishandled that transition so badly that the game's rep has been tarnished. I don't think it's a coincidence that new IPs seem to be Blizzard's thing lately, or mashups of IPs like Heroes of the Storm. They bald faced tried to capitalize on Diablo's popularity and tie it to a real money economy and it blew up in their faces. I guess it's funny that only a few short years later that is pretty much the norm in every multiplayer game out there. It wasn't just the attempt to double monetize Diablo that pissed people off this much, it's how the entire game was structured to funnel you into that system. Now Diablo 3 has gone the opposite direction, by showering players with so much power that high level gameplay is just a speed run mess of ability spam, the numbers keep getting higher and the curve getting longer...I mean, multi-billion damage crits. WTF does that even mean anymore?
I imagine for someone new to the Diablo series it might have been a good experience. For an old jaded gamer though it just seemed like a fuck ton of window dressing around a game someone didn't take the long term enjoyability of seriously enough. Blizzard has been playing catch up to their own IP since they released it. And the stuff Blizzard does to try and keep D3 fresh month to month, I now see adopted by a lot of "games as services" online aRPGs. Scaling, seasonal content. "Loot crates" at regular intervals. Endless, scaling micro improvement grinds. No wonder people say they simply don't have the time or the desire to play this kind of stuff anymore.
Author
Topic: Worst Sequel(s) you have ever played? (Read 15012 times)