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[nenjin]

I find it poorly written, logically flimsy and committing the worst of sins: inserting things into the original storyline that no one could have known.

It's not so entertaining for me as it is is rage-inducing.

Also virtually every voice actor in it is hammy as fuck.

[Lagslayer]

Ham is fine, as long as it's entertaining ham.

Overacting > underacting

[nenjin]

Ham is fine, as long as it's entertaining ham.

Overacting > underacting

When your Lords of Hell sound like mustache-twirling Disney villains, about the only reaction you can have is to laugh. I would have preferred a plot and story that wasn't targeted at 8 year olds.

[Neonivek]

nenjin...

You played the first game didn't you?

Because if so... I feel your pain. It is just that I felt it during Diablo 2 and I had no faith coming in that Diablo 3 was going to be faithful ESPECIALLY with the brightness (as it represents a stark tonal shift) and the giant enemies... and the tree monsters.

That and this is Blizzard. They couldn't write a continuous storyline if their lives depended on it. Warcraft 2 was their best written sequel (I think, I never paid attention to the story)

[Zangi]

You guys played D3 for the plot?

The fact that people bought and played/play this game actually makes me lose faith in humanity a little.

Has your faith in B12 been lowered?

[nenjin]

Hell, I've come to grips with Blizzard Art Theory by now. But.....did the writers seriously think Azmodan spouting off every 5 minutes about how the players will not do THE THING THEY WILL INEVITABLY DO was going to endear anyone to the story or characters? Or that irritating British child voice actors are liked by ANYONE? Or that Leah wailing "they're just stories!!!111" well beyond the point it was rational was going to do anything other than make her into a meme?

It's telling that all the major bad guys think they're masters of deception, tactics, strategy, terror....and that they completely fail to demonstrate that in story. I think it's a reflection of Blizzard's mindset at the time, that they felt themselves masters of game design, plotting, story and visuals. They thought they were being so fucking clever by writing hidden events into D2 after the fact, to justify how far their story needed to contort. When all it really did was show veteran players that the designers/authors of D3 had neither the touch nor the grace of the original designers.

And that's saying a lot for a game whose basic premise is: Go to Hell to beat up Satan.

You guys played D3 for the plot?

No. But it definitely added to my experience in D2. It only gave me something to laugh at, mock and skip in D3.

[Neonivek]

Or that Leah wailing "they're just stories!!!111"

Honestly that alone raised soo many questions to me. Shouldn't the existence of demons and angels be an established FACT in the diablo universe? ESPECIALLY since if you try hard enough you can easily find one...

And the fact that Diablo 2 happened...

Diablo 1 I could understand... it was rather isolated and I could see it happening without anyone really knowing about it.

But Diablo 2 was demons cutting a bloody swath across several countries with tons of witnesses.

And don't get me started on the word "Nephilim" and how much stupidity surrounds it and how the game and the manual contradict each other on exactly what it means (The manual for example suggests it is an archaic word for "human" that has been long forgotten... while the game uses it to mean people who have super powers because of the destruction of the world stone, which makes no sense if you understand the story given in the manual)

[Lagslayer]

Ham is fine, as long as it's entertaining ham.

Overacting > underacting

When your Lords of Hell sound like mustache-twirling Disney villains, about the only reaction you can have is to laugh. I would have preferred a plot and story that wasn't targeted at 8 year olds.

Allow me to elaborate.

About half the ham is ok, while the other half feels out of place. Azmodan seems like the sort of guy that likes to rub it in your face, so I give him a pass. The incredible camp of the templar was quite entertaining. Of course, after a few hours of playing, hearing the same little snippets of chat gets grating. If there was a way to turn the follower chatter off, I would.

As far as ham that was always bad, Maghda talks way too much for her relatively unthreatening character. Belial is also too obnoxious and "obvious" when he shows up, but nobody seems to notice. And Diablo should be completely silent. Diablo taunting every couple of minutes was the biggest problem I had with it, because he's much more intimidating otherwise.

[Neonivek]

Shouldn't the fact that they made King Leoric a laughing mustache twirling villain be any sort of tip off that they wouldn't keep diablo silent?

Also why is it Diablo when you think about it?

[Lagslayer]

Shouldn't the fact that they made King Leoric a laughing mustache twirling villain be any sort of tip off that they wouldn't keep diablo silent?

Also why is it Diablo when you think about it?

Because Diablo is the Lord of Terror. His greatest strength is his actions and sheer presence. He works best as a looming threat, felt but not confronted directly until the climax. Empty threats just make him look petty.
"If you destroy the rift it will kill you!!!!!1!10ne"
"It doesn't matter that you effortlessly destroyed my rift! You totally won't destroy the second one!"

Azmodan, on the other hand, comes off as a rather cocky personality, lending him more to spouting off and bragging. He is a battlefield commander, and communication is an important tool in his arsenal.

While Maghda was pretty stupid, her charisma was what made her most effective. Her writing is a bit poor, but not particularly out of character. Her master, Belial, isn't out of character, but suffers from even worse writing. His actions are more intelligent within the story logic, but the story logic also prevents the good guys from realizing what should be painfully obvious. But that's not camp, it's really bad writing.

tl;dr Diablo is campy AND written badly, while other characters simply can't match him on both levels.

[Neonivek]

And King Leoric was originally depicted as a sympathetic villain and a victim of diablo. Hence why he was made silent in the first game.

I think he wins the "butchered" contest.

[nenjin]

Diablo is the biggest offender, but he's just demonstrating a pattern that all the bad guys share.

"YOU WILL NOT DO THIS THING BECAUSE YOU ARE PATHETIC AND WEAK." (Find the Sword Fragments, Defend the Keep, Destroy the Siege Engines, Destroy the Hell Rifts.)

"YOU DID THAT THING DESPITE BEING PATHETIC AND WEAK, BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER. MY NEXT CHALLENGE WILL STOP YOU." (The whole fucking game.)

"OK, THAT CHALLENGE DIDN'T STOP YOU EITHER BUT I WILL KILL YOU LIKE ANTS WHEN WE MEET."

"ARGH, I'M DEAD. NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN."

Azmodan and Diablo are basically the same character. They say the same basic shit, have to constantly reframe what you're supposed to care about because you steamroll them and they both talk in that throaty, unimaginative demon voice.

I mean, compare D2. "LOOKING FOR BAEL?" That's the only fucking thing Duriel ever said and it made him a character people will never forget. (That and because he's a total cheap bastard.)

You know what D3's writing reminds me of? The Power Rangers. Some fucking exec was like "We cant' make this too subtle, otherwise we can't get legions of 12 year olds on board." Nevermind that D1 was basically the poster child for adult gaming and was boycotted as such. And yet D3 is filled with impaled corpses, exploding bodies and the like. You know, kid stuff.

That's what's so irritating. They knew what was expected of them, they put the barest framework in there, and then they a) went apeshit with all the lore that happens in the books written after D2: LOD and put it all into game and b) they boiled down everyone to hammy caricatures. You can't even fucking tell the differences between the Lords of Hell if you were just listening to their tone, because they all sound the same: angry and feckless.

Also, the sheer amount of homages to the original game. Why the fuck is Leoric back in the first place? WHY THE FUCK IS THE BUTCHER HERE? IZUAL, YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD AND HAVE BEEN FOR YEARS, GO AWAY. I can appreciate Act 1 trying to tie back to the original game. But they went completely overboard with it. I'm still surprised I didn't have to kill Griswold AGAIN, or that the Spirit of Wirt didn't come back to be like "Hey, remember me from that game you loved!??!"

But the absolute best example of the poor quality of the writing is....the guilt spirits in the High Heavens. Nowhere does the logic of the writing fall apart more than when NPCs you didn't like try to make you feel guilty for shit the story did, and not you. Zultan Khule is trying to make me feel bad about him dying? Did the people who wrote the dialog even fucking play the game or listen to what someone else wrote? Maaaayyyybeeee if Zultan Khule had been like "We had a chance to stop Diablo in his tracks but you killed me, so all this tragedy is your fault", I'd have been like "Maybe." But then again, Zultan Khule attacks you in the first fucking place. I can't watch those bits without having this running through my head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjTdO5bNHj0

And remember, these are the Lords of Hell, masters of whatever domain they claim. And they can't even manage to guilt trip effectively, let alone scare, intimidate or cow you. And that thinking is written into the character dialogs, where every single character heroically tells each bad guy NPC to go fuck themselves.

The core dialog and banter is basically what killed the entire story. If they didn't talk directly to us, and we didn't directly talk to them, I probably would have found more personal meaning and context in what was happening.

[Neonivek]

It is because the world stone brings the dead back to life for no reason. So it revived Leoric (who once again is still the most butchered, and I don't hear a reason other then Diablo is more silly) and the butcher.

Why the Butcher looks ABSOLUTELY FREEKEN NOTHING like his Diablo 1 counter part and why the world stone even went as far as Tristam when it fell no where close to Tristram is beyond me. Look there are tons of plotholes and inconsistencies in Diablo 3.

I mean don't get me wrong... Diablo is much hammier then Leoric, but Leoric had even less reason to be like that.

--

Actually in that respect... The World stone is the most lazy writing in the game. In that it can just do whatever the heck the writers want it to do.

In spite of the fact that it has a clear use and abilities written out in the previous game. (In that I believe it both closed off Earth from the other realms AND took away the demon/angel powers of the Nephilim)

[Tnx]

Hah, I just saw the Butcher last night and he was 6 times as large as he was from the first game.  That was very confusing.

[Darkmere]

Heh. I'm just going to say my piece and be gone.

It wasn't the worldstone falling, which means you failed to complete even half of one act. Also, the manual for the first game states that there were many butcher-like demons, you even fought them in the cave levels in one. The new one has been twisted by things into more of a monstrosity than the standard model.

There's also an option to auto-skip cutscenes now. The rest of it was pretty dumb, but I've heard the new project director took act V in a far more satisfying direction, so I'll wait and see.

Beyond all that, the actual gameplay and loot-whoring has improved exponentially into something far more like Diablo 2 should have been (even with it's permanently bugged skills and all that).

If you bought it and were disappointed with even a hint of desire to play the game, I do suggest trying it again to see how the new changes play out. It's changed from something I wanted desperately to like into something I'm excited to play again.

If there's any interest in a Bay12 community in-game, please post it here so I can join the chat.