If you had told me four years ago, in summer of 2008 when Diablo III was first announced, that this was the game that would ruin my faith in Blizzard Entertainment, I would have looked at you like you were mad. And there are probably quite a lot of people out there that will look at me like I'm mad now that I'm actually saying it; Diablo III has ruined my faith in Blizzard.
Blizzard has, in the past, made games that has massive replayability. I don't know how many hours I've spent playing Starcraft, Warcraft III, even World of Warcraft as a casual gamer, and particularly Diablo II. Starcraft II not so much, but that's mostly because, aside from the campaign, that game is so much focused on competitive gaming, and I'm not a competitive gamer. But now there's Diablo III, and I don't see any replayability here at all. I've maxed out two characters to level 60, and feel no incentive to keep playing those characters. And absolutely no desire to create new ones.
In Diablo II, creating new characters was fun. You had to plan out what you wanted to do, what skills you wanted, how to best upgrade your stats... It required some thought and actual choices. And if you wanted to try something different, you'd have to create a new character and start over. I liked that, I liked creating lots of characters and specialize them. In Diablo III there is no reason to create a new character of a class you've already played, it'll just be the same as the old one. And that's just... Sad.
Don't get me wrong. The game is fun. But it just doesn't feel like a Diablo-game. I probably wouldn't have been this disappointed if this was an entirely new franchise, but... It's not. It's Diablo. And it's disappointing. I don't see myself still playing this game at all in a month, except maybe as a novelty on LAN's. As a matter of fact, I'll probably play Diablo II over III.
Or, you know... Torchlight II. Which is made by the actual people who made Diablo II. And looks so much better.
Anyway... I no longer feel particularly excited about anything coming from Blizzard. I'll most likely buy the next two parts of Starcraft II, as I can't imagine they'd do anything to screw up that, considering the massive professional community around that game. But I have completely lost interest in anything that has to do with World of Warcraft with the recent changes to character development and skills. There's bound to be an expansion to Diablo III at some point, but I can't really imagine being interested in that. They'd have to make some really mind-blowing changes to make me interested. And then there's the unknown new project they're working on, apparently code-named Titan, but... Based on Diablo III and the recent developments in WoW, I'm not gonna hold my breath... Also; It's apparently gonna be an MMO as well, and will most likely be subscription-based, so I'm really not interested either way.
There used to be a time where Blizzard meant quality and longevity. Sadly, that time has apparently passed.
