Is Diablo III worth the money?

The Game Room
41

I’m still playing it, and feel I got my $60 worth out of it. It’s not perfect, there are issues, but if I break it down I spent less than a dollar an hour. I have mostly focused on one character (monk), and have started dabbling with the other characters and feel I will eventually take all 5 characters to level 60 because they play differently enough that it would still be fun.

To a lot of the complaining coming from people comparing Diablo 2 to Diablo 3: D2 had a LOT of polishing and tweaking over the years. D3 has been out for 2 months. FWIW I think D3 is a better game 2 months in than D2 was 2 months in.

They’ve addressed a lot of little things, I love the shared stash, in-game auction houses (although prices on higher end stuff is ridiculously inflated right now), running over gold to pick it up, treasure goblins, town portal as a skill rather than an item, no more id scrolls, nephalem valors (bonus mf and gold find bonuses you get for killing elites/champs), etc.
Some things that I don’t like include: how ridiculously inflated auction house prices are right now, gold farm spammers, REALLY low drop rate on legendaries and set items, some balance issues, etc.

In between: I love that they put in a super hard difficulty level, but I can’t handle most of the elite and champion mobs in inferno, and don’t feel like spending weeks or months grinding gold to survive it. That’s okay though, I’m planning on leveling my other characters at least to the end of hell, and that will take some time, so my cost spent per hour playing is only going to keep going way down.
I don’t know if I like or hate the way skills work now. On one hand, I did like putting points into my skills in D2 and trying to get that perfect build, but on the other hand, it’s nice to be able to experiment now and change skills at any time with no penalty. I strongly disagree with people who think most builds are the same, I have seen quite a few different skill sets being used.

42

I will say that this game seems more prone to “build of the day” issues. Meaning every time someone posts a video on you tube of them tearing up inferno with some new build all the sudden everybody and their mother instantly tries to switch to it, driving ah prices thru the stratosphere on very common gear. It’s pretty annoying. Happening right now with crit gear. Used to be attack speed gear.

43

It is a very streamlined version of D2. You can play wacky builds without having to relevel a guy. You don’t need to play inventory tetris. You can socket gems guilt free since you can take them out for a nominal fee. Boss fights are a little more fun and creative (ok, it went from facetank or kite to facetank or kite while not standing in the fire, still a bit of an improvement). You can access 6 of your skills at a time without messing with the f keys. You don’t need to make mules or risk tranferring items between characters.

The cons of the streamlining is that a lot of the bells and whistles went away. Fewer gems, no jewels, no charms, no rune words, no pvp yet.

The big con for me is the Auction house takes over the game. Getting to 60 is trivially easy, because you can get amazing leveling gear for chump change. Getting drops is less exciting, since 90% of the time your good gear goes to acquiring gold, which you then use to buy good gear. Finding an upgrade is much harder since you’ll have purchased good gear from the auction house.

I’ve enjoyed the game a lot, and still play it quite a bit, but not being able to get that excited about item drops is a big downer, as that seemed to be a big part of my D2 enjoyment.

44

As someone who had multiple types of Barb in D2, guess I’ll be skipping this until it’s heavily discounted and play Torchlight II instead.

45

Its the first Blizzard game Ive left with a bad taste. Ive gotten bored with others eventually as you do with any game, this is the first where Ive stopped because I found it irritating.

Online to play is not a big deal to me, as such. I have some sympathy for anti-piracy measures, my problem is with the method with everything being kept on server - lag issues in a single player mode is unforgiveable as far as Im concerned, particularly when its combined with the possibility of being so weak you cant play effectively any more. They were so focussed on auction house and real money that they have deliberately made it worse for people who just wanted to play in the game.

Otara

46

This is true, but at the same time, it’s not an excuse. The problem is that a lot of the things that got added over time to D2 that made it better should have been in D3 from the start - there was no reason to go backwards. Stuff that was perfected in D2, like the item system, should NOT have been changed. And yet we end up with stuff like boring item affixes, useless legendaries, no reason to even click on white items (some were useful in D2 due to sell value, imbuing or socketing, for example).

They did indeed fix a lot of little things, and I can understand why some things (the skill system) needed an overhaul and would take some experimenting. But they also really screwed up on some of the big stuff, and no amount of nice little things like automatic gold pickup or the like can overcome that and make D3 as fun to play as D2 was.

47

In Blizzard’s defense, imbuing and socketing were both added long, long after release, IIRC. We may very well see them make a reappearance after Blizzard takes care of the many, many other itemization issues in the game.

And, yes, whites were also often great for gold, but D3 needs less gold in the economy, not more.

48

Replaying games on different difficulties holds no appeal for me. Considering what other games are on the market I’m kind of surprised D3 seems to get away with releasing a game whose main draw seems to be playing it over and over again. I imagine if it wasn’t called “Diablo III” and had been released by some other company it’d be blasted by everyone for how boring it is.

49

To be fair, playing the game over and over at higher difficulties was the point of Diablo and Diablo II too

50

Is D3 worth the money? Yes.

Is D3 a great game? No.

It looks good and is easy to play. Like, super-easy. Here, I’ll give you the main combat strategy for the game: left-click, left-click, left-click, left-click, right-click, left-click, left-click, left-click, left-click, left-click, press 1, left-click, left-click, etc.

I got bored after the 2nd boss and stopped playing, but I still don’t feel like I wasted my money, prolly because I got the game free as a download with my 1-year subscription to WoW. Had I paid $60, I would still feel the game was worth the money, since it is well-made and fun in a non-thinking, relaxing kind of way. But, I didn’t play D1 or D2, or any other top-down RPG, so for me this was my introduction to the genre, and as such I don’t regret the time I spent playing at all.

Mind you, I don’t feel the need to keep playing it at all, although I feel I might try it again near the end of the year, when there’s much more content via patches.

I can’t afford anything in the game AH, and I refuse to pay real money in that AH, so those aspects of the game are for me a point against, not in favor.

My advice: wait a year or two and get this game for $20. For $20, I don’t think anyone could say it was a travesty of a game.

51

Titan’s Quest?
Torchlight?
Borderlands?

Nope - you may not like playing different difficulties over and over, but there are plenty of people who do.

53

That would be left-press, right-click, left-press, 1, left-press…

54

Haven’t read through everyone’s response, so most likely everything I say here will have already been covered. Also, might piss a few people off, as right now I’m frustrated with the game.

First off, the answer to this is ‘yes’…‘but’. It’s worth the money, and it’s fun to play and even replay, but there are some aspects of the game that can be quite frustrating. For one, it’s internet only. I’m sure you know this, but you need to REALLY know it, and evaluate your internet connection, not just for how fast it is but for how reliable it is. My home internet (from CenturyLink) basically sucks, in a nut shell (or a large donkey sack). Oh, it’s fast enough, no doubt…but it’s highly unstable, cutting out several times a day for anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute or so. No big deal usually…but when playing this game, especially solo, it’s VERY frustrating to get booted and have to restart a level from scratch every hour or so. Especially when you’ve just managed to clear to that nice shinny chest after dying several times (more on this in a sec), and the reward is in sight…and then bam, internet goes down just long enough to lose conn and you are back to square one. Maybe…depends on where the latest checkpoint is, since frustration factor number two is you can’t save your game progress on your own. It autosaves at several fixed checkpoints in the game. Oh, it will save your loot, as long as you’ve put it in your bag before your internet went tits up for the 5th time this evening, but you are going to have to slog back through everything you just did, even if the next checkpoint is in sight.

Which brings us to frustration factor number…well, whatever whining rant number I’m on now. Gear and difficulty level/dying. This game is all about gear. Get that in your head first off. Oh, I can see the rolling of eyes…ALL of these kinds of games are about gear. Sure…but in order to even play the later levels (well, assuming you want to survive more than a few seconds when you meet an elite pack) you have got to gear up. And the only way to do that is to BUY stuff. Crafting? Forget about it…don’t waste your money. It’s not worth it. I’ve spent literally 100k trying to craft one usable helmet that I could (possibly…another rant on this in a few) buy at the auction house for a tenth the price. That is, unless I want something decent, in which case my options are to pony up enough gold to make Bill Gates wince. The only crafting that’s worth having is gem crafting…and here you are going to sink literally a boat load into trying to create the higher level gems. To get, say, a star gem you need to craft at least 3 of the previous types (30k gold each) and then craft your gem (an additional 80k)…and for this you get a marginally better gem than the one you had. There are better gems, but unless you are dead lucky (I’m not) you need to find the plans for them, since they cost in the millions of gold to purchase.

On to dying. In the early levels, the game is quite fun and you probably won’t die very much. I think I went through the entire first play through with my Demon Hunter and died maybe once. On Nightmare it was still playable, but I probably died once per act at this point…maybe a touch more. Again, it was fun, my guy was leveling and a few deaths are no worries. By Hell though I was having to gear up (after wasting a ton of money on crafting that I wish I had back now), and I was dying fairly frequently. Maybe 1-2 deaths per boss mob and a few deaths per level if I ran into one of the elite packs in a bad situation. At this point I started to watch YouTube videos on how to spec my DH and what gear I needed, and started trying to buy what I needed. I finally managed to make it through Hell though, and thought I was geared pretty well. Until Inferno. Basically, forget it unless you are a god like player with the Gear of the Gods. After perhaps 2 dozen deaths I managed to make it though the first act. I haven’t even been able to survive an entire play through of one of the random dungeons or even just wandering around at the beginning of the second act yet. The elite packs are just ridiculous. Wall, imprison, fire, poison and arcane traps are the norm. Oh, and they are faster than you too. Basically, even in optimal situations (narrow winding passages where I can run, drop traps and shoot over my hip as I flee like a coward) I’m generally dying multiple times. And that’s IF my internet connection manages to stay up, which it won’t.

There are some other rants dealing mainly with the folks on the auction house, but I think that hits the highlights. Is the game worth it? Yeah, even with the frustration factor, I’m glad I bought it. I’ve played some games with friends and co-workers on less than Inferno and enjoy it…on Inferno, even with 2 or 3 friends party wipes happen literally all the time and folks get frustrated and bolt. But if you are planning to buy this game, make sure you have a decent internet connection that is stable. Fast helps, but the critical thing is it needs to be stable. If it isn’t, then don’t buy this game (or really any other MMO) because all you’ll get is even more frustrated. And this game has frustrations enough with a good connection.

That’s my two cents anyway. Just needed to get that all off my chest. :stuck_out_tongue:

55

Wait. You only died 24 times through the whole 1st act of whats supposed to be the hardest difficulty in the game and you are complaining that it’s too much? This is with the gear you used in Hell too right? What were you expecting to happen in Inferno?

56

No…this was after I spent basically all the gold I had to buy the best possible gear I could. Lots of resist, armor, vit and dex plus every piece I could get with a gem in it and the best gems I could make. THEN I died repeatedly. Hell, regular mobs were killing me, let alone the elite packs and the various boss mobs (I think the Butcher alone killed me 6 or 7 times).

Well…I expected that, as a game it would be ‘fun’. :stuck_out_tongue: It’s not fun at that level. It’s horribly frustrating. You can’t level anymore (you can’t even go there unless you are 60) so your character isn’t getting any better. The loot dropping isn’t as good as what I’ve bought (since it’s from later acts presumably) so that’s no help except to generate gold…but my repair bills are in the 10k or higher, so it’s mostly a wash wrt gold (oh, I’m making a little, but not enough to buy the higher ticket things I really need to survive a bit better in this ridiculous level).

Seriously, if they want to make the game this ridiculous then take out the idiotic level cap. Or make sure that the stuff that’s dropping in a given act is actually useful in helping you to survive IN the freaking act. Don’t make me have to buy stuff from later acts in order to play the one I’m in. Don’t make me have to buy gear in the from hundreds of thousands of gold to millions just to play…or make it so only elite players who are either dumping in hundreds or thousands of hours into the game OR buying stuff with actual money can play the game at all. Literally, I can’t play through Act II…I’ve tried several times to just get through past the bridge and have died dozens of times. I have yet to be able to play through a random dungeon in this act yet. Every time I’ve tried an elite pack in there has wiped the floor with me. I’ve died over and over and the elites are still just about at full heath and my gear is shot to shit. Where is the fun there?

57

I think the problem is the game from 1-4 feels so short compared to the original game that its easy to see the acts 1-4 as being replaced by the difficulty levels. Ie the difficulty ramps up as you increase in gear, and your average player can expect to get there.

Except they arent, so you’re either left with a game that feels short compared to earlier versions, or one that feels like a major change in difficulty, to the point that it feels frustrating by comparison.

It would be interesting to know if they were really expecting the huge dropoff in play and saw that as a worthwhile tradeoff for the people paying RL money that are left, or whether they have actually flubbed it. I know I wont be buying any sequels for it unless massive changes were made.

No easy way to know directly for now of course as it wont be publically acknowledged for years, if ever.

Otara