Diablo 3

World of Warcraft certainly wasn't my last game addiction...  I've been playing Diablo 3 a lot.  With such perfect timing, the game was released on May 15th, barely a week after the summer semester started, and I've been playing way too much since.  I am finally on a hiatus due to the inevitable last semester crunch time.

My "main" character, Sinpathy, a male Barbarian.  105 hours spent on him?  Yikes.

Developed by Blizzard, the same people who also created WoW, Diablo 3 has players create characters to venture in the realm of Sanctuary, battling hordes of demons, and the Prime Evil, Diablo, itself.  There's a whole metagame around this game: what items are best, overpowered skills, class quirks, and general hate or love of the game.  See the appropriate sub-Reddit for much more...

The game was a load of fun for the first few weeks.  However, once reaching the max level on one character, and reaching Inferno, the hardest difficulty, the game slows to a crawl.  The game becomes a game of playing the Auction House and lottery.  You have to buy better gear on the player driven auction house or continuously "farm" good items, by killing lots of monsters and hoping you strike gold with a near perfectly rolled item with awesome stats.

My secondary character, 忠忍者, which roughly translates to "loyal ninja".  As you can see, I named some of my characters with Chinese and Korean characters.  Because I'm cool like that.  "Only" 65 hours on him so far, but he's my gold and item "farmer", due to his demon killing efficiency.

In that regards, the game is very broken.  There are so many complaints about how Blizzard is running the game.  Within weeks of release, people were able to create automated scripts and "bots" to watch the auction house and buy and resell items for higher profits.  Bots have also been made to farm gold and items.  Blizzard addresses this by banning these accounts, but they always return in droves, decreasing the value of gold and ruining the game economy.  This description is a little exaggerated, but many players would agree.

Difficulty is another thing.  Why do you make a game so difficult, your testers couldn't even get through it - and then DOUBLE the difficulty and release it to the public?  Well, people have certainly beat it, and Blizzard has addressed some difficulty issues with patches, but the game can be a masochist's game for those who don't play enough to improve their characters and gear.

Well, at least the pre-rendered cutscenes are undoubtedly amazing.  Granted, this trailer makes the game seem much better than it actually is.

The video above touches upon even more things people have been complaining about.  The "customization" apparently praised by the trailer is more of a myth.  For most players, it means copying builds that are guaranteed to be the "best" or most "useful", making most skills at this time, useless.  PvP, a core part of many MMO games, still isn't even released yet, and it's been 2+ months since the game came out.  And hilariously enough, during the "end game", there is no incentive with playing with others.  It is much more efficient playing by yourself.  And unless you have many friends that haven't yet given up on the game, you'll be stuck with undergeared idiots in public games.

Nonetheless, I suppose I can't complain.  This game was well worth the $60 (and I can still attempt to sell some items using the Real Money Auction House for some real money and earn it all back...).  I do regret that it has wasted over 170 hours of my precious time over the last two months.  Time that could have been spent working on my senior project and other class assignments.  :(