Am I the only person who really liked Diablo 3? I introduced my wife to it as her first game in the genre, and we’ve spent a lot of hours making team runs through hard dungeons. For sheer “let’s kill 300 things at once” endorphin hits, it’s great.
D3 has had a strange life. I think it's still a great casual Diablo game, but it totally lacks the depth that other titles in the genre (Path of Exile, Last Epoch, even Grim Dawn) offer, and has some very degenerate systems like paragon points and legendary effect scaling that make the game unbelievably boring for more serious/committed players. You basically get all of your endgame gear within 8 hours of starting a new season, and then there's nothing to do but push slight stat increases on the same items or with paragon points or gems. The game totally plays itself.
There was a time around the Reaper of Souls prepatch where the game could have been reworked into something actually quite good, and that just never came. Coupled with a multi-year content drought up against massive PoE leagues every 3 months, it's just a tough sell.
I thought it was fun for what it was, but that it was sold and pushed as something it wasn’t. And overall (just my opinion) lacking gravitas.
For one it felt too easy. Some of this was likely console controller vs. mouse - and so maybe not the game itself’s fault - but it felt like point-and-click turned into just click, making it more one dimensional.
And two, I felt less weight/permanence in character building decisions. One of my favorite aspects of d2 is specialized builds, that you can screw them up, and generally delaying spending skill/stat points until certain. I thought d3 character customization felt more cosmetic and like my choices ultimately didn’t matter as all builds were so strong. Like it didn’t matter how I allocated points on my tree in the same way it felt like navigation and attack, described above, had lost some nuance. And that seems off to me when every character pretty much plays as a gear-independent caster.
D3 is really, really fun. It started out at launch ok at best. Pretty grindy, and slow. One or two playthroughs was enough for most people. Nowadays though the endgame is definitely on my top 10 list. Once you hit level 70 and get an armor set finished with some Kanai's Cube and start leveling up your legendary gems... Oh man
That’s how I saw it. My wife and I each have hundreds of paragon points, so that new characters are born ridiculously OP. But IMHO that’s fun, too! I collected all the speed runs, like “beat Act I in 1 hour” and that was challenging. Going for the ludicrous achievements like “kill 400 enemies consecutively” was fun. Running through a ridiculously hard timed dungeon, getting an electric charge, and watching all these uber-powerful demons explode as I sprint past them was way satisfying. Coming up with equipment sets where every piece doubles my damage points was engaging.
At launch, it was alright. Now that I’m a wildly powerful godlike thing that can kill Diablo by looking at him sideways, it’s an awful lot of fun in a completely different way.
