Honest (small) review from new Diablo player

[Defaulty]

TL;DR version

Just a slight intro; I've never played Diablo before D3 so this is my first time touching a near hack-n-slash game as such. Always seen DEMO CDs in my dad's old CD stashes, but never thought of installing it for I was hooked on Command and Conquer during my teen years. :P

Furthest Progress: Normal: ACT II (7 hours total game time on Wizard)

Gameplay:
Simply flawless; Easy to use commands, point and shoot, and epic moves. I've played a Demon Hunter (11) and a Wizard (19). The enemies on normal are not complete pushovers, but still are fairly simple to any standard gamers. Loot keeps you wanting to go further, new skills make you want to level more, and blacksmith-ing makes you wish that you could spawn in a room full of Loot Creeps xD

Story Line:
Fairly standardized story in my opinion as a new player. Bad guy, gotta kill his minions, find bad guy and kill him for epic lootz. While it's a fairly straight forward story it's easy for anyone to jump in and understand what is going on. Hell is unleashed for the search of a certain item and you need to stop them. Though the cutscene after ACT I was brilliant and actually had me hooked and attached wanting more!

Progression:
Very very linear. I understand that you can go search for little spots to kill monsters, find loot, open chests, off-the-road quests; but whats the point? Other than the driven fact of finding better gear and gold there is no real reason to 'venture out. It's a negative in my game playing experience to have way too straight forward of a storyline. I come from playing the Metal Gear Solid series where the story had you hooked 24/7 and could get lost in the midst of finding your target. It would almost make sense in of something like that in the world of Diablo.

Especially with the NPC that quotes, "The world is so beautiful, I didn't know how big it was outside the Palace." Well that's great you get to see the world, but I get tree lines that direct me straight to the objective with a giant blinking circle of where to go. In essence it's a bad thing to help brain dead people when you are releasing a third of the series that should be more geared towards the dedicated players. At the same time the other attributes of the game outweighs this small nitpick

Graphics:
I usually don't worry about graphics with games because in my mind it doesn't make the game, but I'll touch base on it. If you honestly haven't seen it then I hope you're blind. This game is everywhere, but in short the graphics are pretty top notch. You don't need overly excessive shiny shader particles with a grand amount of tessellation to make a great game, but where the things need to shine, they shine the brightest out of recent years of games.

Effects, the moves, the spells is where all the pretty pixels are at. They make you want to join your friend's party to show them what cool sh*t you unlocked from recent levels. I love it and they got the perfect balance of graphics and gameplay. I give extreme kudos to Blizzard for this!



While I've barely touched a tenth of the whole entire content of Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno; I can tell it will be a long road ahead of me with this game before I can say I truly conquered Diablo 3. It won't let you down, but that will depend on how high of a pedistal you held it in the first place along with how recent you've been into the Diablo series.

[Sunshine]

Thanks for the well-thought-out post, but please keep all reviews in the existing discussion threads.