Diablo III is an exceedingly strange game. On the surface, it doesn't look like it—Blizzard brought their trademark polish and shine to the title, making it look, feel, and sound better than any other action RPG on the market in 2012. But all the bells and whistles belie a barebones interior keeping Diablo III held aloft. It's a game of infinitesimal improvement and repetitive farming, of endless achievements and quixotic gimmicks every season. You get into Diablo III not for its lore, community, or even the clever builds; the main draw is its bottomless, meaningless, tedious grind. And while it may not be a terrible grind, it is an absolutely shameless one.
Before we get to the grind, let's talk about the elephant in the room: Diablo III's main campaign is a bust. I'm typically one of the folks that defends video game narratives (game prose is on par with serialized television at least), but Diablo III is the poster child for lackluster writing. I paid attention to the story, I gathered the bestiary books, and I engaged in the side conversations—yet not a single thing stood out as interesting. My most "captivating" discovery was that the big bad Malthael had once been the Archangel of Wisdom... but the game does absolutely nothing clever with that realization. All the villains are unambiguously evil, their plans positively brainless; comics from the 1970's could generate more hooks in 20 pages than all 20 hours of Diablo III's campaign combined.
That leaves Diablo III's core gameplay loop as the main draw, which is a nest of webs to navigate due to two reasons, the first being its heavy reliance on equipment. That might sound like a petty complaint—aren't all ARPGs centered around their loot?—but Diablo III is unique in that your build is determined first and foremost by what you find rather than the skills you pick. During my replay of Diablo III's campaign, my hardcore Monk was absolutely useless (on T1) until she stumbled across a level 14 legendary item (Cesar's Memento), which granted a whopping 750% bonus damage to a skill I didn't even like (Tempest Rush). But to avoid fights that could take upwards of five minutes, I had to center my build around activating that boring ability as much as possible, never needing to switch it off my main skills when the bracers became horribly outdated.
If having to balance your build around random item drops sounds awful, don't worry—you can opt to ignore equipment synergy by instead grappling with Diablo III's second issue: the ludicrous Torment system. The game boasts a total twenty tiers of difficulties, 80% of which are just numerical additions to the word "Torment". Sure, you can play through the game on its base difficulty of Normal or Hard, but you'll never be challenged so long as you remember to equip gear (any gear!) that's around your level range. To fully engage with your skill set and feel a modicum of accomplishment, you'll have to dive into the Torment difficulties—and even then you're not likely to make it beyond Torment IV unless you really know what you're doing.
I dove into Season 22 of Diablo III prepared to finally make an endgame build that could topple the highest difficulty: Torment XVI. I watched a video on the Masquerade Bone Spear Necromancer and dug into the icy-veins page to get a better handling on what every piece did and why. For the most part, it was fairly fun battling my way to level 70 with my skeleton mage army, and then knocking off the seasonal achievements one by one until I could claim the entire Masquerade set as my own. After that, my goal was to fill every equipment slot with its recommended legendary, having to mix and match what I was wearing until the fabled Haunted Visions amulet—the linchpin of the entire build—landed in my lap. From there, all that was left to do was reroll the stats on my current gear, or hope to find Ancient/Primal versions of it (ie rare max stat mutations) either via Kunai's Cube or Rifts.
If a lot of that sounds like nonsense to you, let me break things down more clearly: once reaching level 70 in Adventure mode, you run one activity (Rifts) 90% of the time and do another activity (Bounties) 10% of the time. Once you get good gear you raise the difficulty, which allows you to find more gear to further optimize your build, letting you raise the difficulty to find even more gear in order to raise the difficulty and so on and so forth until you become a snake eating its own tail in the belly of a Greater Rift. As Rifts are just recycled content (same with Bounties), you're not really seeing or experiencing anything "new"—your adventure through Torment X will mirror your experience with Torment VII, IV, XIII, etc. Even when you topple the fairly lethal Torment XVI, you can try your hand at Greater Rift pushing, where you can play all the way up to a theoretical super-duper lethal Torment XXXII—which, need I remind you, boasts no new content outside of inflated enemy health and damage.
I could posit that I soured on Diablo III after finally reaching Torment XVI, but I think from the very beginning the game was slowly, gradually ebbing my excitement. To its credit, Diablo III at least hides this process very well—every class is a lot of fun to play and there's bound to be some abilities you'll never get tired of using (Disintegrate, Falling Sword, Corpse Spiders). But the game's one-two punch of gear dependence and arbitrary difficulty settings will always leave me stupefied. And it's not that it's wrong to allow players to tweak the difficulty—Supergiant Games is a master at this—but Diablo III's Torment tiers all blend together, testing you in the exact same way from the first numbered iteration to the last. Eventually you'll find yourself playing the game as a habitual way to kill time, collecting loot you'll never need and spending Paragon points to increase your stats by a fraction of a percent. It's a great game to play while listening to an audiobook or podcast, largely because your brain will need something more captivating to do in the meantime.
In a way, it's weird that I can't accurately speak to what Diablo III was like in 2012. I played through it at launch but didn't explore the harder difficulties, nor engage with the real-money auction house. I'm sure—as fans are quick to note—that the game is in a better state now, but I'd hesitate to call the features that have been tacked on (Rifts, Torments, Haedrig's Gift) "solutions". They certainly add to the replayable and help the game feel more diverse, but fundamentally, Diablo III's blueprint is severely lacking. I've funneled more than 200 hours into the title but most of that time was spent looking for something meaningful and rewarding out of its complex systems and plethora of gear. In the end, I'll have to face the fact that I'm walking away from the Diablo III with my hands...
... empty.
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