It was fun for a week, now gimme Torchlight 2

I know, I know. Diablo 3 is fucking what little there is left of my sanity. For the best part of a decade I was hyped about it, preordered it about five or so years ago, then I stopped caring the more I heard about what it was gonna be like. Told everyone I wasn't gonna play it much. I even wasted a ton of money by refusing to write any guides or articles about it, because I simply didn't care about the game enough.
I was still getting the game, of course, what with me being a monthly pass idiot and all, so when it went live, I gave it a try. Well, several hours after it went live, because the Blizzard servers didn't work too well and you can't actually play Diablo 3 unless the servers are up, even if you just intend on having some singleplayer fun. That's like being forced to wait until the missus comes home before having a wank.

And it was fun. Sure, it's all candy-coloured, it really looks ten years old and the soundtrack... well, let's just say it's not as good as the music in the original games. Not by a long shot. As I played through the piss-easy normal difficulty, I thought maybe I was just that good. First time I ever died on my first ever character was at level 21, while I was rubberbanding like mad and lagging like crazy (yes, insane lag in a singleplayer session, which other game offers that?), I couldn't get away from a boss baddie and - WHAM! That was the end of me.

I came to terms with the oversimplified character-progression long before launch (no more manual stat increases, no stat requirements on items, it's all super casual now), I got some fun out of the simple skill-system, which had replaced complex talent trees and before I knew it, I was well on my way through Hell difficulty. The game still felt insanely easy and D3 Hell simply isn't anywhere near as tough as Hell is in Diablo 2. But that didn't bother me - Inferno mode was on the horizon. Even the somewhat dumb and predictable storyline wasn't a big deal. So the Diablo 1 hero wasn't just the 'wanderer' now, but suddenly became Leoric's eldest son Aidan, apparently he shagged Adria the witch and she gave birth to Leah, who - GASP! - eventually becomes Diablo.

It's all a bit weird. Tyrael and Adria have new voice actors and sound nothing like they used to, Tyrael is a black guy and Diablo is a girl. It's kind of a 21st century equality thing or summat. I mean, everyone is either black or a chick or a combination of these two now. It doesn't bother me, but that kind of thing stopped being unique, cool or surprising quite a while back. Of course there's also a lot of soulstone talk going on. You know, trapping the souls of Diablo and pals in a soulstone, so they may not be reborn and all that? Well, turns out that after killing Diablo at the end of the game, there is no soulstone around, they just do a quick Osama on his body and say evil is dead now and everyone can live happily ever after. Erm... huh? What? But didn't they kill Diablo exactly like that in that weird anime teaser and then he was reborn? So why is this no longer a problem? Hellooo?!

Okay. So the story is a bit shit, the music is shit, the visuals are a bit dated, the game is a bit too easy... oh and did I mention there are no more rune words or any rune enchantments for that matter? No horadric cube and all that? I know, 15 year old Diablo 1 didn't have any of that, but at least it had stats allocation and... well, character progression was probably a tad more complex back then. But oh well, I was having fun, I was leveling up like mad, I absolutely destroyed the first three, stupidly easy difficulty levels and then I got started on Inferno. Heh... yeah.

I'm playing a barbarian. I'm not a huge fan of the barbarian, but it was the one of the five boring classes in this game I could tolerate the most. According to my stats, I have about 70% resistance vs absolutely every form of damage, both physical and magical, I have tens of thousands of hit points and just as much DPS, all the most powerful gear one could farm on hell difficulty and none of it matters. Because on inferno difficulty, you run into packs of elite mobs, who will trap your character and hold them in one spot, then either kill them with a single melee attack, nuke them with stupidly powerful pink lasers or they just surround you with minions, which happen to be invulnerable, yet they're insanely efficient at stopping you from running away or grabbing health pickups.

The most popular strategy to defeat those guys is "kiting", which is a fancy expression for "running away like a pussy". Basically, you're supposed to run away for 20 minutes and only attack whenever your most powerful, 2 minute cooldown abilities become available. If you take too long to beat a particular baddie, the game will put a curse on you and you will lose health over time.
They said inferno was going to be incredibly difficult. I suppose they got that part straight. Alas, none of this is actually challenging or fun in any way. It's not difficult in a way that you could overcome these baddies by getting better at the game or mastering your character. It's difficult in a way that enemies use a selection of incredibly cheap, stupid, frustrating and blatantly unfair abilities to humiliate you in every way imaginable.

I don't mind baddies with obscene amounts of health, who dish out massive damage. I don't mind monsters with nasty special attacks, for as long as they can be countered or evaded in some way. But enemies, who just create magical walls around you or simply immobilize your character from a distance, then take you out in a single shot, aren't fun. This isn't clever gameplay, it's not brilliant design, it's not "getting more complex with every level" as had been announced at Blizzcon. It's cheap. It's cheap, unfair and nothing but that.

The main problem, however, is how the entire game becomes centered about these broken, annoying groups of "rare" baddies. They drop all the good loot. They buff your chance at finding more gold and better items up to 75%. They drop more stuff than Diablo and all the "regular" bosses combined, they're ten times more powerful than Diablo will ever be, they make all other enemies and bosses completely redundant. Which would all be nice and neat, if they were actually fun to kill. If you've played Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty, then you've probably spent a LOT of time killing Diablo (or Baal) for loot. And they generally dropped some nice stuff. The fight was actually pretty fun, everyone was getting excited over the impending loot drops, it was repetitive, but strangely addictive at that.

The rare baddies on Diablo 3 aren't fun. Not remotely. And their loot, whilst nicely colour-coded in blue and yellow, is rarely ever worth the effort. Why oh why do enemies on a level 60 mega hard difficulty setting drop level 56-59 items half of the time? What the fuck am I supposed to do with a wizard staff, that has shitloads of strength and dexterity on it? Why do I have to spend an eternity farming those fuckers, dying fifty times per pack, only to get a bunch of insanely useless loot, which goes straight to the vendor at 250 gold a pop?

Don't get me wrong. I don't want the first monster I run across to explode in a cloud of epic, super-powerful gear that will make the rest of inferno a cakewalk. But in its current state, there is no fun to be had on inferno. Risk vs reward isn't just fucked up, it's simply not there! Die over and over again against stupidly powerful enemies, grit your teeth, force yourself to kill them no matter how frustrating the process, get rewarded with useless trash.
Diablo 2 was tough on hell. It took a lifetime of farming (or 20 monies at any Chinese D2 website) to get all the best gear. But it was actually fun! It was hard, but it was doable and it was fun. Diablo 3 isn't. Normal - Hell are a joke and Inferno is a kick in the nuts.

It's a nice game, sure. I think it's worth the money. I had fun getting where I am. But now I have zero motivation to keep playing. Even if I keep trying until eventually they may or may not adjust this crap, the impending real money auction house pretty much ruins the fun. So I could spend all day farming the most powerful stuff if they ever manage to make it playable. Or I could just leave 100 Quid at the RMAH, get all the most powerful stuff and be done with it for good. Hurray.

I dunno. I think I'm just gonna wait for Torchlight 2 now.

-Cat