Whenever I find myself questioning the adequacy of my current sleep cycle, I find comfort in looking back to the summer nights of early high school. I can remember vividly how I nurtured my Diablo addiction.
Sitting in the darkness of my basement, I ran countless boss runs, leveling my characters in hopes of reaching the near unattainable number 99. I never did. I was chasing the dragon, except the dragon happened to be the lord Diablo himself, and I must have killed him 10,000 times, only to have him re-spawn in a new game.
All the while, my level of sleep deprivation stacked upon itself to unprecedented heights (I think I may still be catching up on that sleep). As I ran through endless dungeons slaying corrupted, soulless hell spawn and searching for loot, I came to the realization that Blizzard had truly achieved RPG perfection. Though the game may have distorted my understanding of “reality” for a few months, there is no denying that Diablo 2 and its immersive gameplay represented was a huge leap for the world of online video gaming.
World of Warcraft and Starcraft nuts across the nation may forever associate Blizzard’s “Battle net” service with their respective games, but make no mistake, Diablo was the first game to showcase the revolutionary service back in 1996. While the wimpy and catered-to “WoW generation” was still in diapers, hardcore Diablo fans were slashing away at various forms of demonic lords and minions, not to mention PVP-ing online. The dark and sinister series laid the groundwork for countless other fully-online RPGs and, to this day, maintains an enormously loyal fan-base…which brings me to my next point.
The Diablo series’ highly anticipated third installment will soon be upon us. Diablo 3 has already been in beta for months, so hopefully we can expect to see the final product sooner rather than later this year.
I am excited as hell for this game, as any hardcore fan should be. I have been waiting for the entirety of my short adult life for this game, and now that the moment finally draws near, I find myself having some late-term apprehension. It’s been over ten years since the last Diablo title has been released, not to mention the fact that the series’ original development team, “Blizzard North” has all but disbanded. Unfortunately, this means that any hope of keeping the original conditions which created the excellence that was Diablo 1 and 2 is lost.
The fact that Blizzard has been so caught up in their money maker World of Warcraft for so long scares the hell out of me, and for a while I worried that D3 would be nothing more than a dark and desolate version of WoW with different character choices and plot. Luckily, from the feedback I’ve seen from beta players, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
The game will still follow an “Act-based” quest system, rather than the jumbled mishmash of quests seen in other MMOs, though there will be significant changes to gameplay itself. I was also pleased to see that Blizzard responded to the complaint that the game just didn’t look “dark enough,” a valid complaint considering how beautifully bleak and disparaging the original Diablo series looked. Nothing would ruin that classic, gothic feel like the prospect of having players slaying the living-dead in lush green fields on bright sunny days. No. Darker is better for Diablo. I want to be able to turn my brightness levels on high and still struggle to see ahead of me.
A rather important question that has yet to be answered is whether or not D3 will be pay-to-play. If Blizzard has any sense, which I believe they still do, I think they’ll realize that there couldn’t be a more catastrophically awful idea than making a pay-to-play Diablo. Sure, people will still buy the game, and Blizzard’s shares of stock will surge, but it’s going to leave a very bad taste in the mouths of veteran players who have been enjoying the luxury of a free-to-play service for years.
Blizzard has to know that Diablo’s fan-base demographics are far different than their other games. You won’t find a bunch of hyperactive 12-year-olds who are willing to shell out daddy’s money on a whim on Diablo servers nowadays. These are 18-30 somethings that are looking to pick up where they left off in high school or college, and probably aren’t going to have cash to burn just lying around.
Regardless of the direction that Blizzard takes with Diablo 3, once they slate a release date there will be excitement on an unprecedented scale. I can only imagine the flood of days-off requests that companies across the nation are going to experience. Personally, I hope I’m wearing an old pair of underwear if and when the announcement finally comes. I’ve already got my collector’s edition ordered on Amazon so that I can immediately plunge head first into Sanctuary, regardless of release date. And now…I wait.
