Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

It was nearly two years ago today that this editor reviewed Diablo III, lavishing endless praise upon its various refinements to the already-strong loot-hunting formula, with nary a negative comment to bestow. And that’s practically the way the game started: everyone was addicted, everyone played for a solid month, and nothing else in the gaming world really mattered to any of us during that period. It was, as I put it in June of 2012, “a narcotic substance constructed of ones and zeroes, relentlessly toying with your neural reward center, oozing dopamine and forcing you to abuse caffeine like you’ve never before dreamed of doing. It is the very definition of addiction.”

However, while we all knew the euphoria would eventually fade, none of us ever anticipated the thud with which our enthusiasm for the game would land once the honeymoon ended. There came a point where everyone simply quit, and the parting thoughts weren’t exactly positive: there was a general consensus that we all felt slightly disgusted, even betrayed, by what the game had become. It was an incredibly fun and addictive month—indeed, one of the best we each had ever experienced in the world of social gaming—but something ruined it all with reckless abandon.

More gothic, more beautiful, and darker than before

There are multiple theories as to what precisely that something was, but I have what I believe to be a very plausible interpretation of it all. You see, Diablo is all about adventure and loot. It’s all about grinding through hordes of enemies in pursuit of that next big find—a find which comes just frequently enough to keep you going. It’s a nearly-flawless digital reconstruction of the “press button, get reward” phenomenon which speaks so eloquently to our primordial nature. It exploits those same biological principles which make other massively addictive activities such as gambling exciting—except, unlike with gambling, in Diablo III, you always win. It’s the perfect storm.

But, excepting various other flaws in the formula which eventually surfaced, there was one major phenomenon which undermined the efforts of DIII’s exquisitely-crafted addiction: the Auction House. Bear with me here and I’ll try to explain.

In Diablo II, players were forced to trade items manually if they ever wanted to acquire powerful equipment without lucking themselves into it via the adventures and monster slaying. That was fun, but mostly just because you were able to get the items from other people. In other words, trading wasn’t the fun part, it was the mechanism to reach the fun. Actually getting the Soul Scratch for 5 SOJs was the fun part; not the arduous process of finding a willing trading partner, entering their game, and executing the deal. So, then, it made sense—at least initially—to shortcut that process by way of the Auction House in Diablo III, so that all of the hassle was lost: instead, purchasing and trading items was incredibly convenient, provided you had the necessary resources to make it happen.

Getting those resources was still the subject of the adventure: if you didn’t find items that were useful to you directly, at least they were often useful to someone, which gave you a great reason to hoard them in your stash and list them in the AH in hopes of a payoff you could use to purchase something more relevant for your character. It’s economics; it’s capitalism. It’s how things happen in the real world. You trade a good or service that is of lower utility/value to you personally for a different good or service which you value more highly. Money/gold is the intermediary by which all of these trades are facilitated. All the AH was is a front-end for all of that to occur.

That’s a lot of bodies.

But it’s not that simple. The first and biggest problem with this newfound capitalistic convenience was brought to light when the so-called Real Money Auction House made its debut. This concept basically allowed players to shortcut all of the work of actually playing the game in exchange for real money, meaning you could pay to win (of course, excepting the actual level-gaining that had to take place). You could even purchase gold and gems—which were some of the primary forms of money in the game—for actual dollars and cents. What’s the harm in this? Well, apart from the philosophical disputes surrounding games which allow players to pay their way to success in exchange for actually spending time playing the game, this setup was economically unfeasible.

Remember back in ECON 101 when your teacher tried to explain to you the concepts of supply and demand and how the money supply affected inflation? No? Well, if you didn’t get it now, you weren’t the only one. Perhaps it was hard to predict, but Diablo III’s economy perfectly exemplifies the problems with allowing endless expansions of the money supply to occur: it leads to devaluation of the money itself, since the scarcity of the legal tender is reduced as the supply expands. In other words, by definition, it allows inflation to run unchecked.

The only way to suppress this to some extent is to allow—or really, to force—money back out of the supply in some way. For example, you can siphon it back out of the economy by way of taxes and other fees, thereby reducing supply even as it expands by other mechanisms. Still, this doesn’t solve the problem, and those who do not participate actively in the economy find themselves becoming ever-poorer as their funds are siphoned and they have little to show for it. Besides, Diablo III could never keep up with the expansion of the supply anyway, and that led to predictable results: items which cost billions in gold, or basically sums of money which were unattainable via actual adventuring. Of course, the other option is to simply buy items outright using real money, but with the infinite convenience of trading with others worldwide, that meant that prices were exceedingly low for many extremely powerful items.

The game has had its focus reevaluated.

That might sound like a good thing, but consider this: what’s the point in playing the game for five hours to find a great item when you could simply log onto the Auction House, pay 3 bucks, and get something better? Even if you decide not to partake in this microtransactional convenience, it still imposes a debilitating effect on the overall game: it essentially pegs the value of your five hours of play as worth 3 bucks. That’s a powerful sedative even when combined with a formula as inherently addictive as Diablo’s.

It basically is an undermining of everything that makes Diablo fun to start with; when trading is too convenient, the curtain is lifted, efficiency gains a solid foothold, and adventuring loses a large part of its appeal. The very principles that make market economics so undeniably powerful in the real world also poke holes in the raft that keeps Diablo III’s concept afloat. People begin adventuring more for the purpose of filling their stash with items which can be exchanged for gold to help purchase useful stuff for their particular character class as opposed to actually hoping for any relevant equipment drops for their own use.

The result is that their stash quickly fills up, and killing monsters with friends turns into more of a cooperative mechanical chore than an actual socially enjoyable task—as the promise of any truly exciting drops is ever diminished, much like gambling when you realize you have almost no chance of winning anything big. And ultimately, any lingering fragments of enthusiasm you might have had for actually getting out and killing some enemies is further harpooned by the alternative of simply dropping a few bucks in the Auction House and forgoing all of the hassle. And for what? Why spend money on great equipment if there’s no sense in using it in the first place?

In other words, Diablo becomes pointless. That’s what happened.

2.0

When I say the beta is over, I’m not referring to the Reaper of Souls expansion. I’m talking about Diablo III itself, which basically experienced the most effective beta test of all: release to market with millions of real-life candidates, each providing valuable statistics, honest feedback, and participating in the economy as they would if it was their own money (because it was). Some twenty-or-so months later, we finally have what appears to be the solution: Version 2.0. Granted, much of this isn’t part of the expansion as much as it is a part of the 2.0 refinements, but it’s so impacting that it has to be addressed in this review before we can get to the expansion’s additions.

Do it for the loot.

Among literally countless other items, the latest updates to Diablo III have accomplished the following:

• The Auction House is gone. Yes, this means no more convenient acquisition of powerful items. But, as we just covered, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Think of it like the removal of a cheat code.

• The old items are now “legacy” items, and the new items are better than ever. This effectively serves to devalue even the most powerful of the items that were circulating on the Auction House, which is the next major step to resuscitating a game that was pounded into submission by the power of market economics.

• Drops are now more relevant to the person who finds them. Yes, you still occasionally come across a Barbarian-specific item when playing with your Wizard, but it’s incredibly uncommon now, whereas before it was just the opposite: finding loot perfectly relevant to your class was difficult and infrequent, whereas amassing piles of items meant for other classes was easy. What did you do? You hoarded the items in your stash meant for later listing on the AH to produce money. But now, with the removal of the AH, that’s no longer possible—and thus there’s no longer any real need to bestow all of those irrelevant items on players of different classes. With the Smart Drops system, items you find are nearly always items relevant to you—even if it’s still uncommon to find equipment that’s better than what you already have (that’s the fun part).

  So, what do you do now when you find an item you don’t want? Why, you salvage or sell it—simple as that.

• Legendaries and other rare items are Bound to Account – In an extremely controversial about-face, the developers have taken the reversal of focus even more seriously by outright disallowing trading between players of many powerful and valuable items in Reaper of Souls. There are a few exceptions: for starters, you can trade most anything you find to anyone else who is playing with you for the next two hours after finding an item—but after that point, it’s yours for good. The most controversial aspect of this change is probably that regarding the inability to trade commodities; it makes sense that somehow gold, gems, and other items perhaps should be shareable between close friends (who play together often), but maybe changes are on the horizon which will correct this. After all, there are those who spent real money on gold just before the AH shut down, putting them in a position of relative affluence as compared to those who did not.

• Difficulty levels have been reworked. Now, there’s Normal through Master, followed by Torment, which features six levels (1 through 6). Each tick of the slider from 1 to 6 directly and explicitly increases the rewards in the form of experience, gold, legendary drops, and others. The difficulty can even be lowered in-game without needing to exit and recreate in case you find yourself stuck at a particular point.

• Paragon levels were added. These existed before 2.0, but they’re basically additional gainable levels beyond the limit of 60 (or 70 in the RoS expansion) that provide dispersible stat points that can be dumped into a number of different categorical buffs, such as Movement Speed, Life per Hit, Attack Speed, and so on.

• Stat comparisons were consolidated and simplified. Tired of poring over every little attribute each time you pick up an item in an effort to gauge its relative value in context with your current equipment? Now, all of an item’s (and hero’s) attributes are boiled down to three consolidated categories: Damage, Toughness, and Healing. This provides a valuable summary of the effects an item will have on your character if equipped, and it allows you to quickly and painlessly judge the utility of the item while adventuring.

• Player skills are now more balanced than ever before. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I enjoyed being able to permafreeze my enemies using my Wizard and the Wicked Winds exploit that was so very prevalent around a year ago. But now, with the balance of the skill sets really coming to equilibrium, it is an awful lot of fun having different play options at hand. I’ve changed my skills more since beginning RoS than I ever did playing vanilla Diablo III, and that’s all thanks to the changes that were made between the time I quit and today. Overall, it’s a very positive move.

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you there’s a recall on our stove.

And then there’s the stuff that’s specific to Reaper of Souls:

• The focus has shifted from simply elite pack hunting to all manner of cooperative adventuring. As opposed to merely hunting elites in search of great drops, now, bosses once again provide better rewards, and there are even new “bounties” which open up following the completion of Act V—which more or less are compartmentalized challenges related to a chosen monster that, once completed, bestow rewards upon participants. Completing all five bounties in each Act also earns you a Horadric Cache, which is basically a treasure chest of great items.

• Character level caps have increased to 70.

• Paragon level caps have become unlimited.
  

• New skills have been added for all classes, including an Active Skill and three new Passive Skills.
  

• A new Passive Skill slot is available at level 70.
  

• A new tab in the stash is purchasable.
  

• Tons of new items and legendaries, as well as buffs, are available.
  

• Item crafting was introduced. That’s right, but it’s different from what you’d expect: rather than reroll an item in any way you’d like, your changes are limited to one chosen attribute of the item permanently. Here’s how it works:

  • Pick the attribute you want to change. You can choose from any attribute the item currently has; i.e., +38% gold from monsters.

  • Review the costs and resource requirements to make the change. Depending on the grade and type of the item, you’ll need a reasonable amount of gold, possibly a gem, and a couple of different crafting materials, some of which are rather difficult to come by. The materials can be obtained by salvaging items of different types and grades.

  • Inspect the possible attributes for the particular slot and decide if you want to take the chance. Each slot on an item’s properties has different possible attributes.

  • Choose to pay to replace the attribute and choose from three choices. The first choice is always the original attribute, so you can never screw up an item if you get a bad roll.

  • Revel in your new creation. It’s now bound to your account only, so you can’t trade it. If you ever want to change the item again, you can only change the attribute you already chose to change the first time. This prevents you from remaking legendaries into anything you want.

• Gambling is back. Using the blood shards that you obtain from hunting bounties, you can gamble for rare and legendary items in each town.
  

• A new character class is available: The Crusader. This is a lot like the Paladin from Diablo II, which was one of my favorite classes personally. It’s a well-rounded class which focuses on tank-like abilities; while it’s melee-oriented, its skills are also heavily based on attracting enemy attacks and responding to them while others attack from afar.

• Act V is introduced. This Act is lengthy and dynamic, spanning such environments as a rainy city at night, a cemetery, fields and ruins, and the battlegrounds and Pandemonium Fortress high above the clouds. It’s a lot of fun overall, and the new antagonist (the Angel of Death, Malthael), is a pretty awesome bad guy.

• In addition to bounties, Nephalem Rifts are new. Despite the fact that Diablo III’s environments are fairly randomized in their organization, there were still plenty of complaints that the game seemed overall more linear than Diablo II. Not so with Nephalem Rifts, and addition which those who are seeking more variety in their time playing will appreciate. These are one-to-ten-part randomly-generated dungeons each capped by an end boss called a Rift Guardian. They’re created after collecting five Rift Keystones and redeeming them at the Nephalem Obelisk in each town. Inside, a progress bar creeps from 0 to 100% as monsters are killed, after which the Rift Guardian appears. Plenty of loot is provided once the Rift is completed. It’s yet another (even more randomized) way to keep playing for loot in RoS.

Still fighting this guy?  Must be T6.

Is it enough?

Obviously only time will tell whether or not these changes will be enough to sustain Diablo III for the long haul, or even if they’ll manage to entice those who previously abandoned the game to return for a second go. But there’s a strong case to be made that, with the (perhaps rather acute) refocusing of the formula on the core competency of the design—that is, kill monsters, get loot—everything that made Diablo II so darn addictive should be alive and well in Reaper of Souls.

In fact, the positivity of the experience is very heavily front-weighted, with the first couple of hours of item drops very likely to impress anyone who ground for dozens of hours in the pre-2.0 era. That’s most certainly intentional, as 1) it provides the immediate euphoria that’s necessary to re-snare those who had previously escaped the event horizon of DIII’s presence, and 2) it serves the purpose of transitioning those items which were acquired in pre-2.0 days into irrelevancy. It’s quite likely that after the first night of playing on 2.0 (or, to an even greater extent, Reaper of Souls), you’ll already have replaced much of your pre-2.0 equipment—it is that pronounced of a difference.

We did our best to spend as much time as we could with the expansion to try and ensure that the viciously addictive honeymoon period had as little to do with our opinions of the product as possible. While we’ve felt the euphoria die down at this point, the appeal of the rebalanced formula continues to draw us in frequently for more play time. This is largely thanks to the open-ended nature of the endgame, which leverages:

• A seemingly infinite number of unique Nephalem Rifts (essentially random dungeons) filled with elites and goodies

• A well-structured and bite-sized selection of Bounties with great rewards

• Incredibly challenging, well-defined, and granular endgame difficulty levels (Torment 1 through 6)

Currently we are on the level of probably Torment II, where we can comfortably play in most circumstances, but which requires us to sit up and pay serious attention when we encounter certain groups of elites. It doesn’t seem likely that we will be graduating to TIII anytime in the immediate future, and it’s hard to fathom ever making it up to T6 and playing without constantly dying—though the rewards are great.

This is why I avoid the alleys.

While for the most part the alterations make a lot of sense, there are a few items which will irritate those who abandoned the game during its darker periods. For one thing, there’s the fact that so much gold is still sitting around in individual accounts where people bought their way up to the billions mark—something which was impossible if you didn’t dabble in the AH madness that ensued midway through 2013. That gold can’t be traded even to friends, which is relatively silly. Essentially, since most of the items which were circulating pre-2.0 are now becoming obsolete in their power, and the new grades of gems immediately replace the pre-expansion gems in terms of drop frequency and power, gold is the final remaining item perpetuating the imbalance of the old DIII.

It would probably be better if Blizzard allowed close friends (those who play together frequently for instance) to exchange some degree of earnings in the way of gold and gems. That way, some of the imbalance can be spread across different accounts, and hopefully the recovery to equilibrium will happen more quickly. Alternatively, simply removing the influence of gold altogether might not be a bad idea. It sounds crazy, but isn’t that essentially what they’ve already done with gambling and the required blood shards? Why not just relegate gold to near-irrelevancy, and completely remove the need for it to produce better gems and craft items?

Elsewhere, account-bound items don’t seem like such a bad idea, and the concept does make sense. Certainly some tweaking is still yet to come on the horizon we’d figure however.

Two items I haven’t really covered much here are the story and environments. In terms of environments, Act V is a great addition with dreary, dark-paletted backdrops and varied locales, even if most of them are incredibly washed-out (yet still attractive). Having said that, the colorful presentation of the original 4 Acts in Diablo III was something that was criticized by some (not by this editor for the record), so this might be appreciated by the fanbase.

As far as story is concerned—let’s be honest, it really just doesn’t matter all that much. Sure, it’s kind of fun to go chasing down devils and angels and giving them what-for with fearless poise and reckless abandon, but in the end, Diablo’s appeal is about the formula, not the story.

And, at least as far as formula, this time around, there isn’t much to complain about. Blizzard has carefully done away with the self-destructive aspects of the original and replaced them with more of Diablo’s core competency: kill stuff and get great loot. And so far, it’s working very well.