Never read games criticism before, because never been into games... But I stumbled on this review (below) in
Edge magazine a while ago (waiting for a rental car in their little waiting room, if you must know) and was struck by the quality of the prose, how vivid and elegant it was. Yet also completely enclosed and walled-inside the games-worldview of functionality and specifications and sensation, no sense at all of any spill over into real life (but then again, you might say the same about most music criticism these days!)
Strange thing, though: the review appears to be uncredited -- i couldn't find the byeline, anyway, either in the physical hardcopy mag in the waiting room, or later looking online. So even if the "Lester Bangs of Games Writing" exists out there, perhaps the readership as yet doesn't --a readership that is looking for a Voice/Leader/Prophet and therefore would anoint such a figure should he or she materialise
I enjoyed this just as a piece of colorful, contoured writing (it starts to get really going two or three paragraphs in) while barely understanding half of the terms:
Diablo III
benefits from great writing. Not necessarily in the narrative or dialogue, both
of which offer the same old gleefully stagey stuff about warring angels and
ancient prophecies. No, it has great writing where it matters: in the names of
its class skills. Wrath Of The Berserker, Rain Of Vengeance, Mass Confusion –
here’s where creative effort has been spent. Here’s where you can see the
density of pulpy exuberance that ten years of development can provide.
As
it is for the writing, so it goes for the wider game. Diablo III is
defined by its skills, and by the characters who unlock them. With five vividly
distinct heroes to choose from, Blizzard’s returned to
the dungeon-crawler with rebalancing in mind. Enemies drop the same coins,
shields and magical trousers when you hit them, but it now seems like a minor
concern compared to your own progression. Diablo’s still a fruit
machine, but it’s far more rewarding to step away from the randomness and
approach it as a series of decisions. Which power now, which one next?
The
biggest decision comes right at the beginning: who to play as? The answer, of
course, is everyone eventually, but that doesn’t make selecting your first
class any easier. Seek the standard all-rounder for that initial playthrough
and you’ll discover that there isn’t one. The Barbarian, for example, is the
melee tank rendered seismic. He’s handed the bone-shaking Leap and Earthquake,
the latter of which shatters the ground beneath him and brings lava oozing to
the surface. However, Ancient Spear makes him surprisingly good for distanced
play, since a quick tap of the action bar can harpoon mobs from halfway across
the screen, while Whirlwind twists him into a tornado of blades, spinning
around like Taz the Tazmanian Devil. Even core skills such as Frenzy bring to
the fore leftfield ideas such as incremental speed boosts, each strike
diminishing the cooldown before the next. The spirit of Conan is hard to locate
within this dynamic, scene-stealing demi-god; he’s not the straightforward
option you might expect.
The
Wizard’s no more traditional: a youthful mage who plays like a spry angel
crossed with a Tesla coil, firing frosty lasers and linking enemies together
with lattices of electricity. Decked out in a schoolgirl ponytail and a bright
sash, she chucks Magic Missiles like she’s pitching baseballs. And while she’s
built for range, she’s an uncommonly hardy tank if you weight your deck with
defensive and area skills.
After
that, things get really creative. The Demon Hunter is Batman with a Gatling
gun, a dark knight of traps, bows and grenades who rolls into combat and dashes
between shadows. The Monk, meanwhile, mixes elements from healers with moves
you’d expect from Capcom. Seven-Sided Strike rattles him between groups of
enemies, and Lashing Tail Kick unleashes a powerful knockback attack that’s
accompanied by the sound of a jet engine. Then, of course, there’s the Witch
Doctor, the weirdest and most contradictory of the bunch. He’s a confusing
blend of ranged and melee attacks, direct and indirect, and each new power
represents another trip to the world’s strangest pet shop, summoning spiders,
firebats, and zombie dogs that scamper after their master in a disgusting
parody of the real thing.
There’s
plenty of fun to be had as you use classes together in the churning muddle of
co-op – letting a Wizard freeze a group in place, say, before a Barbarian sends
them flying – but the addition of runestones ensures that heroes offer endless
entertainment for solo adventurers. Runes unlock gradually as you level,
allowing you to flare each power in unusual directions by slotting them into sockets.
In a game built upon a series of incapacitating choices, they offer some real
dilemmas – do you want that Cyclone Strike to be explosive or heal? Like the
skills they enhance, runes can be reset at will, allowing you to play across
the entirety of a class at once. Diablo’s always been a complex game
powered by simple things, and to impulses such as greed and violence you can
now add curiosity. Stat-tweaking, loadouts, bespoke resources: the campaign is
both laboratory and sweetshop, offering depth as well as sugary fanboy excess.
The end result is an embarrassment of rewards, an endless nested arrangement of
gifts, levels, abilities, items, runes, sigils, achievements, and AI followers
to play alongside.
If
there’s a casualty to all this generosity, it’s the loot system, and
particularly the arsenal. Assaulted by feisty class powers on one side and
sabotaged by an in-game auction house that allows you to trade items on the
other, what you’re holding in your hand has far less impact than it used to. Each
weapon still has a distinct feel, but you’re not likely to experience much of
that as you map gaudier pleasures to both mouse buttons and move through the
game performing glissandos on your recharging action bar.
This
matters less than you might expect, though, partly because the skills are so
dazzling, and partly because the rest of the game has evolved alongside the
classes. Diablo III is filled with marvels – its fantasy world has been
redrawn in rich colours and mineral textures, eschewing po-faced Tolkien
influences for the pulpiness of a horror comic as it paints its forests and
oases in deep turquoises and throbbing reds. These environments provide pacing
as well as atmosphere, and quests send you between towns, vast explorative
areas, and a variety of internal spaces that defy the ‘dungeon’ classification.
Blizzard’s tilesets can handle anything from the balanced architecture of
cathedrals to the organic sprawl of spiders’ nests, and it’s nearly impossible
to tell when you’ve switched between designed landscapes and randomisation.
The
game’s filled with detailing, too, from midnight springs turning jerry-rigged
waterwheels to useful clutter, such as walls and chandeliers primed to collapse
on your foes. The monsters, meanwhile, are a wonder to behold and a joy to
destroy, whether they’re Writhing Deceivers (fat, snake-bodied menaces
wriggling on scaly bellies) or Grotesques (tottering doughballs that explode
when killed and can set off chain reactions). Dune Dervishes, meanwhile, are
spectral hard men who spin at you with bladed skirts. They’re joined, in the
space of just a single area, by a set of gruesome delights bearing names such
as Gore Harrier, Spine Hewer and Copperfang Lurker. There’s certainly nothing
wrong with Diablo’s imagination.
Step
back and you’ll find a game that’s learned lessons from WOW, whether
it’s the scrolling timeline that blends player chat with NPC dialogue, or the
ease with which you can connect with friends, leaping into another game at the
click of a button, trading, fighting, and then disappearing again. Many of Warcraft’s
social interfaces transition across almost unchanged, and you can see the
knowledge Blizzard’s accrued from running an MMOG in the headlong rush of the
campaign and the cruel entanglement of its compulsions. It’s there in the way a
quest leads you past side missions or random events, or the reward schedule
that follows a separate rhythm to the plot. Crucially, it’s visible in the fact
that Blizzard approaches balance in a manner that sees you orbiting the right
level, ensuring you’re either slightly underpowered for the next area, so that
battles are tense and exhilarating, or slightly overpowered, meaning brawls are
almost shamefully satisfying.
Perhaps
Diablo’s learned too much from WOW, in fact. Its least lovable
aspect is its mandatory Internet connection. This protects Blizzard from piracy
and may help to slow the spread of auction corruption, but it casts out mods
and opens the door for frustrating
disconnects and freezing. This is a singleplayer game that you may struggle
to load at first due to busy servers, or because America just woke up and
everyone has logged on at once. It’s a corporate decision that affects you on a
personal level, and so it’s hard not to see it as an imposition, an insult, and
a worrying precedent. More immediately, Blizzard’s approach is just intensely
disappointing: Diablo III’s an amazing place, and it’s a shame that
you’ll never achieve the full sensation of ownership over it.
Even
then, it’s hard to stop clicking. You may think you know Diablo, but you
don’t know it with this level of polish, from the clean brilliance of
interlocking skills and classes to the sheer amount of chaos the game’s
comfortable with conjuring in its later dungeons. It’s a testament to what
money and confidence (Blizzard’s own equivalent of mana and health) can do.
You’ll sense those long years of development in characters that suggest a
certain approach while supporting myriad different playstyles, and in enemies
that aren’t content to simply wander around, but spill from ruptured tombs or
burrow out of the dark earth.
To
the disinterested, Diablo III’s another game about hitting monsters and
looting their corpses. Such a characterisation misses the wider point, however.
It’s also the best game about hitting monsters and looting their corpses that
has yet been made. [9]
