The third installment in the Diablo series is the first one I'm playing this close to release. I played the first Diablo forever ago and somehow managed to thrust the crystal into my forehead. I played a couple hours of Diablo 2 years after it was released and saw that it was good. I quickly got distracted with other things, and there it sits in a stack, sandwiched between King's Bounty and Elven Legacy. Both of which I've yet to play, I realize.
I play cames casually. When I was a kid I used to abuse cheat codes almost religiously. I didn't want to be challenged, I just wanted to live out my power fantasies. I almost never finished games. I eventually grew out of much of that, but I still find myself getting frustrated really easily. I don't go on Gamefaqs and blubber about the game being cheap, though. I still have some dignity left.
I'm unlikely to finish a game that allows me to allocate skill points in a wide variety of ways. For some reason I play a character for a while, and then just make a new character with a different build. Maybe I get bored with the abilities my current character has, or maybe I'm just curious to see what the other character classes and branches of the skill tree have to offer. Who knows. This happened with Diablo 2 as well.
Diablo 3 is different. The only thing you commit to is the character class. You can change the skills you use whenever you want. When my witch doctor gets tired of spiders in jars, she can switch to exploding frogs instead. You have no control over the base attributes of your character, so you don't have to worry about your hulking barbarian having too little charisma. There's little need to go look up the best character builds on the Internet.
Even with equipment you always know what you need. The only choice is in the special effects attached to the equipment: Whether you want life steal or better luck at finding quarters on the ground. Chances are you'll later run into a piece of equipment that does both at the same time.
I play this game in a weird way. I have five characters going on at the same time, one for each class. When I finish an act with my barbarian, I go to my demon hunter and finish the act with her. Then I go to my wizard and, you get the idea. I finish the act with all of my characters before moving on to the next act. I'm clocking almost 50 hours with the game and I'm starting act 3 on normal for the first time.
The thing about Diablo that lends itself to this kind of playing is the fact that it's randomly generated. I've played through acts 1 and 2 five times back-to-back, but I still haven't seen all the enemies, dungeons, events, journals and merchants available in those acts. Every time the side content has been slightly different. Because of the randomness, multiple playthroughs become an integral part of the exploration in the game. It doesn't feel that I'm just doing the same thing over and over again. Instead, it feels like I'm delving deeper and deeper into the game. I'm digging for the parts that I haven't seen yet.
For me the hardest difficulty is not a problem. Chances are I'll never even make it to the "endgame content" the hardcore players are crying over. It'll be a happy surprise if I manage to get even one character all the way up to max level. I realize going about the game in this autistic way is working against that. But it feels good, man.
If the game wasn't occasionally laggy, and if the writing in the game wasn't so unappealing, this streamlined point-and-click adventure might well be the perfect Diablo experience for a casual player like me. Hardcore gamers, sux 2 be u.