In fact, screwing around and making mistakes was part of the fun! I knew one guy who decided he would put every single point into Strength just to see how far he could get with that setup. However, what this overlooked was the fact that 99% of the people playing Diablo were not power gamers who needed or even cared about an optimal allocation of stat points. These arguments are quite correct, and I completely understand why Blizzard made the decision that they did. There was an optimal stat point allocation for each build, and anyone who didn't know that setup was wasting many of their points. In D2, you wanted exactly enough Strength and Dexterity to equip your chosen items, and everything else generally went into Vitality. Blizzard argued that the stat point system was an outdated design element, difficult for newcomers to understand, and represented a 'burden of knowledge' penalty that only experts utilized correctly.

The stat points were the absolute core of the original Diablo's character system, and were still an important part of the gameplay in D2, so this represented a major shift. This was something that was controversial prior to release, as Blizzard's development team made it clear that they were removing the ability to assign stat points on leveling up. We're leaving out stat point gains from items for the moment, we'll get to the problems with itemization in a little bit. Technically the stat points are still in the game in D3, but you don't get to assign them, and they may as well not exist given how they function passively in the background. I'll run through a number of these points in list form. This article is designed around understanding how and why so many fans walked away from D3 with that unsatisfied feeling. The word that best describes the Diablo 3 experience is 'unsatisfying', a feeling that the game was decent enough for a little while, but failed to live up to its predecessors and squandered the enormous potential that it could have had. I pride myself on not getting taken in when it comes to gaming reviews, and even I had very positive impressions from my character run on Normal difficulty. Indeed, many of the biggest problems with the gameplay only became apparent on multiple playthroughs, especially on higher difficulty levels, which helps to explain why so much of the initial reception of the game was positive. There were no crippling bugs in D3, the presentation values were almost amazingly good, and if you only played through the game a single time, you would most likely be happy with the experience. It certainly does not belong on the short list of 'worst sequels ever', as I've seen bandied about in some corners of the Internet. I want to establish one thing at the outset: D3 is not a 'bad' game.

With the hype and excitement in the rear view mirror at this point, let's examine what specifically went wrong with the design of Diablo 3. Its rise was meteoric (over ten million copies sold in the first few months) and its fall equally catastrophic ( D3 had one of the fastest abandon rates of any online game ever). While D2 remained extremely popular for many years after its release, D3 was virtually forgotten by the end of the 2012 calendar year. For a game that launched with such immense fanfare and promise, it's hard to believe how little long-term impact D3 had on the larger gaming community.

With the impending release of the console versions of D3 coming up soon, now seems like a good time to revist the subject of Diablo 3, and put a close to this section of my website. I've had the Diablo 3 shortcut sitting on my desktop for over a year now without once clicking on it to launch the game. This is an article that's been sitting around in the planning stages for a long time.

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