Path of Exile is the better game - maybe the best in the genre - if you have a master’s degree in character building, but if you don’t, it has one of the steepest learning curves. What else was there? Both original Torchlight games filled a similar casual, arcade-like role, but I think Diablo III came away with a more expansive endgame. Sure, Diablo III didn’t scratch quite the same obsessive itch as Diablo II, but it filled an important niche over time - a game worthy of sinking a few dozen hours into at the very least for fans of the otherwise starved genre. The console ports also introduced rolling, which made the game by far the best-feeling isometric ARPG off PCs. Procedurally generated Nephalem Rifts and Greater Rifts added hundreds of hours of gameplay, along with seasons that doled out new armor sets as if Sanctuary had its own fashion industry. The Reaper of Souls expansion brought back the grimdark aesthetic along with the Crusader class. At the forefront of these fixes, the real-money auction house got nixed and the end-game itemization improved dramatically. It took some time, but Blizzard listened to plenty of player complaints and subsequently righted the demonic ship so well that I’d argue only No Man’s Sky has turned it around better. Diablo III launched as one of the worst examples of the genre, but on the eve of Diablo IV, it stands as one of the better examples by balancing accessibility well with complexity. Worse still, the loot system and gameplay loop were notoriously stingy at first, pushing the real-money auction house above all else. And they’re totally right to do so: It had an atrocious story and did away with the series’s mature, horror-esque aesthetic for a more cartoonish palette. If you ask an ARPG enthusiast - let’s say someone who put a minimum of one thousand hours into Diablo II or Path of Exile - many still hold Diablo III in low regard. These opinions suffered even further when Diablo III was stacked up against its revered predecessor, the grandfather of the loot-heavy dungeon crawler, Diablo II. It was a launch that soured both the opinions of longtime fans and newcomers.
It was always online, it had a real-money auction house, and worst of all, connection issues plagued the game as if a Witch Doctor had let a Gargantuan loose in Activision Blizzard’s server room. Unfortunately, it launched with controversy rivaled only by Mass Effect 3’s tricolor ending. Way back in the ancient days of 2012, Diablo III was one of the most anticipated games of the year.
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