Magda: “Hahaha! All your friends and sword shards are belong to us!”
Tyrael: “My sword doesn’t get enough screen time, so I’m going to explain how it’ll destroy demonic seals… every time we destroy one.”
I was hoping I could think of more, but that’s a start. Basically NPCs think they need to explain everything they do. Don’t talk to me about your sword, just break that seal.
Malthael was right.,
I actually meant to say Magda. She couldn’t get more cliche if she tried.
The campaign has absolutely tons of lore in its dialogue, which I think is kinda cool. The story itself is mostly forgettable, though I did enjoy taking the fight to Heaven and them killing off Leah in the tragic way they did was actually rather ballsy and badass. Finally, all of Act 5 is just a good time and has a cool villain to wrap it all up. For me the lowest points were Cain’s anticlimactic death and Azmodan in general. He literally acts exactly like a Power Rangers villain. Stop freaking calling me and telling me your plans in a Saturday morning cartoon fashion, you inept moron. And then after all that, he ends up being the easiest/lamest act boss in the game.
Yeah, honestly Azmodan was definitely poorly handled. You’d think that for one of Hell’s greatest military tacticians, with millennia worth of experience, he wouldn’t go around making costly mistakes like informing his enemies of his plans ahead of time. I mean sure, on one hand, it’s understandable that one of the reasons he contacted the Nephalem was in an attempt to instill fear and sow discord amongst the humans. But after the first couple of calls ended up with the Nephalem not only thwarting Azmodan’s plans of overtaking the keep from the inside, but also saw the Nephalem taking on Azmodan’s catapults on the battlefield; you’d think he adopt a new strategy that didn’t involve further contacts with the Nephalem.
But beyond Azmodan, and some other aspects of the campaign, I didn’t have too much issue with the game’s story. Especially RoS, which imo, did great especially considering setting up the horrific events that D4 will likely have.
Act 3 has me gooin all which ways.
i mean i dont like it, but it has so much cool stuff about it. Like the battlements and the huge giant wall monsters and how you can see the siege down below going on. It starts in the snowy mountains and finishes in the depths of hell. The larder was pretty gross but a good design for a boss. Why are there hell scorpions again? huh? The bridge with Tyreal. Azmodan should have been a tough boss fight, with a lot of strategy, i mean he’s the literal god strategery.
That’s actually present in every media nowadays, be it movies, comics, books, games, etc.
And they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!
If we are comparing story telling in D3 vs D1/D2, the antagonists engage in direct exposition (they tell us what they are doing and why) whereas in the previous two entries the exposition is indirect (ie Cain or other NPC gives us their interpretation of what is going on and why). The latter style imparts a degree of uncertainty or an impersonal quality to the villians’ motivations and actions which probably works better when portraying ancient famonthless evils.
To add to the above:
In Diablo 1 and 2, the bosses never actually (outside of a few battle lines) bothered to pay attention to the efforts and actions of our characters until we actually engaged them. This also created the guise that they didn’t percieve us as much of a threat and/or that handling us was a secondary priority rather than a primary priority, which one can say may had aided in our defeat of them since they had underestimated us.
In Diablo 3 however, with our characters awakening to our Nephalem birthright and realizing their true potential, along with the bosses either keeping tabs of our progress/activities or speaking directly to us, it created the notion that the elimination of our characters was the bosses greatest concern or at least on par with their other grand schemes (like the acquisition of the Black Soulstone, or the destruction of the High Heavens). At least that the notion I had always had judging from all of their orders to their minions to either destroy us and/or be wary of us.
Now by itself, this isn’t a bad thing imo, since having the enemy acknowledge us could lead less into them underestimating us and more into actual story scenarios where they attempt to attack us at every moment, such as right after a difficult boss battle or in town, or having plans that we’re not aware of until nearly the last minute, for example demons disguised as villagers and by the time we realized it half or nearly all of the villagers were wiped out. All in all it could be done well to actually show the great demons resourcefulness. Sadly we didn’t really get that in D3 (not the base game anyway).
Instead we got them underestimating, taunting, and belittling us at nearly every turn despite the fact we had proven to be an enormous threat to their plans. It kind of makes them look silly, foolish, and/or even idiotic when one moment they’re telling their minions to watch out for us, and then some minutes later, they’re telling us we’ll lose just after we foiled their latest plan.
Apparently angelic weapons being able to break things that you can’t break otherwise are now an important lore bit, since you have an entire questline to get one to break worldstone shards in diablo immoral, so I think it’s fair that he pointed that out. Just for future reference I guess. Need a seal broken? Call uncle Tyrael.
Azomdan was over confident. Thought he had everything in the bag. Everything was going the BHs way and norhing pointed to them being stopped(other than the player because it would be a bad game if we always failed). That leads to costly mistakes.
Azmodan being over confident is fine.
But I think they could have made that clear enough without he appearing as a hologram to scrubquote you everytime you soil one of his plans. It’s some scooby-doo level villaining.
Even if he was overconfident, that was no reason for him to absolutely ignore any possible setbacks. As I said, you’d think that someone who was considered one of Hell’s greatest military tacticians wouldn’t had made the mistakes that he had in D3. Don’t forget, it’s not like it’s the first time he was confident in Hell’s victory, he had plenty of times throughout the Eternal Conflict where he supposedly gain great victories againt Heaven, while at the same time suffered crushing defeats by them as well. So there was little reason for him to be so sure of victory when he knew he was facing the same person (us) who had defeated Belial, someone who Azmodan himself had waged battle against for centuries and yet never scored a clear victory.
I get that, ive said the delivery was bad at times, but the story was good add a ton of lore for players.
It happens all the time in real life where professionals in sports are so over confident they get beat by teams/players they have absolutely no business losing too. The get caught off guard, press, and forget fundamentals. Happens to militaries as well.
The delivery is the most important part in storytelling. It’s what separates a good idea from a good story.
It’s not the worst story I’ve ever played but it’s pretty subpar compared to previous Blizzard products like Starcraft and Warcraft 3, and even Starcraft 2 (which they kinda dropped the ball on the expansions, but the terran campaign was pretty solid).
I feel like the storywriting of the company in general just went downhill after 2011 or so. For all their IPs. Maybe they lost all their good writers, I don’t know.
Except there’s a large number of factors that can play into those things that can’t be controlled and can affect the parties involved, be it someone’s physical or mental condition, weather, enviroment, etc.
Most of those things would barely affect demons, at least not nearly as much as humans. And once again, considering Azmodan had existed since millenias and his specialty was a tactician, it seems highly unlikely for him to caught off guard like how you described, unless he actually wasn’t as good as the lore and game states him to be.
I don’t get too caught up in it when it comes to video games. Story is near the bottom, if not the bottom, of importance to me, so it didn’t bother me. I understand why others have issues with it.
Just the fact he was so arrogant, he never thought we would defeat his army, defeat his defenses, and make it to him, is more than enough to make him panic. His arrogance nephalem scream is pure projection.