Hi,
I recently purchased D3 to play the campaign co-op with some friends. I played the game all the way up to level 60 when it first came out back in 2012 and just wanted to replay the game for fun, like I often do with NES and SNES classics.
I started a game as a Crusader on normal difficulty but realized that the game was very, very easy. I immediately found ‘reptilian’ items that regenerated my health and also noticed my armor was at 400 even though I wasn’t wearing any armor.
Down in the cathedral, I realized I wasn’t losing any health at all and started doing tests like standing in a crowd of enemies to let myself be killed, to no avail. I then restarted the game on expert difficulty to do some more tests. Enemies took much longer to kill, but I was still invincible.
Recalling the game used to be kinda challenging, I did some research on the internet and discovered hundreds of posts on various forums reporting this problem. Fans of the game responded by explaining the campaign didn’t matter, because the goal of the game is to rush to level 70 to reach torment, do rifts and get the best gear. Some players even wrote that Diablo isn’t about story or gameplay, it’s basically just a sophisticated slot machine, and if some players didn’t like it that way, they could basically go **** themselves. So I’m guessing the game from levels 1 to 70 has been made artificially easy to cater to the casino-loving crowd, allowing players to get to level 70 very fast to access the higher end content?
However, that’s not fair, because the game is marketed with the promise of a fun campaign and many players would like to just enjoy said campaign in a laid back manner.
Anyways, I managed to get a refund from Playstation, even though it went against their policy. I argued that the game is broken and explained why. The representative did some research, agreed with me and granted me a full refund. So from a Playstation representative’s point of view, this really is a bug, because the game is not working the way it is marketed to work. I did get my money back, but I would have preferred playing through the Diablo 3 campaign…
I don’t think this would take a lot of work to fix, just tweak a few numbers so that players can die during the campaign on easy, hard and expert modes. Otherwise, playing isn’t any fun, since the choices you make don’t matter. Maybe allow players to skip right to Torment if they so choose? That way everyone could be happy. At the very least, Blizzard should warn people who want to purchase the game that it is required to grind all the way to level 70 before the game becomes interesting -_-
Hopefully I haven’t overlooked a solution to this problem that is already available…
Mike