What’s wrong… Let’s see.
- Paragon growth and power creep.
While it helped developers to distinguish the power scale, after a while it starts to feel senseless. Both of these elements get amplified by randomization in a bad light. Player have very little control over the variables since every ounce of power coming from equipment, the character parameters climb or dive very rapidly with a simple change. This means you as a player have way less control with the variables. Only control you have is through grinding and looking forward to the next Paragon level.
- Randomization and rewards.
By paragon system D3 always followed small bread crumbs as a way to go for rewarding the player. However, this also rip the control from players’ hand for the sake of balance. When you tweak something, it’s a huge loss from one parameter for the benefit of another, always.
As item drops are a complete chaos and acquiring them is nothing different than playing at a roullette table; be it at town square, or awaiting a good drop, you never feel completely ready for the challenge.
I prefer a system where I have control and rewards can spike up at different layers instead having single aspect only. Game doesn’t give you different outlets to layer out your power, so you can only be rewarded by very simple means; a good item with desirable combination of affixes or stacking stat growth.
Bad randomization in Greater Rifts always serve as a sink for GR keys; everyone is aware of that. This has to do with layout tile set and monster group types that appear in the Rift. However, this is also a shortcoming of the design. Since tileset assets are almost always static, you don’t have any wildcards at commiting positions, and since monsters are always grouped as a package, you don’t have any wild cards for reacting against your counters.
In a similar fashion, gambling of any sort, has this dilemma as well; but you are not exactly gambling but trying to enjoy the end game. Since any material you find always have this one sink that goes nowhere and designed to drain you, it all feels weirdly monotonous.
It exists, but since everything is dependent on effort, which widely restricts that, it’s somewhat questionable. Found a nice way to play as an alternative spec but it requires abit more effort? Good job; it only climbs as high as the traditional build at best, and do nothing else out of ordinary. This creates this feeling that effort is not entirely rewarded, but always a mixture of effort and risks in gameplay do.
While this is indeed balanced and ensure the environment is controllable, it doesn’t encourage any player to explore anything. It’s really nice that characters have many aspects to consider in gameplay; classes don’t divert too far from each other on their flow because of lacking specific gimmick for characteristics.
- Forgettable story and side characters.
What more to add? Main characters are unable to keep a good conversation or interact with towns folk. Villains are better guides than good guys ever can be; while showing no more character than a saturday morning cartoon. Each main character had somewhat amazing backstory, and it never was explored just to serve the same bittersweet ending.
Whole story of campaign plays like a drunk tabletop night around friends, and I highly believe that was the case with Diablo 3’s story. Instead of going intricate on the detail, they must have put the whole story aside for the last moment and took notes while playing a session of TRPG.
Everything has a contrast of orange and baby blue. I get that they do that to make it easier on the eyes, but I prefer them to take some quotes from the book of color theory for complementary colors for the scenery; not the readability of combat area. When combat goes hectic, everything smudges and becomes really hard to read, due weak contrast of the color palette.
I know that you are well aware that people play this for a long time, and the last thing you wanted to make visuals any weary or off-putting for the audience. In the end, lack of hue and contrast, whole scene looked saturated at best and bland at worst. All the while People wonder why they become sleepy when farming for basic tasks in D3. This is why; the color contrast is weak.
