"A delayed game is eventually good. A rushed game is bad forever."
Whenever a game gets held back for a long time, I remind myself of this wisdom and hold onto it in the hopes that the end product might be better for the extra time spent. In the modern age of game development that idea is no longer as concrete as it once was. Patches, expansions, and DLC are all able to enhance a game years after its original release, and improve players' perception of the original. I've never seen opinion of a game reverse as much as Diablo III when the expansion Reaper of Souls launched, however.
The original game was a much-anticipated continuation of the Diablo franchise. Introducing new hero classes, new crafting systems, and a new physics engine that implemented some of the new skills, the game seemed set up to be a huge success. Indeed, it was a financial success, breaking the world record for fastest-selling PC game of all time. Despite the sales, it was immediately apparent that Blizzard was unprepared for the game's launch. The infamous "error 37" kept players from logging into servers to play on launch day, and opened a lot of eyes to the inconvenience of always-online digital rights management. The game developers also underestimated the pounding their bosses would take, saying that Diablo, the final boss, would take months for people to beat on the highest difficulty. Surprisingly, inferno-mode Diablo was being killed in mere days by some players. The hype for Diablo III swept through the internet like a firestorm, and just as fast as it erupted, it dissipated.
Reaper of Souls has arrived now to clean up after the original game's mistakes, and offer players new reasons to head back to Sanctuary and slay demons by the numbers. The most notable issues the expansion has addressed are the issues with loot and gearing up characters. Where the original game had completely randomized loot that could yield stats from intelligence to strength, and most of these stats were irrelevant to specific characters, Reaper introduces a new loot system, coined "Loot 2.0" by the designers, that caters item drops specifically to the character you're playing. The loot is still random, as is half the fun of Diablo games, but the most important stats to have are always there. Your hassle isn't about just finding an item with a bare amount of strength, now it's about choosing between the pieces with critical strike, or haste. No matter what choice, your character is upgrading, but now the choices can be more meaningful than required.
Of course, Reaper is an expansion, and the fixes it made to the original are fantastic, but the new content it brings is just as important. Three big features come with the new expansion, that all add to the original content in some way. The first is the addition of another act to play through. Act V is a departure from the typical demon-slaying theme in Diablo, and instead pits the player against the Angel of Death, Malthael. I was intrigued by the story that surrounded the conflict between Malthael and the Nephalem heroes, listening to the supporting characters debate whether humans and angels really can coexist for good, or if humanity is something greater than the rigid definitions of good and evil established by Diablo's mythology. It seems on the surface like a very basic narrative. "There's a bad guy and we're good guys so we have to stop him." But playing the act to the end reveals that Malthael's motives may not be so evil, and what sort of darkness might lurk underneath the heroism of the Nephalem? Questions like this have me itching to know what will come next in the Diablo story.
Also new to the game is a sixth character class, the Crusader. The new class is a holy warrior that uses strength, rounding out the stat distribution as a second strength-user (intelligence for Witch Doctor/Wizard, dexterity for Demon Hunter/Monk, strength for Barbarian/Crusader). The Crusader immediately charmed me with his simply clever writing and Kenobi-esque way of speaking. If nothing else, I was compelled to keep playing a Crusader just to hear more of what he had to say in the story. Of course, playing as the Crusader is also an immensely rewarding experience. The signature weapons of the Crusader are his shield and flail. In a game of randomized loot, however, players don't always find themselves wielding a shield or flail, but the Crusader remedies this with abilities that emulate the signature weapons even when he doesn't have them. My favorite ability of the Crusader's was undoubtedly Sweep, a large arcing attack that summons a spectral flail and swings it in front of him. I was using a legendary dagger when I started using Sweep, and the spectral flail was so seamlessly animated overtop my dagger that the dagger was barely relevant to the awesome flashiness of the ability. Certainly, "flashiness" is the word I would describe the Crusader's playstyle with, while "humble" is how I would describe his writing. The two characteristics make for a very interesting character.
The third and final major piece of content added in Reaper of Souls is adventure mode, which was the most liberating addition to the game in my opinion. For two years, the only way players have been able to grind their progress in Diablo has been by grinding the campaign from Act I to Act IV, and then all over again. This process can get mind-numbingly tedious without yielding a lot of results. I was only able to play through twice before giving up on my third grind. But adventure mode frees players from the tunnel vision of grinding the campaign and allows them to seek treasure on their own terms. Every act's world map is open at every checkpoint, and all the bosses stand waiting in their rooms. If players want to just go boss-to-boss and headhunt for loot, they're welcome to. Or if they want to seek out that elusive dungeon they could never find in the campaign, they can go on a search for it. But the big incentive for adventure mode is the bounties offered for clearing specific dungeons, completing specific events, or killing specific bosses. Similar to a quest in the campaign, a bounty will give the player a huge sum of experience and gold, but will also give them a keystone which is used as currency to access a new type of dungeon, Nephalem Rifts. Nephalem Rifts are randomly-generated dungeons filled with enemies which, after they have all been defeated, summon a final boss that will drop loot equivalent to an act boss. The whole system is a great way to keep players hooked like gambling, because:
(a) They never know which bounties they'll get.
(b) They never know what kind of Nephalem Rift they'll get.
(c) They never know what kind of boss they'll fight.
The randomness of the Nephalem Rifts especially can be enticing, since it is possible to get a rift full of Treasure Goblins, which will probably require more than one trip back home to empty your pockets. But that randomness in the game space as well as the game rewards has given Reaper of Souls virtually infinite replay value as long as the servers run.
When Diablo III was first released it was a mess of a AAA title, and players burned through it faster than Diablo himself could burn through players with his laser breath. It was like a flash fire, creating a ton of buzz and then dying without any memory. Blizzard's games have a reputation for lasting a long time, and they took careful measures to make sure their struggling game would get back up and draw the players back. Reaper of Souls has, so far, been an enormous success, and if patches like the Paragon system or Infernal Machine pop up throughout the expansion, it can only get better from here.
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