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You’ll be completing quests for various townsfolk, pushing the main storyline further, and stumbling into ‘Events’ that give you a quick challenge with the promise of some sort of reward, which is usually gold and loot. In several words, satisfying and rewarding, if slightly repetitive. So you’ve got a character, armour, weapons, and special shiny abilities, all in the name of murderousness but how does this said murderousness gameplay feel? In a word, good. They have a decent variety to them, but this variety is restricted more in some classes than others, and you’ve no way of knowing what you’ll be able to learn until you’ve started the game and actually unlocked each ability after hours of play. The abilities you learn are dished out in a very linear fashion, and unless you choose ‘Elective Mode’ in the options menu, only one from each category can be assigned at any one time. They’ll be in hiding in chests, falling from downed foes, and leaping out of nearby corpses if you walk too closely to them. As you scurry around the landscape you’ll find bits of armour, gold, jewels, and weapons. Just like the rest of the game, all the loot is delivered old-school, by just playing the game and not opening your wallet a second time. Whoa there! Hold your horses, we’re not talking about loot boxes or microtransactions or anything like that, so put down your pitchforks and flaming torches and allow us to explain. The hook that ties your whole adventure together is loot. So if it’s so by the numbers, who do so many people harp on about the series? Well, it’s all about the execution, and one crucial factor we’ve not mentioned yet to give the review some pacing. Don’t expect it to rock your entire worldview, but it’s well-written and most of the dialogue is decent, with only the occasional chunk of ham thrown in. There’s a plot, sure, and it’s a pretty good one at that. It’s not exactly breaking new ground or trying to mix up the genre, then this a straightforward RPG with linear level progression and simple mechanics, but a game doesn’t have to be complex to be good. As you go about murdering you’ll earn experience that causes your character to level-up and learn new abilities to help you more efficiently - you guessed it - go about murdering. Unsurprisingly, this runs true in Diablo III: Eternal Collection as well, even retaining the locked camera angle to the point that it functions in the same isometric manner as previous entries. The Diablo formula is relatively simple you have a character who runs around from an angled top-down perspective that some may call isometric, and you command that character to do all sorts of wholesome things like raise the dead and kick a giant ethereal bell in order to murder as much nastiness as is feasible. Thankfully, it’s 2018 now and most companies have got this whole internet thing down pat for the most part - but even with stable netcode, can a 5-year-old game stand up to modern scrutiny? Well, yes, but let’s pretend the answer’s not so obvious, at least for a bit.
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Of course, some people managed to find something to moan about, but admittedly a lot of that surrounded issues with Diablo III when played online. Coming off the success of such a beloved game as Diablo II after quite a few years was a bold move by Blizzard, as any shift away from the old mechanics could easily have been taken poorly by those that played - and loved - the first two games.
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