Okay, so the Arthur Gies review of Diablo III.
Not for the score itself (plenty of sites gave Diablo III great scores, because it made a great first impression on the first playthrough), but for the writing, which comes off as incredible in retrospect when you remember how much Blizzard had to rework the game, admit they made massive mistakes with it, release an expac that was partially to redeem the game itself, and later behind-the-scenes from Jason Schreier revealed that Activision even canned a second expac because they lost faith in the game and felt that starting over with 4 was a better idea.
Diablo 3 is the first game to render Diablo 2 obsolete.
With Diablo 3, Blizzard has taken the fundamentals of the franchise, broken them apart and rebuilt them into an action RPG so refined and compulsively playable that it's done the unthinkable: It's finally rendered its predecessor a footnote.
Ordinarily, my position as Reviews Editor at Polygon is that we review a game as it exists on release day, because our responsibility is to our audience. While we do all we can to maintain due diligence with regards to giving a game every opportunity to deliver, we choose your wallet and your time before the benefit of the doubt.
But Diablo 3 is different. It's different because Blizzard has a track record spanning almost two decades of games that have become institutions, and they've also run the most popular MMO around for almost eight years. Put simply, Blizzard, more than any developer around, has earned that benefit of the doubt. I believe that the server issues will be resolved. With that in mind, it does both our audience and Diablo 3 a disservice to dwell on that aspect in this review.
Forty hours into a single playthrough, I'm still seeing new enemy types and new events I didn't trigger last go-round, finding progressively more epic equipment and loot. You can't even find the necessary ingredients for most gem-crafting and item creation until an hour or two into Nightmare mode - I can't even imagine what waits in hell.
Games this thoughtfully crafted don't happen very often, and the care that Blizzard has taken with Diablo 3 shows in every facet of its design and execution. It might not be perfect, but after 45 hours, I'm not sure where it missteps, and after 45 hours, I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what it has to offer. Diablo 3 is almost evil in how high a bar it's set for every PC action RPG to follow, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that bar remain for a very long time.
So, for people who didn't play Diablo III, or at launch:
-The depth of content mentioned ran out almost immediately.
-The difficulty curve on higher difficulties became absurdly skewed toward elite mobs that carried a bunch of effects, and the only way to survive was to either grind for gear that specifically carried elemental resistances, or...
-...more likely, you'd give up and just buy said resistance gear from the Auction House, which was supplemented by the controversial
Real Money Auction House, neither of which the review mentions once.
-Loot was terrible, you'd get better results from rares with lucky rolls than from sets and legendaries, which were practically useless at launch.
-Blizzard later made major changes to practically all of the game's systems from top to bottom, as a bunch of elemental types were completely useless without corresponding skills on various classes, the leveling system had to be overhauled, the difficulty system had to be overhauled, and a brand new endgame with procedurally generated missions (Adventure Mode and Rifts) had to be added because there was no content besides the same campaign with minor variations on higher difficulties. It also took two years to implement season ladders.
Pretty much all of these issues were admitted to by Blizzard themselves, and the fact that they saw their own post-launch work as saving the game from its own mistakes (Activision later got Blizzard to go talk to Bungie about fixing Destiny 1, using D3 as an example of how to fix a fucked-up game) makes the review stand out more due to its tone; the author is just so hyperbolic and confident about how perfectly crafted the game is, and how it will remain a high bar for the forseeable future, and how he can't think of any mistakes it makes.
