As a life-long Blizzard fan since the days of The Lost Vikings and Rock and Roll Racing to Diablo and World of Warcraft, I couldn’t have been more excited to play Diablo 3. I waited and watched previews and was giddy as a school girl hearing rumors of large-scale PvP and arena combat. I was more than ready to spend hours theory-crafting certain character builds, without even playing the game, so that I could have the most powerful hero in Sanctuary. I had seen the scope of World of Warcraft, and Diablo 3 was promised to be as big or bigger, with open-world elements.

All I could think about was roaming the lands hacking and slashing anything and everything I could, including other players, to become the most notorious adventurer anyone had ever seen. This fever built up inside me for years as rumors flew about and screenshots were released. To say the least, I was genuinely excited about a game for the first time since World of Warcraft was released back in 2004.
Then, the Diablo 3 open beta weekend came.

For this momentous occasion, my friends and I set up a LAN at my house to experience what was going to be my new favorite game. As we raced through the playable demo to the skeleton king it became clear that the open world we were expecting was non-existent. As we leveled, we were all trying to figure out where the screen was to allocate points and customize our characters so that my barbarian wasn’t exactly the same as my friends. As we gained loot, we began to realize that most of it wasn’t that helpful and certainly wasn’t very epic looking.

It’s not as if we were hating the game; we did enjoy it, but there was something missing, something that Diablo I & II had that this game didn’t. We chalked it up to the fact that the game was a beta; surely Blizzard was hiding some of the best features, and would right themselves upon release of the full game. I immediately pre-ordered the game, believing this to be fact.

As the weeks passed, the rumor mill started up again. I won’t talk about the Auction Houses, as Blizzard recognized their mistake and removed them, even though the damage was already done. A huge blow was that upon release, Diablo 3 would have no PvP whatsoever. This was a big one for me. PvP is a huge reason I play games. It is what you do end-game when you have the best gear. It is so much more satisfying battling a real life person who can think and outplay you, rather than an AI monster which you know how to exploit. This was a big hit, but I justified it saying that they were probably so busy making the rest of the game amazing that it would balance out, and they promised to release PvP later in free DLC, so it was fine by me.

At the time of release, Diablo 3 was plagued with bugs that gave way to exploits which made certain characters invincible, dupes were rampant, and there was a huge wall at the beginning of the final difficulty level. If you weren’t decked out in the finest gear the Auction House offered, you were SOL. A lot of the skills for some classes were utterly useless, and the diversity in classes and character building present in the previous “Diablo” titles was nowhere to be seen. The classes were completely unbalanced, and my wizard became a better melee tank than my barbarian. Every class pretty much was pigeon-holed into playing a specific build just to survive. As Blizzard released fix after fix, and my Diablo friends list shrank by the week, I decided to give up and stop playing.

My hopes were rekindled when the newest patch, 2.0 included changes which brought it more in line with the console version. I had played the console version and enjoyed it. (You can see my review of that patch here )

After playing the new patch, I must admit that I did enjoy the changes, but unfortunately, it’s just not enough. What the expansion intends to offer is this:
• A new class, the Crusader, which is similar to a paladin.
• A new level cap of up to 70 with new skills for each class
• A new Act with a new Boss
• A new Artisan that will let you reroll stats on items and change the look of them

This seems all well and good for a Blizzard expansion; you have the obligatory level cap raise, the new area with a new end boss, the new class abilities, and the new artisan type. Unfortunately the key problems have still not been addressed.

There is still no major PvP, which was supposed to be included in the vanilla game and has seemingly been all but scrapped. There is still no major customization for the character classes. Sure there are paragon points to allocate, but time will tell if that can truly make a huge impact. Lastly, the biggest killer here for me is the price tag. $40 dollars for an expansion to a game that is currently faltering is almost a joke.

If Blizzard really cares about fixing the train wreck that is Diablo 3, maybe they should offer the game at a discount to all the players who made it one of the best-selling games in years before they were disillusioned and quit.

Honestly, what I’d like most from Blizzard is an apology, and a promise that Diablo 3 will one day live up to its heritage.

Mark is MONG’s Lead PC Editor.  Follow his completely average life on Twitter, Facebook, or MONG.