Diablo III Game Critique Thesis

Diablo III is an action role-playing game (ARPG) taking place in a fantasy-based, Dungeons and Dragons-esque universe. Players will choose one class from barbarian, demon hunter, monk, witch doctor, or wizard. All heroes are well balanced; for example, barbarian and monk classes have a benefit in survival in the game beginning, but they have a low damage per second with the same levels and equipment compared with demon hunter and wizard. Demon hunter and wizard have high damage per second (DPS) but they are easily killed. Players can have fun from challenging, fantasy, discovery and a little bit narrative.
The goal of Diablo III is to make your hero stronger and stronger, and to kill much more challenging monsters and bosses. Fabricatore explains that successful core mechanics can make a game simple yet rich. Long-term players will receive the mastery, challenge and reward that they seek, conquering essential difficulties, increasing their passion and motivation (Fabricatore, n.d.). Diablo III has this kind of successful core and satellite mechanics. Second, players can enhance their heroes by killing non-player enemy, so that players can power themselves up by getting more resources and powerful equipment, leveling up, learning new powerful skills, improving the ability of followers (powerful companions who join you in battle), getting rewards from completing missions and so forth. After avatars become stronger, they can defeat more challenging monsters, complete tougher missions and have the same cycle. Players would gain everlasting fun and motivations to enhance their heroes.
Salen and Zimmerman claims that giving players a feeling of randomness and uncertain risks could increase more fun in game play. Uncertainty makes plays meaningful as a result of the ultimate outcome of the game can be influenced by the player's actions on the macro-level. On the micro-level, at isolated moments in a game system, actual operations of chance may occur (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004). In my opinion, most people like the pleasure that uncertainty gives them, because people do not have interests and motivations to do a thing that they have known the results already and they cannot change the results. In Diablo III, when players restart game for several times, players would see different equipment on sale, different maps from before, new monsters and new mazes. Uncertainty in Diablo III provides more freedom and hidden uncertain points to create more pleasure for players. These random setups in Diablo III are input uncertainty. Designers of Diablo III also create constant maps to control and exploit amounts of uncertainty are not too huge , which make the game are unpredictable chaos.
The narrative structure of Diablo III is divided into four acts. Every act includes main quests and random events. The main quest is to prevent the Lord of Terror, Diablo, from taking over the realm of Sanctuary. The tension of the story arc is related to the protagonist’s relationship to the other characters, including Deckard Cain and Leah, the heroes of the previous game. However, Diablo has a clumsy narrative structure. Kaiser refer to Diablo III’s story has no creativity, and looks like a repeat of Diablo II. Both first two acts in Diablo II and Diablo III are forest and desert, Diablo III ends up very much like Act IV in Diablo II (Kaiser, 2012). Therefore, Diablo looks like a modified 3D version of Diablo II. Blizzard focused on showing their story instead of telling, making for a more immersive narrative while not sacrificing the gameplay (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014). Compared to Diablo II, the plot and themes of Diablo III are far more complex, taking convoluted narratives and incorporating them into the ARPG formula; however, this ends up making the story a bit too complicated, making the turns predictable and the characters a bit flat.
Yee examines how Ever Quest (EQ) creates fun in RPG games, and explains this through the Operant Conditioning theory. EverQuest is additive because players want to repeat rewarded behaviors, and to suppress punished behaviors. Behaviors are made rewarding through reinforcement rather than inherently rewarding. In game "achievements" rewarding made by Ever Quest provide players even more rewarding than "real life" achievements (Yee, n.d.). Diablo III is a typical sample of Ever Quest RPG game. When players finish normal difficulty, they can play nightmare difficulty with more buffed monsters; unlock more advanced equipment and new achievements. When players finish the nightmare difficulty, they can play hell difficulty. When players finish the hell difficulty, they can play inferno difficulty, which provides players the most pleasure during the play. In the Inferno difficulty, players will realize how important they lay a solid foundation in former difficulty. It is worth for players to make efforts in former play. So Ever Quest provides players lots of fun in game, and also increases game play to some extent.
Johnson explains that designers use economic game mechanics to balance a game. Free trade between players can make every player better off; Players can exchange different resources to meet their own needs. Specifically, they sell extra resources and buy rare resources to balance their resources (Johnson, 2008). In my opinion, other players’ “trash” is the gift of some new players. There is a “saleroom” in Diablo III for trading equipment between players. When new players play Diablo III, they do not have many resources and money to quickly develop them. However, for some experienced players, they want to sell their obsolete weapons to exchange some money to develop them. They always treat their obsolete weapons as trash, and sell these weapons with a far lower price comparing with the market price. But for players, these weapons are advanced and cheap. Therefore, free trade in Diablo III can make different kinds of players better off.
Diablo III shows both positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks. For example, players spend money buying advanced equipment to kill stronger monsters and gain more money as rewards. This is a positive feedback, because players spend money to generate more money. For negative feedbacks, when players buy items, such as potions in store, players would have less money and more potions; or players sell potions to store, and they would have less potions and more money. This results in a player experience that is designed to make them invested in leveling up – performing even the most mundane activities puts you that much closer to getting more points and skills, which brings a level of gratification to the long-term invested player that the designers surely intended to include to add to the addictive quality of the games.
Although Diablo III has a clumsy narrative structure, it is still a very successful video game in terms of its gameplay. Seamless interaction in Diablo III is very attractive; for instance, players can share items between different characters, which would speed up players to power up a new character. Also, players can teleport back to town, which saves unnecessary time on the way. Seamless interaction makes Diablo III have fluid gameplay and immense replay value. With these and all the other factors previously mentioned, Diablo III becomes one of the most valuable new games on PC.