"The good is oft interrèd with their bones."

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.

-- Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2

Unlike Antonius, I bear no ill will. I have no axe to grind, and no reason to deny the developers of Diablo III their due & proper for those aspects of the game which actually do work well.

Don't get me wrong: I do think that Diablo III is a fundamentally broken mess. By which I mean that the developers failed to understand several fundamental concepts in game design, either didn't understand or didn't much care for the conventions of the genre of game they were making, and achieved an end result which fails on so many different levels that it's going to take a few thousand words to unpack it all. 

But that doesn't mean that Diablo III is entirely bad. The game does do some things well, and it does a few things very well, and its only fair that I recognize the game's undeniable charms... before I start tearing it apart to see why it went so far wrong in every other respect.

And so, I shall begin my detailed criticism of Diablo III by praising it.

1. Animation

Blizzard's games, all of them, have featured top-notch animation work for decades now, and Diablo III is no exception. 

Fully pre-rendered cinematic cut scenes were something that Blizzard popularized, of course, and Diablo III's cinematics are, naturally, gorgeous, but it doesn't end there. Diablo III also includes a second set of line-art and ink-wash style cut scenes; while I might take issue with the narrative function of these added animations (and I will; believe me, I will), the videos themselves are also beautiful. While not as lush as the fully 3D pre-rendered scenes, they're visually and aesthetically interesting, and I can honestly say that I've never seen anything quite like them in any other game.

But even that isn't the end of D3's excellent animation work. No, as far as I'm concerned, the real star of the game, animation-wise, is the in-game character animation work, which is some of the best that I've seen in any game, regardless of genre.

Every player action in D3 has multiple animations that can play when the ability is triggered; every one of those animations has secondary animations that can play if the main animation is interrupted; and all of those animations are carefully calibrated so that they flow together seamlessly. The result is an amazingly fluid gameplay experience. You'll often hear D3 players raving about how good combat feel; this is what they're talking about.

I especially want to praise the in-game character animations because they often go unnoticed in a game, unless they're bad. This isn't a game element that normally draws a lot of attention to itself when it's working; unlike the show-stopping cinematics, this is something you feel, rather than something that you see. But you will feel it, if it's done right; if you played Diablo III, and liked the way it felt, give credit to the animators for that, because they did a lot of really fiddly, time-consuming work to make it happen.

2. Aesthetics: visual design, sound design, and music

Diablo III got a lot of flak for being "too colourful," especially when compared to previous games in the Diablo series, but I personally love the way this game looks. For one thing, D3's aesthetics are demonstrably not the problem with this game, but there's more to it than that.

While there is certainly a debate to be had about the overall tone and feel of D3, and whether it really fits within the Diablo series as a whole, there's simply no arguing that D3's artistic direction perfectly suits the tone and themes of the game that Blizzard made here, and it's executed to a high degree of skill and polish. Whether you like the game or not, there's no doubt that it looks really, really good.

I even like the fact that it's not all drab and colourless. Diablo III was in production at a time when brown cover-based shooters were ruling AAA game development, and it would have been very easy for Blizzard to go in a very monochromatic direction. Blizzard went in a much more visually lush direction instead, and the result felt like an oasis in the middle of AAA's wasteland of apocalyptically themed visuals.

And the visual excellence isn't only found in the quality of the images. The designs are excellent in and of themselves; even if they weren't as polished, they'd still be visually interesting. Diablo III has some of the most creative monster designs that I've seen in a fantasy game recently, with a staggering variety of creatures that tick every horrific box, from the body horror of the Tormented Stingers, to the squick factor of the Spider Queen and her creepy crawly dungeon. Yes, the game does have both pseudo-Shelob and pseudo-Lolth as antagonists, and someone on the design team certainly a serious case of lepidoperaphobia, but those are minor quibbles here.

The game's score and sound effects go perfectly with its visuals, too. Yes, I also love Matt Uelman's excellent work in Diablo and Diablo II, and Diablo III's soundtrack doesn't reach those same heights of artistic originality, but the game's epic score perfectly matches the epic tone of the game that Blizzard was making; you may not have liked that tone, but transplanting Uelman's music into D3 really doesn't make it better. 

And the excellent sound work doesn't end with the score. While some of the voice-acted dialogue is not especially well written, the quality of the voice acting itself it top notch, and the creature voice actors are especially good. Every monster in the game has a uniquely expressive voice, and all of those voices perfectly match the creatures' visual designs, which is really hard to pull off. Other sound effect are equally well-matched to the in-game events that they accompany.

3. User interface

This is where things start to get a little blurrier. Because a game's UI connects the player to the game's underlying systems and mechanics, it can sometimes be hard to separate UI design flaws from broader game design issues... and Diablo III does have underlying design issues.

A good example would be the option to display damage numbers on the screen during game play. Obviously, adding more numbers flashing on the screen is going to make the screen busier, but the problem is exacerbated by the magnitude of the D3's player damage numbers, which can easily run to tens of billions of points of damage per target hit, and hit every monster on the screen at once. The result can be chaos... but that's not so much a UI design issue, as it is a game mechanics issue (i.e. why are damage numbers so large in the first place?). It's like trying to separate the dancer from the dance.

The one thing that I can say about D3's UI design is that there's no single element of it that I would do differently, and some of the game's UI elements are quite clever. Inventory management is a good example, here. Every RPG ever made has wrestled with this problem, and many of the solutions that they've come up with are quite good (Titan Quest's auto-sort function is a standout, here, and Torchlight/Torchlight 2 also had some clever and innovative solutions), but the way D3 adds items to the player's inventory as loot is picked up essentially optimizes for space used, and eliminates "inventory Tetris" almost entirely. It's simple, elegant, effective, and invisible because it works... which is exactly what you want from a User Interface.

And that's just one example. Diablo III's UI design work is all like that; everywhere you look, you can clearly see where Blizzard has applied the lessons learned from dozens of games in multiple genres, and applied them to excellent effect. Assuming that you think to look, of course... which most players won't, because a well-designed UI provides a nearly transparent connection between the players and their game.

4. Miscellaneous

There are a couple of other things for which Blizzard deserve some acknowledgement.

First, while I'd hardly describe D3's character designs as especially progressive or culturally sensitive, the developers did make a point of having both male and female character models for every class, which is a first for the franchise. There are a couple of different body types for each gender, too, something that we would later see a lot more of in Blizzard's Overwatch. It was a baby step in the direction of diversity, but it was a step, and noteworthy for 2012, especially for a AAA developer.

And there's Blizzard's commitment to post-release support of the game. Again, it hasn't been perfect; the developers attitude towards their players, and towards fans of earlier games in the franchise, specifically, has been... rocky, shall we say? at times degenerating into a profoundly un-Blizzard-like palpable contempt.

But even at the lowest points, Blizzard never stopped polishing the rough edges off Diablo III, even if they didn't go so far as to actually fix the game (again... I'll be coming back to this subject). The fact that this sort of product support is now the norm for the industry doesn't in any way diminish the role that Blizzard played in making this the industry standard practice. Hell, they're still balancing and patching D3; that's pretty decent service, and still better than most AAA studios manage.

And that's all, folks!

From here on, we'll be discussing what Diablo III's developers got wrong: fundamentally missing the point of the RPG genre, and why progression mechanics were crucial to Diablo; failing to understand the importance of opportunity cost (and its corollary, player choice and agency) in game design; failure to understand and employ basic narrative techniques (like Chekov's Gun) in their story-heavy game; failure to finish the game before launch (oh, yes, you know that we'll get to the launch); and their failure to fix the game after the launch, in spite of having spent five more years patching, polishing, and expanding it.

And, just for good measure, I'll give examples of other games, from other developers, that did all of those things right... or, at least, better.

The journey begins. Thanks for coming along.