2018-11-25

Part 3: It's time to talk about Diablo III's story

SPOILERS ahead, obviously.

First, a quick recap: Having first praised the parts of Diablo III that worked, we then went on to discuss D3's genre, and established that it's definitely an RPG, and not an action game.

It's not very effective as an RPG, though, having neutered or entirely removed most or all of Diablo II's genre-defining RPG systems, while failing to replace them with robust collision-detection-based action mechanics. But there are plenty of RPGs that don't have especially strong RPG mechanics, or any action mechanics to speak of. Many of them have still come to be very highly-regarded as examples of the genre, in spite of those shortcomings.

How? Simple: by telling a compelling story.

Sure, ARPGs are generally not story-heavy, and their largely linear plots don't normally lend themselves to replayability for the story alone, but a good story can carry you a good long way into a game, compensating for shortcomings in other areas until you become so immersed in the game that the flaws cease to matter. And the Diablo series has a history of solid lore and story elements. The original Diablo game was chock-full of lore, otherwise known as environmental story-telling; Diablo II's story is generally regarded as one of the best ever for the genre.

This should have been an easy win for Diablo III. Instead, it became one of the game's most-hated elements. Players hated the story so much that Blizzard added an entire play mode that allows them to avoid engaging with the story entirely. And it's weird, because the basic beats of the story, as they appear in the game's gorgeous cinematics, are basically fine. Seriously, they are.
So, what in the burning hells happened? How did Diablo III turn a basically solid story outline into the game's third-most-hated element?

Screenwriter and author John August has some ideas about that.
Last week, I tweeted:
Finished Diablo III. Writing credits are pretty deep in the end crawl, consistent with how little they cared.
Yes, I was trying to kill two birds with 140 characters. The writers weren’t given very good placement in the hierarchy of credits, and the storytelling in Diablo III is pretty damn weak.
Many folks have asked me to elaborate my story gripes, so here we go. There are very minor spoilers within. Trust me, I’m not really ruining anything.
His argument basically boils down to a handful of pretty simple points.

1. Watching NPCs talk among themselves is boring.
In Diablo III, you encounter most of the plot by listening as other characters talk to each other. Leah talks to Deckard Cain. Tyrael talks to Adria. They’re having an exclamation point party, and you’re welcome to quietly observe.
It's normal in an ARPG to have NPCs talk to the player, without the players' characters actually saying much. That's always struck me as something of a missed opportunity; why not have voice-acted, in-character dialogue responses cued up for the PCs, too, as a way to give them a more expressive character? Missed opportunity or not, though, at least the player feels involved when the NPCs talk to them; players don't feel involved when NPCs talk amongst themselves, and basically ignore the players' presence entirely.

Used sparingly, the "candid reveal" moment, when a player comes upon two NPCs talking to each other, about things that they'd never say to the player directly, can be very effective; it can make you feel like you've stumbled across a crucial clue in an unfolding mystery. When it's the only kind of NPC encounter the players have, though, then it rapidly loses that effectiveness. It just feels like the player may as well not be there.


2. Players should have at least the illusion that they're the ones moving the story forward.
Note that I’m not actually demanding choice or free will as a player. Look, I’ve played Diablo. I’ll go kill the next thing. But I’d love to feel like my character was making the choice, rather than being a lackey.
The Diablo III devs have explicitly expressed contempt for the basic idea of player choice; or, as they call it, "analysis paralysis," and "the illusion of choice." The problem is that player agency is the reason why we're playing a video game in the first place, instead of reading a book or watching a movie. In a game where the story is highly linear, like an ARPG, branching plotlines with multiple decision- and end- points are a non-starter, but that makes the illusion of choice more important, not less, when it comes to keeping the player engaged. 

3. D3's NPCs are poorly-developed as characters; we know little about them, and care less.
At several points in the game, major NPCs betray you and/or die. And you shrug.
Deckard Cain is an excellent example, here. Long-time Diablo fans will recognize him, of course; apart from Diablo himself, The Last Horadric Seer is the only recurring named character to appear in all three games of the series. New players, however, won't know who he is, and our new characters have no reason to know or care who he is, either. Nonetheless, we're expected to risk life and limb to search for him in an undead- and cultist- infested cathedral, in spite of the fact that we have every reason to suspect that he's dead anyway, and then meekly follow his marching orders... because reasons. It's weak story-telling that relies entirely on metatextual references to work. That means that it doesn't work on its own. At all.

4. The player is always ahead of the plot; there are no surprises. Characters in the story are always surprised by events that the player saw coming from miles off, though, which feels stupid.
Gee, nothing bad could happen from sucking all those demon lords into a fiery black soul stone.
My favourite example of this comes partway through Act I, when you've reached the crater of the falling star to find [SPOILERS] not a meteor, but a man. My immediate thought was, "Oh, hey, a fallen angel," followed immediately with, "wait, aren't fallen angels bad things?"

Deckard Cain, paragon of wisdom for the Diablo franchise, reacts to this plot point with, "No man could survive such a thing!" And that's it. No quoting of the ominous prophecy that foretold this event ("Justice shall fall"), no recognition of the fact that fallen angels are basically devils, and maybe we shouldn't trust this one. No, we're immediately sent on a MacGuffin quest for the pieces of the fallen angel's sword, in order to restore his memories, as if that's something we should want to be doing.

Oh, and that sword? Stick a pin that one, because we'll be coming back to that sword.

5. The sepia-toned character interludes waste time while adding nothing.
At several moments in the game — generally at act breaks — the game goes to a completely different animation style. Your character gives voiceover to recap what’s just happened and where they’re headed next. It’s oddly repetitive and tacked-on.
My hunch, though I have no proof, is that these interludes came very late in the development of the game, when someone at Blizzard realized that the player/plot relationship was non-existant. It very much feels like voiceover added to a movie that’s not working.
[...]
I dug the character introductions, which are done in that same sepia style. No matter which character class you choose, your hero is racing to get to Tristram to investigate a falling star. I love characters who run towards danger. Their backstory details are interesting and specific — and sadly irrelevant, because you’re never going to refer to them again.
Diablo III's sepia-toned set of cut-scenes weren't an inherently bad idea. If the full-colour cut scenes had advanced Leah's/Tyrael's story, while the sepia-toned scenes showed an arc for the player character, then they could have worked. But they don't do that; with the sole exceptions of the first introduction scene, and the final sepia-toned scene after act V, none of them have anything to do with the players' characters at all. They're just exposition, literally repeating information from the NPC dialogue that players had just witnessed. That's pure filler, and a total waste of time.


Those are all solid points, and ones that I fully agree with. But I think that John August missed one, and it's a big one.

6. Diablo III's plot structure ignores both the Rule of Threes, and the Law of Narrative Economy, to its detriment.

Let's begin with the rule of threes; the basic function of set-up and pay-off in a story.

Remember the fallen angel's sword? A huge chunk of act I is spent chasing its pieces; the villains even kill Deckard Cain to get them, while literally saying that they have no idea why the sword is so important, only that their masters have plans for it.


This, incidentally, is also the scene in which Deckard Cain finally figures out that the "man"from the crater is an angel, spending his last breath to gasp out a plot point that the player had figured out literally hours earlier. It ends with Maghda leaving the sword behind, but abducting the angel it belongs to, forcing us to chase her in order to get him back, give him the sword, and restore his memories... an action whose rationale and benefits still haven't been explained, but whatever.

Act I ends with us having accomplished all of those things, bound for Act II and a confrontation with Maghda and, presumably, her demonic master. The sword and its plot-critical role, however, are never mentioned again. Ever.

We eventually spend the bulk of Act II chasing an entirely different MacGuffin (the "fiery black soul stone" mentioned above), and Tyrael (the fallen angel of justice, who everyone trusts without question because of course they do -- did I mention that the NPCs in this constantly come off as stupid?) gets to use the sword a couple of times to open some really big doors, but that's it for the sword as plot element. It gets a big, pointed set-up in the form of a MacGuffin quest that occupies most of Act I, is reinforced by killing one of only two recurring named characters in the series, and then gets simply dropped. What did Deckard Cain die for, exactly?

This violates not only the rule of threes (set-up, reminder, pay-off), but also the law of narrative economy, also short-handed as Chekhov's gun... or, in this case, Chekhov's Sword of the Fallen Angel of Justice:
"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
Tyrael's sword is, ultimately, irrelevant to the story. So why do is so much time wasted on it in Act I? I get that this is an ARPG, and certain number of MacGuffin retrievals are par for the course, but given the amount of narrative weight given to this one item, it really should come up again later, but it doesn't. Having Tyrael suffer from amnesia is cheap enough, as writing goes, but killing off a major NPC simply to restore his memories, especially when we have no good reason to want that to happen, and then have no further consequences result, is hack writing.


Did I mention that Deckard Cain was murdered over this pointless MacGuffin?

Yeah, we should probably talk a bit about killing off major characters for shock value. I'm not going to start with Deckard Cain, though; I'm going to start with Spock.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is widely regarded as the best Star Trek movie ever made (with the possible exception of Galaxy Quest), in part because of the powerful scene near the end of the movie in which [SPOILERS?] Spock is killed. What's sometimes lost in the discussion of this movie now, however, is the context into which the movie was released into theatres for the first time, for audiences who did not know what they were about to see.

Rumours had been swirling for months, of course: that Leonard Nimoy was sick of being typecast as this one character, and had only agreed to play the part this time around because he'd been promised that this would be the last time. Every Trek fan had heard the rumours, but nobody had believed them. Trek, after all, simply didn't work without the emotionally repressed Vulcan; no more Spock meant no more Trek, and why would Paramount ever agree to that?

And then the movie happened. And Spock died in front of us. And it has to be the single most memorable character death that I've ever seen in a film.

I'm actually having trouble typing this, right now, some thirty-six years after first seeing Khan in theatres. Even now, after seeing exactly the same scene done to far less effect in Star Trek: Into Darkness (which I actually quite enjoyed, in spite of it being a far inferior knock-off of Khan), the thought alone of Spock's death is enough to make me tear up.

The reaction of fans was an astonishing thing to be a part of. The only similar reaction that I've ever seen in a movie theatre came at the end of the recent Avengers: Infinity War, which saw shocked movie-goers filing out of the theatres in near-total silence... and then go on to proclaim the movie to be a cinematic triumph. And the Snap worked for the same reason that Spock's death worked:
  1. Nobody saw it coming;
  2. In the moment, it felt life-altering.
Trek fans grieved over Spock's death; it was like a close friend or family member, someone we'd known, and admired, and loved for years, had died horribly while we watched. Yes, we knew that Leonard Nimoy was totally fine, and that he'd lobbied hard to make this moment happen; we knew that Spock was 100% fictional, and couldn't actually die because he'd never actually lived. We knew all of that, and it didn't matter at all, to anybody.

Various member of Khan's cast have talked about what it was like to film Spock's funeral scene. About how they didn't really need to act; about how the tears were all real, and how William Shatner's line delivery, which had him barely able to choke out his lines, was the only take in which he'd been able to do so intelligibly. Because they all knew, even as they were making the film, how big of a deal this was going to be.

Spock was resurrected in the very next movie, of course; there really couldn't be Trek without Spock, but Khan was such a hit that there absolutely had to be more Trek, and it turned out that Leonard Nimoy was perfectly okay to play Spock again if he also got to direct. And the follow-up movies were mostly fine, too, although none them were ever as good as Khan. Data's death in Star Trek: Nemesis was well-done, but it wasn't as powerful as Spock's death had been. When Wash got Whedoned in Serenity, it was shocking but didn't move me.

Spock's death is the very best example of how to kill a beloved fan-favourite character:
1) Khan's writers didn't rely on viewers knowing the entire history of Star Trek; instead, they take time in their own story to establish both Spock's character, and Spock and Kirk's friendship:
2) Spock's actions leading up to his death are perfectly in keeping with the character as established here. Someone had to be sacrificed to save the ship, and as the captain of the Enterprise the responsibility was his; Admiral Kirk couldn't be spared. Of course Spock walked into a warp chamber and certain death for the sake of others; anything else would have been illogical.
3) The scene itself pays off the themes laid down in that earlier dialogue, too, echoing Kirk and Spock's earlier exchange but with the meaning having completely changed.
That is great writing.

4) Spock's death had a significant consequences beyond its emotional impact, too: Spock died heroically, saving the Enterprise and all aboard her, and his death is treated with the weight it deserves; the aforementioned funeral scene is, if anything, even more powerfully emotional than the death scene that precedes it.

Deckard Cain's death is the polar opposite of this in every conceivable way.

We spend almost no time with Cain prior to witnessing his murder. The few times that we do "interact" with him, he's either saying things which the player already knows to be stupid, or he's talking to other NPCs and ignoring us entirely.

Nothing about his death is set up before the event. He dies uselessly, reforging the sword (Q: Why isn't the Blacksmith doing this?) and then gasping out a plot point that the player figured out hours earlier. His death is immediately stepped on, too, with the player immediately tasked with recovering the fallen angel, because reasons. Your NPC followers even comment on this; the Enchantress will actually say, "I cannot help but think of Cain," even as the plot keeps right on moving past him. Cain does get a funeral, but it's immediately overwhelmed by the flashback about Tyrael's fall; Cain himself feels like an afterthought.

The player's character will still talk ceaselessly through the first part of Act II about avenging Cain, though: a character who was not established, with whom we barely interact before he dies, and whose pointless, off-handed death almost certainly made the player feel almost nothing. It's not even a Whedon-ing; Book and Wash die for shock value, sure, but their deaths are handled better than Cain's was, and they die in the process of moving the story forwards. Cain's death is only shocking... and  given how the Diablo III devs had spoken about Diablo II ("hazy recollections," "rose-tinted glasses," etc.), it came across as them killing off the franchise's past, basically just to do it.

Many long-time fans of Diablo were enraged, and rightly so. Personally, I just felt like my intelligence had been insulted. I didn't mind that they'd killed Cain, per se; I only minded that they'd bungled the job.


So, could it have been done differently?

That's a rhetorical question, naturally; of course it could have been done differently. And most of the changes can be done early in the game, too, leaving later story acts more-or-less "as is." Let's assume that those expensive cinematics can't be changed (they're expensive, after all), and work to fix the execution of the story inside each act. What should we change in Acts I and II?

The first change that I made would be "Captain" Rumsford... who is actually just a Sergeant, and not a Captain at all, because only nobles can be officers. He's more than a little bitter about it, too, which will become important later; and he plays the role of nay-sayer right from the beginning, constantly present during the NPC discussions about recent plot developments, and expressing nothing but negativity about the players' chances of accomplishing much of anything,

The second change would be the reaction of those NPCs to the "fallen angel," who is immediately recognized as such by Deckard Cain. Cain has been spending months buried a serious of dusty tomes and scrolls in an effort to puzzle out the Prophecy (you know, the one that begins with "Justice shall fall"), and immediately realizes that this newly-fallen angel might just be the first sign that the End of Days is at hand. He withholds the name of the angel, though, not because he doesn't know that name (he does), but because he's still hoping that we're dealing with some other angel that's fallen to Sanctuary: still bad, but not apocalyptically so.

Cain still sends you to collect the pieces of the angel's sword, too. Angelic weapons are not just pieces of enchanted steel: they're the laws of reality constrained into a physical form. A broken angelic weapon is basically the same as a break in the laws of reality itself, driving men and beasts (and beast-men) mad through simple proximity. The weapon has to be contained, somehow, and also kept out of the wrong hands... like those of the demon-worshipping cultists that we've already met.

This is when you and Leah get to spend some time together, and she confesses her fear that Cain's stories are turning out to be more than just stories... something she's suspected for a while, actually, due to her recurring nightmares and occasional uncontrollable magical outbursts. Much like Cain, she doesn't want to believe that the prophecy might be about to come true, either, although her fears are much more personal: Leah's afraid of the role that she, herself, might play in the end of the world.

You recover the second sword piece, which Leah takes back to New Tristram while you chase the third, only to discover that Maghda, who has been ahead of you this whole time, has the third piece already, and it about to steal the other two. Smash cut to the inside of Cain's house, where we see Maghda's projection (she's still in Caldeum, after all), several cultists, and Rumsford, who is now revealed to have been working with the cultists this whole time (he is the reason why Captain Dalton was killed along with his most trusted men, and why Maghda has seemingly known all of your moves in advance so far). Leah explodes, and Rumsford and the cultists flee, taking the fallen angel with them... because their demonic lord, Belial, has plans that require both sword and angel.

He stabs Cain on the way out, too, with a cursed blade... and now Cain is slowly dying as the curse kills him, unable to be helped by any mortal healing (potion or spell). Leah begs the player to help one more time, chasing after Rumsford to recover the angel, in the hope that even a fallen angel is still angel enough to work one last miracle... because only a miracle can save Cain now. Cain, for his part, gasps out that the sword must be protected at all costs, before lapsing into a coma.

Now the race is on, with the player desperately trying to catch the cultists before Cain dies. This results in a dramatic confrontation with the treacherous Rumsford, as he stands in a summoning circle with dismembered corpses all around... a confrontation which ends abruptly when the Butcher Demon appears in response to the summons, tears Rumsford in half, and then tries to butcher the player. The player triumphs and takes the fallen angel back to New Tristram, where Haedrig and Leah have combined his skill as smithing with her innate magic and Horadric education to reforge the angel's sword. Restoring his sword restores his memories, too... but not his powers, which weren't much about healing anyway.

After all that effort, Cain still dies horribly anyway. His last words are the next stanza of the prophecy, which hints at why Belial was so keen to get his demonic hands on Tyrael and El'Druin in the first place. Leah, bitter about the fact that Tyrael's lack of angelic powers have resulted in Cain's death ("He's not an angel. He's only a man. I always knew they were just stories.") is about to burn Cain's book and walk away, but Tyrael convinces her otherwise in the next cinematic, and we're off to Act II.

See? Isn't that better already? Cain is better established, and his primary attributes are clear: he is wise, and acts wise, seeing instantly things that the players is almost certain to see, and advancing the story by giving us more of the prophecy which will form the framework for the story of the rest of the game. His death isn't immediately followed with a madcap chase, but rather with a funeral; it's given time to breathe, in other words, which reinforces its impact.

Act II needs less intervention. Heeding Cain's words of wisdom, Tyrael and his much-coveted sword are basically forced to spend the entire act in hiding, while we try to ferret out the demon lord himself. This takes the form of chasing Maghda, at first, not to avenge Cain's death (although that can certainly be part of it for, say, the Demon Hunter) but rather to interrogate her and learn where Belial is hiding, and what he's up to.

Our efforts are opposed by the child emperor's Regent, a moustache-twirling Obvious Bad Guy who is ruling like the cruelest of tyrants... in his young nephews name, of course. Having a Regent to serve as red herring, the child emperor, Hakan, is left free to do what children do best in this sort of narrative: play on our emotions by behaving like a terrified child, rather than like a far-older-than-his-years born ruler. The rest of the act plays out much as before, with Hakan "finding" ways to goad us along with increasingly desperate pleas for help, all while intercepted messages between Belial and his minions drop sinister hints about the demon lord's long-term goals.

Those goals, incidentally, should have nothing to do with the Black Soulstone, which hasn't even been mentioned at this point. Instead, it should be Maghda who points the way to Leah's mother, a "treacherous bitch" that she's apparently having tortured to death out of pure spite. It's only after Adria is rescued that she first mentions the Soulstone, telling us that it could be used as a weapon against all of the demon lords, Belial included.

Belial learns about the Soulstone from the player, who mentions it, in passing, to Hakan... who seems oddly interested for a second before resuming his childlike demeanour. The fact that Belial panics shortly after the player obtains the thing is remarked on by Tyrael, but by then the attack is already underway and there's no time to think about it before the player finds themselves storming the palace, in search of the demon lord who's hiding there.

The player, naturally, confronts the Obvious Bad Guy Regent... only to discover that the Regent isn't Belial in disguise.
HAKAN: "Thank goodness! You've finally arrived! Do you have it? Do you have the Soulstone?"
REGENT: "Soulstone? What Soulstone? What are you talking about? Hakan, what's doing on?"
HAKAN: (Waves dismissively) "Kill him."
REGENT: "What do you mean? Kill who? Let go of me! Hakan? Hakan!"
(REGENT is dragged off-screen by the Royal Guards/Deceiver Demons; we hear a loud scream, cut off by a brutal chopping noise, both from off-screen.)
HAKAN: (Sighs with relief) "That's better. I've been wanting to do that for months. Now.."
(HAKAN's voice begins to doppler, dropping noticebaly with each word until it's unmistakabley BELIAL's)
HAKAN/BELIAL:  "... show... me.. my... Soulstone."
PLAYER: (shakily) "You'll see the stone soon enough. It will be your prison... Belial."
Just like that, Belial's taunting ("Oh, very clever!") make sense, because he actually has pulled off a deception... unlike Belial as implemented, who is hyped as a lord of lies, but who doesn't tell a convincing lie at any point.

Now, isn't that better? On to Act III, where we finally learn that the sword was coveted by Belial because of a property which we actually see Tyrael use on several occasions: El'Druin, and possibly any angelic weapon, can open portals. And not just locked doors and demonic seals, naturally, but any kind of portals, including the magical kind. El'Druin, being basically a piece of the High Heavens, can open a portal directly to the High Heavens. This is why Belial wanted it; because having the sword, and a fallen angel to wield it, would allow him to finally bypass Pandemonium and take the Eternal Conflict directly to his angelic enemies, something he'd never been able to do before.

Maybe fallen angels don't normally get to bring their angelic weapons with them, while slain angels' weapons die with the angels themselves, which is why this opportunity has never arisen before. Tyrael is also the only member of the Angiris Council ever to fall; maybe the self-sacrificing nature of that fall allows him to retain enough innate goodness and justness that El'Druin will still respond to his hand. Either way, Diablo, newly reborn from the Soulstone through Adria's independent-of-Belial efforts, is able to seize the sword from Tyrael and use it without the fallen angel's help, all while taunting Tyrael the entire time: "Which thought gives you the greater terror? That I am too powerful now for your weapon to resist my will? Or that my cause is a just one?"

Remember how fallen angels are bad things? Yeah, it turns out that they're Very Bad Things, no matter how noble and self-sacrificing the angel in question may be. Because Tyrael's fall is played in D3 as a noble sacrifice, when it should be played as an essentially short-sighted act that nearly dooms all creation. Tyrael doesn't fall because he turns to evil, but it's a Very Bad Thing, nonetheless, which is much more in keeping with the nature of fallen angels, both in the game's mythology and in the players' own.

(Adria could be given a somewhat more nuanced motivation, too. Rather than just being a closet demon-worshipper this whole time, she could be convinced that Sanctuary is doomed to be destroyed in the Eternal Conflict, and decides that the aloof angels deserve to suffer just like humankind will suffer when that happens... exactly as she herself suffered, when the love of her life was killed by a dark force that possessed and ultimately destroyed him. It's a classic motivation: "A plague on both your houses!" I mean, if you're going to retcon both Adria and the Dark Wanderer, at least do it right.)

Act IV is pretty light on story, so there's not much to revise. Given the choice, though, I would cut the end of Act IV cinematic entirely. Technically, it's as well done as all the others, but after all that's been lost and sacrificed, including the innocent Leah, the wise and noble Deckard Cain, a swathe of the Host of the High Heavens, and many other innocents along the way who were tortured and butchered by the forces of evil, to end on "Glorious new dawn" is just too much of a tonal shift, and unearned in the bargain. Instead, maybe close with a sepia-toned "character" moment, in which the players' character muses about how much this experience has changed them...

Until you release Act V in an expansion pack, of course, at which point you can open with the opening cinematic (or cinematic trailer) from Reaper of Souls. Alternately, Act IV can end with Diablo beaten, but not slain, escaping through the Realm of Terror into the past... which provides the player with a portal to the "Nightmare" difficulty level, and a mission to kill Diablo again.... and  again in Hell difficulty... and then again in Inferno difficulty. Only after all of that are you rewarded with the sight of Diablo, broken and dead at your feet, and a "glorious new dawn" which you've now earned by killing Diablo four times over.

Incidentally, while this cinematic can certainly include Tyrael being recruited to rejoin the Angiris Council, he shouldn't be sitting as Wisdom, something which has not been earned at all in the story to this point. Instead, he can resume his prior post as Justice, with Malthael's seat being taken by none other than Deckard Cain himself. After all, humans are nothing but stunted Nephalem, and thus half-angel as a matter of canon; the idea that one could be elevated to the Angiris Council makes a kind of sense, and doing so allows them to end by rewarding Cain for his long lifetime of selfless service and wise advice.

It also allows the game to end with Deckard Cain's classic line, about the further adventures of the Nephalem being another tale entirely... perhaps the players would like to stay awhile, and listen? Yes, I know that I said we'd leave the cinematics alone, but the end-of-Act IV cinematic is the weakest of the lot; if you're going to re-work any of them, then that's the one which most needs work.


Diablo III's story is one of missed opportunities

Wow. That was a lot of writing to basically say, "John August was right."

It's important to note that I'm not trying to say that my story outline above is "right," or that anyone else's take on this story is "wrong." My treatment (not the first such I've written, obviously, but the previous "drafts" were fundamentally the same) is only a quick pass at the material. Also, I'm an amateur; a team of professional screen writers, given enough time to work on this story, should be able to put my ideas to shame.

But they didn't; even though Diablo III was intended by its developers to be an epic, sweeping, heroic tale, the story reads like first-draft fanfic, full of clumsy retcons, dropped plot elements, set-ups that never pay off, and payoffs that aren't earned at all. As I've demonstrated here, fixing Diablo III's story isn't that hard to do; the basic beats of the story don't even need to change.
 
There's only one reason for Blizzard to have failed to do this: clearly, the story isn't meant to be the core gameplay experience. So if the game isn't really meant to be a full-blown RPG experience, doesn't deliver a satisfying action experience, and isn't intended to be a story-driven experience, either, then what sort of experience was Diablo III meant to deliver?

What is the core gameplay experience of Diablo III? For that matter, what was the core gameplay experience of Diablo II? The answers to those questions, gentle readers, are a tale for next time...
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