I thought I would be getting an enhanced Titan Quest experience. All I got was mindless clicking in a nice-looking world, a beautiful glorified unergonomic time sink.
What?
Never owned a Blizzard game before. This one is my first and the last. The sole reason for playing through it was that at least the combat felt somewhat snappy and allowed me to get at least 10 minutes of "joy" before getting repetitive.
OK, what's the status?
Finished the main campaign, most of the side quests, and many dungeons. I collected all of the Renown to get the highest rewards. After that, even nightmare dungeons seem just not enough of a challenge / bring no variety that can attract me.
How I got to this point
I got baited. By the graphics... The last time I played a decent RPG, I played Titan Quest and Grim Dawn (I didn't enjoy GD for some reason). So seeing a game I deemed it similar in playstyle but with better looks, and I got excited.
I didn't look at the reviews or flaws of the game because nowadays we either have console wars or ideological review bombing. Additionally, there is no centralized collection of reviews of actual owners (unlike on Steam). I simply didn't give a damn about biased & outright unintelligent "gaming journalists" or overly excited Blizzard neckbearded fanboys. I simply don't care about reviews that much because guess what? You cannot reduce your actual personal experience of the game to your ability to sympathize with a review written by god-knows-who.
So why this post then?
Because some things are objectively wrong with the game. Yes, I was bored, yes, I was falling asleep during boss fights (the first time I caught myself falling asleep while playing a game ever) and yes, I regret buying the game for the full price. However... apart from my feelings and impressions, the game just does not live up to its price. Not even a little bit if you discard visual qualities and (pointlessly overdone) cinematics.
In the following sections, I present a few of the bugs / illogical stuff I found inexcusable. This is not an exhaustive list but provides solid evidence of Blizzard's lack of giving the game at least a few minutes of thinking.
World design
Here I list some of the design flaws that made me irritated or caused confusion.
Teleport back from a town
The portal which teleports you back is instant - no channelling time, no confirmation. Multiple times I teleported back accidentally because I was simply pre-clicking on the loading screen.
Why every other teleportation requires channelling or other additional layers of interaction while this one single portal does not is beyond me.
Level reuse
This is a rather small negative but since the game's "full" playtime is insane, I have to at least mention it.
Given the number of dungeons, it is perfectly OK to reuse assets. With 2 exceptions which rubbed me the wrong way:
Do not reuse levels from the main campaign. The main quest line is not that long and diverse to justify such compromise. Secondly, do not reuse the same level sections in the same dungeon... Frankly, I don't give a damn about how those dungeons are created, I have a feeling I noticed their structure changes as you replay them, but dynamically generated or not, you can prevent the reuse of entire architectural sections pretty easily, I'd say. Just take a look at one situation I encountered - this was natural terrain, no buildings, no man-made structures:
Minimap in the Treebones Glade Dungeon
Minor horse travel hiccups
It seems that despite the game running in only 4 camera angles (regular, regular zoomed in, on horse, on horse zoomed in), the devs were unable to verify that the camera would behave well every time. I found cave locations where if you happened to use a horse, the camera would clip into the ceiling, obstructing 100% of the screen. This has also happened multiple times in buildings/tents where I was able to ride on a horse.
Another (rather pleasant) thing happened to me when I discovered a Lilith altar only thanks to my horse. When riding a horse, the camera zooms out a bit more and changes the angle. This was enough to reveal part of the terrain where I could see the familiar red glow.
Misc
Other issues I encountered...
(Mini)map
A. Disaster. I fail to imagine how this abomination came into existence. First, you have no filters. Zooming out is your only imitation of filtering. Lack of filtering becomes apparent in later stages when all sorts of additional mechanics and events are unlocked and displayed on the map... Although the least annoying thing, it still makes me wonder - why didn't they just copy-paste GTA 5's filter system? Ugh...
Second, there is the minimap navigation. You can place a single waypoint and you'll be navigated to that point. Except you won't. Sometimes, in some areas, the navigation is held back by some limitations. You get a dotted line almost as if you were to magically fly over the terrain or teleport to the destination...
Minimap navigation 1
Minimap navigation 2
Minimap navigation 3
And now, my final and most serious issue with the map, rendering the map almost useless to me: as you explore, the map reveals itself in large, enormous chunks. (see image above, that is a whole chunk, the entire 2/3 of the image) This way, you have no idea what you did or did not explore.
Why might this matter? Well, imagine some people think this game is about grinding and exploring the map. Imagine some people wanted to just go around the map and explore everything. Or just imagine someone who wanted to discover all the Litith altars by himself.
Also, imagine that person is not a shut-in NEET in his parents' basement and enjoys life outside his man cave. It is logical then that this person (which I don't think is that rare in the hack-and-slash RPG player bases) might want to know somewhat precisely where he left off, and what he's discovered to not waste time by either re-exploring or memorizing/writing this stuff down.
Now imagine you enter a new area and 70% of that area reveals itself on the minimap instantly, as if you travelled through the entire chunk already.
I suppress my anger and disbelief. In what world is this a good idea?! In a lazy world. In Blizzard's world...
What is instead done in most games is a gradual reveal tied to the player's close vicinty. This way, you reveal area in a predefined radius around your character. Like in Titan Quest (2006, resurrected by Nordic Games in 2016):
Here you can see the small radius around my character, with less vivid colors depicting my last playthrough and more vivid colors depicting my current session. When I relaunch the character, I see exactly what I did not explore last time.
In 18 years Blizzard managed to subvert / bastardize this simple piece of know-how.
Overall Difficulty
What in the literal hell? The game is too easy. I am no tryhard gamer, my reflexes have degraded since I hit 19 years of age and I was falling asleep while fighting bosses. Still, even on the highest tier available to me, I rarely spend healing potions during boss fights and regular fights. Regular here means I don't spend a minute running around tanking 50+ enemies including CC elites - of course those sometimes require assistance.
You will probably be able to judge my build at the end of this post, however, from start to finish, I was, most of the time, one or two-shotting regular enemies (non-elites). Bosses were tanky but not challenging in terms of their damage output. The only time I had to use my brain to create a tactic for a specific boss was my first boss death in a dungeon (I didn't anticipate he would revive the elites he's previously spawned and completely wasted my potion on tanking AOE poison) and the first time I met the Butcher (a nasty surprise in a dungeon). All other times, I just used my build's seemingly default mechanics... It felt boring, even Lilith was a piece of cake...
Ironically, the more I played, the less tanky the bosses were... It wasn't my skill, it was the overall scaling - that brings me to the next point:
Scaling
I broke the game's scaling. That is if there is any... To understand, I will describe my gameplay:
I started exploring Fractured Peaks, thinking I would explore one location to 90%+ (all things included - dungeons, side quests, ...) before moving on to another one.
I thought world tier 3 would unlock at level 50, so up until hitting that level, I was exploring in a DFS fashion. At level 50 I found out about the other requirement - finishing the main campaign... So I rushed the main campaign. While rushing, I noticed the bosses were... up to 5 levels below mine. Excuse me? Why does every dungeon and every area scale 1:1 with your level, yet the main questline is made even easier by scaling enemies down?
Mind you, I found the game to be too easy despite not using ability enchantments - a system that allows you to improve 2 of your abilities with powerful properties. I chose AOE-on-death which made cluster fight incredibly satisfying - and even easier. You can probably imagine my surprise when I discovered both of these changes which made me even more OP.
It was too easy to defeat my way through the main questline and I was looking forward to going back to "the proper scaling" and switching to a higher difficulty level only to find out that somehow I was still OP?!
Paragon points. I currently have insane bonuses to vulnerable/frozen/stunned enemies and an intelligence-driven nonphysical damage boost. The values are in higher tens of percentage points! I slice through bosses even more easily than at any other time...
And I also may have gotten lucky - I got a 730-level staff when all the other items I had barely hit level 700 with full Sacred (5x) upgrades.
The mystery of absent Murmuring Obols
As I didn't need much gear upgrade or replacement, I only spent Murmuring Obols on the Silent keys. After hours and hours of playing, I noticed that no Obols dropped for a long time. After I spent some Obols (more Silent keys), the Obols were dropping again.
I think that this is a rather weird mechanic given how rare the Obols are relative to everything else in the game.
One last thing...
A missing dialog option which lead into the game falling into a no-UI (normal cutscene) mode without any cutscene or dialog taking place. The game got stuck and I had to forcefully close the game... No idea how this happens when essentially all dialogs are precisely scripted/known...
Missing dialog option
Stuck after clicking the dialog option...
Epilogue
I enjoyed the graphics and the extremely dark and morbid story lines. That's about it. I don't usually record bugs or take screenshots unless something hilarious happens. In this game, the crap just piled up. This game made me make an exception...
Don't buy this game unless you don't have anything better to waste your time on. Don't support Blizzard in this UX hell.
My build (3rd September 2023)
Equipment
Helm
Armor
Gloves
Pants
Boots
Staff (!!!)
Ring 1
Ring 3
Amulet
Skills
I snipped out only relevant parts of the skill tree...
Skill tree 1
Skill tree 2
Skill tree 3
Skill tree 4
Skill assignment and enchantments
Paragon system
Sorry for the resolution, I just can't care less.
Main board
Additional board
Paragon socket glyph I used
Appendix - Updates
Heartbeat updates regarding my playthrough.
UPDATE 01/08/2023: Starting at level 40, the leveling rate has slowed down dramatically. I can feel it (unlike with the previous levels). Since I can up my game difficulty at level 50, though, I still have the drive to continue. The game is just too easy at this point... And I want to unlock a mount already dammit!!!
AND HOLY **** HOW DO I CONTAIN MY HYPE FOR STARFIELD?!
UPDATE 21/08/2023: I am preparing a rundown of nonsense I've encountered while playing. I find the end game much more diverse as more and more systems unlocked. Sad to see the first 50 levels wasted for nothing. One notable blunder however is the fact that I can still 2-shot most enemies with my build on the world tier 3... WTF?
Last update
3rd September 2023