Diablo III and Me?

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about Blizzard’s big sequel announcement that has almost everyone soiling themselves with glee as drool pours from gaping maws and  eyes take on an unfocused stare towards its inevitable - yet unknown - release.

I’ll admit, the gameplay video looks very slick and the cinematic is another increasingly awesome iteration in a long line of great Blizzard cinematics.

But I’m not entirely sold on the game.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Diablo 3 will fulfill every wet dream imaginable for many gamers, but I don’t go for the dungeon-crawl concept, no matter how epic it is. The cooperative mechanic makes it slightly more digestible, however, I lost interest in RPGs focused entirely on PvE around the time of FF9. Even more recently when playing God of War 1 & 2 and Resident Evil 4, I just couldn’t help wanting the bloody games to finish up already.

I need two things in my games these days - multiplayer and PvP - and Diablo 3 is only advertising half the equation so far. And as it stands, I won’t play it without the other half.

What could they do to make a gamer like me want to play it? You know, this post probably borders on self-indulgence, because we all know they won’t need to appeal to my type of playstyle for this game to smash sales records. But you know… it’s my blog and I’ll spew frothy, vomitous advice if I want to!

Making Diablo 3 my kind of game:

• Keep all the PvE elements as advertised (they do seem epic!)
• Keep all the mechanics as advertised (they look savage too!)
• Introduce team-based PvP into the dungeon crawls
• Allow for 2-4 equal numbered teams to enter the dungeons from separate wings
• Design the dungeons like Darkness Falls or the Frontier RvR dungeons from DAOC
• Players will grind through mirrored PvE and meet in the middle for a huge clash against enemy teams
• Obviously, players who grind through their content fastest and/or most efficiently will have an advantage (rewarding skill - what a concept!)
• The last team standing will be able to resurrect fallen companions and continue down the final path leading towards the dungeon’s main boss

I’m not saying they need to design the game this way for everyone because that will lose them a crapload of fans, however, it wouldn’t be too hard to design an alternate PvP system/server for players of my flavour (Yes, I has a flavur!). My understanding is that PvP elements in D1 and D2 were pretty weak, basically coming down to a duel system. I think something like what I mentioned above would give Diablo 3 even more reach than it has already.

The game looks like it has so much potential for PvP, so I really hope they spend some of the resources they’ve earned from WoW and finally do it right. Warcraft 3 was amazing fun and Defence of the Ancients seems to have made it even cooler from a PvP perspective. Show us PvPers some love Blizzard!

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