Blizzard’s 2012 Action RPG Is Still the Best Co-Op Game on Game Pass

Among Diablo devotees (the people who follow Blizzard’s grim action RPGs, not the residents of hell), one entry is held up as the one to admire: Diablo 2. Few people argue the point. The 2000 release is the series at its bleakest and most punishing, yet it still feels vast. It has remarkable staying power and holds up well today, especially in the Resurrected remaster.

You could claim purist credentials by championing the original Diablo, but it’s clearly a rough first draft, and hardly anyone argues it’s the better game. Diablo 4 is too recent and too widely played to earn any cachet. The fashionable move is to grumble about the latest balance patch or endgame adjustment.

Then there’s Diablo 3, a game with an awkward place in the series’ reputation. Before launch, fans mocked its brighter, less gloomy visuals. At launch, they attacked its server problems, its real-money auction house and its shaky tuning. Blizzard eventually turned things around with the excellent Reaper of Souls expansion in 2014 and strong console ports. The stigma from those early months lingers, though. The game may not be old enough, or its successor may be too fresh, for a proper reappraisal to take hold.

Even so, people keep playing it, and they’re having a wonderful time. I’ve loved Diablo 3 since day one, flaws and all. It’s on Xbox Game Pass right now, and I’d steer a newcomer toward it before any other Diablo game, Diablo 4 included.

The reason is simple. It’s the friendliest, most generous and least punishing game in the series, and the easiest to start. It lacks the stern, old-school design of 2 and the live-service sprawl that comes with 4. It feels lean and self-contained. That’s remarkable for a game with practically endless content that has been running for 14 years, 11 of them with active updates.

Although Diablo 3 comes from a long line of computer RPGs, it has an arcade spirit that cuts through the stat-heavy systems and shows you its appeal right away. Its game feel and combat are the best the series has produced, no contest. Positioning and smart crowd control matter, and you have to keep moving to grab health drops, since you get only one potion and it sits on a cooldown. From moment to moment, it’s simply more fun to play.

You can lose yourself in the game’s itemization and progression systems if you like. Yet, to the irritation of some action-RPG fans, its builds are so flexible that it resists min-maxing and theorycrafting. Skills and their runes aren’t locked into sprawling trees with tangled dependencies, nor buried beneath heavy crafting. You can swap them freely, almost without limits. In Diablo 3, I don’t commit to a build and then hunt for gear to fit it. I reshape my build around whatever drops, so my character plays differently all the time. Some ARPG purists call that heresy. I find it endlessly fresh and exciting.

It also helps that Blizzard, the best in the business, has polished every class, skill and rune. The fiery Wizard is still the most thrilling glass-cannon class Diablo has ever offered. The game is also full of flavorful spins on familiar archetypes, particularly the Monk, the Crusader and the Demon Hunter.

The campaign is probably the game’s weakest part, though I’ve never understood players who come to these games for the plot. The writing, and especially the voice acting, is steeped in a loud, sweeping, high-fantasy campiness. Most Diablo fans find it grating, but I think it’s very entertaining if you approach it in the right spirit. That goes double for the scenery-chewing villainy of Zoltun Kulle, the ghostly mage who travels with you for a while.

Once you finish the campaign, Adventure Mode opens up. It’s a gloriously surreal, never-ending remix of everything in the game. Bounty missions are scattered across the world map and lead into runs through the wildly randomized, explosive Nephalem Rift dungeons. The result is monster slaughter with no story attached, and your character grows along a thrilling exponential curve.

Finally, there’s a point that sadly applies only to the console version, not the PC one: Diablo 3 is one of the best local co-op games ever made. Up to four friends can play together with a refreshingly easy drop-in, drop-out setup and a smartly streamlined interface. The game asks very little of a group beyond good company while they enjoy its satisfying, infinite chaos. It has a natural rhythm, too. Bursts of savage monster-killing give way to relaxed chatter as everyone sorts loot and tweaks builds.

Diablo 3 is about as unfashionable as Diablo gets, and I’ll always love it dearly. I’m not the only one, either. There are dozens of us! Maybe Blizzard will one day look back on us fondly and decide we deserve a new class or another expansion. We might tell them not to bother, because Diablo 3 doesn’t need one.

Source: Polygon