Diablo 3 with Maximum Tedium
Diablo III for Mac OS X
Loading...I suspect something is not quite right at Diablo HQ. A week after announcing they were scrapping Team Deathmatch modes due to “balance” difficulties, a post on the official Diablo blog is instructing players on the most efficient way to get to Paragon level 100 (currently the highest level in the game). Just how is this feat accomplished?
By playing through a specific segment of the game, quitting and then reloading and replaying said section “thousands of times”. The blog post does go on to explain that (gasp!) there are actually 3 or 4 different sections in the game to play through for maximum xp gain boredom.
Now, I realise that many people will be more than happy to play the game this way, it does kind of fit in to the “speedrunning” culture in gaming, and Diablo 3 was always going to be about efficient character builds to some extent. But it does seem telling that Blizzard feel this is the sort of information that Diablo 3 players are after, despite almost every criticism of the game citing the amount of repetition and grinding involved. It’s a real shame that they seem to be so obsessed with balance that they’ve thrown out an entire game mode (and there’s still no sign of any PvP modes at all). It’s also a shame that there need to be conceits to make the real money auction house the first and foremost yardstick of such balance. Increasingly, the game is more and more about number crunching, repetition, and listening to the same shoddy game dialogue over and over again.
Hands up, who remembers when video games were about having fun?