Diablo III Console Preview

Eurogamer is offering a fairly negative preview for the console version of Diablo III, written from the perspective of a newcomer to the series and the genre at large. Here’s a snip:

At a glance, Diablo 3 may resemble a console action game. This new port even has a fancy God of War-style evade manoeuvre tied to the right analogue stick. And yet, it doesn’t feel like an action game. The isometric view and real-time combat may evoke something along the lines of Bastion, but compared to Supergiant’s cult classic, Diablo 3 feels downright sloppy, with your rigid moveset ill equipped to fend off the insurmountable throngs of foes the game throws at you. No matter how defensively I play, combat inevitably devolves into a sea of demons clumsily trading blows back and forth with my avatar. My successes and failures seem to be tied more to my stats and gear than how well I perform. For a game that’s primarily about fighting things, that’s a problem.

I understand the addictive loop of grabbing gear and slaying larger foes may not come across well in a demo, but when the producer Josh Mosqueira maintains that “at its heart, the game has always been very action-focused,” I find it worrying that the combat feels slipshod when stacked against other console action RPGs.

Still, I’ve heard it argued that Diablo’s raison d’être is its co-op, which this console version goes to great lengths to make more accessible. The biggest change is that there’s now local co-op for up to four players, though Blizzard was only demoing the single-player portion at the PAX East convention in Boston last weekend, where I tried the game out. According to Blizzard, all players will share the same screen, with each person’s interface displaying in a separate corner. As they get further away from each other, the screen zooms out – to a point at least.

Aside from the curious and arguably misguided approach used to judge the title there’s a fair amount of info on the new interface and changes, so it’s still a worthy read.