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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

It's embarrassing that D3 is the result of 11 years of development. It's one of the most unoriginal, badly written, cynical and frustrating games I've played in many years. I'm at the very end of the damn thing (final boss, Normal) only I can't really bother to finish it because it's too repetitive.

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Bobby Kotick is the one to blame for this. I think every single design decision in the game was always measured against "Will this make more money for Activision or not?"

I'm surprised you don't need to spend additional real money to finish the game.

This kind of perpetual squeeze might work in games where, for whatever reason, players are unusually motivated as seems to be the case with Call of Duty, but Diablo III is a PC game, not a "bro" console game, and this pay-as-you-go model doesn't seem to be translating as well.

11 years development? I believe D2 came out 11 years ago, but D3 wasn't in development for the last 11 years. They released quite a few other games in meantime. Notably WoW, which kept the whole company completely busy for at least 3-4 years.

"Development on Diablo III began in 2001 when Blizzard North was still in operation," [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Development

I've enjoyed a lot about the game, but I agree with you about the story. I suffered through all the dialogue in normal mode. Franticly clicking the X on all the conversations in nightmare mode has made the game much more bearable.

try using the spacebar - much faster

I love you.

I recommend Escape, actually - it skips the whole conversation. :)

What happens after you beat Diablo? Do you start from the very beginning with the same hero as before? Because my guy is a ~30 wizard and it's got to be pretty difficult to get to a higher level on Normal.

Yes. You beat the game on a character in Normal, after getting to like ~30 or whatever (dunno, made up number). Then you can play through again from the beginning doing the exact same thing, with tougher monsters, in Nightmare. Beat nightmare and you're at 40~50 or whatever. Repeat again on Hell, at which point you're probably 60. Repeat again on inferno.

So basically you play the same game over and over again.

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