Left a comment in there!
Abandoned D3 in 2013. Never looked back.
Sadly it’s too late. I’ve been on the Blizzard boards for a long time whining about Diablo 3 and how it utterly ruined the franchise, but Blizzard doesn’t give any flying you-know-whats. All that they care about is whatever master plan they have in turning Diablo into a World of Diablocraft MMO-thing.
And sadly, since Diablo 3 sold millions and generated billions of dollars of revenue for Diablo, they are probably going to take it as a sign that this is the direction Diablo 4 should take.
Sad days, but Diablo as we knew it is dead and gone. Fortunately Grim Dawn is here to pick up the slack, but to be honest I always felt Diablo 2 was far superior to Titan Quest in skill system and builds, so while Grim Dawn is pretty close, it doesn’t quite scratch the itch I’m looking for when I play Diablo 2.
Anyway, we can only hope that Crate and other independent developers who aren’t slaves to corporate greed can provide us quality ARPGs in the years to come. This genre is truly dying and even with stalwarts like Grim Dawn, it’s clear the glory days of the ARPG are long gone.
Diablo 3 isn’t a bad game. But it’s barely an ARPG and it’s certainly not the spiritual successor of Diablo 2.
It’s not a big deal to me that Diablo 3 looks bright and happy without the grit of Diablo 1 and 2, but it’s a big deal to me that it doesn’t have skill trees, stat allocation, and was designed to be an Auction House money grab which had that very thing ripped out of it resulting in a sloppy mess where Looting Legendaries is the only thing that defines your class and build.
The game is a complete mess, and while it’s fun from a brainless hack and slash point of view, and I admit spending tons of hours just killing things because it’s fun, the game NEVER scratched my Diablo 2 itch. Not even close.