14 DAY TRIAL // Diablo 3 was released after more than 10 years since its predecessor, on May 15, 2012, for PC and Mac. Blizzard, while it could have played it extremely safe and just deliver more of the same role-playing dungeon crawling experience that delighted fans, chose to go on a new route.
There was a big emphasis on loot, an always online experience, and on the Auction House to provide the perfect avenues for players to share and get better loot, while seamlessly playing alongside their friends.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, it grossly underestimated the interest players had in the game and, as a result, the launch was plagued by the already infamous Error 37 message, which prevented owners of the game from actually connecting to the studio's Battle.net servers and from playing the game they bought.
After a while, things were back to normal and the game was available for all owners. Diablo 3 certainly delivered a good RPG experience with plenty of impressive moments in its story but it still had some problems, chief among which being the extreme rarity of Legendary loot and the poor drops received by players.
As such, many flocked to the Auction House to get better gear, paying either in-game gold or real-life money so that their characters stood a chance against their enemies.
Over time, Blizzard listened to feedback and introduced quite a lot of different new features, such as the Paragon system, to make the end-game portion more appealing in the long run.
With patch 2.0.1, it finally overhauled the loot system so that legendary items dropped more often and gear that can be used by the player's current character appeared. While that addition was certainly great, Blizzard also took the decision to remove the Auction House which in turn eliminated the easy option of just searching for a weapon you need with all the best stats.
Blizzard also released last month the Reaper of Souls expansion, which once again catered to fan feedback by offering more story content, in the form of Act 5, a new character class – the Crusader – a special new gameplay mode called Adventure, and plenty of other mechanics, like the Nephalem Rifts or the Mystic artisan.
After a few weeks, Blizzard has rolled out a few different patches for the game, once again proving that it listens to player feedback and can act on it sooner rather than later.
With update 2.0.4, it overhauled the abilities of the Crusader while making changes to the exploits used by some players to farm bounty rewards in Adventure mode on Torment 6 difficulty.
It also posted a series of hotfixes last week, buffing the legendary drop in Nephalem Rifts, improving the gear provided by Kadala, and removing some more exploits relating to chests and other such things.
Diablo 3, together with Reaper of Souls, still isn't a perfect game but it's getting better and better thanks to Blizzard's dedication. The studio has once again proved that, while it may not be able to deliver a great experience at first, it will most definitely put the time in to make sure that it gets improved over time.