Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Review
Long Live the Loot
As someone who was there, Hot Pockets in hand for all the
midnight server issues, and other heartbreaks of Diablo 3’s PC launch,
it’s difficult to imagine a larger turnaround than Diablo 3: Reaper of
Souls. Not only has the game it’s built upon been markedly improved by
the recent Loot 2.0 patch, but the excellent new content in this
expansion is exactly in line with what I wanted for the series. Its
world is darker and more dangerous-feeling, its bestiary more varied,
and its brilliant new adventure mode gives Reaper of Souls the sense of
long-lasting reward that Diablo 3 sorely lacked.
While the saturated colors and occasional rainbows that
punctuated Diablo 3’s rendition of Sanctuary were pretty to look at,
Reaper of Souls tosses all of it aside and splashes the canvas with
charcoal shades, and deliciously dreary landscapes that harken back to
the Diablo of old.
The streets of Westmarch, where the new Act 5 kicks off,
are bleak, and filled with scripted events and side-quests that
effectively set a tone of hopelessness. Corpses are piled
high in cathedrals, civilians run
futilely through the streets before being possessed by evil spirits, and
civil unrest stirs as it becomes clear that Westmarch’s King is unfit
to protect his people. The tritely written plot doesn’t successfully
carry these ideas for long, but the atmosphere remains thick to the end,
resulting in a world that feels imperiled, and more in need of a hero
than the first four acts.
Despite staying on the darker end of the spectrum, Reaper
of Souls shows an impressive level of diversity in both its locales and
monster designs. Only one quick encounter borrows art from Diablo 3, so
the rest of the five-ish hour-long campaign is flush with exciting new
sights to see and ever more impressive demons to smite. In one single
act, Reaper of Souls exhibits almost as much variety as the entirety of
Diablo 3 before it.
The new content in Reaper of Souls really helps give Diablo
3 a longer tail than it previously enjoyed. One of the biggest factors
is the new Crusader class, which ably fills the role of Diablo 2’s
Paladin. They hit with holy authority, but they also sport an array of
defensive, and support abilities that can be useful when playing with
friends. Particularly when equipped with a massive shield in one hand
and a normally two-handed weapon in the other, Crusaders exhibit a
presence and physicality that effectively sets them apart from the other
classes, who have new active and passive skills to pick up on the way
to the new level cap of 70. You’d be surprised how much that one extra
passive slot opens up build possibilities.
Back in town, the Mystic artisan can transmogrify your gear
to give it a more cohesive overall look, and with enchantments, you can
reroll a single modifier on a piece of gear until you get what you
need, for a price. Enchanting is handled really intelligently, allowing
you to see what the possible outcomes are, and letting you either choose
one of two new results, or stick with what you originally had. It
leaves just enough to chance to feel exciting when you get that perfect
roll, but controlled enough that I never felt cheated when things didn’t
work out.
But the crown jewel here is undoubtedly the new Adventure
mode, which gives you unrestricted access to every waypoint across all
five acts. Random side missions called bounties litter the map, offering
progressively greater rewards as you go. Complete enough, and you’ll
earn items that grant you passage into a Nephalem Rift. These
randomly-generated dungeons of varying size are absolutely teeming with
mobs pulled from every corner of the game map, making for some the most
intense, varied battles I’ve ever fought in an action RPG.
Different tilesets and environmental effects are
anarchically tossed together too, turning each rift into a freshly
insane fever-dream. Slay the boss at the end, and you’ll be treated to a
huge lootsplosion that almost always includes a legendary. Essentially,
Blizzard has created a framework that handsomely rewards us for doing
exactly what we want to do after completing the story anyway: log on, do
runs, get paid, and log out. Brilliant.
Each of these new elements benefits from the many system
changes Diablo 3 has seen in recent months. Though you don’t need to buy
Reaper of Souls to experience the joys of Loot 2.0, the revamped
Paragon system, or the end of the auction houses, it all adds up to a
much greater sense of choice and ownership over how your character looks
and plays despite the lingering over-simplicity of the stat system
beneath it all. Modifiers that buff specific skills roll frequently,
finally making it feasible to gear around specific skill builds.
Legendaries drop more often too, and being able to use enchanting to
swap useless stats for more relevant ones means you’ll be more likely to
use what you find, and keep grinding to find more.
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