Meet Djibouti the Witch Doctor.

Chillin’ with his corpse dawgs!

As recent as last week, I wasn’t too concerned about Diablo 3. Despite loving Diablos 1 and 2, this gamer wasn’t salivating for Diablo 3 like most people out there in video game land. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I’ve pretty much loved every game Blizzard has released, from Warcraft to Starcraft, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Diablo 3 would be awesome. How could it not? But I just wasn’t all that interested.

Fast forward to yesterday, when my girlfriend (1wombat4u) and I decided to take the plunge and buy the game. $60 is no chump change, but I’m an adult now, with a job and disposable income. Might as well spend it on something fun.

And I’ve gotta say, Diablo 3 is definitely a lot of fun so far. We didn’t experience any of the server problems that everyone else is claiming about, and I have no real opinion on the DRM issue, which requires that players have an active Internet connection at all times to play a game, even in single player. That sort of thing just doesn’t bug me. I live in  a city, there’s probably always going to be Internet in my neighborhood. And considering some of the connection problems Wombat and I have had with past games, being able to just jump into a Diablo 3 game together was a blast. A friend of ours even showed up later in the evening and was able to just jump right into our game without any hassle. That was awesome.

The game is so far standard Diablo. It looks the same as previous games, albeit with better graphics, animations and voice work. My character, Djibouti, is fully voiced and can chat with quest-givers or townsfolk. The game even has character specific cut scenes, though I don’t yet know if it also has gender specific cut scenes. There are no dialogue trees to pick my own responses, but Diablo isn’t that kind of a game. I kill monsters, I pick up loot and I play pack rat, bringing a full satchel of loot back to town to sell, even if everything is broken and only worth $2 or $3. I’m a huge pack rat in Diablo games, selling nearly everything I find, no matter how many trips back to town it takes. This always gives me a huge pile of gold later in the game, though I rarely splurge on the super expensive items.

So in most games like this, I kind of just save my money for the sake of saving my money…if only I did that in real life.

The classes include Barbarian, Sorcerer, Demon Hunter, Monk and Witch Doctor. I picked Witch Doctor because clearly it was the most awesome choice out of those five. The rest are standard RPG classes, whereas Witch Doctor is unique and cool. It seems he’s going to be like the old Necromancer class, able to summon zombies, zombie dogs and other minions to fight his fights. That sounds cool to me.

I will keep you all posted on my progress, just for kicks. Though this game isn’t going to be as unique as Skyrim, with my orc Tannenbaum. Right now we’re simply making our way through Act I. We visited old Tristram, and went into the cathedral, but unfortunately there were no Wurt references this time around. I suppose we did take his leg in Diablo 2, and we killed Griswold, so it’s not like they’d still be around. Oh well, fun to visit the old locale.

I would love to hear about your Diablo 3 characters in the comments. Maybe we can play together someday.