An early Christmas present from Mum (she had some Argos vouchers) meant I was getting Diablo III Eternal Collection for the Switch about 6 – 8 months early. If it wasn’t a present I’d have waited until Nintendo (eventually) put it on sale.

For me Diablo has always been Blizzards take on a roguelike. Whether it is an actual roguelike I’ll leave to all those online forums to discuss in great detail, and go round in every decreasing circles arguing over the most irrelevant points.

I’m pretty sure they use procedural generation in the code used in its design. As Darren Grey in his chapter of the book Procedural Generation in Game Design wrote:

“…quilted-content PCG using premade blocks of content, meshed together on the fly for a varied experience. This is how the Diablo games make their levels. But it often produces the least varied experience, as the player gets to recognize the content blocks and the patterns produced by the generator. Over repeated plays, it can produce repetitive and stale gameplay.” (Darren Grey, 2017)

I think Darren might be referring to the original Diablo. But I’d be real surprised if this quote isn’t true to some extent in Diablo III also. Why change a winning formula?

Now some will say this is unforgivable but my Switch has never been connected to a tv. I’m using it like a glorified handheld. It means I can game and have something on the tv at the same time, like Cheers on Netflix acting as background noise!

The nice thing about the Switch is I can take photos easily in game to show you how beautiful Diablo III looks, not only prerendered cut scenes, but the in game stuff as well. Sadly it’s not able to stream, so you are spared that.

The cut scene stuff has a couple of interesting styles, and differ completely. There is the hand drawn on parchment brown/tea hue style that is used to progress the story between Acts. Which is effective, and has a charm to it. But the prerendered stuff that is used during the Acts is stunning, well rendered, and I love it.

I love the isometric view of the world you get when playing. It really works well with this style of game. The mini map is a god send for navigating round the dungeons. And so far there is a nice mixture of above and below ground level design.

I love dungeon crawls, roguelikes, and on this front Diablo III doesn’t disappoint. Naturally I go to type and play a wizard. So my character is wondering around casting lightning bolts, or rays of pure energy. And yes casting spells has an energy cost. The more powerful the spell, the more energy it uses up, limiting its use. Which early on his a hinderance. Currently at level 34 it is much less so.

There is the opportunity to do a lot of personalisation within the game. As you can see above my character has wings, and a banner at the moment. Not very practical, but looks awesome (well to me). And it’s nice to see however you kit your character out that this is reflected within not only the screen you see above, but the character on screen as you play.

You also get to personalise, weapons used, spells using, armour etc. There is also a fair bit I haven’t explored yet on this side, like crafting.

The story so far is all about stopping a couple of remaining lords of hell (I’ve stopped one, and currently on way to stopping the second). But I’m expecting one or two plot twists and an even bigger big bad to emerge.

For me the story is almost secondary, and it’s about running around killing everything in sight, and collecting treasure.

The story naturally influences the objectives/quests that you go on, and give you a reason for having to go into a dungeon.

So far the variety in objectives/quests isn’t amazing. But then that is a limitation of this style of game.

I’ve still to try out the multiplayer aspect of the game. Which will be interesting to see how that goes.

But so far the game is really living up to my expectations, and delivering big time on what I am looking for in this style of game.

Right I’m off to hack and slay, well fire some fireballs at the poor minions of whoever I’m trying to defeat at the moment. Oh and get loot.