He is a well-written, realistic character. That moron who can’t admit defeat and always adds another line you can only laugh about. Until you punch them in the face.
As for the mysterious stranger - that certainly was not that much of a mystery, yeah. That the dark wanderer was Diablo was also not much a mystery in D2 for those who played D1.
It’s okay, not everything needs to be super obscure and complicated.
The premise of the stranger choosing this path because his superiors were jerks seems like a nice little nod towards the working conditions at blizzard. Splendidly discovered social critique!
It wsa just the writing, it was dire. I’ve read better characterisation in the books my kids used to learn to read. I don’t need arpgs to be super serious all the time (I loved Sacred 1 & 2 after all), but if you’re going to be a “serious” arpg (like the Diablo series were written as), then can we at least have good writing & characterisation that isn’t pitched at a pre-teen level? I think if the Diablo games had been as tongue in cheek as Sacred then Azmodan would have been fine as he was written, but he’s supposed to be a big threat to Sanctuary & he’s written as a fucking idiot.
I guess it’s about expectation, if it’s a serious game then I expect my main antagonists (ie, the act bosses) to be serious, competent antagonists, not buffoons, there can be comic relief in the form of minions (Gharbad in D2 was a good example), but not one of the Lords of Hell who, apparently, couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery let alone an invasion of the mortal realm!
The dark wanderer wasn’t written (to me at least) as some mysterious entity who you’re not sure who they are, are the good or bad, etc. And I agree that not everything needs to be obscure or full of twists, but if you’re going to write a character as a mystery (the Stranger in D3), could you at least make it such that a teenager might not be able to work it out?
I mean, you are perfectly correct in your assessment of Azmodan. He doesn’t feel like a Great Evil of Hell, and it is a missed opportunity.
I am not sure if the stranger was even meant to be a mystery for the player to figure out, it is just the setup of how the world reacts. It might have been strange if all the characters were like ‘yeah, probably the Justice One who fell from the sky’. IIRC, good ol’ D.C. had a hunch from the beginning - this fits his position in the lore.
For many players, this might have been their first Diablo game, and they might have not known about all the lore that came before. For them, the identity of this stranger might have been unclear until the reveal. I don’t remember if there was an introduction that gave a summary about the previous events and how much lore snippets were given away otherwise.
I think it goes to show how both of you remember D3 in that much detail that the writing couldn’t have been that bad. Meanwhile I can’t remember anything from it other than meme lines that I quote with my friends like “ahhhh! Haedrig! Help me!” when Headrig’s wife turns undead in Act 1 or the fact that we got this stickbug framed Diablo like it’s somehow more threatening than the menace from D2
I think I remember a witch in the desert with butterflies?
It being memorable does not mean that it was good. I still remember spending all night puking on account of some dodgy hash browns (no way was it the chicken they were with) in the first year at uni, doesn’t mean the food was good.
So Azmodan is supposed to be the demon general. No one better. He alone figures out that it’s Diablo. And they give him moustache twirling dialog?
I’m with Llama, writing for Azmodan was awful. I remember it because it was just so bad. For the money hats that Blizzard was printing during this time due to WoW, they couldn’t afford better writers?
That’s an absolutely fair point. I don’t remember anything about either D3 or LE’s story compared to TQ or GD tbf lol.
It’s really sad when you can apply “hips don’t lie” to the BBEG of your video game and they’re NOT supposed to be sexy.
He should have stayed a while and listened.
Blizzard is spending all the money on the guy who says “people WANT to spend $100 on horse dlc. The same price they paid for a full game and it’s bonus content is absolutely the same price they want to spend on a skin for their horse.”
D2:R has double or triple the online of LE, and its a remake of a 26 year old game. If you think that is dead, what is LE ?.
And no, you are also wrong that games cannot survive on pure nostalgia. Ever heard of nostalrius ? classic wow ? la2 servers where thousands of people continue playing a 20yo game out of PURE NOSTALGIA ?.
You mean what’s linked now is better than what was linked before? It reminds me of what my autistic eldest child used to write as stories in primary school. If an AI wrote it I could understand it being that bad, I got about a minute in & then had to stop.
I would personally prefer that they hire whoever did the writing for D3, as dire as that was. Fan fic != professional writing. You might also not want to go with the racist tropes, but that’s up to you I guess.
The other link seemed to be more on the raunchy side.
I don’t even dare to open the link, for I am afraid I will die of ‘Fremdschämen’. That’s a useful German word for the concept of feeling embarrassed by the actions (or in this case: the writing) of others, almost as if it were your own doing.
