There isn't much reason to play Diablo 3 anymore

Diablo 3 was already on the ropes before this past week. I kind of fell in love with the game once they stopped charging silly money for it (which is strange for Blizzard to offer discounts) but I think they were preparing for the launch of the Diablo 2 remake and were prepping people for it by essentially giving away Diablo 3.

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Diablo 3 is a pretty fantastic game and the thing I like about it is that it really isn't that difficult and depending on the playstyle that you prefer you can quite easily defeat this game a number of ways. I mentioned in the past that I easily defeated the entire game only dying one single time when I was playing the game on "Hard" not realizing there were like 15 additional difficulty levels above that. I never looked beyond the first screen

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I figured that was the end of it but nah, it goes on for at least 2 more pages.

It's a fun game because it is relatively mindless and other than those irritating revolving laser things that many higher powered enemies possess, there is very little in this game that is going to insta-kill you. Even then it doesn't really matter because you can respawn in the same location basically endlessly and if your equipment deteriorates you can run back to town to sort that out.

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The boss fights are great, the maps are procedurally generated so in theory it is a new game every time you play it, the music is fantastic and the loot of course, is the main reason why anyone plays this. It is a fantastic game but we have one major problem: It is old and not many people play it anymore.

Once you have gone through the story once, there is not that much incentive to do so again and the only thing that is really fun about the game is to get into a group and do harder and harder "Rifts" that result in fantastic loot drops and tons of xp that will enable you to power up all of your characters that are on your machine (outside of seasonal play.) This was probably great fun 8 or even 3 years ago but these days, if you ever find a group you should consider yourself lucky.

Years ago, if you left your network setting open to the public, you could basically play any part of the game and people would pop in and out to help you or to just come along for the company. I remember playing just my story and some folks would jump in, help for a bit and then they would take off. I would almost never talk to these people because my headset was not plugged in. I don't even know if they tried to speak to me.

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Just like most games, it is a lot more fun with friends but unless you have a bunch of real life friends in your PS or PC list, there is a very good chance that you are never going to find another person and this is something that Blizzard would probably patch as far as LFG is concerned but since their "new" game launches on 23-Sep-2021 I would be willing to bet that they are less than super concerned about what people think about a game that they have likely already sold all that they are going to.

I have tried a wide variety of methods of attempting to play with other people and I don't know where the hell they are. According to a wide variety of websites there are about 15,000 people playing Diablo 3 at any given point in time but this introduces another problem: There isn't cross-platform support and since this game is available on 7 different consoles and of course PC there is a really good chance that a big chunk of that 15,000 that are online aren't even using the same system that you are.

Unless Diablo 2 is a big flop I would say that Blizzard feels very little notion to continue supporting or updating D3. It would be nice if they could simply improve the ability to find groups because that would still be fun if it was easier to find people. However, they might be interested in reducing server use and don't actually want people to play it anymore. They already have your money anyway and since there are no microtransactions (thank god) there is very little financial incentive for Blizzard to give a crap about Diablo 3.

Oh well, it made it at least a decade and that's impressive by any gaming standards.