From a third-person perspective, players take control of the games main protagonist, Capell.  Through seamless game play and excellent story-telling, players take Capell from a run down cell in a secret prison on a journey with the members of the Liberation Force. The story centers around the 17 year old and his growth from a fearful flute player to a strong willed leader, making many friends and attempting to save the world along the way.  Infinite Undiscovery takes place in a world where the populous reveres the moon, using it to grant individuals magical power, usually at birth under the light of the moon.  The mandate of the Liberation Force is to severe the chains that are being placed around the world, tethering the moon to the planet.  When a chain is set into the ground by the antagonists, a group calling themselves The Order of Chains, horrible monsters appear and nearby cities and kingdoms are often faced with great perils.

Infinite Undiscovery is an action-based, real-time RPG.  The player primarily relies on Capells swordsmanship and some flute playing skills to defeat enemies throughout the game, but with a simple tap of a couple of controller buttons, Capell can connect to other party members to utilize their skills to perform a variety of tasks outside of battle or to subjugate their wrath on the enemy at hand.  Item use during battle is a particular pain, when the menu is up the player is unable to move Capell, leaving him at the mercy of the enemy.  When your party is in trouble and you require a potion, it can be a tricky maneuver.  I cannot express how many times Capell has died in my care due to this annoying system.  Battle is relatively simple, A for a quick attack and B for a heavy attack.  There are very few combinations to explore, (A + B, A + A + B and A + A + A + B) each resulting in a special skill.  As the player levels up, Capell along with other party members do gain some new battle skills.  These skills are not customizable in any way, they  are given out like Halloween candy at pre-determined levels.  Capell’s skills are used by holding the A button or B button respectively after they are set through the menu.

Along with real-time battle, comes real-time item use/item creation/enchantment.  After sheathing Capells sword (and inevitably the rest of the parties weapons) and the menu is pulled up, the party sits in a little circle awaiting the players orders.  This makes the party vulnerable to attacks as time in continuously flowing.  It is very important to clear the area ahead of time.  Item-creation is similar to many other games, collect or purchase ingredients and create everything from food and medicine to armors, books and weapons.  Each character within the game has a specialty and with practice has the ability to ‘level up’ their creation skills and acquire more recipes.  There are hundreds of items in the game to create, the player may choose to create them all, or simply purchase their items through one of the many in-game merchants.  Unlike item creation, enchantments can be done anytime as Capell is the character who performs the enchanting (due to his inability to use magic).  Everything from increasing attack, intelligence, hit point and defense values for the party to making the party immune to sleep, poisoning, etc.  I found myself neglecting the use of enchantments until very late in the game, although when I finally did begin using them, they became an invaluable part of my battle strategy.

Make sure to prepare a bowl of popcorn before beginning Infinite Undiscovery.  As with many RPGs, the game is extremely story-based and the cutscenes are numerous.  I was pleased to see most of the scenes are voiced over, and the game allows the player to set subtitles ‘ON’ in the options menu.  I said -most- right?  Bizarrely enough, after an extended cut scene the developers take a turn and stop paying the voice actors for brief periods.  Leaving the player to read the tiny writing across the bottom of the screen to continue following the story.  Oh, and I certainly hope you like bad kung-fu flick dubbing, because there was not even a feeble attempt at matching the voice acting to the predetermined Japanese mouth movement.  Sometimes a character will be speaking for 30 seconds, while their mouth stops moving for the final 10.  The voice acting itself was not something to brag about, some performances were rather lackluster and left much to be desired.

Speaking of characters, with over a dozen main and an additional five secondary members of your group – the player is left with a multitude of options for setting up their party in the local town before heading out on their adventure.  There are even times when the player is asked to set multiple parties (ranging from 2 to 3) to aid in missions requiring ‘multiple aspects’ to be completed.  The player only controls the primary party however, and Capell is always the party leader.  As there is an upside and a downside to every choice made when developing a game, the upside to having so many choices in party members is that the player can customize their party to their liking.  Rely on healers, tanks, magic-users, thieves and straight out attackers of every variety matching the players unique play style.  The characters never grow stagnant as these characters are introduced over the entirety of the game.  Deep into hour 20+ I was still acquiring new allies.  The downside, lack of character development in many instances.  Some characters are simply thrown into the mix, forced to join your group by some member of royalty, or simply coming along to seek out their own form of personal vengeance upon The Order of Chains.  The player is usually offered the basics of the characters history, and the game then moves onto the next chapter.

One of the most disappointing discoveries of the game Infinite Undiscovery was the save points…or lack thereof.  As the player progresses through a variety of cities, dungeons, castles, fields and caverns there are a relatively small amount of save points to use.  One particular castle in which I had progressed, was filled with a variety of ‘big bosses’ one after the other.  Only after dying several times and replaying 75% of the area did I make it to the ‘top’ and was finally able to save.  With few save points, the player would hope to see ‘Checkpoint Reached!’ pop up on the screen every so often, but that is not the case.  Save when you can and try not to die in the meantime, try and keep a good healer on hand.

Infinite Undiscovery is a must play for anyone who enjoys RPGs, or anyone who wants to simply enjoy the twists and turns the plot provides.  However, the customizable parties do not really make up for the lack of skill customization or the lack or character development. (aside from Capell)  On the verge of completing the game, I have noticed there are some sub quests I did not complete and chests I could not reach.  I will not be playing Infinite Undiscovery a second time as the story and game play will not change based on not completing these menial tasks.

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Taking place 20 years after Baal’s fall in the Worldstone Chamber, Diablo III returns us to Sanctuary.  After an impressive opening cinematic where we’re re-introduced to our old friend Deckard Cain and a new face, his niece Leah, the journey to finally bring an end to Diablo begins.

Diablo III gives you 5 classes to choose from, only one returning from Diablo II.  There’s the Barbarian, a physical tank with a wide range of offensive and defensive skills and a high damage output.  The Demon Hunter is a fusion of the Amazon ranged abilities with the Assassin’s trap abilities.  The Wizard is re-branded Sorceress from Diablo II that cast spells to enhance their own abilities while raining havoc on anything in their path.  The Monk replaces the Paladin from Diablo II.  This class focuses on mitigation, healing, and hand to hand combat, a very versatile class and my personal favourite.  Finally we have the Witch Doctor, which utilizes voodoo, crowd control and minions.

Each class has a specific role they play.  One of my biggest gripes with Diablo III is the removal of the Skill Tree system from Diablo II in favour of an automated skill and rune system which unfortunately paints a class into a corner. Previously with Diablo II, on levelling up you’d receive skill and stat points that you could distribute how you saw fit.  This allowed people to build a character to the play style they wanted, focusing  on skills/abilities that appealed to them.  Upon reaching a new level in Diablo III, you unlock a new skill/ability and or rune that modifies what said skill/ability can do and your stat points are automatically assigned.  This essentially makes every class the same at the maximum level 60.  The only difference is player skill and their equipment.

Taking a page from World of Warcraft, Diablo III replaces the player belt user interface with quick bar with your assigned skills.  Skills have an associated cost, a cool-down timer, a resource generator, or a combination of any of those.  It seems Blizzard was trying to go for a more simplistic approach with this, and while it does the job, I wish they hadn’t gone this route and refined/tweaked Diablo II’s system.  Enabling “Elective Mode” in your options menu allows you more flexibility with customization of skills which should have been enabled by default.

One of the things that is a fantastic improvement in Diablo III is the stash and inventory system.  For years players wanted a shared stash amongst all their characters and we finally got it with Diablo III.  It starts off small, and requires a significant gold investment to expand it to maximum capacity, but the function of it is perfect.  Items and gold are stored universally over all characters on your account and server.  This only changes for Hardcore mode which has a separate stash from Softcore characters.  Items can quickly be transferred in and out of your stash with right click, so dragging and dropping is a thing of the past. Furthermore, commodity items,  can now be stacked up to 99 times, which allows for better organization and less clutter.

With the inventory system, hovering the cursor over an item will reveal a breakdown on what the item does, and if you have a piece of equipment of that slot equipped, it will show both items and compare them, revealing automatically for players whether an item is an improvement or not, though this only applies to Life, Damage Per Second and Protection.  Another enhancement is a massive list of details on your character.  It breaks down every possible stat you can acquire, how much you have and what it does for you.

Gameplay is virtually the same as Diablo II.  This is a hack n slash game where you will likely go through a few mice a year with all the clicking you’ll be doing.  Diablo III has been modernized to feel more like an MMO.  As mentioned a few paragraphs back, the skill system has been simplified and the customization factor Diablo II had is essentially gone.  One improvement with the skill system is the ability to respec your character at a moments notice.  This does allow you to tweak the way you play your class and it does work extremely well, however this may seem blasphemous to Diablo II fans.

Loot is one of the biggest features the Diablo franchise is known for.  When you kill enemies in Diablo, they have a chance to drop items, potions, and gold.  A new addition to drops are health globes.  These are automatic potions that heal you in the middle of combat.  Globes and gold are automatically picked up when you walk over them so you can focus on what you’re fighting.  There are the base items, magic items, rare items and legendary items.  Items can have anywhere from 1-6 properties.  These properties are what improve your character and that’s where the lasting appeal to Diablo comes from.  You always want to have the “best” equipment, and to get it you need to farm farm farm.  So you’ll end up spending hours trying to find better equipment.  The biggest issue with the loot system is it always felt like junk items were dropping. Items dropped numerous levels below your current level so it felt like you were either over-levelled, under-geared or both.  Thankfully Blizzard added the Auction House giving players easier access to quality items at a price.

The Auction House is fantastic in principal.  Items you don’t want or need, you can either sell it for pennies to vendors in game, or you can load up the Auction House and list it.  You can set the minimum bid price and the a buyout price for an immediate purchase.  You list the item and wait to see if it sells.  When looking for an item you can search by specific item locations, you can set search parameters for what properties an item has and by what factor, and you can even set the maximum buy out price you’re willing to spend.  Unfortunately Blizzard didn’t add an option to filter by auction end date so you’ll have to really search hard for bargains.

Blizzard doesn’t do this for free though.  There’s the Gold Auction House and the Real Money Auction House.  Yes, that’s right.  You can sell items for in game currency, or for REAL money.  If you’re selling items in gold, Blizzard takes a 15% cut.  This is done as a Gold Sink so Blizzard can reduce the amount of gold people have as it can be gained quickly through killing things or completing quests.  If you’re using the RMAH, Blizzard charges $1 minimum if the money is going to your battle.net account, or 15% if you’re transferring the money to Paypal.

I applaud Blizzard for doing this as they will and ARE going to make a lot of money from this and it will help keep the game up for a very long time.  However it forces player to either play the game A LOT to find elite level items.  All the best items you can find, generally are listed on the RMAH.  The GAH gets some good items listed, but the prices for these are extremely steep.  With all the nerfs Blizzard has been doing to places that give great gold or good item drops, it seems they’re doing this intentionally to force people to give up and spend real money on items.

The biggest issue with the Auction House, besides all the downtime but that’s mostly resolved now, is the social factor Diablo II had no longer exists.  When joining a Public Game you don’t know who will be in it.  While you can still trade in Diablo III, it’s a more complex process and it’s not worth the hassle of trying to find people to trade with directly.  This eliminates the bartering, but it takes away a huge social element from the game.

The presentation of Diablo III is fantastic.  Even though the game looks like it was designed years ago, it’s very polished.  The cinematics are hands down some of the best I’ve seen in a long time.  There are a handful of cinematics in each act.  The sketched cinematics are good, but it’s the start and end of Act ones that will truly impress.  The voice acting is great and I love that the town folk attempt to interact with the player and what’s going on in the story, even if you hear the same thing over and over again.  “I was thinking…”  “Don’t hurt yourself.”  Old joke, but still funny.

The story of Diablo III starts off fantastic but tapers off as you progress.  Act I and Act II are the best  developed.  The story comes full circle with characters and references from Diablo I and Diablo II.  The entirety of Act I is a tribute to Diablo I and I love that Blizzard did that.  Act II starts to get into the actual story and it has one of the most epic Diablo boss fights ever, even though we’re in the desert again.  Act III is challenging, but it’s very repetitive and lacks a “wow” factor.  Act IV…. Sigh.  Blizzard, we’ve been waiting for 12 years.  We knew Heaven and Hell would eventually meet and it would be huge, EPIC.  So why was this the most disappointing Act in the game?  It was rushed, repetitive and it should have been the longest Act.  The conclusion of the story leaves some questions unanswered and that will pave the way for an expansion or two.

I’m a Diablo enthusiast.  I’ve been waiting for this game for a very long time.  Even though I’ve criticized a lot of things about Diablo III, the game is still great.  It could have been exceptional in my opinion.  Regardless of the short-comings I believe there are, I’ve put 100+ hours into the game and that number will continue to rise.  If you are a fan of the Diablo franchise, and you haven’t picked this up yet, you’re insane.  Diablo III will keep you engaged for years to come.  When additional content is released and promised features are finally added, (Where’s the PvP?!) you’ll find that Diablo III was well worth your time and money.

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