One of my gaming goals for this month is to finish the campaign in Diablo 3.

This morning I was playing and… I died! It has been SO LONG since I died in Diablo 3 that I didn’t really understand what was happening for a few seconds.

Then I felt a moment of euphoria… was Diablo 3 going to turn into an actual game instead of the mind-numbing busy-work it has been? You hold down a button and move around and collect loot until you have to go back and sell or smash it, then return for more. Seriously it has been incredibly tedious so far. I should have pushed the difficulty up I guess. I’m playing on Hard, I can’t imagine how mindless Normal must be.

Unfortunately the euphoria was short-lived as I realized that death really has no consequences. You can revive right where you died and aside from having to spend a handful of coins to repair your gear, there’s no harm done.

I’m not really hardcore enough for hardcore but I wish there were some setting in between. Something that give death some sting but not the pain of having to start fresh. I really miss the old Diablo games where you’d drop your gear and have to try to get it back. You’d have to have backup gear to help you recover from a death…it was really interesting.

Later I died a second time, but then res’d on the spot and kept going. What’s weird is that right now I seem to have two states: Full health and dead. In both cases it seemed like I was 1-shotted by a powerful enemy or something. It happened so fast I never really saw my health dropping.

But meh, push a button and stand up and keep grinding through mobs… YAWN.

I know the conventional wisdom here is to play MP and I’m sure that makes the game much different. For for solo players, Diablo 3 is a real snooze-fest so far. I’m hoping once I unlock Adventure Mode it’ll get more interesting.

So Diablo 3 came and — for most gamers — went a few months ago. I dutifully pre-purchased the game but honestly I didn’t like it very much. I managed to get a Demon Hunter to level 17 and then moved on.

I really felt like the game was dumbed down from D2. You had to start playing on Normal mode and the entire first act of normal was completely devoid of challenge. Death was meaningless (when it even happened) and character building at low levels was more or less non-existent.

Intellectually I understood that many of these issues resolved themselves further into the game or on higher difficulty levels, but emotionally I just couldn’t bring myself to slog through the newbie-friendly stuff to get at the good gameplay. So on the shelf it went.

Now plenty of people suggested I try out Hardcore mode and I thought about it but I was just too soured on the whole Diablo 3 experience.

Fast forward a couple of months and Tipa has been chronicling her Hardcore Diablo 3 adventures. Her posts intrigued me.

So for the past week I’ve been playing Diablo 3 again, in hardcore mode. I’m approaching it like a Rogue-Like. In other words I expect to die a lot and my goal is to see how far I can get rather than to see the end of the game or whatever. And I took a hint from Tipa and rather than just playing 1 hardcore character, I’m playing a stable of them. That way when 1 dies I don’t have to start over at level 1 again.

Essentially I’m playing the meta-game of Diablo 3 now. My crew can share resources and work together to level up the vault and the blacksmith. Good items are traded back and forth. Also switching characters helps stave off boredom, because much of the basic game play is still dull as hell.

The differences now are those moments of terror when you finally encounter something that can put a ding in your health pool and you’re reminded that it is possible to die, and that dying means starting over. It changes the whole experience for me.

Back in the real world, we’re moving next week so that means evenings have been devoted to packing. I generally wind down at 10 or 10:15 pm and then I’m looking for an alcoholic beverage and something fun to do. As much as I want to play The Secret World it kind of requires too much thinking at the ends of these days, and click-click-clicking and sorting loot in Diablo 3 fits my current situation perfectly.

I don’t know how long that will be the case. And I’m not sure how I’ll react when I actually lose a character. But for now I’m at least getting some value out of a game I’d pretty much written off.

I’m really glad Blizzard lets us share resources between characters. What would make the game perfect for me would be if a character dropped its loot when it died and then a different character could actually go and find that loot. I feel like that would be a nice organic ‘quest’ to do… since a dead character means there’s probably something bad-ass where that dropped loot is.

But you can’t have everything I guess, and while I’m still looking forward to Torchlight 2, for now Diablo 3 is entertaining me, and that’s what gaming is all about.

When Diablo 3 launched, I wasn’t a fan. I was hoping for a real sequel to Diablo II in more than just lore and the very broadest of brush strokes, but that’s not what Blizzard delivered and I found it hard to adjust. I was anticipating a game with endless character building possibilities but Blizzard opted to deliver a more mainstream title for today’s more casual gamer. People no longer see having to re-roll a character as part of the challenge of gameplay and learning a game; they see it as an annoyance.

Anyway while Raptr was showing people racking up 18 hours in the first 3 days of launch, I put about 5 hours in total in the first week. I just didn’t find it all that interesting so I stopped playing.

Friday night, after almost a full week away, I picked it up again. I spent some time tweaking the controls (I have Move on W and Stop on E & D) so it controls a little like a direct control game (downside is I keep hitting S meaning to backup but instead pop up the Skill window in mid fight) and I have easy access to the few hotkeys the game gives you. I think these adjustments helped me let go of the dream of a sequel to Diablo II since the game now played so differently. I also turned off the stupid, stupid system that makes you bind certain skills to certain buttons and only lets you have 1 skill in every category active at a time. Now at least I have some tactical customization options.

You can probably tell by the tone of this post that I still harbor some ill-will towards the game, but at least I’m finding it fun in small doses now. Mostly I’m just soaking up the lore and the random chat going on around me. My Templar companion makes me chuckle fairly often and the things the villagers say can be amusing as well. The gameplay still seems awfully simple and there are some very odd decisions that seem to have been made as a result of yanking features. For instance they’ve gotten rid of Town Portal and Identify scrolls. Casting Town Portal takes a few seconds and I understand that…you don’t want it to be an escape mechanism from a tough fight. But Identify takes a few seconds, too. Why? Why have Unidentified items at all if you just have to right click them to identify them?

I do miss those scrolls though. I miss having a full inventory and having to decide if it’s worth the cost of a Town Portal to go back and sell, or if I should just discard some low value objects and press on. On the other hand, not requiring them keeps casual players clicking away, which is what Diablo 3 is all about. Click click and click some more! It could almost be a Zynga game.

Another thing that’s a bit disappointing was finding out that my rate of fire while holding down the left mouse button is much slower than the rate of fire I can obtain by rapidly clicking it. On the one hand, the ‘hold down’ rate of fire is sufficient to kill most enemies before they get near me. On the other hand, if the game ever does ramp up the challenge spamming that button is going to play hell with my RSI issues on my mousing hand.

I’m a bit baffled by the loot system, too. I’ve had a few Rare items drop but they’ve tended to be no better than Blue items I already had equipped, even though they both have the same level requirements. Nor do they salvage into anything interesting. I guess they’re meant to be vendored? Or maybe I’ve just been unlucky. I did find one rare Quiver that is pretty interesting..it has a bunch of stat boosts on it. Most of my Rare stuff has been dull, though.

So far gold has been kind of irrelevant. I’ve been spending all mine to level up the Blacksmith since the merchants never have anything worth buying, I’ve never had need of potions, and scrolls have been removed from the game. Essentially there seems to be a lack of gold sinks in the Normal Difficulty game. I understand this all changes a lot on higher difficulties though. I don’t want to use the AH because honestly the game is providing absolutely no challenge at this point (still in Act 1, remember) and I certainly don’t want to make it any easier.

My goal for now is to chip away at my first play-through, enjoying the story and the lore. Then when I have the higher difficulty levels unlocked I’m hoping the gameplay gets more interesting (or maybe even before then…perhaps later Acts get more exciting). Or perhaps I should re-roll as a barbarian (I’m playing a demon hunter) since I hear in general the game is much more challenging for melee characters. Or maybe Blizzard will put a $9.95 “unlock” item up for sale that lets me jump to higher difficulty levels before finishing normal.

Still, I’m at the point where I can jump in and spend an hour having fun just making monsters go “Blammo!” and listening to my Templar pal hoot and holler and ask for more fights like that one. This is way beyond where I was during launch week when I was just pissed off that I’d flushed $60 down the toilet for a game I really didn’t like.

I really wish players could just pick a difficulty level from the start. I think that would’ve changed my experience considerably.