6 years prior it was "do you guys not have the internet?"

I had boycotted Diablo 3 since its release for this reason alone, until two years ago when I found out about their Starter Edition and decided to give it a try, but gave up about 1.5 hours in. Lately though I've been feeling like I may have judged the game unfairly. So this time I figured I'd squeeze as much as I can from this demo, and yet I still ended up giving up, but this time after finishing the story portion that was present here. I gotta say, my views on this game haven't changed much, though I did notice a few new aspects I haven't before.

I'll begin with the things I liked:

1. The item pickup and inventory management is probably the best in the genre. They got rid of all the unnecessary items, and made the actually important items take up less space. In the time I played, I haven't had the need to teleport back to the town once. I do understand that this would probably change later in the game, but the fact that in the 2 hours I played I never filled up even half of my inventory is already something I've never seen another DIablo-clone achieve.
2. I've never cared much for story and lore in these types of games, but Diablo 3 does probably the most unintrusive delivery of the story. Whenever NPCs talk, you can freely run around, kill enemies, sort through in-game menus, etc. The voice acting is great too, and i loved the character of the Witch Doctor, which is who I played as (I've always been a fan of the Druid in D2:LoD, and this seemed like a natural successor). Not only his design and voice acting, but the way the NPCs react to his scary looks, that was quite amusing. However, I will say that, even though it's unintrusive, there's perhaps too much lore being dumped on you, and the writing in the game isn't great. But that's not much of an issue.
3. Great mini-map. I know this sounds like a minor thing, but so many Diablo-clones fuck it up, which makes you constantly open the full map, interrupting the game flow. A mini-map in these games should include enough of the unexplored territory so that you're able to see where to go, and Diablo 3's mini-map does that perfectly.

And now to a long list of things I disliked:

1. There are no camera controls whatsoever, and the default view is a bit too far removed for me. There is a zoom button, but it zooms in extremely close and under an angle. And since you can't rotate, half the time it hits some obstacles in the way and you can't see shit. I don't get why a 3D game has a 2D camera and couldn't implement at least a controlled zoom (with a mouse-wheel), especially considering their insane budget and years of development.
2. No stat or skill upgrade management. The fact that you can't choose what to upgrade almost completely removes the RPG side of the game. The Diablo series has never had much of "role-playing" in the traditional sense of the word, since you don't participate in the story much, but you were still kinda role-playing in the sense that you were building your own character. But that's no longer the case. The stats are upgraded for you, and all skills get unlocked simultaneously. Technically, you're still making choices as to which skills to use, but that system is fucked, which brings me to my next point.
3. One of the worst skill systems I've seen. So you have 6 slots for skills, two of which are tied to your mouse buttons, and the other 4 to the hotbar. First of all, why not have 10 hotbar slots? There are 10 digit keys on the keyboard. In Diablo 2 you could use 8 function keys, so why not here? Well, every skill slot has its own dedicated skills. Meaning, if you unlock a skill for the 1 key, you can't bind it to 2-4 or mouse buttons. This is such a dumb system, because what it means in practice is that about 1/4 of all the skills unlocked end up not being used, even if you want to use them. Because the skills that you unlock are not equivalent to each other. For example, one skill can be an aoe attack, and the other is a summon or a direct attack. So you end up constantly choosing not to use newly-unlocked skills because you don't wanna replace some of the basic functionality. And yes, this concerns even the left mouse button skills. I can't comprehend which moron came up with this system and how the game ended up getting shipped in this state.
4. The game almost feels like a beat-em-up. There are too many enemies, which makes each enemy feel less significant. You're constantly slaying through crowds of monsters, and there is a kill-streak system that chains your kills kinda like a combo-meter. I remember when games like X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance were coming out, marketing themselves as Action-RPGs, and everybody was making fun of them, saying they're just beat-em-ups. Well, how is Diablo 3 different? In fact, those games actually had RPG systems in them. Just because they had more than one attack button and combos, suddenly they're beat-em-ups but Diablo 3 isn't?
5. This is a minor thing, but why does my character not use his weapons? I mean, he is a witch doctor and his primary attack is to shoot darts, why does he need a dagger in the first place? I feel silly running around with a dagger and never actually use it. Why not give him like a dart-shooting weapon instead?
6. Very low difficulty on Normal. I get that you can change the difficulty in the full version, but this game's "Normal" should not be called "Normal". I played through the entire demo without ever coming close to dying. I've not used a single potion or a health altar.
7. Microtransactions. No game with an in-game shop should ever be sold for money. I don't care if it's "decorative" or whatever, this is disgusting. It makes me glad I've never bought this piece of shit.
8. The mini-map doesn't save your exploration progress. Meaning the areas you've already visited get covered by the fog of war again upon relaunch. This is a huge problem. One of the core ingredients of Diablo's addictiveness was the exploration. It gave you a constant sense of progression, reaffirming you that with each step you get closer to completion. It made you wanna clear out dungeons and every corner of the map. Now, Hellgate London had the same issue, and I hated it there just as much, but there it was compensated by two things. First of all, Hellgate is a conceptually different game. It puts you in the world where humans were driven into the underground, and the world on the surface is an unknown and dangerous territory. You make raids into it, you don't inhabit it. This is indicated by how you don't just walk to the surface, you only reach it through portals. Second of all, the areas you've already cleared would spawn stronger enemies with better loot on revisits. This made the grind more fun, and the fog of war helped make those areas feel fresh again. The first point does not apply to Diablo, where entire acts are traversable with no loading screens. The second point can only really apply to dungeons, which in Hellgate all areas basically functioned as. Diablo isn't just about raiding dungeons and progressing through the story, it also has an exploration element, which here was effectively killed. This is the reason I stopped playing after finishing the story portion, despite my initial intent to squeeze out as much as possible out of this demo. The rest of the game just doesn't feel like progression anymore.
9. Cartoony art-design and visual pollution. Much has already been said about the art-design here. It ruins the atmosphere, plain and simple. In fact, playing this game today conjures up associations with shitty freemium mobile games. Cartoony art-design has its place and time, it goes well with bright colors and a more neutral or optimistic tone. But here they tried to make the game feel "dark", and this art-design just cheapens that. The attempt at darkness and the actual art-direction undermine each other, so the game reaps benefits of neither. But I just wanna add that personally I felt nauseated by the amount of unnecessary interface elements on the screen, pop-ups and flashy special effects. Playing this game for only 2 hours felt genuinely exhausting. This game is basically using the mobile-game strategy of making every little thing feel like a reward through achievement-like popups ("Congrats! You just broke 10 crates!"). And the way that health and experience are now huge floating orbs that explode on impact doesn't make it easier on the eyes. I'm not principally against orbs, but either they're too big here or it's the fact they pile up on top of an already chaotic visual mess.
10. And of course the biggest problem of this game: it's online-only. While playing this demo, I had a few lags, but one time my connection died for like 10-20 seconds, and everything in the game just became non-interactable, and the world stopped loading (to the point that you could see the edges). And even though my connection returned shortly after, the game did not recover. I had to Alt+F4 it because none of the menu buttons worked either. Well, I guess it's my fault for living in a developing country. But hey, the occasional inability to play isn't even the worst thing about it. The worst thing is that this is a game you will never own. And this is why Blizzard doesn't deserve your money. And I'm okay with free-to-play MMORPGs being "games as a service" because the MMOs utilize their internet connection to its full potential, creating experiences that could only be possible through the internet. But Diablo 3 can totally function without the internet, the proof to which is the console version. And even if it couldn't, why would you develop a sequel to a single-player game as an MMO? If you want a Diablo MMO, make it a spin-off. Also, I am aware that the original team (the devs of D1, D2 and Hellgate) also wanted to make D3 an MMO, and I would've been equally as critical if they did.

Conclusion:

One might call me biased, and tbh it's hard not to be biased, when the main dev of this game said "fuck that loser" about David Brevik (aka the guy who invented half of the mechanics you're implementing in your game). I have grown a real distaste towards Blizzard over the last decade or so. People often debate upon when Blizzard died, and I believe it was here. Blizzard ignored and mocked the fans for criticizing the art design and the online-only aspect, and repeatedly showed a complete lack of respect to the original games and their creators, and yet the game still sold incredibly well (exceeding Blizzard's expectations, which yet again meant dead servers on launch). This was probably the point when the heads at Blizzard realized they could do whatever they want. Then you get Warcraft Reforged and Diablo Immortal, and during the development of D2: Resurrected, the original devs weren't paid royalties, weren't invited as consultants, and intentionally weren't mentioned by names, being usually referred to as "the original team". Blizzard today is a pack of scumbags, and I'm not even talking about their sex scandals (where one girl was driven to a suicide).

Yet despite my bias towards Blizzard, I tried to analyze this game objectively. When playing the game, I intentionally ignored all the external factors and focused on the direct experience. After all, the only reason I decided to play this was my curiosity (and the Starter Edition being free). In my rating here, one star was removed for the online-only aspect, but other than that I tried to be fair. In fact, by the time I finished the story portion I thought I wouldn't mind playing the story a bit longer. Perhaps the game could've grown on me a little and I could slightly increase the rating, but oh well, we'll never find out because I'm not paying for an online-only game. My current rating reflects the experience I had with the time I was given, and that's also the reason why I tagged it "retired". I tag games "abandoned" when I choose to stop playing, but in this case I was practically forced to.

Diablo 3, contrary to its predecessors, was developed during an era when Blizzard had become one of the biggest companies in the industry. And if you look at the game's development history, it was developed as a commercial product. The goal wasn't to create what the devs liked, but to capture as much audience as possible. Everything was financially motivated, and this can be felt in every aspect of the game. The previous games were never perfect, they had a lot of repetition, and some mechanics were annoyingly unpolished. But the strength of the core gameplay in combination with the strong atmosphere and presentation made sure you could spend hours upon hours in the game without it devolving into tedium. Diablo 3 is a much more polished experience, but the foundation of it has been ruined. Thus it feels like a shallow corpse of what came before.