The man who wrote movies like Charlie’s Angels and Big Fish has written an interesting blog post about Diablo III‘s narrative failures, calling its story “pretty damn weak.” John August, a Hollywood screenwriter with a rather lengthy resumé, has a few gripes about
Blizzard’s action-roleplaying game. He says the story fails because your character has no choices, and that the cut-scenes—which revolve around you watching and nodding your head as a bunch of other people talk to one another—fail to deliver.
(Minor spoilers for Diablo III follow.) “At several points in the game, major NPCs betray you and/or die. And you shrug,” August writes. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Remember Raynor and Kerrigan from StarCraft? I became invested in those characters,
not because of their cut scenes, but because I got to play as them. I
Y1 COM kept them alive through zerg rushes, and watched as they made sacrifices that transformed them. So even when I wasn’t playing those characters, I knew them.”cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"e3616d04-4972-4839-a63a-c6975e2e9731","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.kotaku.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"5929091","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"uncategorized","SECTION":"","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"uncategorized","TAGS":"diablo","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); August says it’s not necessarily about being able to make decisions—he just wants the illusion of choice. “Note that I’m not actually
demanding choice or free will as a player. Look, I’ve played Diablo. I’ll go kill the next thing.
Y1 Games But I’d love to feel like my character was making the choice, rather than being a lackey.”
What do you think? Did Diablo III‘s story suffer because
Y1 App you just couldn’t bring yourself to care about the characters around you? Or did you enjoy it?