My friend sent me a trial code and I have started playing to see for myself if my concerns with D3 are true.
Aaaaand they are. Every single one of my main concerns is valid. In a matter of two hours, I got disconnected from the servers twice, and both times I lost significant exploration progress and good items from my inventory. The entire time I experienced significant warping lag which made the game unplayable at times. All of this was happening while I didn't see a single other soul ... it was simply a SP game with all the nasty side effects of an MMO. Oh and no pausing ... it's ludicrous. Love me some draconian DRM of the worst variety.
From a gameplay stand point, I'm not impressed with D3. The game just feeds you skills ... gone are the skill trees from D2 where at least you had to make choices about how you wanted to develop your character. Now all of that is taken care of for you, which severely reduces replayability. Even the runes which add a layer of depth to the shallow system are fed to you via unlocks, and the entire set up feels artificial, contrived, and uninteresting. The removal of assigning stats also feels like a gross mistake. I'm really shocked Blizzard went with such a dumbed down system -- though I suppose it makes the game ideal for 10 year olds.
The removal of scrolls of identify and town portal really take away from the game, and I hate how enemies drop little health orbs like Devil May Cry ... it just feels lame somehow -- no longer do I really have to manage my character's health, which I thought was interesting in D2 (despite the potion problems). In fact, the game is so damn easy that I never really felt like I had to worry about health much at all, and I don't even have access to an auction house (can't use it in the trial), which would make things even easier. I am aware that you can unlock harder difficulties, but the game should NOT be this easy on Normal -- especially since you can't simply skip the difficulty level. I'm also aware that the game probably gets harder, but even so, I can't imagine the tedium of playing through level after level of such an easy experience.
I have to admit that the graphics style looks more impressive when I played the game in person, but even so, the low resolution textures really make this feel like a title from 3-4 years ago. Physics destruction is a nice, if mostly totally cosmetic touch. Music and voice work is more than solid, which is to be expected. Even so, with the unrewarding gameplay thus far, the strong presentation fails to carry the game for me.
On the whole, D3 feels like a Diablo-inspired casual action game made by a different company -- not an action RPG that requires tactical strategy or smart player choices. For these reasons, I'll stay clear of D3, and I'm glad I had a chance to play it for myself to not only avoid hypocrisy but to confirm my suspicions about the game.