The main campaign objectives are as fetch-questy as ever, though what else can you do with Diablo, but the sheer quantity of 'bonus' material crammed into every cranny makes it feel like a long and true adventure.

But Diablo 3's issues were never really in the art department, and what makes Act V the best Diablo campaign act yet is the wealth of incidental content – enter almost any door or cavern opening and you'll find an event or special monster to take down. The locations are gorgeous a city being torn apart from within, with corpses littering the streets, leading onto the war-scarred terrain of Pandemonium and below. We'll come back to that idea, but first the new campaign. Read between the lines here and you can see the problem with vanilla Diablo 3: it didn't have long-term pull, an 'endgame.' Finally the randomly-generated Adventure mode is joined by a new 'Torment' difficulty level. Reaper of Souls adds an Act V to the campaign, which sits alongside the new Crusader player class (very influenced by Diablo 2's Paladin), and an increase in the level cap of all characters from 60-70. Loot 2.0 kind of ties into this, being an attempt to make loot feel more valuable by tailoring it towards your characters dropping more legendaries, adding 'playstyle-altering' characteristics to certain items, a new NPC that lets you re-roll certain stats, and of course an absolute tonne of new loot. This was only ever something that made your own drops feel worthless, so good riddance. List-me-up! The real-money auction house is gone, and lo the nerds did rejoice. Of course companies like Blizzard listen to their playerbases, and respond, but rarely do you see a top-down redesign of a game that seems designed to answer almost every problem that a large and vocal playerbase has raised. But can it be fixed?įirst thing to establish is that Reaper of Souls and a patch introducing 'Loot 2.0' are separate things, the latter of which is available to all Diablo 3 players, but for the sake of convenience we're going to look at them together – and after all, both are something of an experiment in fan feedback. This expansion is Blizzard dealing with the reality that, in many people's eyes, Diablo 3 just wasn't very good. But Reaper of Souls isn't a nip here and a tuck there. Blizzard are one of the best developers in the world not only because it makes great games, but because it prods and tweaks and adds to them after release until they positively hum with glory. The most interesting thing about Reaper of Souls, the first expansion for Diablo 3, is that it's an admission of guilt.

Diablo 2 reaper of souls