Diablo III: Not Just a Vitality Race!

[AgentPaper]

Do I really have to answer this one?

Basically everything.

It's not a ROLE playing game if I'm not taking the ROLE of a person and have significant choices regarding who that person IS.

Diablo 3 seems to be an action game with a built in character improvement mechanic.

There's two parts you hit on there. One is taking the role of someone, and making significant choices about who that person is. I don't think even you could argue that D3 doesn't do the first, but the second is a bit more interesting.

How do you define a "significant" choice? Does it have to be permanent for it to be significant? I would argue that it doesn't. Making the choice of what skills you pick, what runes you put in them, what gear you pick up, and so on, all of those are significant in that they decide whether you live or die when you go out to fight your opponent. Beyond that, they are significant in that they define how you fight.

The fact that these choices aren't permanent doesn't make them any less of a choice. Your level 80 Demon Hunter has the potential to take any skills, any runes, and wear any equipment he wants, but then so does a level 1 necromancer. The only difference here is the time involved. You can spend 200 hours getting your necromancer up to nightmare, or you can spend 2 minutes changing your demon hunter's skills. Does that 200 hours actually make those choices more significant?

You can keep arguing whatever, but the fact that I dislike it is not gonna change.

The whole point of discussion is that you might be proven wrong. If you're not here to discuss, then why are you here?

It means that my character is a master at every single ability available to him at the same time. It doesn't make sense. And yes, it does make choices less meaningful, if not meaningless.

No, it certainly does NOT mean that. You have 6 skills, 3 passives, and a rune for each skill. You can use exactly those skills at any given point of time. If you want to min-max, you can forsake character identity and change your skills every fight, but there's no reason to assume that you need to. For me, at least, I plan to play around with a few builds, but will likely end up focusing on a specific build, and fine-tune that build to exactly fit my playstyle. That build will be mine, and mine only, as opposed to D2, where I was forced to go online and use someone else's character.

I sort of agree, but I would have expected Blizzard to come up with a way to make the choices better and more meaningful, not taking them away.

They didn't come up with the way because it doesn't exist. Permanent choice has inherent flaws that are impossible to address. It certainly makes sense in a few games, but Diablo 3 is not one of them, and neither are most of the RPGs it's forced into. It's only common because people expect it, not because it actually improves most of the games it's in.

The only games that should have permanent choice are tabletop RPGs, and storytelling games (IE fallout/oblivion) where the actual gameplay is secondary to the story being told.

You're describing an action game. That's ok. But it's not what I expected of Diablo 3.

Diablo is an Action RPG, so was Diablo 2. Besides that, does it really matter what you call the game? It's a game, unique in it's own way, and should be judged on it's own merits. Just because other RPGs (mostly single-player, by the way) did things a certain way, doesn't mean that those are the right thing for D3 to do.