You know a great side effect to Diablo 3 being finally released? Pretty soon those sentiments are going to be drowned out in the sheer wave of ecstasy riding across the human collective conscience until culminating in an orgasmic explosion of universal praise. And that's not hype, the beta has given pretty much total transparency as to what we can expect and it is all good.
Diablo 2 came out 12 years ago. Since then there have been improvements within even Diablo's own small subgenre, but more importantly major advancements in western RPGs in general and yes that includes World of Warcraft. Every Bioware game Knights of the Old Republic and after, every Bethesda game Morrowind and after, even Dota were all good resources to pull from and it's pretty easy to imagine they were used. God if only Diablo 2 had ability cooldowns, or any reason not to spam the same Frozen orb spell on a Sorceress (insert same situation with different class).
My question to people who complain about static leveling is this; do they just not know what a dead level is? Do they not understand this aspect of RPGs in general? Cause dead levels (level ups where you get nothing but slight statistical upgrades) are a very bad thing. In Diablo 3 you have new fun things to do at every level at every stage of your progression through Hell difficulty right up to the level cap, and this is only a good thing. In fact for 60 levels and 5 characters it is god damn beautiful. Your character is what you do with it and a character's identity is diminished purely in your imagination.
EDIT: And let's face it, there is no way classic RPG gamers should be able to hate this. Cause I just opened the box, and it came with a gigantic notepad. Like, wow. If you've ever played Ultima Underworld or old games like it, you know what that is all about.
They might as well have had Bashiok sign each notepad with "Classic gamers, you haven't been forgotten :) " This is so much cooler than anything in the Collector's Edition.
