So just what was Belial's plan there?

[MongoJerry]

Thank god Buzzard put a ton of (imo) very well done Lore into the game to distract me from the main story. Shen (as has been mentioned) is brilliant, there are lots of references to interesting events and I especially enjoyed the Bestiary entries. So, there was definitely a lot of talent available for the game. It just didn't have anything to do with the main story. Meh.

Thinking about this some more, I think that this is key. It's obvious that they wanted to make the main story simple and linear so that everyone coming to the game could follow it and know exactly what to do at each stage. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the writers wrote a more complicated main story and at each stage were told to simplify it so that even the most obtuse players could know what to do at each stage. (Go to the Keep Depths, dummy!).

However, it does seem like a lot of the side bits of lore are more interesting. We already talked about Shen, Haedrig, the mercenaries and the lore books and journals in Act 1 that gave a good view of the history of Tristram and the surrounding countryside. I also just started paying more attention to Mayor Holis, the guy you first see trying to run away in Act I. He shows up again in Act III as a merchant and again he asks for help with his attempts to run away. However, if you go to him after each quest completes, the conversation changes from attempts to run away with the main character needling him for being a coward to Holis saying that he's starting to be inspired by the main character's bravery to at the end showing him dead with a guard saying, "He had a chance to escape. I don't know why he stayed around."

I also liked the mythology of the creation of Sanctuary, the creation of the nephalem, the tuning of the worldstone to weaken the nephalem, and the vote by the angels on whether to destroy humanity or not. I don't know how much of that was already established in Diablo books and such, but since I only knew about the snippets of mythology that D2 showed (which wasn't much), this information was all new to me.