To nobody in particular, a thought occurred to me, about what's happened to the series.
D1 was clearly a classic horror. The evil you were up against were vast, ancient, and hidden. Diablo was something beyond the power of humans to defeat, the very idea of fear. Tristram is not the last refuge of epic warriors, but the charred, tragic remains of an encounter with the impossibly evil. Even at the end of your quest, once your champion had hacked and slashed your way to the end, accumulating power and equipment far beyond ordinary mortals, you merely became the monster you tried to kill. Humans = ephemeral, Evil = eternal. Angels feature in the backstory, but they are decidedly absent in any other way. Only dark cults even have any sense that the evil even exists, and their best efforts amount to little in the end. Classic Lovecraft.
D3 flips this around, weirdly. You are not infinitely less than the angels and demons - perhaps you are even slightly more. Nephalem are not heroes from Lovecraftian horror, outmatched and afraid. They're Kratos-style Godslayers, out to butcher every entity in the heavens and hells, if given any excuse at all. This is a completely different genre, something more like a comic book story, humans-as-superhumans.
I never felt, in all D3, a single moment of actual terror. I was a lot younger when I played D1, but I definitely remember fear being a major part of the emotional atmosphere of that game. (The pseudo-hardcore corpse system might have had something to do with it, in fairness, but I think atmosphere has a lot to do with it as well.)
-Jester
D1 was clearly a classic horror. The evil you were up against were vast, ancient, and hidden. Diablo was something beyond the power of humans to defeat, the very idea of fear. Tristram is not the last refuge of epic warriors, but the charred, tragic remains of an encounter with the impossibly evil. Even at the end of your quest, once your champion had hacked and slashed your way to the end, accumulating power and equipment far beyond ordinary mortals, you merely became the monster you tried to kill. Humans = ephemeral, Evil = eternal. Angels feature in the backstory, but they are decidedly absent in any other way. Only dark cults even have any sense that the evil even exists, and their best efforts amount to little in the end. Classic Lovecraft.
D3 flips this around, weirdly. You are not infinitely less than the angels and demons - perhaps you are even slightly more. Nephalem are not heroes from Lovecraftian horror, outmatched and afraid. They're Kratos-style Godslayers, out to butcher every entity in the heavens and hells, if given any excuse at all. This is a completely different genre, something more like a comic book story, humans-as-superhumans.
I never felt, in all D3, a single moment of actual terror. I was a lot younger when I played D1, but I definitely remember fear being a major part of the emotional atmosphere of that game. (The pseudo-hardcore corpse system might have had something to do with it, in fairness, but I think atmosphere has a lot to do with it as well.)
-Jester